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07 Jul 09

Education at Risk: Fallout from a Flawed Report | Edutopia

www.edutopia.org/k-education-report-nation-risk - Preview

nclb businessroundtable

08 May 09

Global Ideologies in Education: Democrats For Education Reform?

www.ourglobaleducation.com/...rats-for-education-reform.html - Preview

duncan charters businessroundtable

27 Apr 09

Obama’s Remarks to the Business Roundtable - Washington Wire - WSJ

blogs.wsj.com/...rks-to-the-business-roundtable - Preview

obama businessroundtable

What is true, though, is that in the current global, highly competitive environment that the burdens and benefits, the dislocations of that dynamism are disproportionately borne by workers in certain sectors, in certain regions. And that creates great pain, it creates great hardship. And so part of what we want to figure out is how do we make sure that the burdens and benefits of this dynamic economy are spread in a way that maintains strong political and social support for that dynamism.
And so figuring out how we’re training people for the right jobs, that requires consultation with business. You guys can help us identify what are the particular skill sets that people are going to need so that working with community colleges, universities, vocational programs, apprenticeship programs, we are teeing that up.
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- But having said that, I also just have a very hard-headed analysis about this, which is the path we’re on is unsustainable. If you have six, eight, 10 percent health care inflation every single year, at some point we are all broke; businesses are broke, or you stop providing health care to your employees. The federal government is way broke with Medicare and Medicaid. State governments are groaning under the weight of this stuff; it’s consuming everything.
  
  So what that also means though — and this is something I’ve tried to emphasize to my more progressive friends — we can’t simply just add on a whole bunch of people to a broken system, because that’s also unsustainable. You can’t just take people who are currently uninsured, plop them on to a system that is generating those kinds of costs, not dig into the engine and try to figure out how to make the thing run more efficiently, because then you’ll just be broke that much faster. And at some point, you start making very draconian decisions about people losing benefits.
  
  So the cost issue is the thing that we actually think is the big driver in this whole debate. And that’s why — I know you heard from Peter Orszag — things like comparative effectiveness, health IT, prevention, figuring out how our reimbursement structures are designed under Medicare and Medicaid. Medical liability issues — I think all those things have to be on the table. And I won’t lie to you that everybody agrees on this theoretically until you start getting into the specifics. And oftentimes though, Ivan, one of the things I’ll note, is the resistance is not based on evidence, it’s based on people’s interests. Everybody is kind of dug in. They know that the system doesn’t work, but at least it kind of works for them in one particular aspect.
- I just wanted to comment that a number of us in the business community are concerned that a hundred percent auction will effectively be a tax that would impose significant costs on energy-intensive industries such as some that we operate, and may impact existing industries’ ability to fund needed investments in new low-carbon technologies.
  
  I just wondered if you could explain how the hundred percent auction approach would work in our highly challenged economy — because we’re all feeling a lot of pressure today on costs — and yet still preserve jobs for existing industries, and strengthen our existing manufacturing sector.
- I was talking to some members of Congress just yesterday, you know, who were concerned about this, because I’m sure they’re hearing from industries and, you know, what does this mean economically, et cetera. I just want to point out, you know, anybody who has been to Las Vegas recently and looked at Lake Mead; or who is familiar with what’s happening in agriculture in California right now; or go down to Atlanta, which may not have any water soon, because of what’s happening in terms of changing weather patterns; or talk to Kevin Rudd in Australia — that’s going to cost us money too. It’s just not — it’s not priced.
  
  And I’m not somebody who — I’ve never bought into these Malthusian — woe — Chicken Little, the earth is falling — I tend to be pretty optimistic. I wouldn’t be here if I weren’t pretty optimistic. But I think this is — the science is overwhelming. This is a real problem. It will have severe economic consequences, as well as political and national security and environmental consequences.
  
  And I’m confident that if we do it smart, if we’re talking to you guys, if we’re talking to industries, if our projections don’t end up being wildly unrealistic, then I think we can handle this problem.

26 Apr 09

Tutoring program not hitting its marks - Las Vegas Sun

WaPo makes most of its money from SES profits along these lines - Kaplan, above all.

www.lasvegassun.com/...-program-not-hitting-its-marks - Preview

nclb corruption businessroundtable

A federally mandated after-school tutoring program, which has cost the state more than $20 million over five years, has had no effect on Clark County student achievement in reading while bringing slight gains in math, according to researchers.

