More lies from the head honcho corporate reformer

Richard Rothstein is both smart AND honest. Bill Gates is not.

The American public should storm the Gates Foundation headquarters and demand that that know-nothing, ed reform dabbler, public policy-driving, and Ed Dept billionaire puppeteer, Bill Gates, appears in a televised public debate with Richard Rothstein. From the National Journal Education Expert blog (my red bolding).

Fact-Challenged Policy

Richard Rothstein

Research Associate, Economic Policy Institute

Last week, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates published an op-ed in the Washington Post, “How Teacher Development could Revolutionize our Schools,” proposing that American public schools should do a better job of evaluating the effectiveness of teachers, a goal with which none can disagree. But his specific prescriptions, and the urgency he attaches to them, are based on the misrepresentation of one fact, the misinterpretation of another and the demagogic presentation of a third. It is remarkable that someone associated with technology and progress should have such a careless disregard for accuracy when it comes to the education policy in which he is now so deeply involved.

Gates’ most important factual claim is that “over the past four decades, the per-student cost of running our K-12 schools has more than doubled, while our student achievement has remained virtually flat.” And, he adds, “spending has climbed, but our percentage of college graduates has dropped compared with other countries.” Let’s examine these factual claims:

Bill Gates says: “Our student achievement has remained virtually flat”

The only longitudinal measure of student achievement that is available to Bill Gates or anyone else is the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)…

On these exams, American students have improved substantially, in some cases phenomenally. In general, the improvements have been greatest for African-American students, and among these, for the most disadvantaged. The improvements have been greatest for both black and white 4th and 8th graders in math…

Bill Gates may think that these improvements are insufficient, and perhaps he is correct. But, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan reportedly quipped, “everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but not to their own facts.” No rational reading of these NAEP data can support Bill Gates’ claim that “student achievement has remained virtually flat” over the last four decades. And, to repeat, no other longitudinal data are available that describe student achievement over time.

These facts also don’t support the story that the typical teacher of disadvantaged children is ineffective. Certainly, some teachers are ineffective, and schools should do a better job of removing them. But that should not, if facts are to be believed, be the main story.

Yet it seems to be. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan recently asserted that “many, if not most, teacher-training programs are mediocre.” This may be true, but how does he know? What is his evidence? It wouldn’t seem that mediocre teacher training programs could consistently be turning out teachers who have posted the kinds of gains we’ve seen on NAEP in the last generation and more…

…It is also important to investigate why teachers have apparently been more effective during most (though not all) of the last few decades in teaching math than reading, but it is difficult to motivate anyone to investigate this if our vision is clouded by the myth that all student achievement has been flat.

Bill Gates says: “The per-student cost of running our K-12 schools has more than doubled.”

Here, Bill Gates is nominally correct, but misleading. When properly adjusted for inflation, K-12 per pupil spending has about doubled over the last four decades, but less than half of this new money has gone to regular education (including compensatory education for disadvantaged children, programs for English-language learners, integration programs like magnet schools, and special schools for dropout recovery and prevention). The biggest single recipient of new money has been special education for children with disabilities. Four decades ago, special education consumed less than 4% of all K-12 spending. It now consumes 21%...

The increase in regular education spending has still been substantial, even if not nearly as great as Bill Gates implies. Should this spending increase have produced even greater improvement in achievement than has in fact occurred? This is a more difficult judgment to make. But in light of the actual achievement improvements documented by NAEP, it is not reasonable to jump to the facile conclusion of a productivity collapse in K-12 education. A more reasonable story is that spending has increased and achievement has increased as well. Perhaps we have gotten what we paid for.

Bill Gates says: “Spending has climbed, but our percentage of college graduates has dropped compared with other countries.”

This is the Bill Gates claim that can properly be called demagogic. It attempts to agitate readers by presenting a positive development in a negative light. A climb in spending should produce an increase in the percentage of college graduates. And it has. In the last four decades, the percentage of college graduates in the United States has nearly doubled. In 1970, 16% of young adults (ages 25 to 29) were college graduates. Today, it is 31%. The improvement has been across the board: the share of African-American young adults who are college graduates has gone from 10% to 19%; for whites it has gone from 17% to 37%. Somehow, Bill Gates saw fit to present this as an indictment…

It is commonplace to imply, as Bill Gates does in his Washington Post op-ed, that our failure to increase our college graduation rate “compared with other countries” will prevent us from “build[ing] a dynamic 21st-century economy.” Certainly, we need a sufficient number of well-trained college graduates for such an economy, but there is no reason to believe that a graduate rate in excess of 30% is too small for this purpose, or that economic dynamism can, after reaching sufficiency, increase linearly with increases in the share of young people who graduate from college. The threats to a dynamic 21st century economy are likely to come from a failure of macroeconomic policy, regulation of speculation, and investment in education, not from inefficiency in the investment we already make.

