Grannan: Where have all the KIPPsters gone?

Guest post by Caroline Grannan.

“[Charter schools] have a distinct advantage … Their families have already chosen to be at a charter and have often jumped through numerous hoops to get there. This makes it easier for charters to create their own cultures. They can define the length of their days, dictate exactly how children dress and enforce strict codes of conduct. Those students — scholars, in charter parlance — who fall out of line don’t last.”

– Jonathan Mahler in the New York Times Magazine

“I will never follow the lead of those who exclude the kids who need education the most so that their precious scores will rise.”

– John Kuhn, superintendent of Perrin-Whitt Consolidated Independent School District, Perrin, Texas

The highly acclaimed charter school operator KIPP – the Knowledge is Power Program – wins widespread praise for the overall high achievement of the low-income students it serves. It's no wonder that KIPP's practices are watched closely. And that means asking an obvious question: Why do so many KIPP students leave the schools without being replaced, and how does that affect the schools' achievement?

Why is attrition at KIPP schools an issue?

Several studies show that a high number of students who enroll at KIPP schools leave the schools early, and the numbers show that students who leave aren't replaced by new, incoming students. At public schools that serve comparable demographics, students who leave are replaced by new, incoming students.

A 2008 study of San Francisco Bay Area KIPP schools by SRI International found that it's consistently the lower-performing students who leave.

How does this affect KIPP's achievement? The lower-performing students are no longer there to bring down averages – but it would also be valuable to learn more about the impact on the students who don't leave after the lower performers have departed. Do they learn more and achieve more, unfettered by their less successful former classmates? This is difficult to address, since the topic is so often met with denial and distortion. Would those students do as well at public schools if their less successful classmates left and weren't replaced?

KIPP schools' achievement is regularly compared to public schools' achievement (i), but the attrition question confounds those comparisons.

Richard Kahlenberg, senior fellow at the New Century Foundation, wrote: “The issue is important because if large numbers of weaker students drop out of KIPP’s rigorous program, it would be highly unfair to compare the test score gains won by the top KIPP students against the scores of all regular public school students – who include KIPP dropouts.” Unfairness is only one issue. If we want to look at KIPP schools to see how they often achieve academic success, the high attrition confounds efforts to do that.

We frequently hear that KIPP schools have waiting lists, but the attrition puts that supposed situation in a whole different light. If there are waiting lists, why aren't all the departing students immediately replaced?

The movie “Waiting for 'Superman',” a PR tool for charter schools, presented the story of Daisy, who hoped to attend KIPP Los Angeles College Preparatory Academy and was devastated to lose out in the admission lottery. But in real life, the high attrition at KIPP LA Prep means Daisy shouldn't have to wait long for an opening. For example, KIPP LA Prep's most recent 8th-grade cohort lost a third of the students who started in grade 5 by the beginning of 8th grade – figures aren't publicly available for how many students finished 8th grade. For that class, which started grade 5 in the 2006-'07 school year and finished grade 8 in 2010, the number dropped from 97 students at the beginning of 5th grade to 81 by the beginning of 6th grade to 65 by the beginning of 8th grade.

Based on that attrition rate, the school would have room for Daisy and many more hopeful applicants if the administrators filled those spots from the waiting list. Why isn't that happening? It's a mystery.

Does this attrition happen at all KIPP schools?

The available research doesn't provide that information.

• In early 2007, I researched attrition at KIPP's California schools as a volunteer project, using data publicly available on the California Department of Education website. At the time, KIPP had nine schools in California. My research found very high attrition at six of them. I also broke down the attrition by demographic subgroup. At all six of the schools with high attrition, the attrition was much higher in the subgroup that's statistically likely to be the most academically challenged – either African-American males or Latino males, depending on the school. My blog posts about the issue appear to mark the first time KIPP attrition had been publicly discussed. What my findings refer to is the overall drop in the number of students – total and by subgroup – year by year in a grade cohort.
• In fall 2008, the organization SRI International released a study of the five KIPP schools that existed at the time in the San Francisco Bay Area. SRI used data that went deeper than the publicly available data I'd used, and found high attrition at all five Bay Area KIPP schools. SRI reported that overall, 60% of the students who enrolled at the five KIPP schools didn't finish at those schools. SRI also found that the students who left were consistently the lower-performing students. If SRI's research broke the students down by demographic subgroup, that wasn't included in the final report.

(Interestingly, SRI International found the high attrition pattern even at a KIPP school – KIPP Heartwood in San Jose – that didn't show high attrition in the figures I researched. As noted, SRI International had access to more complete data than I did; I used only publicly available statistics.)

• KIPP supporters responded to my research and to the SRI study with this claim: “The San Francisco KIPP schools are outliers.” But that was an invalid, misleading and inapplicable response. I had researched all the KIPP schools in California (nine at the time), and SRI had researched all the KIPP schools in the Bay Area (five at the time) – not just the two San Francisco KIPP schools. The two San Francisco KIPP schools, KIPP San Francisco Bay Academy and KIPP Bayview Academy, did show high attrition, but not the highest among the Bay Area's or the state's KIPP schools. It wasn't true that the San Francisco KIPP schools were outliers, and that claim didn't negate my findings or SRI's findings. It didn't even make sense in context of those findings.
• A 2010 study of KIPP schools by Mathematica Policy Research was framed in a manner intended to refute reports of high attrition at KIPP. The report found that of the KIPP schools studied, one-third showed lower attrition than comparable public schools, one-third showed higher attrition and the rest showed comparable attrition. However, the Mathematica report failed to address the issue of whether KIPP replaces the students who leave, which leaves a giant gap in the report.
• A 2011 study by Western Michigan University researchers, published jointly with Columbia University, found significantly higher attrition at KIPP schools than at comparable public schools – 15 percent attrition per year at KIPP vs. 3 percent at public schools. The study found that 30 percent of KIPP students leave between 6th and 8th grades.

But many KIPP supporters say that public schools have the same high rates of attrition, and the Mathematica study said that too.

That's not valid because of the critical difference that at public schools, the students who leave are replaced by new, incoming students. The numbers show that at KIPP schools, students who leave are not replaced. The cohort of students simply shrinks drastically. Even though Mathematica did indeed make that statement, it's not valid. It flies in the face of logic. The distinction puts the situations in an entirely different light.