While noting that the researchers’ findings are not definitive, Keith Rheault, Nevada’s superintendent of public instruction, said the federal dollars spent on reading tutoring appear to have been “a waste of money,” which he intends to correct.

“We should have spent that money on programs during the academic day instead of 30 or 40 minutes after school a couple times per week,” Rheault said. “We need to figure out why the reading (tutoring) has failed.”

Nearly all the funding was spent in the Clark County School District, which has about 70 percent of the state’s K-12 enrollment. To evaluate the tutoring, which is provided by private companies at schools serving large numbers of students from low-income households, researchers at the University of Memphis compared test scores of students who received the assistance during the 2007-08 academic year with their peers who did not.

24 Apr 09

Gerald Bracey: Getting the Word Out, Countering Fear-Mongers

The best response to the fear-mongers and stats-distorters I've read.

www.susanohanian.org/show_commentaries.html - Preview

businessroundtable nclb history education assessment statistics

Congressman Miller seems to have forgotten that economic cycles have come and gone in the past independent of what 4th graders were doing in math and science. The economies of developed nations will continue to rise in fall independent of test scores. Japan, with some of the highest scoring students in the world, has been in the economic doldrums for almost 20 years. Iceland, with high scoring students, has become an overnight basket case with national debt equal to 850% of its GDP.
Kids in Wyoming are 70 points ahead of kids in Mississippi. On WHAT? I cannot think of any common test kids in WY and MS take except NAEP and in 2007, Wyoming 4th graders scored 225 and Mississippi 4th graders scored 208. That’s 17 points, not 70, but I don’t think the President misread his teleprompter or suffers dyslexia. Whatever the differences, are they due, as the President claims, to the different standards in the two states? How about, differences in poverty. Thirty percent of the students in Wyoming are eligible for free or reduced price lunch. In Mississippi it’s 68 percent. My forthcoming book has a chapter "Poverty is Poison," a title I stole from Paul Krugman, with credit, and that, along with Dave Berliner’s new monograph on out-of-school factors in achievement should finally shut up the "poverty-is-no-excuse" crowd. (But they won’t).
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- What about those 13- and 14-year olds, only one third of whom "can read as well as they should?" This is NAEP data. This is one of the critics’ favorite statistics for stirring up anxiety. Roy Romer and Bob Wise use it all the time. About one third of these kids score at the NAEP "proficient" level. When the Center for American Progress, an organization that claims to be progressive, rolled out Leaders and Laggards, its joint venture with the Chamber of Commerce in 2007, CAP executive director, John Podesta declared that he found it "unconscionable" that no state had a majority of its students scoring at the NAEP proficient level. Unconscionable!
  
  But, let’s ask, "If 13- and 14-year olds in other nations sat for America’s NAEP, how many of those countries would have a majority of students scoring at the proficient level?"
  
  The answer, in reading at least is: Zero.
  
  That’s what Richard Rothstein and colleagues found using a method first developed by Bob Linn. The highest scoring nation, Sweden, (Finland did not participate in this reading study) would have about one third of their students at or above the proficient level. The U. S., which scored very high, had 31%. Gary Phillips, former acting commissioner for statistics at NCES and now with the American Institutes for Research made similar estimates for math and science using TIMSS data. Only 5 of 45 nations would have a small majority of their students proficient in math and only two would clear that barrier in science. Further evidence, I would argue, that the NAEP achievement levels are set far too high.
- The 'Fastest Growing Occupations'
  
  What about those 30 fastest growing occupations? I’ve never seen that statistic presented in quite that way, but it also means that half of the 30 fastest growing jobs DON’T require a B.A. or better. But, the signal point about this statistic is that the 30 fastest growing jobs don’t account for many jobs. And the few that do are occupations like personal care aides, home health aides, nursing aides — low-paying service sector jobs needed in and for an aging nation.
  
  Retail sales accounts for more jobs than the top ten fastest growing occupations combined. For every systems engineer needed by a computer firm, Wal-Mart needs about 15 people on the floor. The ten occupations accounting for the largest NUMBER of jobs in a Bureau of Labor Statistics projection from 2006 to 2016 were retail sales, cashiers, office clerks, registered nurses, janitors and cleaners, bookkeeping clerks, waiters and waitresses, food preparers and servers, customer service representatives, and truck and tractor drivers. I will show the falsity of Miller's and Duncan's linking of education and economic crises in detail later in the talk, but it terrifies me that our new President and Secretary of Education have apparently bought into the old falsehoods.
  
