Indiana blows up the Education 'Oblast'; massive vouchers, teacher tenure kaput, asse

[Samson]

I used to be a supporter of this. Now I'm not so sure. My group invested in a private education company that went into public school systems and took over the running of the schools. It was one of the few investments were we felt good about making a profit and doing good socially. But after years of watching it, I'm not sure if it did any better than the public schools.

Interesting debate for and against.
Fresh Air from WHYY : NPR

*shrugs*


snip-

When Mr. Obama first moved to phase out the D.C. voucher program in 2009, his Education Department was in possession of a federal study showing that voucher recipients, who number more than 3,300, made gains in reading scores and didn't decline in math. The administration claims that the reading gains were not large enough to be significant. Yet even smaller positive effects were championed by the administration as justification for expanding Head Start.

In any case, the program's merits don't rest on reading scores alone. In a study published last year, Patrick Wolf of the University of Arkansas found that voucher recipients had graduation rates of 91%. That's significantly higher than the D.C. public school average (56%) and the graduation rate for students who applied for a D.C. voucher but didn't win the lottery (70%). In testimony before a Senate subcommittee in February, Mr. Wolf said that "we can be more than 99% confident that access to school choice through the Opportunity Scholarship Program, and not mere statistical noise, was the reason why OSP students graduated at these higher rates."

snip-

The positive effects of the D.C. voucher program are not unique. A recent study of Milwaukee's older and larger voucher program found that 94% of students who stayed in the program throughout high school graduated, versus just 75% of students in Milwaukee's traditional public schools. And contrary to the claim that vouchers hurt public schools, the report found that students at Milwaukee public schools "are performing at somewhat higher levels as a result of competitive pressure from the school voucher program." Thus can vouchers benefit even the children that don't receive them.

Research gathered by Greg Forster of the Foundation for Educational Choice also calls into question the White House assertion that vouchers are ineffective. In a paper released in March, he says that "every empirical study ever conducted in Milwaukee, Florida, Ohio, Texas, Maine and Vermont finds that voucher programs in those places improved public schools." Mr. Forster surveyed 10 empirical studies that use "random assignment, the gold standard of social science," to assure that the groups being compared are as similar as possible. "Nine [of the 10] studies find that vouchers improve student outcomes, six that all students benefit and three that some benefit and some are not affected," he writes. "One study finds no visible impact. None of these studies finds a negative impact."

more at-

Jason Riley: The Evidence Is In—School Vouchers Work - WSJ.com

I've gone from being a supporter of this stuff to being agnostic.

My first guest, Diane Ravitch, had been an advocate of choice, testing, accountability and market-based education reform. Now she has profound doubts about these same ideas. She says she was persuaded by accumulating evidence that these reforms were not likely to live up to their promise.

Diane Ravitch's latest book is called "The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Undermine Education." She served as assistant secretary of education in the George W. Bush administration. President Clinton appointed her to the National Assessment Governing Board, which oversees federal testing of student progress in different subject areas. She served on that board for seven years. Diane Ravitch is a professor of education at NYU and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. ...

Well, here's why I think it's a problem, and it's because I step back and I'm a historian and I look at the data from studies across the world, and what I see is that the best-performing nations in the world have strong public education systems.

I don't see any of the high-performing nations handing over control of children in the public sector and handing over public funding to entrepreneurs. I see them instead building a public school system, building and strengthening their education profession so that their teachers are the best, so that they're well-supported, so that they feel passionate and energetic about the work they're doing.

And we seem to be doing the opposite. We're privatizing many of our public schools. We're demoralizing the people who work in the regular public schools. We're doing, as a nation, at this moment in time, doing nothing to improve our public school system and everything to undermine it. ...

So what's your assessment of the pros and cons of teachers unions today?

Prof. RAVITCH: Well, the first thing you have to understand about teachers unions is they're not the problem. The state with the highest scores on the national tests, the ones given by the federal government, the state - that state is Massachusetts, which is 100 percent union.