To give a clear picture: Let's say 100 students start 5th grade at a KIPP school that serves grades 5-8. Sixty of the students leave along the way, before completing 8th grade, and those are the lowest-performing 60 students. They aren't replaced with incoming students. So that cohort at the KIPP school winds up with only the 40 highest-performing students.

At the public school down the street, 100 students start. Sixty of them leave along the way, but each time one leaves, a new student arrives to replace him or her. So that cohort at the public school consists of 100 students from start to finish. Clearly, those two situations are not parallel, equivalent or comparable.

Low-income, at-risk students are likely to be “high-mobility” – meaning that they move a lot due to the instability that tends to afflict the lives of impoverished families. Those students are also statistically likely to be low academic achievers. With the high mobility that characterizes low-income communities, if if a high-mobility student leaves a public school, he or she is replaced with a similarly high-mobility student. By contrast, if a high-mobility student leaves a KIPP school, the numbers show that KIPP is usually not replacing him or her with an incoming student.

Why do the students leave KIPP schools?

That's not publicly known. KIPP spokespeople and supporters deny that KIPP expels or “counsels out” (ii) low-performing students.

Does KIPP have a policy of not enrolling new students after the starting grade? How do we know KIPP isn't replacing the students who leave?

KIPP doesn't appear to have an actual policy of not enrolling new students. But the enrollment numbers at the KIPP schools studied show that the students who leave are, overall, not being replaced with incoming students. It's not clear why that is, given the widespread reports of “long waiting lists.” Even if some of the students who leave are replaced with incoming students, the numbers still show that a very high number are not, resulting in very high total overall attrition and significant shrinkage of the grade cohorts.

If schools receive state funding based on the number of students, doesn't the attrition mean that KIPP schools lose funding as students transfer to other schools?

Yes, it must mean that, though there's discussion of whether the students leave after they are counted for the year, so that KIPP still receives the funding. (This situation could vary state by state.) The KIPP organization receives an immense amount of private philanthropical funding, which may provide enough of a cushion against the loss of the public funding. Perhaps the tradeoff – losing the less-successful students and also losing the per-student funding – is worth it to KIPP schools.

But there's a high dropout rate in public schools that serve low-income populations, so how can we say that public schools replace the students who leave?

Most KIPP schools are middle schools, serving grades 5 through 8. (Almost all of the KIPP schools that have existed long enough for their attrition to be tracked are middle schools.) Except for a very small number of extreme, problematic outliers, students don't drop out of middle school, so public schools don't suffer from dropout rates at those grade levels. Students who leave KIPP schools would be transferring to other schools. I did comparisons of grade cohorts in demographically comparable public schools, and those schools simply didn't show a pattern of attrition at all.

Why would Mathematica make the misleading statement that attrition was comparable to public schools?

Research organizations are known to negotiate with the funders of the research about just how the findings will be presented. It is not publicly knowable what kind of negotiations went on with Mathematica, whose report was funded by KIPP.

The 2008 SRI International report – the one that found 60 percent attrition at all the Bay Area KIPP schools and reported that it was the lower achievers who left – presented that finding as a secondary one in its report. The report, which was also funded by KIPP, announced KIPP's high achievement as the primary finding. The attrition was the newsworthy finding and the one that is still extensively – and increasingly – discussed today.

Some reports have said it might not be that students are leaving KIPP schools but that they're being required to repeat a grade.

That might be true in some – or many – cases. But the overall numbers still show the grade cohorts shrinking, so many students are clearly leaving the schools.

So what's the conclusion?

KIPP attrition isn't comparable to the flow of high-mobility students in and out of public schools – it simply isn't, no matter how many claims there are to the contrary. Why it happens and what it means are still hard to pin down.

i The usual question is: “But aren't KIPP schools public schools?” I don't believe that schools run by a private operator are truly public schools, even if they receive public funding.

ii “Counseling out” refers to a practice of gently but firmly persuading the student and family to leave the school. The archetypal method would be to tell the family that the school isn't the “right fit” for the student, or vice versa.

Grannan: Powerful “Parent” Trigger operators target vulnerable school; attack misfires

Guest post by Caroline Grannan -- P.P.

The current hot story in education reform is California's Parent Trigger law and its deployment against high-poverty McKinley Elementary school in disadvantaged Compton, near Los Angeles.

The simplified description of this law, which the state Legislature passed last year, is that it mandates radical change at a school if petitions are turned in bearing the signatures of more than 50 percent of the parents at the school (and for middle and high schools, of parents at feeder schools, a situation undoubtedly as unwieldy as it sounds).

In the McKinley Elementary situation, as with other complex education reform issues, reading through the press coverage may cause dizziness due to the conflicting perspectives. Here's a clear-eyed summary from a recent Los Angeles Times editorial (Jan. 29, 2011):

The first parent trigger petition, at McKinley Elementary School in Compton, offered an example of how the process shouldn't work. The signature drive was held in secret, to avoid a backlash from the school, but with the decision pre-made for parents that the school would be taken over by charter operator Celerity Educational Group. There was no public discussion of parents' options or rights. McKinley is not a school that has resisted change; though low-performing, it has dramatically raised test scores in recent years. Some parents complained afterwards that they didn't understand the petition they were signing; others accused school personnel of threatening and harassing them to get them to rescind their signatures. Meanwhile, the school district has set up a process for verifying the signatures that is harder on parents and more intrusive than is reasonably necessary.

As the Times account indicates, this Parent Trigger was deployed not to empower the McKinley parents, but rather to turn McKinley over to a pre-selected charter operator. This Parent Trigger drive was initiated not by the parents but by Parent Revolution, an organization founded by the Green Dot charter school operator.

The Parent Trigger law squeaked through the California legislature last year, sponsored by departing state Sen. Gloria Romero. (Romero was running unsuccessfully for state Superintendent of Public Instruction; after being defeated in the primary, she was hired by Democrats for Education Reform, which promotes charter schools, privatization and other currently vogueish education panaceas.)

The Parent Trigger was conceived by a group called Parent Revolution, formerly known as the Los Angeles Parents Union. It's no secret that the organization was founded by the Green Dot charter school chain, though occasionally there's a halfhearted effort to portray Parent Revolution as a “grassroots” parents' group.