We only need to examine the list of international college graduation rates to see the absurdity of efforts to make a direct link between college graduation rates and economic success. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) publishes comparative data. One country that outranks the U.S. in college graduation rates is Ireland, whose economy has now collapsed because its regulation of the real estate bubble was even more careless and corrupt than ours. Another is Portugal, whose economic health is also worse than that of the U.S. Of course there are also nations on the list that are not on the verge of bankruptcy, but the chief lesson of the list is this: provided a nation has a sufficient number of college graduates for a dynamic economy, rankings above that point are irrelevant. Of course we should increase our college graduation rate, and there are many civic and cultural reasons to do so, even if we may already produce (as some analyses suggest) an apparent surplus, for economic purposes, of science, technology, engineering, and math graduates.

Education is complex, and the relationship between education and the economy even more so. Our ability to grapple with the challenges these present is not enhanced by factually inaccurate and hyperventilated appeals from those who should know better.

Grannan: Critic blasts Obama administration education policy; official spokesman agrees

Posted with the permission of Caroline Grannan, the SF Education Examiner.

Critic blasts Obama administration education policy; official spokesman agrees

(Jan. 24, 2010) A spokesman for the Obama administration's Department of Education, appearing on a Jan. 12 radio broadcast, readily agreed with the views of another program guest who sharply criticized his department's Race to the Top school reform program.

Peter Cunningham, assistant secretary of communications for the U.S. Department of Education, (more here) appeared on the program "To the Point" on radio station KCRW with education researcher Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute. Cunningham willingly concurred with Rothstein that overreliance on standardized testing is detrimental to students, and that "many" charter schools, a model being promoted as a solution for troubled schools, are not successful. Rothstein spoke forcefully about the "major harm" done by administration policies, getting no argument from Cunningham.

The Obama administration's education department is promoting policies that are "actually harming the education of students in this country," Rothstein charged, and "education has been corrupted" by those policies. "A major consequence of No Child Left Behind that's done major harm to American education is the narrowing of the curriculum," he said. Sciences, history, social studies, music, the arts and physical education are neglected or abandoned as educators struggle to adhere to NCLB's emphasis on math and reading, Rothstein explained, and "Race to the Top doesn't change that." Abandoning important subjects "does the most harm to disadvantaged students," Rothstein added. Race to the Top, he said, is "accentuating the harm that NCLB did."

"Absolutely that's a very real issue," Cunningham admitted.

When Rothstein pointed out that "charter schools on average don't have better student performance than regular public schools," Cunningham responded, "We 100% agree that many of them are not good."

Moderator Warren Olney asked Rothstein: "Are standardized tests a good measure of teacher performance and ultimately of school performance?"

"No, they're not," Rothstein responded. "Education has been corrupted. In addition to narrowing the curriculum by abandoning other topics, what this kind of system does is create incentives to game the system. We're actually harming the education of students in this country."

Rothstein is a research associate with the Economic Policy Institute, a former education columnist for the New York Times, and the author of many books and studies about education policy.

Cunningham was previously a communications consultant for the Chicago Public Schools during the time when his current boss, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, was head of that school system.

"To the Point" was part of the Jan. 12 KCRW broadcast of the program "Which Way, L.A.?" which also covered the issue of outside groups' efforts to take over a number of Los Angeles schools. Thanks to Mike Klonsky for spreading the word about this program.

- KCRW comes out of Santa Monica, California. Listen to the show here.

- Mike Klonsky's comments on the radio interview are here.

- About Richard Rothstein from the Economic Policy Institute bio page.

Richard Rothstein is a research associate of the Economic Policy Institute. From 1999 to 2002 he was the national education columnist of The New York Times. He is the author of Grading Education: Getting Accountability Right (Teachers College Press and EPI, 2008) and Class and Schools: Using Social, Economic and Educational Reform to Close the Black-White Achievement Gap (Teachers College Press 2004). He is also the author of The Way We Were? Myths and Realities of America's Student Achievement (1998). Other recent books include The Charter School Dust-Up: Examining the Evidence on Enrollment and Achievement (co-authored in 2005); and All Else Equal. Are Public and Private Schools Different? (co-authored in 2003).

