Bloomberg's Education Reforms Would be a Disaster for Public Schoos

Mike Bloomberg's Education 'Reforms' Would be a Disaster for Public Schools

Dr Heather Gautney and Eric Blanc
February 17, 2020  The Guardian

Like Trump, Bloomberg is a fervent backer of privatizing and dismantling public schools across the country



Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg attends a campaign event at Buffalo Soldiers national museum in Houston, Texas, on 13 February., Photograph: Go Nakamura/Reuters

Nominating Michael Bloomberg would be a disaster for public schools – and for the Democrats’ chances at beating Donald Trump in 2020. Because when it comes to education policy, it is virtually impossible to tell the two billionaire politicians apart.

Like Trump and his inept secretary of education, Betsy Devos, Bloomberg is a fervent backer of privatizing and dismantling public schools across the country. Education, in their view, should be run like a business.

While other establishment Democrats have begun changing their tune in response to the “Red for Ed” movement, Bloomberg’s campaign spokesman has made it clear that privatization will be a core message of his 2020 presidential run: “Mike has always supported charter schools, he opened a record number of charter schools as mayor of New York City, and he will champion the issue as president.”

Indeed, Bloomberg succeeded in massively expanding privately run but publicly funded charter schools during his term as mayor, increasing their number from 18 to 183. His controversial push to “increase school choice” closed over 100 schools in low-income communities and entrenched New York City’s education system as the most racially segregated in the country.

In contrast with Bloomberg’s too-little-too-late apology for imposing racist stop-and-frisk policies upon New York City – and its overwhelmingly non-white student body – the former mayor has doubled down on his rightwing education approach in recent years.

If anything, the main difference between Bloomberg and Trump is that the former has spent far more of his immense personal fortune to boost corporate “education reform” and local candidates driving this agenda. The New York Times reported last week that Bloomberg has spent millions to promote charters in the state of Louisiana alone. And this is just the tip of the iceberg: Bloomberg’s foundation in 2018 announced its plan to spend $375m to promote charters, merit pay and the sacking of “failing” teachers, among other reforms.

Amend and Re Authorize NCLB; Now ESEA (again)

This week, the House of Representatives will take up the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. The Senate is scheduled to follow suit as soon the House is finished.

The new version of ESEA, called the Every Student Succeeds Act—if passed in Congress and signed by the president—is a paradigm shift. In eliminating the adequate yearly progress requirement and shifting the focus away from testing as the be all and end all, ESSA would provide a fresh start for states to re-envision public schooling, better aligning it to what students need to succeed. And it should be a wake-up call to any state that wants to double down on what will now be the discarded test-and-punish system that has dominated in recent years.

After years and years of false starts, this bill is almost at the finish line. Write to your representative today and urge him or her to pass a final bill reauthorizing ESEA.

We wouldn’t be here without you. Our members, activists and leaders worked hard to make sure our message—as parents, as educators, as community members and as people who want to make a difference in the lives of children—was heard. More than 130,000 of you took action online, made phone calls, submitted comments on the bill and met with your members of Congress, and it made a difference.

We’re almost there. Write to your representative today.

The bill is not perfect, and with so much authority being turned over to the states, we will have our work cut out for us. But ESSA brings us closer to letting states, local districts and educators focus on students and their success, and to ending the harmful test fixation that has become the predominant schooling strategy. It sends a clear signal to states that the policies of No Child Left Behind, waivers and Race to the Top should be abandoned, not replicated. By maintaining funding for the students who need it most; not including support for private school vouchers, portability or other divisive policies; and including more transparency and accountability for charters, the bill also signals to states that these are unproven policies that should not be pursued.

Dan Walters Argues for More Testing - Again and Again

Dan Walters continues to use his position as a major editorial writer in the Bee in support of corporate style school control in support of the fake school reform industry and consultants.  (Sac Bee, Nov. 15, page A3) He does this by regularly describing neoliberal charter advocates such as Gloria Romero and Michelle Rhee  and others as advocates of “school reform”.

In reality they are advocates of more testing and test driven change.

High-stakes standardized tests, and the new curriculum they have spawned, require  teachers to avoid thinking deeply about the information  we’re sending to students.  The aim of testing is to provide demonstrable, measurable evidence that work is being produced — that teachers and students are not thinking creatively  when they should be lecturing, memorizing, studying. The idea is that a teacher’s job is to get information into the heads of students, and a student’s job is to write it out, unchanged, on a test.

BATs Responds to Administration Call to Limit Testing

Today the  Obama Administration released a statement calling for  "a cap on assessment so that no child would spend more than 2 percent of classroom instruction time taking tests. It called on Congress to 'reduce over-testing' as it reauthorizes the federal legislation governing the nation’s public elementary and secondary schools.” 