The Los Angeles Weekly, a fiery, right/libertarian “advocacy journalism” practitioner, has taken a fervent stance in support of Parent Revolution and its Parent Trigger campaign against McKinley Elementary. The Weekly's detailed coverage is invaluable for following the course of events – not just despite but because of its fierce backing of the Parent Trigger and because of its contemptuous treatment of McKinley teachers, the McKinley PTA and anyone else who might question the Parent Revolution operation.

For that reason, the Weekly's description of Parent Revolution's wealthy and powerful backers carries far more weight than mine would:

Parent Revolution, with 10 full-time staff members and a $1 million annual operating budget, is funded by blue-chip philanthropic endeavors, such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Wasserman Foundation, the Broad Foundation, the Hewlett Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation.

Parent Revolution looked for a vulnerable school in a vulnerable district to target with a Parent Trigger campaign, and then sent paid organizers out into Compton to knock on doors in search of McKinley parents. An actual parent-led effort wouldn't require paid organizers to cold-call door-to-door in search of parents at the school, it should go without saying. The L.A. Weekly:

Parent Revolution decided to focus on McKinley Elementary School and approach parents there after researching the worst school districts in California. … (Parent Revolution's paid) field organizers have canvassed a large chunk of the 10-square-mile city of Compton, knocking on hundreds of doors, walking its sidewalks and driving its streets, asking people if their children attend McKinley. … [Organizing director Pat DeTemple] set up a computer program to track trends in the progress of his staff's work. Once a parent signature was obtained, DeTemple input that parent’s address in the program, and a green dot appeared on a digital map of Compton. If a particular block in McKinley Elementary's feeder area showed no green dots, he'd ask one of the five salaried organizers to make a follow-up visit to the block.

After the Parent Revolution operatives had collected sufficient signatures, the petitions were delivered on Dec. 7 to Compton district officials in a professionally staged, photo-op PR event, attended by reporters from the Los Angeles Times and New York Times, and staffers representing Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. The Weekly describes the well-orchestrated scene:

The crowd — including parents, children and reporters from The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, CNN, local TV channels 2, 4, 7, 11, radio news stations KPCC and others, as well as aides to U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa — then clambers into two yellow buses and arrives at Compton Unified School District headquarters on Santa Fe Avenue.

There, [McKinley parent Ysmenia] Guzman hands over a book of parent signatures to acting superintendent Karen Frison ... who is waiting outside the building flanked by several school district police officers. …

Guzman holds the receipt [for the signatures] in the air and several parents and their children cheer and began chanting, "Yes we can! Yes we can!"

The Parent Trigger law allows the petitioners to choose one of four options: Close the school entirely; replace the school with a charter school; replace the principal; or fire the staff and reorganize the school. The McKinley Parent Trigger operation was based from the beginning on only one of those options – replacing McKinley with a charter school. The charter operator , the Celerity Educational Group, was pre-selected by Parent Revolution. The L.A. Weekly:

Around the same time that Parent Revolution was researching Compton Unified, Celerity was looking to open a school in the stubbornly anti-charter district. The two organizations found each other.

The process has drawn criticism as the signature drive was quiet and low-profile. There were no open meetings, presentations of the various options the parents could have chosen, discussions with the school district, opportunities for debate and rebuttal, or the usual messy interactions of democracy.

One of those messy interactions did transpire a week later, on Dec. 14, at a Compton Unified School District (CUSD) board meeting. Again, the L.A. Weekly was there and live-blogging – and described “hundreds of angry parents – many of whom say they were tricked into signing the Parent Trigger petition.” Again, this description comes from an outspoken supporter of the Parent Trigger petition. This significant event has gone almost entirely unremarked upon, with the storyline from Parent Revolution being that a few individuals manipulated by the McKinley PTA or deceived by scheming teachers have voiced opposition.

Excerpts from the Weekly's account of the Dec. 14 meeting, which it describes as “packed” with 200 to 300 people: 

We're reporting live from the CUSD board meeting, packed with press and hundreds of angry parents -- many of whom say they were tricked into signing the Parent Trigger petition without understanding its gravity.

Above all, the air is buzzing with confusion. …

More and more, the crowd reveals itself as anti-Parent Trigger. The only speakers who get a positive reaction are the ones defending CUSD. …

Another man rouses parents: "How dare they come here and say not the whole truth? If we look at charter schools, we know what they are about. They are about the dollar."

… the crowd chants, "COMPTON! COMPTON! COMPTON!" Someone waves an "I [Heart] Compton" shirt above his head.

It seems the concept of a charter school has now become the antithesis of hometown pride. … One mother, who rushes out the side door before we can ask her name, says she was approached at her job twice and forced to sign the petition, y "yo no quise fimar" (I didn't want to sign). Parent Kirk Douglas Brown says he signed the petition, but now wants to publicly revoke his signature.

A strong localized defense begins to arise, based on the sentiment that "outside interests" like Parent Revolution, Celerity Educational Group and even L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa are coming in and "telling us what to do with our city."

… There's a new civil war …

Outside the Weekly's report, this meeting and the crowd of protesters opposing the charterization have gone entirely unnoticed in the national conversation about the Parent Trigger.

Here's an outline of the further plot twists in this strange saga.

·         Both the state Board of Education and then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger made public accusations of harassment and intimidation in the Parent Trigger brouhaha, and directed the state Attorney General's office to investigate.

o        The accusations were intended to paint the McKinley teachers and PTA members as the harassers, intimidating parents who had signed the petition. The press got understandably confused, and some accounts (including the Los Angeles Times') described the charges as accusations that the signature-gatherers were the harassers.

§         (Parent Revolution and the L.A. Weekly have repeatedly painted the PTA as some kind of operation of what public-education opponents call the “blob,” though school PTAs consist entirely of parent volunteers and teachers.)

o        Ben Austin, who is the hired Executive Director of Parent Revolution, was a member of the state Board of Education at the time that it made those charges. Austin is no longer on the state board.

o        Gov. Schwarzenegger has been replaced by newly elected Gov. Jerry Brown, who has a very different attitude from Schwarzenegger's about education reform.

o        Austin's then-colleagues on the state Board of Education were highly supportive of charter schools and the Parent Trigger. Jerry Brown replaced a number of them as soon as he took office, and the state board is no longer likely to be an automatic booster.

o        Nothing more has been publicly heard about any investigation process by the state Attorney General's office.