The nation with the highest scores in the world is Finland, which is 100 percent union. Management and labor can always work together around the needs of children if they're willing to. ...

handing the schools in low-income neighborhoods over to private entrepreneurs does not, in itself, improve them.

There's plenty of evidence by now that the kids in those schools do no better,

Diane Ravitch: Standardized Testing Undermines Teaching : NPR

That last sentence has been my experience.

The nation with the least kids to teach, and the most homogeneous population on the planet is Finland. Findland HAS NO MEXICAN IMMIGRANTS. Finland HAS NEVER ENSLAVED BLACKS. Finland has a NATIONAL EDUCATION SYSTEM. Why do we constantly try to compare ourselves to FINLAND? They would have an educated population if they hired PENGUINS to teach!

My experience is that anyone that WANTS to be educated can be educated.

Very often, Americans do not want to be educated, certainly not for 12 years, and certainly not in 3 levels of abstract math. There is not any preceived value, because:

THE STANDARD OF LIVING IS TO HIGH!
In America you can be a complete ninny, and still live in an air-conditioned home, with clean water, and a cell phone, color TV, and usually own a car.

 

[rdean]

Why do right wingers care? They don't even like education.

 

[Baruch Menachem]

I had a friend who taught math in Kenya. Kids were motivated, and the parents more so. The kids walked to school from huts because they knew that if they didn't do well, they would be another generation in huts. They were motivated, self directed, dedicated. Their parents also. It was a joy to teach them

Then he came back to American and taught in Public school for a year. The administration, the kids, the parents, all were just marking time. No one gave a rip. After he had two students come to school drunk and get in a fistfight in second period, he had his fill.

Parents motivate the kids, the kids are motivated, even with the dummies, you will get real good results. If the parents don't care, the kids care less, and the teacher is reduced to a corrections officer.

Part of the reason parents don't care is they have struggles with the administration that is past caring. The parents can't get movement, they give up.

Vouchers and charter schools give parents an extra level of power and involvement. And extra motivation.

Education is a cooperative enterprise. Anything that fosters cooperation between the parent, student and teacher moves things forward. Anything that breaks these bonds of cooperation makes everyone look bad

 

[PoliticalChic]

I used to be a supporter of this. Now I'm not so sure. My group invested in a private education company that went into public school systems and took over the running of the schools. It was one of the few investments were we felt good about making a profit and doing good socially. But after years of watching it, I'm not sure if it did any better than the public schools.

Interesting debate for and against.
Fresh Air from WHYY : NPR

*shrugs*


snip-

When Mr. Obama first moved to phase out the D.C. voucher program in 2009, his Education Department was in possession of a federal study showing that voucher recipients, who number more than 3,300, made gains in reading scores and didn't decline in math. The administration claims that the reading gains were not large enough to be significant. Yet even smaller positive effects were championed by the administration as justification for expanding Head Start.

In any case, the program's merits don't rest on reading scores alone. In a study published last year, Patrick Wolf of the University of Arkansas found that voucher recipients had graduation rates of 91%. That's significantly higher than the D.C. public school average (56%) and the graduation rate for students who applied for a D.C. voucher but didn't win the lottery (70%). In testimony before a Senate subcommittee in February, Mr. Wolf said that "we can be more than 99% confident that access to school choice through the Opportunity Scholarship Program, and not mere statistical noise, was the reason why OSP students graduated at these higher rates."

snip-

The positive effects of the D.C. voucher program are not unique. A recent study of Milwaukee's older and larger voucher program found that 94% of students who stayed in the program throughout high school graduated, versus just 75% of students in Milwaukee's traditional public schools. And contrary to the claim that vouchers hurt public schools, the report found that students at Milwaukee public schools "are performing at somewhat higher levels as a result of competitive pressure from the school voucher program." Thus can vouchers benefit even the children that don't receive them.