  Little wonder that Diane Ravitch said that in education Obama was a third term for Bush and that Duncan was Margaret Spellings in drag.
- The real causes of the current economic mess
  
  I think one of the reasons we see so many such comments is captured a bit in the first two quotes. Neither Miller nor the President could bring himself to actually blame the schools for today’s economic catastrophe, but they laid on them some of the responsibility for any recovery. There is a long history of trying to link test scores to a nation’s economic health. That notion needs to become extinct
  
  Let’s take a moment to reflect on the causes of the current mess. Banks used very little capital of their own to buy extremely risky real estate assets, granting subprime mortgages and mortgages on overpriced houses, often without even making credit checks. Then they used virtually unfathomable instruments such as credit default swaps to insure against loss. But insurance companies that insured those risks, like AIG didn’t have the capital to pay off the swaps when the banks’ bets went bad. The situation has produced a slight reworking of the opening rhetorical flourishes of that landmark document, "A Nation At Risk:"
  
  We feel compelled to report to the American people that the business and financial foundations of our society are being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people. What was unimaginable a generation ago has begun to occur—companies that extolled themselves as models of excellent practices have deceived the American people with sloppy, undisciplined, and greedy practices that are driving Americans out of their homes, threatening their retirements, and dashing their hopes of a financially secure future. Indeed, if an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre corporate financial performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.
- Looking again at The Manufactured Crisis, I found all the myths that David [Berliner] and Bruce [Biddle] debunked [in their book The Manufactured Crisis] are still hanging around. They are just overlaid with another 15 years worth of data. I have a different perspective, plus the advantage of those 15 years of data. David and Bruce took each myth and demolished it individually. They organized their debunking around a collection of myths. I take a temporal approach. I organize around time and, while "A Nation At Risk," their signal event, was important, I think it all started earlier.
- Bashing public schools in the USA since World War II
  
  I see bashing schools as a longstanding predisposition that really took its current form just after World War II and I’d like to lay out today how that predisposition became an everyday habit. While Arthur Newman in his 1978 book, In Defense of the American Public School, has a section on “The always abundant criticism,” his reports are largely episodic into the Thirties and then he skips to the 70’s. In so doing, I think he misses the most important period of the rise of scapegoating.
  - So what is that period? Tease! - on 2009-04-24
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- most influential of all at the time, Arthur Bestor’s Educational Wastelands: The Retreat from Learning in Public Schools.
  
  Note the use of the word “Retreat.” I think this is the first title ever that suggested that things had once upon a time been better, that there had been some golden age of American public education which we had somehow tarnished. In 1956, Bestor was interviewed by U. S. News & World Report. The interview ran under the headline, "We Are Less Educated than Fifty Years Ago."
  
  Bestor made some remarkable historical errors, mostly by failing to take into account differences in the proportion of students finishing high school in 1906 vs. 1956 and changes in the socioeconomic status of those getting a diploma over that 50-year period. I say remarkable because Bestor was a historian and you’d think a historian would have noticed such things.
- The schools never recovered from the criticism unleashed by Sputnik, and quickly became society’s scapegoat of choice for perceived social crises. Since Sputnik, the driving force behind school reform efforts has been fear of the future with fear often serving as a means to gain power and control over the schools.
- When America’s cities went up in flames in the 1960’s schools once again were blamed. This time, at least one person saw the scam for what it was. Fred Hechinger, writing in the New York Times in 1967 observed
  
  Almost 10 years ago, when the first Soviet Sputnik went into orbit, the schools were blamed for America’s lag in space. Last week, in the Senate, the schools were blamed for the ghetto riots.
  