·         “Parents,” or rather Parent Revolution, in a blaze of publicity, reportedly filed charges with the U.S. Department of Education accusing some teachers of harassment for such behavior as supposedly badmouthing charter schools to children.

o        It hasn't been made clear what the USDOE's investigation process is, what the charges or penalties would be, whether the charges are against the school or individual teachers, whether the teachers would get due process, whether they need legal representation and have to pay for it themselves, and so forth.

o        Post-blaze-of-publicity, nothing further has been heard of that move.

·         The Compton school district, winging it clumsily, tried to create its own verification process for the petition signatures, sending certified letters to the school parents directing them to come in person to the school during a specific period to confirm their signatures. This prompted widespread outrage from Parent Revolution and its supporters.

o        There is no language in the Parent Trigger law regarding verifying petition signatures. The district – caught by surprise, without guidance and under highly publicized attack by the powerful Parent Revolution – devised a poorly thought-out process.

o        The district recanted most of its required process after the outcry; despite some coverage, it's utterly unclear what transpired. As questioning voices have asked, should a school district hand the keys of a public institution over to a private operator, no questions asked, upon receipt of an unverified list of names?

·         Parent Revolution announced that two major law firms would be representing it against Compton Unified – pro bono. It was not clear whether the firms, Gibson Dunn & Crutcher and Kirkland & Ellis, are aware that they're donating their services for free to a billionaire-funded operation that could well afford to pay their standard fees – and representing it in an assault against a challenged, high-poverty school district.

.

The Compton Unified School District held a meeting to discuss possible plans to merge McKinley Elementary with another nearby school – that is, close McKinley. Details were not clear. This plan was met with outrage by Parent Revolution, though that setup is one of the options parents may choose under the Parent Trigger.

That was the situation at the point where the L.A. Times – whose initial coverage of the McKinley situation was favorably inclined toward the Parent Trigger, and whose coverage of charters and Green Dot has been largely positive and uncritical -- stepped in with its possibly game-changing editorial of Jan. 29.

Most important is a public process. The petitions amount to elections; they force dramatic changes up to and including transferring the school to charter operators. Parent trigger must not become a means for private charter groups to get free school buildings through secret proceedings.

The McKinley experience shows that in order for the parent trigger to fulfill its potential, tinkering alone won't do. Regulations by the state Board of Education, which were suspended after Gov. Jerry Brown appointed new board members, fall short as well. It will take new legislation to correct the gaping inadequacies of the first law.

One other tidbit about the Parent Trigger: There is a previous school where an effort has been underway – Mount Gleason Middle School in Sunland, near Los Angeles. A former parent at the school launched the effort, working with Parent Revolution. The parent has said that there was no support for charterizing, so she just wants to get the principal replaced. After a Feb. 14, 2010, article in the Los Angeles Daily News, that effort has been low-profile.

Parent Revolution isn't talking about Mount Gleason at all now. Why? My guesses:

·         Parent Revolution is only interested in efforts to charterize.

·         The effort is gaining no traction.

·         It's a little embarrassing that the parent behind the effort – as a former parent at the school – is herself not qualified to sign the petition under the Parent Trigger law.

My own view on the Parent Trigger is that it's entirely unworkable – that it's guaranteed to cause damaging conflict in a school community that will only do harm to the community and its children – and that this should be evident to anyone who has been part of a school community.

The “civil war” at McKinley bears out my view, though it's a wilder ride than anyone could have predicted. The Mount Gleason situation actually doesn't back up my opinion, as it sounds more like a quiet fizzle.

Numerous commentators are hailing the Parent Trigger. It's beloved by the free-market far right, those who would like to see public schools eliminated and education fully privatized – big supporters include the Wall Street Journal editorial board, National Review and the Heartland Institute. (That conflicts confusingly with the ongoing efforts of Parent Revolution to compare itself to heroes of the labor movement and the civil rights movement, and to emphasize the Democratic Party insider background of its top staff.)

I wish the best to the students and families at McKinley Elementary in Compton. It's quite clear that the Parent Trigger is not in their best interests.

Grannan: With friends like President Obama, does Race to the Top need enemies? (+ extra feature)

[Guest post by Caroline Grannan, plus a video of George Carlin explaining things to us. – P.P.]

President Obama is wrong to slough off the growing concern and outrage and pigheadedly defend Race to the Top. If he can't come up with a better case than he made in his July 29 speech to the National Urban League, it's impossible to see how he can keep on speaking up for it.

This section of his speech calls for a sharp response.

"...there's a concern that Race to the Top doesn't do enough for minority kids..." No, that's not the concern. The concern is that Race to the Top will aggressively harm minority kids. "...because the argument is, well, if there's a competition, then somehow some states or some school districts will get more help than others...." Yes, that is the argument, or a watered-down version of it. More to the point, that a "competition" by definition has winners and losers. Which kids are we going to brand "losers" and give up on altogether? And while Obama states the argument with reasonable accuracy, he doesn't even attempt to rebut it. Instead, he insults us by veering off into irrelevancies. And insulting his listeners and his critics is nothing compared with shrugging off the damage RTTT will do to the "losers." " Let me tell you, what's not working for black kids and Hispanic kids and Native American kids across this country is the status quo. That's what's not working." And does that justify a "let's give whatever we can think of a shot, no matter what damage it may cause" attitude? Because that is what RTTT is. For a lawyer and a smart, eloquent man, Obama makes a pathetic case for his signature program. It's increasingly obvious that he's defending the indefensible.

From George Carlin’s “Life is Worth Losing,” broadcast live on HBO on November 5, 2005.

Grannan: D'oh! College Board report shows apples inferior to oranges

[Guest post by Caroline Grannan – P.P.]

A caveat before you read this post. I am not saying that the dread Frumious Status Quo is a good thing, that improvement isn't needed, that everything is hunky-dory. I am saying that the U.S. educational system is being unfairly blasted based on comparisons that are unsound and invalid.

Alarms are being raised about a new report from the College Board.

Take NPR's coverage as a typical example:

“A new report warns that the United States is falling farther and farther behind other countries in the proportion of adults with a college education. Researchers say the decline could have devastating economic and social consequences for the country.

