Jennifer Glick's List: Current Issues presentation

• conceptualizing education as an individual consumer good, not a social good
• creased privatization
• charter schools and educational management organizations, with “virtual charters” and “vouchers” looming.
• eorge W. Bush gave the neoliberal education model a huge boost when he was able to parlay his highly touted (though largely unsuccessful) efforts in Texas to push NCLB through a compliant Congress eager to pass “bipartisan” legislation in the wake of 9-11. Democrats largely swallowed the test-and-punish “accountability” Kool-Aid, while “local control” Republicans were willing to give Bush what he wanted
• he amount of testing in most states has doubled or nearly tripled
• icts started administering multiple-choice “benchmark” tests three or more times a year.
• ome are using “probes,” short, computer-based tests given several times a week, with results monitored by the central office.
• eaching to the test
• It has helped state scores soar. But on independent exams, such as the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), gains slowed and even halted after NCLB passed.
• rivatization complements high-stakes testing and funding inadequacies and inequities. The past decade has seen a sharp rise in the numbers of “charter schools.”
• publicly funded entities are promoted by the same constellation of forces that back high-stakes testing
• Most states have laws authorizing charters; most are raising or removing caps on the number of allowable charters; and most charters cater to low-income communities
• Charters often remove students whose behavior or test scores create problems for the school, and they under enroll English language learners and students with disabilities
• ound that charters on average perform less well than public schools on standardized tests.
• ducation Secretary Arne Duncan warned states that they would not be eligible for the funds if they did not allow virtually unlimited numbers of charters
• research evidence clearly indicates that privatization and high-stakes testing do not even boost scores on tests that are not the direct target of instruction, never mind improve real learning
• Are we facing, then, the end of meaningful public education, or is what we are witnessing “merely” a reorganization to ensure the continued repr
• Even the far-from-anti-capitalist Diane Ravitch said that public schools “are a public service, a public good. It is the obligation of public officials to provide good public schools in every neighborhood, not to privatize them or to act as an umpire whose role is to judge them defective and shut them down.”
• pose the forces behind test-punish-privatize

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• More than 700 public K-12 schools around the country are now managed by for-profit companies

• y licenses 215 charter operators

• One effect of the movement among schools has been that minority students have become increasingly concentrated in the schools at the bottom of the distribution
• popular schools were more or less free to select the students they would accept, so that they tended to be attractive to easy-to-teach students. Less popular schools had to accept anyone who came along, and some were pretty desperate for students, and they ended up with a relatively high proportion of students with learning or behavioral difficulties, those with limited English, those from dysfunctional families, or those suspended by other schools.
• o the contrary, we found that such governance reforms had positive effects for large numbers of students
• hat New Zealand does show, however, is that autonomy and competition cannot and will not, in and of themselves, solve the problems of troubled urban schools
• What this means is that if the United States continues to take steps down the path of more choice and competition, policymakers should not naively expect them to solve the problems of the schools at the bottom
• nd what's happened in many states is that in the process of having charter school legislation, compromises have been struck in order to get the laws enacted, compromises in many cases that are so severe that the resulting laws don't look very much like the total package of charter school reform that many of us think about in theoretical terms.
• So when I think about the charter school challenge, what I think about is the challenge of giving this reform the best chance it has to work and in seeing what happens.
• It involves setting appropriate expectations for school performance, measuring school performance in a way that makes sense in the context of what the school is trying to accomplish. It means acting on the result of information that comes in from those assessments. And it means making decisions about whether to continue a school's charter or not.
• stablish a system of accountability that encourages schools to improv
• chool districts need to regard charter school programs as an example of an institutional innovation from which they can learn something about how they deal with the schools that are under their purview.
• charter schools become accountable through a kind of information marketplace, much like corporations are accountable through the audit information that is out there in public view.
• o school district likes to have some of its kids go off in charter schools, even though 100 percent of the money never follows the kids. The national average, about 80 percent of the money that would otherwise be spent in the public schools follows the kids to the charter schools

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