  In each case, the politicians’ motives were suspect. Their reflex reaction, when faced with a national crisis, is to assign guilt to persons with the least power to hit back. The schools, which are nonpolitical but dependent on political purse strings, fill the bill of emergency whipping boy.
- Earlier critics did not have the hammer of tests to pound schools with. NAEP did not exist until the 1970’s and it remained largely invisible until the 1990’s. SAT scores were stable up to 1963. Most states did not have state testing programs until the 1970’s. All Norm-Referenced tests except the various Iowa’s had floating standards so there was no way to tell if the 50th percentile in 1960 represented the same level of achievement as in 1950. International comparisons began in the 1960’s but the early ones contained too many methodological flaws to make them credible.
- Testing was now firmly cemented in place as THE instrument for measuring kids, teachers, and schools. A report to add steel reinforcement to that notion would come along soon. President Reagan’s Secretary of Education, Terrell Bell, hoped for what he called a "Sputnik-like event" to shock Americans about the terrible state of their schools. Lacking such an event, Bell in 1981 reluctantly formed the National Commission on Excellence in Education. One of the driving forces of that commission, Harvard Physicist, Gerald Holton, at first refused the invitation to serve because Reagan was moving to dismantle some science and education programs that Holton supported and he was surprised and dismayed by the makeup of the commission—not a single national expert in education. It was an omen—the control of education would, over the next 20 years be stripped from educators.
  
  But Holton was coaxed in and "Reagan gave us our marching orders: Bring God back into the classroom. Encourage tuition tax credits for families using private schools. Support vouchers. And please abolish that abomination, the Department of Education. As we left, I detected no visible dismay in our group. I wondered if we were all equally stunned."
  
  The report, "A Nation At Risk," did not mention any of Reagan’s "marching orders" and that caused a schism in White House. Adviser Ed Meese and other conservatives implored Reagan to reject it because it ignored Reagan’s marching orders. Moderates Jim Baker and Mike Deaver urged acceptance because it contained many issues Republicans, including Reagan, could campaign on.
- After the Cold Warrior rhetoric came 13 indicators of the risk. All reflect test scores. All accentuate the negative, even when they don’t have to. One of the indicators could have said "Scores on the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills and Iowa Tests of Educational Development have risen for seven consecutive years," but that information was not among the 13 pieces of data.
- Some of the indicators were highly selective. For example, one says, "There was a steady decline in science achievement scores of U. S. 17-year-olds as measured by national assessments." If you look at NAEP trends, you will indeed find such a trendline for 17-year-olds. But not for 13-year-olds or 9-year-olds, the other two ages assessed. And the trends in reading and math show no hint of a decline at any age. Thus the commission had 9 trendlines, only one of which could be used to support crisis rhetoric and that was the one it used.
- "A Nation At Risk" brought together two assertions that have become gospel: educational quality can be measured by standardized tests and we must raise our test scores to compete in the global economy. High test scores = healthy economic nation. Those are the leitmotifs of the 26 years since the report appeared. You can hear them reflected over and over again in the quotes from President Obama and secretary Duncan that opened this talk, but they took their current form in 1983.
- Bell dispatched a team of educators headed by assistant secretary Chester Finn to Japan to see if we could import their education system. One of the team members, Herb Walberg, declared to the Washington Post, "I think it’s portable. Gumption and willpower, that’s the key." Otherwise Japan would eat our lunch. In the article, there is no indication that people perceived Walberg’s assertions as absurd.
  
  You remember Japan. Its economy was a miracle. Its students aced the tests in international comparisons. Then, about 1990, the Japanese discovered that the Emperor’s Palace and Grounds really weren’t worth more than the entire state of California, and its economy sank into the Pacific, soon taking the other Asian Tiger nations with it. The Japanese now speak of the 1990’s as the lost decade. They’ve never actually had a particularly good year since 2000 and they’re back in a heap of economic hurt: They officially declared themselves in recession again in 2007 and in 2008, the Japanese economy shrank three times as much as the U. S. economy. Their kids still ace tests.
- In 1987, reviewing a proposal to revamp NAEP, Bob Glaser, writing for the National Academy of Education said,
  
  Most of those personal qualities that we hold dear—resilience and courage in the face of stress, a sense of craft in our work, a commitment to justice and caring in our social relationships, a dedication to advancing the public good in communal life—are exceedingly difficult to assess. And so, unfortunately, we are apt to measure what we can, and eventually come to value what is measured over what is left unmeasured. The shift is subtle and occurs gradually.
- Well, maybe there’s hope.
  