According to the College Completion Agenda, no more than 40 percent of the U.S. adult population has a college degree, and even though most high school graduates enroll in college, only 56 percent earn an undergraduate degree in six years or less.”

Red alert! Our schools and our teachers are blowing it yet again!

Yet I had some questions about this report, starting with what the proportion of adults in the United States with a college education has been in the past, and the comparisons with other countries. I couldn't find that information in the new report, but it references a 2008 report, and I did find references in that report, “Coming to Our Senses,” also from the College Board. That report says that the U.S. was No. 2 in the world in college completion at some unspecified time in the past, and is now No. 11. It also says that the U.S. led the world in high school graduation throughout most of the 20^th century, but by 2005, the U.S. was 21^st out of 27 advanced economies in high school graduation.

Well, sorry, that latter claim is bogus. Here's why: In a number of other nations – I don't have the wherewithal to fully research which or how many other nations – students legitimately graduate from high school after fewer years in school than here in the United States. In the Netherlands (as in many nations), students are separated onto vocational vs. academic tracks at middle school age, and students on vocational tracks legitimately graduate from high school after the equivalent of our 10^th grade, at age 15 or 16.

Let's compare. In the Netherlands, many students who leave school at the end of the 10^th grade are considered legitimate high school graduates. In the United States, all students who leave school at the end of the 10^th grade are dropouts. (Those Netherlands students then go on to further advanced vocational training.)

Q: Now, class, can the Netherlands' high school graduation rate be legitimately compared to the U.S. graduation rate? A: No, they can't be compared because the circumstances are entirely different.

I am told that Switzerland has a similar system, and that Japan's vocational tracks graduate even younger. Other countries? Where's the College Board research on that?

OK, now to the college graduation comparisons. The previous discussion raises an initial question: Are we counting those students in the Netherlands who graduate from advanced vocational training as graduates? Expand this question to all other such programs in all other nations. Discuss among yourselves.

And more. Regarding the figures on the percentage of Americans ages 25-34 who have an A.A. degree or higher: A significant percentage of adults ages 25-34 here in California and in the United States are immigrants who came to this country after the age of K-12 education. Are they counted in these figures on college graduates? How many of them are counted, and how do they impact those figures?

Still more: In some (again, an unknown number of) other nations, students attend college at no cost to themselves. In this country, students and their families pay college tuition, a famously significant, life-altering expense.

And more: In other advanced economies, social safety nets put a college student on an entirely different footing in regard to paying his/her own living expenses.

All these caveats make it impossible to accurately or fairly compare U.S. high school graduation rates to other nations' high school graduation rates, and they make it impossible to accurately or fairly compare U.S. college graduation rates to other nations' college graduation rates.

Unfortunately, it would take vast research resources to dig up further information on the education situation in different nations, and it would take data-crunching skills that I lack to present that information as statistics to respond to the College Board claims. The only thing I can say is that the information we do have shows us plainly that the College Board studies are making sweeping statements – parroted by the press – that are not valid.

The irony of the academically, intellectually and methodologically flawed information coming from the College Board, of all organizations, leaps out a bit.

Grannan: In The Village, no one can hear you scream

Guest post by Caroline Grannan

People like me – regular parents with regular kids in regular schools, along with many other non-headline names -- are having trouble fathoming how the Obama administration could so eagerly embrace the Bush administration’s education policies and push them forward. Obama’s policies even add more emphasis on high-stakes testing, on blaming teachers, and on exalting privatization.

The forces that created and promote those policies pointedly fail to consult with or listen to educators, parents, or anyone else who spends time in actual classrooms with real live kids.

Obama’s wrongheaded tack was already dismaying. But it was even more astonishing when Arne Duncan, Obama’s education secretary, told the New York Times that he had encountered no opposition to the administration’s education policy. “Zero,” Duncan added, for emphasis.

“Hey Arne! Over here!” responded blogger Mike Klonsky.

Here on Planet Earth, dissenting voices have been raising an outcry in every way we can think of. We have a new spokesperson in Diane Ravitch, former Bush administration education official and onetime supporter of the Bush/Obama policies who took a hard look, saw those policies not just failing but doing harm, and now speaks out publicly to oppose them. Ravitch (an NYU education historian and author of “The Death and Life of the Great American School System”) has personally met with Duncan to discuss all this.

How is he not hearing? How is he unaware of the critics? How is none of this getting through to Obama?

“It’s The Village,” my 19-year-old son, a poli-sci wonk, explains patiently. The Village, he tells me, is a concept widely referred to by bloggers and other commentators to define the members and the mindset of the Washington establishment – the insiders who listen only to themselves. As one blogger puts it, “[T]he term ‘Villagers’ denotes a kind of small-minded refusal to think outside an ‘acceptable’ center-right consensus … [T]he ‘Villagers’ include, in part, Democratic elected officials and consultants who insist that their party can’t succeed unless they ally their party with that center-right consensus; think-tankers who churn out position papers designed to prop up this elite consensus view; and elite pundits.” That quote comes from Greg Sargent’s blog The Plum Line, which, ironically for a commentary critical of The Village, is carried on washingtonpost.com.

Since my son – who reads a wide variety of political thought – introduced me to the term, I asked him to write a further explanation for me. Here’s his elaboration: “The foundation of The Village is ethos rather than logos, trust in who's saying something rather than what they're actually saying. To gain The Village's trust, one must submit to The Village consensus on an array of issues. Ideas that take their place in The Village consensus don't come from some sort of rational thought process; like head coverings and prayer shawls in Anatevka, where they come from is unclear. But once the consensus is formed, the primary means a Villager uses to judge any idea is how closely the person or people articulating the idea adheres to the overall Village mindset.”

Washington Post fixture Sally Quinn is credited with defining the concept in a long, earnest 1998 essay explaining why the Monica Lewinsky scandal left the Washington insider community scandalized, outraged, aghast and betrayed -- even though the rest of the country, while fleetingly grossed out, otherwise just didn’t much care. A quote from Quinn’s piece: “ ‘We have our own set of village rules,’ says David Gergen, editor at large at U.S. News & World Report, who worked for both the Reagan and Clinton White House.” Quinn, portraying The Village as a nurturing extended circle with deeply shared values, defined it as both “Washington insiders” and “the Washington Establishment.”