Research gathered by Greg Forster of the Foundation for Educational Choice also calls into question the White House assertion that vouchers are ineffective. In a paper released in March, he says that "every empirical study ever conducted in Milwaukee, Florida, Ohio, Texas, Maine and Vermont finds that voucher programs in those places improved public schools." Mr. Forster surveyed 10 empirical studies that use "random assignment, the gold standard of social science," to assure that the groups being compared are as similar as possible. "Nine [of the 10] studies find that vouchers improve student outcomes, six that all students benefit and three that some benefit and some are not affected," he writes. "One study finds no visible impact. None of these studies finds a negative impact."

more at-

Jason Riley: The Evidence Is In—School Vouchers Work - WSJ.com

I've gone from being a supporter of this stuff to being agnostic.

My first guest, Diane Ravitch, had been an advocate of choice, testing, accountability and market-based education reform. Now she has profound doubts about these same ideas. She says she was persuaded by accumulating evidence that these reforms were not likely to live up to their promise.

Diane Ravitch's latest book is called "The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Undermine Education." She served as assistant secretary of education in the George W. Bush administration. President Clinton appointed her to the National Assessment Governing Board, which oversees federal testing of student progress in different subject areas. She served on that board for seven years. Diane Ravitch is a professor of education at NYU and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. ...

Well, here's why I think it's a problem, and it's because I step back and I'm a historian and I look at the data from studies across the world, and what I see is that the best-performing nations in the world have strong public education systems.

I don't see any of the high-performing nations handing over control of children in the public sector and handing over public funding to entrepreneurs. I see them instead building a public school system, building and strengthening their education profession so that their teachers are the best, so that they're well-supported, so that they feel passionate and energetic about the work they're doing.

And we seem to be doing the opposite. We're privatizing many of our public schools. We're demoralizing the people who work in the regular public schools. We're doing, as a nation, at this moment in time, doing nothing to improve our public school system and everything to undermine it. ...

So what's your assessment of the pros and cons of teachers unions today?

Prof. RAVITCH: Well, the first thing you have to understand about teachers unions is they're not the problem. The state with the highest scores on the national tests, the ones given by the federal government, the state - that state is Massachusetts, which is 100 percent union.

The nation with the highest scores in the world is Finland, which is 100 percent union. Management and labor can always work together around the needs of children if they're willing to. ...

handing the schools in low-income neighborhoods over to private entrepreneurs does not, in itself, improve them.

There's plenty of evidence by now that the kids in those schools do no better,

Diane Ravitch: Standardized Testing Undermines Teaching : NPR

That last sentence has been my experience.

"There's plenty of evidence by now that the kids in those schools do no better,"

I'd be despondent if that proved to be true...

...but if that were to be proven to be the reality, wouldn't it still be a positive to allow Americans to have the choice of where and how their children were educated be more in tune with our history than dictatorship by a Wilsonian-educrat administrative state be the mechanism?

 

[Toro]

The nation with the least kids to teach, and the most homogeneous population on the planet if Finland. Findland HAS NO MEXICAN IMMIGRANTS. Finland HAS NEVER ENSLAVED BLACKS. Finland has a NATIONAL EDUCATION SYSTEM. Why do we constantly try to compare ourselves to FINLAND? They would have an educated population if they hired PENGUINS to teach!

My experience is that anyone that WANTS to be educated can be educated.

Very often, Americans do not want to be educated, certainly not for 12 years, and certainly not in 3 levels of abstract math. There is not any preceived value, because:

THE STANDARD OF LIVING IS TO HIGH!
In America you can be a complete ninny, and still live in an air-conditioned home, with clean water, and a cell phone, color TV, and usually own a car.

That's a very fair observation. Like I said, I'm agnostic on this issue. It's important to look at this empirically, not ideologically. If private entities can get better results, do it. That's one reason why we invested in a private education company. We really believed in the system.