  One way of chasing out the fear mongers, maybe, is to show them that there’s so much more to education than any test can measure. The Sunday, April 5, 2009 New York Times carried a page 1 article about activities that the Scarsdale district is using teach empathy. The hook for the article is probably that it’s in Scarsdale, but it also reports on major efforts in Los Angeles and 18 states. "Empathy lessons are spreading everywhere amid concerns over the pressure on students from high-stakes tests and a race to college that starts in kindergarten."
- The Educational Testing Service is adding a "Personal Potential Index" to the Graduate Record Examination with ratings by instructors on “knowledge and creativity; communication skills; capacity for teamwork; resilience; planning and organizational skills; and ethics and integrity.” ETS says that students need these qualities to succeed in graduate school. Why limit them to graduate school? Somebody should tell Arne about ETS’ plans.
- From my experiences living in East and Southeast Asia and from what I’ve read, I cannot imagine students in any of those nations asking questions, or any employee suggesting to a supervisor that there’s a better way of doing something.
  - After 5 years in Shanghai and three in Seoul, I can attest to that. - on 2009-04-24
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- People, though, especially the media and those who would like to take advantage of one of the largest untapped markets anywhere—the public schools—still make the connection between test scores and the economy.
- The schools cannot buy a good headline. The Progress in International Reading Study gets very few headlines. That might be because the US does well in that international comparison. In 2001, three countries scored higher, 9 were not significantly different, and 23 were lower. In 2006, with 45 countries, 10 scored higher, 13 the same and 30 lower. The U. S. score was 542 in 2001 and 540 in 2006. That difference is the same as a two-point difference on the SAT and well above the international average of 500. But the headline in Education Week, the only outlet I know of that even covered the results at all, was "America Idles on International Reading Test?" Why not "America Continues To Do Well On International Reading Test?" In any case, if America idles, the rest of the world is in neutral, too. Only 10 of the 28 countries that were in both assessments changed more than 10 points in either direction.
- One way of countering the fear mongers is to determine whether or not they are using the right statistic or whether there are statistics that are more meaningful. The international comparisons, TIMSS, PISA, PIRLS, all come to us mostly in terms of average scores and how those scores affect a country’s ranking among other countries in the world. But as Hal Salzman the Urban Institute and Lindsay Lowell of Georgetown pointed out in a paper in Nature last May, the average scores don’t mean anything. They write "If as we argue, average test scores are mostly irrelevant to as a measure of economic potential, other indicators do matter. To produce leading-edge technology, one could argue that it is the numbers of high-performing students that is most important in the global economy. These are students who can enter the science and engineering workforce or are likely to innovate whatever their field of study. Remarkable, but little noted, is the fact that the United States produces the lion’s share of the world’s best students."
  
  I would temper that by pointing out that they define "world’s best" terms of test scores, but that’s the currency of the day and in that currency no one else even comes close. It is very difficult to attain Level 6 on the PISA tests, the highest on the scale. New Zealand tops the world with 4% and Finland is second with 3.9%. But that 3.9% for Finland only translates into 2000 warm bodies. The U. S. has 67,000. Japan is second with about 34,000. The UK has 21,000.
- The bad news is that we have the most lowest-performing students aside from Mexico. So there’s plenty of work to be done on the system, but we don’t have to say, as Duncan just did and as hundreds have across the years, we have a "crisis" in education.
- If test scores were so important to global competitiveness, you’d think our ranks on global competitiveness would be comparable to our ranks in the international test comparisons. But they’re not. There are two organizations that make it their business to rank nations on global competitive, the Institute for Management Development in Lausanne, Switzerland and the better known World Economic Forum which had its annual do recent in Davos, Switzerland. Now it is really going to be interesting to see what the current debacle does to the rankings, but as of 2008-2009 reports, the U. S. was number one.
  
  The IMD ranks 55 nations and the U. S. took over from Japan in 1994.
- The IMD wonders how much longer the U. S. can keep the lead. It notes that Singapore has been rising fast. But who cares? As Sam Dillon of the New York Times observed recently, comparing a diverse nation of 300 million with tiny city states such as Hong Kong and Singapore makes little sense. Which reminds me, seldom do the fear mongers take the cultural context of schools into account when discussing test scores. They seldom mention that everyday thousands of poor Malaysians cross into Singapore to do the dirty work. The long-term “guest workers,” mostly Filipinos, are forbidden to bring their families. These factors save Singapore a lot of work in educating children of the poor.
- What is important about the IMD rankings and even more so the WEF rankings is that they reveal how complex the idea of competitiveness is. Education is only one aspect of those rankings.
  
  The WEF has established what it calls "The Twelve Pillars of Competitiveness." I don’t have time to go into detail, but one way of countering the fear mongers is to try to make them aware of this complexity.
  
  First comes institutions which has to do with bureaucracy, corruption, transparency, trustworthiness, accountability, etc. As I say, it will be interesting to see what this year’s report looks like.
  
