Surprising Comparison of Charter and Regular Public School ‘Pass’ Rates on the HS PARCC

I was actually rather surprised to see that significantly larger percentages of regular DC public school students ‘passed’ the PARCC in both math and in reading than did DC charter school students.

If you don’t believe me, look for yourself at the OSSE press release.

What it says is that in the DC charter schools, 23% of the students ‘passed’ (got a 4 or a 5) on the English portion, whereas in the regular DC public schools, 27% ‘passed’.

And in math, they claim that only 7% of the charter school students ‘passed’, but 12% of the regular DC public school students passed.

Are you surprised, too?

A Few PARCC Scores Have Been Released for DC Public Schools

If you would like to see how District of Columbia public high school students did on the PARCC, you can look here at a press release from DCPS administration. This test was on ELA (reading) and Geometry. The scores for grades 3-8 have not yet been released.

The disparities in ‘pass’ rates between the DCPS magnet schools (Banneker and Walls) and every other DC public high school are amazing, particularly in geometry. Notice that several schools had not a single student ‘pass’. This year’s test gives students scores from 1 to 5; only a score of 4 or 5 is considered ‘college and career ready’ — although no studies have actually been done to determine whether that statement is actually true. Banneker and Walls have the lowest rates of students labeled ‘at risk’.

Here are two graphs which I cut-and-pasted from the press release. Click on them to enlarge them.

Given what I’ve seen of the convoluted questions asked on released sample PARCC questions, it is no wonder that ‘pass’ rates dropped a lot this year, compared with previous years. The DC-CAS wasn’t a very good test, but PARCC is terrible.

Please keep in mind that public education in the District of Columbia has been under the control of DEformers like Michelle Rhee, Kaya Henderson, and the Gates and Broad foundations, for over 8 years now. The students taking this test last spring have been under their rule since they were rising third graders. Every single teacher in DCPS was either hired by Rhee or by Henderson or else passed numerous strict evaluations with flying colors, year after year, and has been teaching just as they were directed to – or else.

And this is the best that the DEformers can do?

The Harm Done by TFA – According to its own Alumni

Here is an article which points out the negative impact of Teach for America, as described by two of its own former members. It’s in a magazine called Jacobin. I recommend it highly.

Here are a few quotes:

In stark contrast to the harsh and constant criticism that TFA doles out to its corps members and staff members, much of what the organization has been doing in recent years — creating its own public relations machine — suggests a desire to be above criticism itself. During my tenure on staff, the organization created a national communications team whose job was to get positive press out about TFA and to swiftly address any negative press. My sense was, and still is, that TFA cares more about the public perception of what it is doing than about what it is actually doing to improve educational outcomes and opportunities for low-income students throughout the United States.

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For an organization that describes itself as “data-driven,” it is interesting that TFA does not collect data on how their corps members are impacted by their TFA commitments. While working in racially segregated and under-resourced schools, 35 percent of the corps members in this study began professional counseling; 27 percent began taking prescription medications to address depression, anxiety, and trauma; 38 percent experienced increased alcohol consumption and dependency; 42 percent experienced major weight changes; 46 percent experienced strained relationships; and 73 percent experienced physical fatigue, some to the point of requiring medical attention.

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After years of uncritical praise, TFA has started receiving less favorable media coverage and more public discontent from alumni. One corps member in your book, Jameson, writes about viewing her time in TFA as “almost a guilty secret.” Why has there been this sort of shift in how TFA is viewed by corps members and the broader public, and how has TFA as an organization handled this uptick in public criticism?

JB

TFA controlled the rhetoric about TFA for the first twenty-three of its twenty-five years. Critique has always been there but only in the last two years has that critique started to come together and find outlets. That was a fundamental aim of our book: providing an outlet for discussion where it was historically absent.

TFA has been forced to include defensive measures to combat negative press. And while any company would likely engage in a public relations campaign, TFA is determined to undermine any and all dissent ranging from nationally syndicated columns to obscure blogs.

Peter Greene of Curmudgucation takes on the Social Justice Argument about Education Reform

Peter Greene may be the best blogger in America. Please read his latest post on how education reform deals with social justice. It’s long but, as always, excellent.

Where have all the teachers gone?

A lot of them have retired (like me) or quit in disgust. This writer collected comments from dozens of teachers around the nation who explained why they retired early or quit teaching altogether because they could not stand the direction that American education has taken.

Very worthwhile reading.

http://badassteachers.blogspot.com/2015/08/where-have-all-teachers-gone.html

With Friends Like These …

(public education doesn’t need enemies!)