- Complete listing of EPI publications by Richard Rothstein

- Watch Rothstein lecture at Columbia University in early 2004.

- Read Class and Schools: Using Social, Economic and Educational Reform to Close the Black-White Achievement Gap (Teachers College Press 2004).

- And for an alternative and much more sane and intelligent approach to education reform, please acquaint yourself with the Broader, Bolder Approach.

Rothstein’s scope of knowledge, brain power, and wisdom about these complicated issues are probably greater than Duncan’s and his entire staff combined. Rothstein's son, Jesse, is now an associate professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley, and has recently started to insert his perspective and findings into the national ed reform conversation, too. I recall reading that Rothstein's wife had once been a public school principal in LA.

The Rothsteins are a powerfully minded group, and I'd love to listen in on their family conversations about education issues. Contrast this intellectual density with the fact that our Department of Education is now headed by someone who has a bachelors degree in sociology and spent time helping at his mom's tutoring center for a handful of childhood years, then eventually landed a big job in the Chicago school district primarily due to his personal connections to powerful people who liked to play basketball, too.

Good grief, President Obama, what could you possibly have been thinking??? You're glorifying the anti-intellectual Bush years all over again.

All I know is that we'd be in much better hands if Duncan and company decided to be wise and started taking Rothstein's advice asap.

A Real Crisis

“Social/Economic Indicators by Race: Disparity 1954 and Today,” Ohio State University, Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race & Ethnicity, PowerPoint presentation (slide 22 of 36), April 2004;

http://4909e99d35cada63e7f757471b7243be73e53e14.gripelements.com/presentations/BrownPresDisparityData.ppt

As Richard Rothstein, David Berliner and Bruce Biddle, and others have reported, schools have been steadily providing an ever-increasing level of education to American students, despite all the constant haranguing we hear about about an education “crisis” today.

Crisis: 1a. A crucial or decisive point or situation; a turning point. b. An unstable condition, as in political, social, or economic affairs, involving an impending abrupt or decisive change (American Heritage Dictionary)

There was never a golden age of education prior to this era, unless it was the time when public schools and their teachers were not under this current aggressive and vicious attack, which was initiated and is being sustained by the corporate class. It is they, using political puppets, who have actually now created a true crisis in public education, by invading school districts to implement their chaotic, top-down transformations!
The war against public schools, and the teachers who work in them, is serving two purposes. One, in the true neo-liberal fashion, it is paving the way to the privatization of public education. Secondly, it has provoked a constant chatter and bickering about "education reform" which serves as a distraction from the more important issues and crises which the corporate/political leadership continually refuse to address.
I urge readers to look at the data in the PowerPoint presentation produced by Ohio State University’s Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race & Ethnicity, “Social/Economic Indicators by Race: Disparity 1954 and Today.” (I am unable to set the link but you can locate it with Google). This April 2004 document reveals facts about African American/White disparities in Education, Housing, Poverty, Employment, Income, Crime, and Health.
For instance:
In the past several decades, educational attainment for African Americans has increased considerably.

• Since 1957, the proportion of the African American population with a high school degree has increased by 300% (18.4% to 79.2%) and the proportion of the African American population with a 4-year college degree increased by almost 500% (2.9% to 17.2%).
• High School dropout rates for African Americans have decreased substantially in the last thirty years, dropping from 33.5% in 1974 to 17% in 2002.
• College enrollment rates have increased from 36% in 1960 to 57.7% in 2002 for African Americans (an increase of 66%). College enrollment rates for Whites increased by 45% during this forty-four year time period.

By no means has the disparity between these races been erased, but there has been a huge, steady improvement in the educational attainment of African Americans over the past 50+ years. Obviously, all the schools are not "failing" and there is no educational “crisis!”
You may wish to ask yourself why it is that Broad, Gates and the other business-minded education reformers don’t ever care to address, via their "venture philanthropy," these other social/economic indicators:

• African American child poverty rates were approximately double the rate of white child poverty in the 1990’s.
• African American unemployment has been approximately twice as high as white unemployment, at least since the 1950s.
• Disparity in income has actually grown been reduced since 1954. The median African American family income in 1954 was 55% of the white median. In 2002 this figure had grown to 62%.*
• In 2000, the median assets ($7,500) for African American households was 9.5% of the median assets for non-Hispanic whites ($79,000).
• The number of incarcerated African Americans has increased 800% since the 1950s, the number of incarcerated African Americans surpassed the number of Whites incarcerated in the late 1980s.