  The second pillar is infrastructure. We hear a lot about that these days, but before Katrina blew into town and that bridge collapsed into the Mississippi, I imagine few Americans thought much about infrastructure. Especially in terms of competitiveness. We took our roads, rails, ports, and airports for granted.
  
  Third is Macroeconomy. This is where the US does worst because the WEF hates deficits—that means money that could be used to increase productivity has to be used as interest on loans.
  
  I’ll just name the others, health and primary education, higher education and training, goods market efficiency, labor market efficiency, financial market sophistication (our financial markets sophisticated themselves right out of business), technological readiness, market size, business sophistication and, most important, innovation. Innovation, where the U. S. is #1, is the most important because it is the only pillar that does not at some point yield diminishing returns. You can only gain so much by, say, making planes bigger and faster, but innovation has no limit. I this connection, I would point out the Bob Sternberg, Dean of Arts and Sciences at Tufts has observed that our obsession with testing has given us our most successful tool for stamping out creativity.
- The WEF ranks 134 nations and the U. S. has been #1 for most of the last decade, occasionally slipping to #2. If the forecasts of A Nation At Risk had been correct and if, as the critics claim, the schools never improved, how then did we get ranked #1 in global competitiveness and enjoy the longest sustained expansion in the world, an expansion that was real—productivity soared in the 1990’s.
  - QUOTE. - on 2009-04-24
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- Finally, let me return to NAEP, but rather than inundating you with numbers of numbers, I’ll just say this: Because of the changing ethnic makeup of this nation, and because of the fact that black and Hispanic students score still lower than whites, analyzing NAEP data simply at the national level makes no sense. In fact, it makes you the victim of Simpson’s Paradox. Simpson’s paradox shows up whenever the whole group analyzed shows one pattern but the subgroups show a different pattern.
  
  In 2002, the College Board lamented that there had been no change in the SAT verbal score since 1982. This was true for the national sample. But when I analyzed the trends by ethnicity, I found gains for all groups, some of them quite large. The reason for the apparent paradox was simply the changing demographics. In 1981, whites made up 85% of all SAT testtakers, in 2005, when I conducted the analysis the figure was 63%. The minorities were improving. But because the scores were still lower than whites and because minorities were making up an ever increasing share of the total pool, their lower scores attenuated the overall average.
- The same thing is true of NAEP. While there have been some areas of gain overall, if you look at the NAEP trends by ethnicity, the only place you see stability is in 17-year-old white kids. Everybody else is up and in groups up dramatically. For example, in mathematics, black 9-year-olds gained 34 points between 1978 and 2004, black 13-year-olds gained 34 points and black 17-year-olds gained 15 points.
- And just as you must cannot speak of "American" scores without looking at ethnic breakouts, neither can you speak of American schools without looking at breakouts by poverty. Yes, other countries have poor kids but many fewer. In one UNESCO study, the U. S. was 20th among 20 developed nations. Here’s an example of what poverty does to test scores taken from PIRLS.
  
  Top country Sweden, score 561
  
  U. S. overall 542
  
  International Average 500
  
  The 14.5% of American students in schools with less than 10% of their students in poverty 589
  
  The 19.5% of students in schools with 10% to 25% in poverty, 567. The 29.8% of students in school with 25-50 in poverty 551—if this group constituted a nation it would rank 4th among the 35 countries.
  
  That’s 64% of American students scoring at the top.
  
  The 21.3% of American students in schools with 50-75% in poverty, 519, still above the international average.
  
  Only the 15.1% of students in schools with more than 75% of their students in poverty score below the international average at 485.
- I fear that there is no way to counter the fear mongers directly. They have an agenda most of which revolves around controlling the curriculum and instruction and/or replacing the public schools with a private system.
  
  They are subject to shame, however. About 10 years ago Alex Molnar put together a loose confederacy of people to act as an underfunded countweight to the Heritage Foundation, Hoover Institution, Manhattan Institute, etc. At the first meeting I looked around at the 25 or so people in the room and said "This will never work." The reason, I thought, was that the people in the room already had very full lives without taking on additional efforts on behalf of the schools. But, ten years later, now co-headquartered at the University of Colorado and Arizona State, there are about 120 "fellows" as we are called engaged in a number of endeavors. Among the more successful, I think, is the Think Twice project known internally as the Think Tank Review Project. The Heritages and Hoovers of the world along with some professors like Paul Peterson at Harvard and Jay Greene at Arkansas had taken to publishing un-peer reviewed papers which, on close examination, presented selective data leading to pretermined conclusion. The Think Twice project hires scholars to review these advocacy research papers as one would a manuscript submitted to Ed Researcher or AERJ and publishes the results. The originals are credited for sound conclusions, faulted for overreaching, which is a common theme in the papers.
- It is said that if you tell a lie often enough people will believe. One can only hope that the same applies to the truth.