(http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/25/us/obama-administration-calls-for-limits-on-testing-in-schools.html?_r=0)      

  The Badass Teachers Association, an education activist organization with over 70,000 supporters nationwide, are reluctantly pleased with this announcement. Our vision statement has always been to refuse to accept assessments, tests and evaluations created and imposed by corporate driven entities that have contempt for authentic teaching and learning. Our goals have always been to reduce or eliminate the use of high stakes testing, increase teacher autonomy in the classroom, and include teacher and family voices in legislative decision-making processes that affect students.

Since No Child Left Behind and Race to The Top we have seen our children and communities of color bear the brunt of  the test obsession that has come in with the wave of Corporate Education Reform. When resources should have been used for funding and programming, politicians and policy makers were focusing on making children take more tests in hopes that equity in education would occur. It didn’t work, and it will not work. We know as educators you cannot test your way out of the education and opportunity gap. The blame and punish test agenda has not closed either the education or opportunity gap . We are reluctantly pleased that the President and his administration are finally taking a stand, but sadly the devastation has already been done.  We are confident that if the President and his administration make a commitment to work with educators, parents, and students we can fix it and make it right. 

None of these "reforms" work - they make this stuff up

We've suffered under the factory model of school reform for the past dozen years under No Child Left Untested. The pillars are simple enough. Privatize (vouchers, franchise charters); De-professionalize (fast-track teacher prep, short-term, disposable labor designed to churn in and out with paychecks low and no pension to worry about); Standardize (scripted texts, homogenized lessons, pacing guides to require each teacher to be on the same page on the same day); and above all else: Hit your number. Motivate staff, students, and systems with carrots and sticks, with the goal wrapped around a quota of kids hitting a cut score. Standardized tests are the measure of basic progress. Standardized tests decide if a child is succeeding. Standardized tests decide if a teacher is effective. Standardized tests decide if a school should be closed down. It is a classic industrial model.

There is no science that says this works with children. There is no evidence that elite private or high-performing public schools are elite or high-performing because they use this model. There's no evidence that parents are demanding it. None of those countries described as our "global competition" that out-perform us on international tests use this model. The corporate school model is not driven by science. It is strictly out of the pages of the New England Journal of We Make This Stuff Up.

But numbers are impressive, and too many people think numbers must mean what someone says they mean. Schools compete against each other by test score rankings that declare which ones are making more "adequate yearly progress" than the others. Teachers compete with each other by test score rankings that declare who is more "effective." Students are expected to perform to specifications each spring so we know which will advance and which will repeat third grade. Teacher are incentivized with prizes or threatened with punishments depending on their students' test scores, just as factory workers are incentivized with bonuses or threatened with losing their jobs depending on who is more efficient at moving the product down the line.

Opting out of testing mania

Network for Public Education

Today, The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights led 11 civil rights groups into a national disagreement with students who have exercised their constitutional political free speech rights and chosen to opt-out of high-stakes testing.

The Network for Public Education supports those who choose to opt out, because we believe these tests are now causing harm to students, and to the cause of educational equity. Seattle teacher Jesse Hagopian has written a response to The Leadership Conference of Civil and Human Rights’ statement, which the Network for Public Education shares here. He states, “High-stakes standardized tests, rather than reducing the opportunity gap, have been used to rank, sort, label, and punish students of color.”

We support opting out of high stakes tests because:

• There is no evidence that these tests contribute to the quality of education, have led to improved educational equity in funding or programs, or have helped close the “achievement gap”.
• These tests, particularly those associated with the Common Core, have become intrusive in our schools, consuming huge amounts of time and resources, and narrowing instruction to focus on test preparation.
• These tests have never been independently validated or shown to be reliable and/or free from racial and ethnic bias.
• Instead the Common Core exams are being used as a political weapon to claim huge numbers of students are failing, to close neighborhood public schools, and fire teachers, all in the effort to disrupt and privatize the public education system.

Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Standardized Testing (HBO)

Subverting Big Money's Attacks on Public Education

Debbie Meier

Sixty years ago, I was active in the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) as well as the democratic socialist movement, and I subbed in Chicago public K-8 schools two days a week. Spending those days in the schools raised some doubts in my mind about both the civil rights and socialist agenda. It was clear that the average urban student was being trained to be “dumb,” thoughtless (in the literal sense) and accepting of what couldn’t be changed. Could we achieve the kind of democracy we dreamed of with such a “dumbed-down” public?

Teaching kindergarten restored my faith. Working in a mostly all-black school was the most exciting experience of my life—intellectually, socially, and emotionally. The kids did have fine vocabularies, were constantly making sense of the world, had profound questions, and were quick learners when engaged. They weren’t “dumb,” but they had good reason to follow their parents’ advice to be obedient and keep quiet in school. With the impetus of the civil rights movement and movements for school change, though, it seemed as if schools could encourage that liveliness of heart and mind and tenacious imagination that I witnessed during the next decade. 