It is of utmost importance to note that, despite the tremendous increase in educational attainment over the past 50+ years on the part of African Americans, their achievements have not decreased the racial disparities for their employment or family income.* This simple truth reveals that the current propaganda about education being "the answer" to all of the socioeconomic problems of African Americans is a lie.
As for the last point in the bulleted section above, the incarceration figures are displayed in the graph at the top of this post. It is from the Kirwan Institute PowerPoint and I apologize for it being so faint.
The two lines and trajectories look quite similar, until one realizes that that the figures are in numbers, not in percentages, and that the African American population in 1997 was about one sixth (1/6) the size of the White population (it was 1/10th in 1930).
The TRUE crisis is the impact these figures are having on the current and future generations of the urban African American community. SO WHY NOT APPLY VENTURE PHILANTHROPY TO DEVELOP SOLUTIONS TO THIS PROBLEM? For instance, Broad and Gates could use their multi-millions to lobby other corporate powerhouses to forgo some of their astronomical, global profits, and create some jobs for people living in America's urban areas!
According to a February 2008 Washington Post article about a released Pew Center study:

More than one in 100 adult Americans are in jail or prison, an all-time high that is costing state governments nearly $50 billion a year, in addition to more than $5 billion spent by the federal government, according to a report released Thursday.
With more than 2.3 million people behind bars at the start of 2008, the United States leads the world in both the number and the percentage of residents it incarcerates, leaving even far more populous China a distant second, noted the report by the nonpartisan Pew Center on the States. [And we consider ourselves to be the world's overseer and guardian of human rights!?!]

The article also states that, over the past two decades, state spending on corrections (adjusted for inflation) increased 127 percent, while spending on higher education rose 21 percent. One estimate is that incarceration costs approximately $27,500 a year, many more times than the average public school per pupil spending.
I did learn though, recently, that Oakland Unified spends nearly this much on the students enrolled in Community Day. This very small secondary school (10 students last year) is for students who have committed extremely severe disciplinary infractions and who have been expelled from the district as a result. At the school they receive educational and mental health services, working closely with clinical therapists and case managers. During 2006-07, the total expenditure per pupil at this school was $20211. This is ten students getting too little, too late.
There is no doubt that the public schools have been made into scapegoats that are blamed for not being able to carry the burden of our nation's failures on their own. Teachers and schools are being forced to jump through senseless, exhausting, futile, and demoralizing hoops which have been set up by the corporate schemers, while so many other things that need to be addressed are being completely ignored.
Public schools and their teachers are NOT the cause of our nation's problems, nor have they ever been. I am not an urban public school teacher, but, as an active and engaged parent, I have watch them deal with the challenges at their schools for nearly 17 years. Honestly, I believe it is time for them to stand up to the bullying and madness, feel confident about speaking the truth, and rebel. Teachers: you are being ground into the ground, and you don't have to take it anymore!
IMPORTANT ADDENDUM: Read Incarceration and Crime: A Complex Relationship, a 2005 report produced by The Sentencing Project. The extreme incarceration rate is exhibited in multiple graphs which are then contrasted with other graphs which exhibit a crime rate which has remained nearly steady. As the report states:

Negative Impacts on Family and Community – The rapid growth of incarceration has had profoundly disruptive effects that radiate into other spheres of society. The persistent removal of persons from the community to prison and their eventual return has a destabilizing effect that has been demonstrated to fray family and community bonds, and contribute to an increase in recidivism and future criminality. Moreover, these trends are exacerbated as prisoners are increasingly incarcerated in facilities hundreds of miles from their homes. Research by the Urban Institute in a number of cities indicates that a critical predictor of success for persons returning to the community is family connections, and prospects for employment are strengthened for persons who are able to maintain some degree of attachment to their former networks of contacts. However, as the use of incarceration continues to grow, there is a resultant decline in these contacts, and a harmful impact on the individual, the family, and the community at large.

A huge number of kids are entwined in this scenario. They should become the focus of the education reform efforts.

*I’ve now taken the liberty to change the original phrasing which I had copied from the Kirwan Institute report, because it was misleading. h/t to Ron for pointing this out. The gap between the incomes has indeed been reduced. In 1954 the ratio of African American/White family income was $13,481:$24,206, or 55.7%. In 2002, the ratio was $33,598:$54,067, or 62%. However, while this is an improvement, it is still a remarkable disparity.