But unfortunately, it doesn't appear that the results were improved with our company. We had to fire the CEO, who was also the founder (and who paid himself a million dollars a year and had gotten rich selling his stock into the market before we took them private), and last I heard, things hadn't gotten much better.

When we made the investment, we argued - to the leftists, primarily teachers unions - that ideology didn't matter. What mattered were results. As huge of a cliche it is, what mattered was the children. Well, if it is correct to say that ideology doesn't matter to the left, it is also the correct thing to say to the right. If it is not working - no matter what the ideology - we must change it, because what matters is outcomes, not ideology.

And this movement in the states this year to strip tenure (which I generally agree with) and charter schools isn't one of empirical application. It is about ideology and a belief that teachers are a problem in regards to the budget.

 

[Trajan]

I used to be a supporter of this. Now I'm not so sure. My group invested in a private education company that went into public school systems and took over the running of the schools. It was one of the few investments were we felt good about making a profit and doing good socially. But after years of watching it, I'm not sure if it did any better than the public schools.

Interesting debate for and against.
Fresh Air from WHYY : NPR

*shrugs*


snip-

When Mr. Obama first moved to phase out the D.C. voucher program in 2009, his Education Department was in possession of a federal study showing that voucher recipients, who number more than 3,300, made gains in reading scores and didn't decline in math. The administration claims that the reading gains were not large enough to be significant. Yet even smaller positive effects were championed by the administration as justification for expanding Head Start.

In any case, the program's merits don't rest on reading scores alone. In a study published last year, Patrick Wolf of the University of Arkansas found that voucher recipients had graduation rates of 91%. That's significantly higher than the D.C. public school average (56%) and the graduation rate for students who applied for a D.C. voucher but didn't win the lottery (70%). In testimony before a Senate subcommittee in February, Mr. Wolf said that "we can be more than 99% confident that access to school choice through the Opportunity Scholarship Program, and not mere statistical noise, was the reason why OSP students graduated at these higher rates."

snip-

The positive effects of the D.C. voucher program are not unique. A recent study of Milwaukee's older and larger voucher program found that 94% of students who stayed in the program throughout high school graduated, versus just 75% of students in Milwaukee's traditional public schools. And contrary to the claim that vouchers hurt public schools, the report found that students at Milwaukee public schools "are performing at somewhat higher levels as a result of competitive pressure from the school voucher program." Thus can vouchers benefit even the children that don't receive them.

Research gathered by Greg Forster of the Foundation for Educational Choice also calls into question the White House assertion that vouchers are ineffective. In a paper released in March, he says that "every empirical study ever conducted in Milwaukee, Florida, Ohio, Texas, Maine and Vermont finds that voucher programs in those places improved public schools." Mr. Forster surveyed 10 empirical studies that use "random assignment, the gold standard of social science," to assure that the groups being compared are as similar as possible. "Nine [of the 10] studies find that vouchers improve student outcomes, six that all students benefit and three that some benefit and some are not affected," he writes. "One study finds no visible impact. None of these studies finds a negative impact."

more at-

Jason Riley: The Evidence Is In—School Vouchers Work - WSJ.com

I've gone from being a supporter of this stuff to being agnostic.

My first guest, Diane Ravitch, had been an advocate of choice, testing, accountability and market-based education reform. Now she has profound doubts about these same ideas. She says she was persuaded by accumulating evidence that these reforms were not likely to live up to their promise.

Diane Ravitch's latest book is called "The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Undermine Education." She served as assistant secretary of education in the George W. Bush administration. President Clinton appointed her to the National Assessment Governing Board, which oversees federal testing of student progress in different subject areas. She served on that board for seven years. Diane Ravitch is a professor of education at NYU and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. ...

Well, here's why I think it's a problem, and it's because I step back and I'm a historian and I look at the data from studies across the world, and what I see is that the best-performing nations in the world have strong public education systems.