When I went looking for more discussion of The Village, I found lots of material, mostly not related to education issues. The blog Down with Tyranny referred aptly to the “seemingly instinctive collusion between the Village's permanently right-of-center political establishment and its faithful media collaborators.” Down with Tyranny was writing about The Village’s horror when Cheney aide Scooter Libby was indicted in connection with the outing of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame.

But blogger Bob Somerby of the Daily Howler blames The Village mentality for the parroting of anti-public-education and anti-teacher scripts by media insiders such Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, a serial public-school basher. Somerby groused: “[C]ould we offer a thought about Cohen and public education? Cohen knows nothing about vouchers, and nothing about charters. He has no idea what goes on in low-income schools, or why low-income kids fail to prosper. He doesn’t have the slightest idea how we could improve our schools. But so what? He has memorized one famous scripted line, the line his colleagues all know to recite. (Democrats won’t stand up to the [teachers’] unions!) Within his Village, this counts as erudition.”

And The Village mindset explains Newsweek’s now-notorious cover story mindlessly blaming teachers for the challenges of public education; the oblivion of liberals like the late, iconic Teddy Kennedy and California Rep. George Miller (co-sponsors of the bill known as No Child Left Behind) to the real-life issues facing schools and teachers – and Arne Duncan and Barack Obama’s intractable deafness.

As blogger Skippy the Bush Kangaroo observed: “In the Village, you can be wrong about everything, but once you're in, you're in for life.”

Grannan: Once more with feeling -- Newsweek's high school rankings are still invalid and corrupt

Guest post by Caroline Grannan.

The Newsweek Magazine high school rankings have just come out.

Once again I’m posting a blog commentary debunking these rankings as both invalid – based on a single measure that simply does not measure the quality or efficacy of a high school – and corrupt. And I'd like to add a warning to the local press. Please don't fall for this dishonest and corrupt PR ploy. Ignore it or debunk it, but don't hype it. You discredit yourself, your publication or outlet, and your entire profession.

I’m reposting the comment I made last year on examiner.com, with slight updates. Here's that post:

**

Newsweek Magazine has once again compromised both credibility and ethics by releasing its annual high school rankings feature. The "rankings" are based on one single measure -- one that is invalid as a gauge of quality and simply does not measure how "good" a high school is. They also violate journalistic ethics, as the gauge is one that directly promotes increased profits for an enterprise run by Newsweek's parent company.

The rankings are based entirely on the single criterion of how many AP (or two other similar) tests are taken by the students in the school. That's it. How the students perform on the tests is not part of the equation. Holly Hacker of the Dallas Morning News reported that at the No. 26 school, Herron High School in Herron, Ind., an average six exams were given to each graduating senior -- but only 5 percent of the graduating seniors passed one or more of the exams.

But the sheer number of exams given qualified Herron as one of the nation's supposed top high schools, despite the students' abysmal performance (or quite possibly deliberate sabotage, I would add, knowing teens all too well. I would cheer them on in this case, though).

Newsweek's description: "Public schools are ranked according to a ratio devised by [reporter/editor] Jay Mathews: the number of Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate (IB) and/or Cambridge tests taken by all students at a school in 2008 divided by the number of graduating seniors."

This is so clearly not a valid gauge of a school's quality that it's hardly worth wasting words explaining. The criterion is also subject to easy manipulation, needless to say -- as is obviously happening in Herron, Ind.

Meanwhile, here's why this feature compromises Newsweek's ethics. Newsweek's parent company, the Washington Post, also owns Kaplan, the test prep powerhouse. It's also hardly necessary to explain that encouraging more students to take AP tests directly correlates with increasing Kaplan's business.

Standard journalistic ethics call for avoiding the appearance of conflict of interest. The Newsweek high school rankings emblazon the appearance of conflict of interest across the heavens.

An increasing chorus of dissenters complains each year about this feature -- including some of the "winners." In May 2008, the superintendents of 38 high-performing school districts signed a letter to Newsweek protesting the feature and requesting that their districts be excluded (a toothless request, but a meaningful gesture).

At this moment, if you Google "Newsweek top high schools 2010," the first post that comes up is the DCist blog, headlined: "Why Newsweek's Best High School List is Useless."

It's not just time-wasting but also harmful to pass authoritative-looking judgments on schools based on invalid criteria. Meanwhile, with the very survival of the news media under threat, journalistic credibility is one asset the media should struggle to keep. Newsweek is making a big mistake to compromise its ethics so shamelessly. The magazine needs to eliminate and renounce this corrupt and damaging feature.

***

The letter sent by superintendents from 38 high-income school districts in five states to Newsweek was intended to announce their boycott of the rankings. Actually, a boycott is impossible, because districts can’t withhold public information, but the message was made strongly. The letter is pasted below.

To the Editor,

The signers of this letter are school superintendents representing a cross section of districts, including some of the finest public schools in the nation. Many of our high schools have received top rankings in your annual edition of "Americas Best High Schools," as well as in numerous other publications. Others might never appear in such rankings, despite great achievements, because of challenges beyond the reach of your superficial approach to measuring quality.

Although some of our schools may seem to be the fortunate beneficiaries of your articles, we all believe that all schools, communities -- and your readers -- are poorly served by Newsweek's persistent efforts to use a single statistic, the number of students who sit for A.P. or I.B. exams, to rank schools.

The inventor of this flawed methodology, Jay Mathews, has insisted that it is meaningful because A.P. or I.B. participation is the sole available nation-wide measure of whether students take a rigorous program of study. He is right that there are few consistent measures of school quality, state-to-state, but that does not justify inappropriate use of the data that is available.

In reality, it is impossible to know which high schools are "the best" in the nation. Determining whether different schools do or don't offer a high quality of education requires a look at many different measures, including students' overall academic accomplishments and their subsequent performance in college, and taking into consideration the unique needs of their communities.

Students and school communities deserve better than simplistic and misleading school rankings, and that is why the signers of this letter will not respond to your request for our A.P. or I.B. test data. We respectfully insist that you omit our schools from your rankings, no matter how well we score, even if you already have our data, or obtain it in some other way.