Economic Effect of Poor Schools Exceeds Recession, Study Says - NYTimes.com

And here's the predictable exploiting of the study by Klein and Co.

www.nytimes.com/...23klein.html - Preview

joel_klein duncan businessroundtable

management consulting firm McKinsey & Company,
- which is on Joel Klein's payroll, and had close ties with Enron, - on 2009-04-24
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The report concluded that if those achievement gaps were closed, the yearly gross domestic product of the United States would be trillions of dollars higher, or $3 billion to $5 billion more per day.
This was the second report on education issues by the firm’s social sector office, which said it was not commissioned by any government, business or other institution. Starting in fall 2008, the researchers reviewed federal and international tests and interviewed education researchers and economists.
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- In New York City, an analysis of 2007 federal test scores for fourth graders showed strikingly stratified achievement levels: While 6 percent of white students in city schools scored below a base achievement level on math, 31 percent of black students and 26 percent of Hispanic students did. In reading, 48 percent of black students and 49 percent of Hispanic students failed to reach that base level, but 19 percent of white students did.
- The New York City schools chancellor, Joel I. Klein, who introduced the findings at the National Press Club in Washington, said the study vindicated the idea that the root cause of test-score disparities was not poverty or family circumstances, but subpar teachers and principals. He pointed to an analysis in the report showing low-income black fourth graders from the city outperformed students in all other major urban districts on reading (they came in second in math).
  - Which cherries does he not pick?
    
    What test was used?
    
    Where's Diane Ravitch? - on 2009-04-24
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- eighth-grade scores on federal math and reading tests, known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress, have not shown significant increases since 2002.
  In an interview after the speech here, Mr. Klein said he would be the first to acknowledge that the city was not where it needed to be in closing the gap, particularly in middle schools.
- While state test scores have shown improvement
- But, he added, there have been signs of progress among younger students, and he believed the city’s four-year graduation rates — 69 percent for white students, 47 percent for black students and 43 percent for Hispanic students — could reach state averages within five or six years.
  - We still suck, but there's a little good news here, and we promise a lot of possible good news within five or six years.
    
    Trust us. - on 2009-04-24
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- He said it would require a focus on finding ways to recruit high-quality teachers.
  - What teacher in his right mind would want to work in a system that scapegoats teachers above all? - on 2009-04-24
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- The Rev. Al Sharpton, Mr. Klein’s partner in leading an alliance that is attempting to electrify the cause of making radical changes in education, criticized those who opposed their efforts.
  “There are no sacred cows in this,” Mr. Sharpton said to the audience of 200 education leaders at the press club.
  - "Now give me another $500,000," he added to Klein as he walked off the stage. - on 2009-04-24
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- Arne Duncan, the federal secretary of education
  - and heir to George W. Bush and Margaret Spellngs' educational philosophies, - on 2009-04-24
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- In many situations, our schools are perpetuating poverty and are perpetuating social failure,
  - "and the absence of living wage laws, health care, and corporate responsibility via taxes and wages and benefits has nothing to do with perpetuating poverty," Duncan asserted.
    
    "You just got to think outside of the box when you think about poverty," he added. - on 2009-04-24
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- He expressed support for the idea of radically restructuring the bottom 1 percent of schools in the country, possibly by closing and reconstituting them.
  - "If we shut down the worst 10% of schools, fire all the adults, and bring in new adults, just imagine how different things could be."
    
    When asked to clarify how being "new" would make a difference, Duncan said, "It's obvious that 'new' is different than 'old.' So 'new teachers' would be different than 'old teachers.' And 'new' is better than 'old,' so therefore, we'll have better teachers."
    
    When we asked Mr. Duncan to elaborate, he said, "Call me Arnie." - on 2009-04-24
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- The trick, he said, would be to share effective strategies.