Teachers Cheating on Tests - Atlanta

Taking the Fall in Atlanta

Posted April 3, 2015 at 11:10 am by RICHARD ROTHSTEIN  

Eleven Atlanta educators, convicted and imprisoned, have taken the fall for systematic cheating on standardized tests in American education. Such cheating is widespread, as is similar corruption in any institution—whether health care, criminal justice, the Veterans Administration, or others—where top policymakers try to manage their institutions with simple quantitative measures that distort the institution’s goals. This corruption is especially inevitable when out-of-touch policymakers set impossible-to-achieve goals and expect that success will nonetheless follow if only underlings are held accountable for measurable results.

There was little doubt, even before the jury’s decision, that Atlanta teachers and administrators had changed answers on student test booklets to increase scores. There was also little doubt that Atlanta’s late superintendent, Beverly Hall, was partly responsible because she had, as a state investigation revealed, “created a culture of fear, intimidation and retaliation” that had permitted “cheating—at all levels—to go unchecked for years.”

What the trial did not explore was whether Dr. Hall herself was reacting to a culture of fear, intimidation, and retaliation that her board, state education officials, and the Bush and Obama administrations had created. Just as her principals’ jobs were in jeopardy if test scores didn’t rise, her tenure, too, was dependent on ever rising test scores.

Students need more funds, not more tests.

As a teacher of more than 20 years at an inner-city high school in Los Angeles, I saw the value of federal dollars sent to our local public schools through the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. In fact, millions of America’s poorest schoolchildren depend on the Title 1 funding that was established in the law as part of the landmark 1965 “War on Poverty” legislation. 

In Los Angeles, Title 1 funding allowed us to buy paper, pens and pencils that, while taken for granted in many communities, were a luxury for children and parents living in poverty. It also allowed us to hire instructional aides and provide programs that gave thousands of students the help they needed to succeed in school and prepare for college.

Congress must now decide whether to reauthorize the act, and whether to continue with the high-stakes testing mandates adopted as part of President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind and President Barack Obama’s Race to the Top.

What has NCLB wrought ?

Lily Ekelsen Garcia, President NEA I have a pop quiz for you. In 2001, before No Child Left Behind (NCLB) was passed, there were six federally-mandated tests per student. Guess how many there are now? 6 8 10 17 The answer: 17 Let that sink in for a minute...17 federally-mandated tests. And that's on TOP of all the other state and local assessments that are being administered.  But that's not even the real issue. It's the high stakes that are tied to those tests and the lack of attention on what really matters - the opportunities we're providing our students across ALL zip codes. That is the real heart of the problem. Join me in speaking up about it now. Right now, Congress is reauthorizing this cornerstone piece of education legislation - the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) or No Child Left Behind (NCLB). It's a HUGE deal that will dictate not only the amount of time students spend on testing, but also the resources like advanced courses, extracurriculars, and access to school counselors - they receive.

On Testing and NCLB- Lily Ekelsen Garcia

http://www.c-span.org/video/?323824-4/washington-journal-lily-eskelsen-garcia-education-policy

Lily Ekelsen Garcia is at the President of the National Education Association. 

More testing from renewed NCLB

AFT’s Weingarten on Secretary Duncan’s ESEA Reauthorization Remarks

In discussing priorities for a revision of No Child Left Behind Secretary of education, Arne Duncan, insisted on  January 5, that the administration would not back away from annual testing for students and performance evaluations of teachers based in part on the results of the tests.

Annual testing has become a point of contention in the often-bitter discussions about how best to improve public education.

Monday, January 12, 2015

WASHINGTON—Statement from American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten on Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s speech regarding the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

"As I've said before, any law that doesn't address our biggest challenges—funding inequity, segregation, the effects of poverty—will fail to make the sweeping transformation our kids and our schools need. Today, it was promising to hear Secretary Duncan make a call for equity, stressing, as we did through the Equity and Excellence Commission, the importance of early childhood education and engaging curriculum. It was encouraging to hear him laud the hard work of educators, who have had to overcome polarization and deep cuts after a harsh recession. And it was heartening to hear him acknowledge the progress our schools have made. However, the robust progress we saw in the first 40 years after the passage of ESEA has slowed over the last 10 years.

Our Public Education System Needs Transformation, Not "Reform"

Editors, The Nation.

Charter-school advocates and others who claim the mantle of education reform have now seen their ideas put into practice in a number of areas—from high-stakes testing to digital learning to the takeover of struggling public schools. The results are in. How are they doing? Suffice it to say, if this were a high-stakes test, they’d fail.