An assessment by Ken Derstine of the overhaul of ESEA / NCLB / ECAA act. Here is the link:

http://www.schoolsmatter.info/2015/07/with-friends-like-these.html

Weekly Roundup of Educational Resistance by Bob Schaeffer

{As usual, this list is collected and distributed by Bob Schaeffer, not by me.}

The U.S. Senate has joined the House of Representatives in responding to growing, grassroots pressure by voting to overhaul “No Child Left Behind” (NCLB). The bills passed by both the Senate and House reflect widespread rejection of failed top-down, test-and-punish strategies as well as the “NCLB on steroids” waiver regime dictated by Arne Duncan. While neither version is close to perfect from an assessment reform perspective, each makes significant progress by rolling back federally mandated high-stakes, eliminating requirements to evaluate educators based on student test scores, and recognizing opt-out rights. FairTest and its allies will closely monitor the conference committee working on compromise language to make sure the gains remain in the final bill sent to President Obama — the alternative is to keep the yoke of NCLB-and-waivers in place for at least two more years, if not much longer. Meanwhile, organizers in many states are keeping the spotlight on the problems of test overuse and misuse, modeling better practices and winning additional policy victories.

Remember that back issues of these weekly updates are archived at:http://fairtest.org/news/other

National End High-Stakes Testing to Help Fix Public Education: Key Civil Rights Leader

http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/education/247770-fix-public-education-end-high-stakes-testing-pass-esea
National U.S. Senate Rejects Proposal to Give Federal Government More Say in Identifying “Failing” Schools
http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/senate-rejects-effort-to-give-feds-more-say-in-identifying-failing-schools/2015/07/15/f6ad9ba2-2a6b-11e5-a5ea-cf74396e59ec_story.html
National Both House and Senate NCLB Overhaul Bills Allow for Penalty-Free Test Opt Out
https://deutsch29.wordpress.com/2015/07/17/both-house-and-senate-esea-bills-allow-for-opt-out-without-penalty/
National “Race to the Top:” Lofty Promises and Top-Down Regulation Brought Few Good Changes to America’s Schools
http://educationnext.org/lofty-promises-little-change-americas-schools/

California Exit Exam on Way Out
http://www.hidesertstar.com/news/article_ee092084-2cfa-11e5-98d3-fbf7e03679c0.html

Colorado Two Small Districts Set Opt Out Records
http://co.chalkbeat.org/2015/07/20/two-small-districts-set-the-record-for-opting-out/#.Va1_rZdLUZw

Connecticut Opposition Coalesces Against Smarter Balanced Tests
http://www.newmilfordspectrum.com/news/article/Opposition-coelesces-regarding-school-testing-6393921.php

Delaware Governor Vetoes Opt-Out Bill; State PTA Pushed for Override Vote
http://www.delawareonline.com/story/news/education/2015/07/16/markell-vetoes-testing-opt-bill/30243869/

Georgia More than 10,000 Young People Who Did Not Pass Grad. Test Recently Received Diplomas
http://jacksonville.com/news/georgia/2015-07-17/story/georgia-hands-diplomas-more-10000-people-who-couldnt-pass-high-school

Hawaii Teachers Fight Evaluations Based on Student Test Scores
http://www.civilbeat.com/2015/07/she-fought-hawaiis-new-way-of-evaluating-teachers-and-won/

Illinois Why Common Core Tests Are Harmful to Students
http://dianeravitch.net/2015/07/20/gerri-k-songer-explains-why-common-core-tests-are-actually-harmful-to-students/

Iowa Third-Grade Promotion Test Pushes Reading Down Into Kindergarten
http://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/education/2015/04/20/early-reading-education-reform/26100783/

Louisiana Fight to Make Charter School Disclose What Test It Uses for Kindergarten Entry
http://hechingerreport.org/when-a-top-nola-charter-wont-reveal-its-admission-test-for-kindergarten/

Minnesota Test Cuts Came After Thorough Debate
http://www.startribune.com/editorial-counterpoint-school-testing-cuts-were-fully-debated/316368021/

Missouri Exam Scores Don’t Tell Full Story of Teacher Preparedness
http://www.examiner.net/article/20150715/OPINION/150719341/-1/sports

Ohio Time Allocated to New State Tests Cut in Half
http://www.cleveland.com/metro/index.ssf/2015/07/ohios_common_core_math_and_english_tests_will_be_cut_to_3_hours_each.html

Nevada After Testing System Breakdown, State to Hire New Assessment Vendor
http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/state_edwatch/2015/07/after_testing_problems_nevada_set_to_hire_new_assessment_vendor.html