I don't see any of the high-performing nations handing over control of children in the public sector and handing over public funding to entrepreneurs. I see them instead building a public school system, building and strengthening their education profession so that their teachers are the best, so that they're well-supported, so that they feel passionate and energetic about the work they're doing.

And we seem to be doing the opposite. We're privatizing many of our public schools. We're demoralizing the people who work in the regular public schools. We're doing, as a nation, at this moment in time, doing nothing to improve our public school system and everything to undermine it. ...

So what's your assessment of the pros and cons of teachers unions today?

Prof. RAVITCH: Well, the first thing you have to understand about teachers unions is they're not the problem. The state with the highest scores on the national tests, the ones given by the federal government, the state - that state is Massachusetts, which is 100 percent union.

The nation with the highest scores in the world is Finland, which is 100 percent union. Management and labor can always work together around the needs of children if they're willing to. ...

handing the schools in low-income neighborhoods over to private entrepreneurs does not, in itself, improve them.

There's plenty of evidence by now that the kids in those schools do no better,

Diane Ravitch: Standardized Testing Undermines Teaching : NPR

That last sentence has been my experience.

I have read and followed Diane for years I saw her speak at Berkeley 2 years ago and have great respect for her, and I think to some extent she exhibits a curious myopia as to social factors here as opposed to say Finland, big time.

same can be said here- "demoralizing the people who work in the regular public schools", there are trends that show competition works, this is not a question and can be found in that Forster survey, so again, I don't understand where she is coming from.

In every mechanism that exhibits the horrid mismanagement and lack of performance our urban schools appear to labor under, demoralization of the work force is not a barometer that sets the trend, we are not in this to foster teacher self esteem, we are in this for the kids, and while having a highly motivated workforce is optimal, hey, the unions themselves and , most especially the administration of school districts does more to bottom teacher morale than any charter school close by.

 

[Trajan]

here, more horror-

California's Parent Trigger Law Compton Parents Take On The Public School System

* MARCH 2, 2011

Crushing Hopes in Compton
The empire strikes back against 'parent trigger.'

snip-

As we reported in December, a majority of parents (more than 250) have exercised their right under a new state law to petition to replace the administrators at McKinley Elementary school in Compton, California and invite a charter-school operator to take over.

McKinley is one of the worst schools in one of the worst-performing districts in the country. Fewer than half of the Compton Unified School District's students graduate from high school, and only 3.3% of those graduates are eligible to attend California's public universities. The parents want McKinley to be run by Celerity Educational Group, which operates three high-performing charters in the Los Angeles area.

The educational empire has not taken this well. At a PTA meeting teachers urged parents to rescind their petitions, and during school hours they pressured students whose parents supported the trigger effort.

When that intimidation failed, the school district suddenly came up with a new signature-verification process. The district required parents—many of whom work multiple jobs—to show up at McKinley at appointed times on one of two days. It also required parents to bring official photo identification, knowing that some of them are illegal immigrants. (The Supreme Court said schools must educate children of illegals in Plyler v. Doe, 1982.)

The parents have sued to stop this harassment. "This is akin to an elected official who is subject to a recall petition requiring that each voter meet with his office," said their legal team from Kirkland & Ellis, which is working pro bono. "The District intends to make it more difficult to petition a local school for reform than vote for President of the United States."

A judge issued a temporary restraining order stopping the district's verification gambit, so the empire struck back again, declaring last week at a hastily-called community meeting that every petition had been disqualified on technicalities: Some legal code numbers were mistyped, for example, and some petitions weren't stapled. Really. The parents will now also challenge this in court.

Meanwhile, the powers in Sacramento are trying to undermine parent trigger statewide. On his first day in office, Governor Jerry Brown replaced seven reform members of the state board of education with union allies, including a lobbyist for the California Teachers Association. The new board immediately announced that it would write new rules to govern the parent trigger law, throwing out eight months of work by the previous board.

more at

Review & Outlook: Crushing Hopes in Compton - WSJ.com