As the articles in this issue illustrate, the strategies pursued by education reformers frequently dovetail with those of austerity hawks. The latter burnish their conservative credentials by cutting budgets and defunding schools. The reformers sweep in to capitalize on the situation, introducing charter chains like Rocketship and K12, which produce real no benefits for students. The chains do, however, generate cash for investors, as a new trove of public money is directed to private coffers. Far too many poor kids, meanwhile, are consigned to schools like Philadelphia’s Bartram High: buffeted by violence, wracked by relentless budget cuts and choked by the “white noose” of wealthy suburbs (in the evocative phrase of former Mayor Richardson Dilworth) that soak up a disproportionate share of resources.

Civil Rights and Civil Wrongs in Public Schooling

By Anthony Cody and Alan Aja.

From the very beginnings of No Child Left Behind, the strongest argument for attaching stakes to tests has been Civil Rights. This phrase is shorthand for equity in education, an end to the systemic neglect of children of color. And proponents of corporate reform have become adept at wrapping themselves in these concerns, while promoting policies that have devastating effects on students and their communities. Common Core is no exception to this.

From Politico last week came word that Common Core proponents have realized that they are losing the battle.

We’re so good at all our statistics and data and rational arguments . [but] emotion is what gets people feeling passionate,” Oldham said. “It may not be the most comfortable place for the business community . [but] we need to get better at doing it.

This message seems to connect with Mike Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, which has received Gates Foundation funding to evaluate the Common Core, as well as general operating grants. Petrilli said:

“We’ve been fighting emotion with talking points, and it doesn’t work,” said Mike Petrilli, executive vice president of the Fordham Institute, a leading supporter of the standards. “There’s got to be a way to get more emotional with our arguments if we want to win this thing. That means we have a lot more work to do.”

Step one: Get Americans angry about the current state of public education.

To that end, expect to start hearing from frustrated college students who ended up in remedial classes even though they passed all their state tests and earned good grades in high school. “These kids should be as mad as hell” that the system failed them, Petrilli said.

Let’s Talk about Testing

New President of NEA and Arne Duncan

Jeff Bryant:

For years, politicians and policy leaders have been running the nation’s public education system basically by the seat of the pants, drafting and passing legislative doctrine that mostly ignores the input from classroom teachers, research experts and public school parents.

What’s got teachers stirred up? How real and potent is this upsurge of their activism? Why should people who identify with progressive causes care? Salon recently posed those questions, and others, to Lily Eskelsen García, the new president-elect of the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers’ union, at the recent Netroots Nation conference in Detroit.

First of all, congratulations on becoming the new NEA president.

Still president-elect. I take office Sept. 1. We have an incredible president, Dennis Van Roekel, who basically said a transition period should be a transition period, not go stand in the corner. So he gave me the president-elect title and told me I would take the press calls, go to Netroots, meet with Arne Duncan, start establishing where you want to go and be as vocal and as visible as you can possibly be. Our members have asked NEA to step up and take things to another level. There’s too much at stake for us. There are policies that need addressing and we have some of the best policy expertise in the nation, but those ideas need a face to the NEA, a face for the American teacher that is channeling the voices of these 3 million educators, and when you hear the words come out of her mouth it’s not just her opinion — it’s a whole lot of teachers and support staff who are saying here’s an important thing for the American people to hear and an important thing for Arne Duncan and President Obama to hear. So he told me to start being that voice today.

The voices of these teachers are important, aren’t they? And too often we don’t really hear their stories about what it’s really like to teach in American schools, do we? For instance, I was just at a meeting of the American Federation of Teachers, where a teacher told us about showing up to school one morning and finding a man had been shot to death in front of the building the night before. The body was still on the sidewalk as the kids were coming to school, and the teachers had to decide how they were going to handle this with the children. So many of our teachers are really serving as first responders for kids, aren’t they?

NEA Delegates call for resignation of Arne Duncan

by Motoko Rich

The long partnership between Democrats and teachers’ unions has frayed in recent years as the Obama administration has pursued policies that many teachers oppose, including performance ratings that link student test scores to evaluations and decisions about promotion or firing.

But the dissatisfaction hit a new level late last week when the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers’ union, with almost three million members, passed a resolution at its convention in Denver calling for the resignation of the secretary of education, Arne Duncan.

Let Teachers Teach, Stop Toxic Testing

by Félix Pérez

By one estimate, nearly one-third of school time is now spent preparing students to take standardized tests, administering the tests and reviewing the test results. Educators increasingly are saying, “Enough is enough!”

TAKE ACTION ›

Join the national campaign to put the focus of public education back on student learning. 

The national rising tide against over testing is about to enter a new phase if 9,000 educators gathering the next four days in Denver approve the “National Education Association Campaign Against Toxic Testing.”

An open letter  from NEA and the “educators of America” states, “It is time to end this toxic testing and implement real accountability in our public education system. As educators who have dedicated our careers and lives to our students and their success, we will not stand silent while commercial standardized testing is used to reduce our public education system to wreckage.”

Teacher Evaluation- James Popham