23 Apr 09

THE PROPAGANDA OF "A NATION AT RISK": Gerald Bracey

A good analysis of ANAR.

www.america-tomorrow.com/...EDDRA8.htm - Preview

businessroundtable propaganda nclb

"If only to keep and improve on the slim c
ompetitive edge we still retain in world markets, we must dedicate ourselves to the reform of our educational system."

This theory became very popular a few years later when the nation slipped into recession. "Lousy schools are producing a lousy workforce and that is killing us in the global marketplace" went the refrain. Larry Cremin, in Popular Education and Its
Discontents, debunked the theory, but no one was listening: "American economic competitiveness with Japan and other nations is to a considerable degree a function of monetary, trade, and industrial policy, and of decisions made by the President and
Congress, the Federal Reserve Board, and the Federal Departments of the Treasury, Commerce and Labor. Therefore, to conclude that problems of international competitiveness can be solved by educational reform, especially educational reform defined solely
as school reform, is not merely utopian and millenialist, it is at best a foolish and at worst a crass effort to direct attention away from those truly responsible for doing something about competitiveness and to lay the burden instead on the schools. I
t is a device that has been used repeatedly in the history of American education."

ASCD Annual Conference: The Commercial Assault on Children and the School Environment

2003.

www.simulconference.com/...2274a.shtml - Preview

nclb businessroundtable

At the same time, of course, the corporations were supporting the ideology behind "A Nation at Risk" and demanding that schools improve, they were also demanding a whole host of economic development strategies which had the effect of knocking the pins out from public funding for public schools. Economic development strategies, like tax incremental financing, industrial revenue bonding, equipment and inventory tax exemptions, and so on, all had the effect of transferring the tax liability, to a very large extent, from corporations to individual homeowners. And with the predictable consequence that, by the mid- and late-eighties and early-nineties, there were tax limitations measures on the ballot in many States, as homeowners found that they were literally sometimes, particularly fixed-income senior citizens and blue-collar workers, who saw their income declining throughout the eighties and into the nineties, that they literally had a choice to pay their ever-escalating public school tax bills or cap the amount of money. The only way they could give themselves a raise was to lower their taxes.

So, on the one hand, you have the explosion of school-business partnerships; on the other hand, you have the embrace of economic development strategies, which have the effect of constricting the resources available for public education.
Let me suggest to you that what has happened is not the triumph of democracy so much as the triumph of an idea called the market and the translation of the idea of a citizen into the idea of a consumer.
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- We are much more likely to talk about our constituents in public education as consumers than as citizens. And that, in my mind at least, is a telling transformation. Because, you see, the market doesn’t care and is not set up to do something that public schools, as democratic institutions, must do. And that is to attend to the idea of equity and justice for all. The market doesn’t care.

27 Feb 09

Budget Proposal Would Shift Student Loans Away From Private Firms - washingtonpost.com

Progressive!

www.washingtonpost.com/...AR2009022603314.html - Preview

duncan businessroundtable webroundup

The Obama administration has proposed a sweeping change in the $85 billion-a-year student loan industry, one that could fundamentally alter the business of lenders such as Sallie Mae.

The proposal, included in today's budget outline, would end a program that pays government subsidies to private student loan companies. The administration said the shift, which would mean that all federal loans come directly through the government, would save $4 billion annually and nearly $47.5 billion over the next decade.
The proposed change would be one of the most significant in decades to the funding of higher education. It's sure to prompt a backlash from student loan companies as well as from Republicans, who say the move would reduce student choices.
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- Today, Education Secretary Arne Duncan signaled a shift from that approach, saying the program that subsidizes private lenders is "on life support."
  
  "Rather than continuing to subsidize banks, we want to help dramatically more students get more access to more aid," Duncan said in a conference call with reporters. "Big picture . . . We're going save about $24 billion dollars over the next five years and we want actively to invest that money in our students."
  - Sounds good. And surprising. Not the Business Roundtable. - on 2009-02-27
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- Since the early 1990s, federal student loans have been implemented through two programs. The program the administration proposed ending, the Federal Family Education Loan Program, uses private-sector lenders such as Sallie Mae and Citigroup to originate and service the education loans, keeping the debt off the government's books.
- The approach outlined today echoes one long favored by Democrats. House education committee Chairman Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), who has been a vocal critic of what he has called "corrupt practices" in the student loan industry, said the proposal is a "a solid plan to make federal student loans more reliable, while saving taxpayers billions of dollars."