Sincerely,

School Districts - Superintendents:

New York Schools:

Ardsley UFSD – Jason Friedman

Bedford CSD – Debra Jackson

Blind Brook-Rye Public Schools – Ronald D. Valenti

Brewster CSD – Jane Sandbank

Bronxville UFSD – David Quattrone

Byram Hills CSD – John Chambers

Chappaqua CSD – David Fleishman

Dobbs Ferry UFSD – Debra Kaplan

Greenburgh/North Castle UFSD – Robert Maher

Hewlett-Woodmere Public Schools - Les Omotani

Katonah-Lewisboro UFSD – Robert Roelle

Mamaroneck UFSD – Paul Fried

Mt. Pleasant-Cottage School, UFSD – Norman Freimark

North Shore Schools – Ed Melnick

Ossining UFSD - Phyllis Glassman

Rye Neck UFSD – Peter Mustich

Scarsdale UFSD – Mike McGill

Spackenkill UFSD - Lois Colletta

Tuckahoe UFSD – Mike Yazurlo

Valhalla UFSD- Diane Ramos-Kelly

New Jersey Schools:

Montclair Schools - Frank Alvarez

Montgomery Schools - Sam Stewart

Tenafly Schools – Morton Sherman

Verona Public Schools – Earl Kim

Connecticut Schools:

Darien Schools – Don Fiftal

Simsbury Schools – Diane Ullman

Stonington Public Schools – Michael L. McKee

Wilton Public Schools - Gary Richards

Illinois Schools:

Decatur Public School District #61 – Gloria J. Davis

Deerfield/Highland Park Township HS District 113 – George V. Fornero

Evanston Township High School – Eric Witherspoon

Glenbrook High School District 225 - Dave Hales

Lincoln-Way High School District 210 – Lawrence A. Wylie

New Trier High School District 203 – Linda Yonke

Oak Park and River Forest High School - Attila J. Weninger

Massachusetts Schools:

Amherst-Pelham Regional Schools - Jere Hochman

Masconomet Regional School District - Claire Sheff Kohn

Wayland Schools – Gary Burton

Cc: The Editors of Time and US News and World Report

US News and World Report

Grannan: Charters want accountability? That's a new concept.

Guest post by Caroline Grannan.

The charter school industry and its supporters earnestly assure the public these days that they want problem charter schools held accountable.

If that’s true, it’s good news. It’s also a drastic about-face for the charter school industry, which has long fought efforts to hold charter schools accountable. A May 25 New York Times article pointed out the same thing. The charter industry has been waging successful court battles against efforts to hold charter schools accountable.

“…[C]harter schools have at times resisted tougher monitoring,” the Times wrote. “In 2007, a group of charter schools and advocates sued the [New York state] comptroller's office, challenging its right to audit the finances and academic performance of such schools. Critics said the comptroller's office had no expertise to assess academics. “Last year, the Court of Appeals, the state's highest court, ruled that charter schools were in effect independent contractors and beyond the comptroller's reach.”

Not that I’m unsympathetic to those who change their minds. After all, I’m a big admirer of Diane Ravitch’s. She’s the former Bush administration education official and former booster of high-stakes-testing/choice/privatization education policies who announced her change of mind and heart in her book “The Death and Life of the Great American School System.” Ravitch, who publicly described her soul-searching, now opposes the ideas she once championed, saying that in real life they have been shown to be not just ineffective but harmful to schools, children and public education.

It’s weird that (unlike Ravitch) the entire charter industry just changed its tune without missing a beat, though. There was no explanation and no discussion of the new philosophy or of renouncing the old philosophy. When did that new philosophy take effect?

Here in San Francisco a few years ago, our Board of Education (BOE) got beaten up by the charter world twice in a short period for trying to hold problem charter schools accountable. In one of those cases, the local, national and even international media eagerly, compliantly and unquestioningly leaped on the charter movement’s crusade, ganging up to blast the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD) for its effort to hold controversial, for-profit Edison Schools Inc. accountable back in 2001. (More on that below.)

Then, in 2003, SFUSD had to deal with its own home-grown charter problem, a high school called Urban Pioneer that specialized in wilderness experience for disaffected students. In March 2003, two UP students died falling into a ravine at night on an unsupervised wilderness outing.

The ensuing scrutiny revealed that UP was also in financial chaos — “the budget allowed for just $2 per student per month and no janitors, testing or staff development,” according to the Chronicle. And UP was committing academic fraud, “graduating” students with far fewer than the required credits. The school’s test scores were rock bottom. Reportedly, the president of the school’s board of directors, a lawyer, had been intimidating would-be whistleblowers within the school into silence by threatening to sue them.

Yet when the SFUSD BOE began investigating the school, the charter lobby fought back hard, rousing the UP community and supporters to battle to keep the school open. Peter Thorp, best known here in San Francisco as founding principal of Gateway High School, our city’s most successful charter, spoke on behalf of the California Network of Educational Charters (now the California Charter Schools Association) against closing Urban Pioneer. I wasn’t present, but a friend who attended one of the public meetings tells me that the grieving parents of the deceased students had come to the meeting intending to speak, but were intimidated by the belligerent crowd and sat silently.

Meanwhile, despite its financial problems, UP somehow managed to scrape together the wherewithal to hire a high-priced damage-control PR specialist, David Hyams of San Francisco’s Solem & Associates. (Hyams had recently changed careers after many years as an editor at the San Francisco Chronicle.) The Chronicle quoted Hyams as likening SFUSD to the Taliban and its investigation to a “witch hunt.”

Urban Pioneer was ultimately shut down, though you can still find people in the community to this day who somehow managed to miss the whole story and who view it as an outrage that SFUSD shut down a “successful” charter school. I haven’t pinned down the source of that version of the story, though it’s easy to guess.

The UP controversy roiled our school district at a time when it had been recently battered by its bloody encounter with Edison Schools, the then-high-flying media darling that was being hailed as the solution for public education.

Edison was running one charter school in our district, Edison Charter Academy (ECA) at 22nd and Dolores on the border between San Francisco's Mission District and Noe Valley. Our wild and woolly superintendent of the ’90s, Bill Rojas, had brought Edison in, supported by a rubber-stamp Board of Ed majority.

Edison-friendly Rojas left in ’99 to run the Dallas school district (which later fired him), and by 2001, the BOE was no longer dominated by unquestioning Edison and Rojas supporters. The district was encountering the same problems with Edison that many other Edison client districts were reporting, including significantly higher costs than projected, low performance and “counseling out” of challenging students who then landed in district schools. Edison made burdensome demands on districts (one SFUSD central office bureaucrat who worked on contracts said she spent nearly half her time over several months just working with ECA), while adding insult to injury by issuing press releases touting itself as superior to the clients who had hired it.

Edison was founded and run by flamboyant entrepreneur Christopher Whittle, a non-educator who previously owned Esquire magazine. Whittle had obviously made some good high-level contacts in media, and when the SFUSD BOE started asking tough questions about ECA, he mobilized those contacts. Editorials criticizing SFUSD and praising Edison popped up all over, in places like the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, the London-based Economist and even random outlets like a Virginia newspaper that headlined its editorial “Dim Bulbs” (referring to the SFUSD BOE). The Chronicle and the San Jose Mercury News editorialized strongly in favor of Edison. The Chronicle editorial page worked itself into such a state of outrage at our BOE that one headline on an editorial about SFUSD used the word “goosestepping” (that particular editorial was not about Edison, but the Edison issue was the spark igniting a general frenzy of hostility at the Chron at that time).

News coverage, including a Page 1 story in the New York Times, portrayed ECA as a huge success and hinted at San Francisco’s leftist “land of fruits and nuts” image to claim that our BOE was opposing successful Edison for entirely “ideological” reasons. The press “forgot” to do a key piece of the research, which should have been to find out what was going on in other Edison client districts around the nation. (The insider term for that type of "forgetful" journalism is “check it and lose it.”)

The New York Times story addressed that issue by using a quote from Whittle: “None of the 44 other cities where we manage schools has ever done anything like this.” Reporter Edward Wyatt used the quote without checking it, challenging it or further commenting, letting it stand as a statement of fact.

But actually, Whittle was lying. Edison had already been kicked out by the Sherman, Texas, school district. Other clients at that time were looking into severing their Edison contracts too — among them Macon, Ga.; Lansing and Flint, Mich.; Goldsboro, N.C.; and Wichita, Kans., none of them generally vulnerable to “land of fruits and nuts” caricatures.

The bashing wasn’t limited to public school critics or mainstream media. Commentator Peter Schrag, normally a public school supporter, wrote a long piece for the leftist Nation magazine telling the same (inaccurate) story. Joan Walsh, now editor of Salon and a media star herself — and at the time an SFUSD parent, though not at ECA — did the same in a long Salon article. (To Walsh’s credit, she is one of the very few journalists who later corrected factual errors fed to her by Edison spokespeople — perhaps the only one.) When one Edison press release described ECA as “a successful school in a failing district,” variations on that line appeared in various media, including Schrag’s Nation article.

For the record, ECA’s achievement at the time (based on California’s Academic Performance Index compilation of test scores) ranked it close to the bottom among SFUSD schools for 1999-2000, the data available at the beginning of the media frenzy. And when the scores from spring 2001 testing were released, ECA’s were dead last in the district.

I helped other advocates research information about Edison, and we used the less-nimble technology of that time to create an e-mail press release list and a website, Parents Advocating School Accountability. At one point I wrote up an account of the situation to share with friends who weren’t versed in it, partly because if they came across my name (I was quoted in the Page 1 New York Times article), I wanted them to have heard my version first. A friend who was a Chronicle copy editor was amazed to learn from me that ECA wasn’t the highest-scoring school in the district. Though the Chronicle’s news coverage had mentioned that ECA’s actual test scores were low, the whole tone of the crusade had given her that impression — even though she was actually copy editing some of the coverage.

Meanwhile, Edison was fighting SFUSD in court too, and California charter PR man Gary Larson was mobilizing ECA parents to storm school board meetings in matching T-shirts, chanting “My child, my choice!”

Why did Edison mobilize against SFUSD — and mobilize the media on its behalf — while keeping a low profile about the numerous other client districts that had the same problems with Edison and were doing the same thing? At the time, Edison was making two ambitious bids in major districts. In New York City, it was trying to win five schools and a solid toehold. In Philadelphia, it was attempting to take over the entire district. My guess is that the thinking was that all this news coverage with a strong tone of disapproval aimed at one “land of fruits and nuts” district would divert everyone from checking into how Edison was doing with its various client districts. The strategy seemed to work.

What this all amounted to was a mass attack on SFUSD for attempting to hold Edison accountable for its commitments to its client school district (and its students). The fact that the media leaped gleefully into the fray provides a good view of the risks of trying to hold a charter operator accountable.

In the end, the outcome in San Francisco was a compromise. Edison and SFUSD severed their contract and the charter-promoting California state Board of Education took over chartering the school (the degree of oversight and accountability now is utterly unknown to the public). ECA is quietly operating in the same location, as a rent-paying tenant in an SFUSD facility. It’s an attractive facility in a great location, too, and a lot of young parents in trendy, family-friendly Noe Valley would like to get it back.

Edison lost its bid for the New York schools and ended up with just a couple dozen in Philadelphia. By now, Edison Schools Inc. has lost 29 of its client districts at last known count — and I am definitely not keeping up, so I’m sure there are more. Here’s an account of Edison Schools’ situation from the PASA website.

It’s easy to see why anyone who has followed the history of charter schools would be surprised to hear from charter advocates that they now believe in accountability for problem charter schools. We shall see.

\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\

From the P.P.:

Bay Area readers will be interested in Vincent Matthews’ ties to Edison Schools, the NewSchools Venture Fund, and the Broad Foundation. Noticing that Matthews’ job history was one in chronic flux, in 2007 a reporter wrote, “He’s got a five-page resume that lists about 10 jobs.”

Vincent Matthews

• pre-2001: Various teaching and administrative positions
• 2001: Principal of Edison Charter Academy in San Francisco
• 2003: Vice president for Edison Schools (regional director of Edison’s West Coast operations)
• Next: Educator in residence for the NewSchools Venture Fund
• 2006: Graduated from the Broad Superintendents Academy
• 2006: Appointed as a regional superintendent of San Diego Unified School District
• 2007: Appointed as chief of staff for the Oakland Unified School District state administrator, Kimberly Statham, another graduate of the Broad Superintendents Academy (Class of 2003).
• 2007: Appointed as state administrator for the Oakland Unified School District
• 2008: Appointed as state trustee for the Oakland Unified School District (receiving an enormous salary as such)
• 2010: Appointed superintendent of the San Jose School District