New Hampshire Schools Can Replace Smarter Balanced Tests with ACT or SAT
http://nhpr.org/post/nh-schools-can-replace-smarter-balanced-test-sat-and-act

New Jersey Be Wary of New State Teacher Ratings
http://www.app.com/story/opinion/2015/07/17/teacher-ratings/30307937/

New Mexico Court Rejects Suit Seeking to Strip Pearson’s Common Core Testing Contract
http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/marketplacek12/2015/07/court_hands_major_victory_to_parcc_pearson_in_challenge_by_vendor.html

New York High School Models Authentic Assessment
http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2015/07/17/nyc-high-school-strives-for-authentic-assessment.html
New York Opt Out Movement Plans to Ratchet Up Actions Against Standardized Exam Overkill
http://blog.timesunion.com/capitol/archives/238624/opt-outers-will-continue-to-protest-tests/
New York Pending NCLB Overhaul Offers Hope to Reduce State’s Testing Obsession
http://www.lohud.com/story/opinion/2015/07/17/hope-reduce-testing-obsession-nclb/30290533/

North Carolina State’s Largest District Cuts Back Local Test Mandates
http://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/education/article27865318.html
North Carolina Cautions About Test-Score-Based Teacher Pay
http://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/community/chapel-hill-news/chn-opinion/article27512254.html

Oregon Students Can Meet Graduation Requirement with Work Samples in Their Home Language
http://www.oregonlive.com/education/index.ssf/2015/07/oregon_students_can_qualify_fo.html

Pennsylvania Questions Mount About Using Volatile Test Results to Evaluate Teachers and Schools
http://thenotebook.org/blog/158810/educators-pennsylvania-pssa-test-score-plunge
Pennsylvania Teachers to School Board: Standardized Testing is Harming Students
http://lancasteronline.com/news/local/cocalico-teachers-to-school-board-standardized-testing-is-harming-students/article_dc32651c-2e4b-11e5-803e-0be9cdf1e4bc.html

Rhode Island What Tests Like PARCC Do Not Measure
http://www.golocalprov.com/news/guest-mindsetter-joel-hellmann-what-parcc-doesnt-measure

Tennessee Teachers School Governor on Testing and Evaluations
http://tn.chalkbeat.org/2015/07/16/tennessee-teachers-school-haslam-on-testing-evaluations-during-first-teachers-cabinet-meeting/#.VahPb5dLUZw
Tennessee Local School Board to Take Up Opt Out Resolution
http://springhillhomepage.com/wcs-board-delays-talks-on-over-testing-cms-4594

Texas New Test Leading Fewer to Get GEDs
https://www.texastribune.org/2015/07/14/education-advocates-say-new-computer-based-ged-too/

Washington State Testing Revolt Pushes State Into Uncharted Waters
http://wutc.org/post/testing-revolt-washington-state-brings-feds-uncharted-waters
Washington Over-Testing is a Flawed Strategy
http://www.dailyrecordnews.com/familyandeducation/is-there-too-much-testing/article_15326290-2cdf-11e5-b9a9-637e48088a15.html

“How Many Tests Can a Child Withstand?” — with apologies to Bob Dylan
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2015/07/14/with-apologies-to-bob-dylan-a-song-how-many-tests-must-a-child-withstandbefore-we-can-kill-this-scam/

The Beatings in Education Will Continue Until Morale Improves
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steve-nelson/the-beatings-will-continu_b_7795784.html

Bob Schaeffer, Public Education Director
FairTest: National Center for Fair & Open Testing
office-   (239) 395-6773   fax-  (239) 395-6779
mobile- (239) 699-0468
web-  http://www.fairtest.org

A Quick Look at the National Academy of Science report on Mayoral Control of Schools in Washington DC

Last week, the National Academy of Science released a very long report assessing the progress (or lack of it) of the education of young people in Washington DC under mayoral control in both the regular public schools and in the charter schools.

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The picture isn’t pretty, as Candi Peterson has pointed out.

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Here are my major conclusions:

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1. Mayoral control of schools has been a spectacular failure if you care anything about reducing the gaps between achievement levels of white students and those of color, the poor, special ed students, and English language learners (i.e. immigrants). The gaps between the pass rates on the DC-CAS standardized tests of those groups under mayoral control or the PERAA (Public Education Reform Amendment Act) are enormous and have essentially remained unchanged since 2007, when the law was implemented, according to the data in this report. Note that the report combines the data for both the DC public schools and charter schools, combined, at all grade levels, in both reading and math. Here are two graphs, made by me from data in the report, which show the lack of change. I estimated the percentage of students ‘proficient’ or ‘advanced’ in each of the groups (whites, blacks, hispanics, students receiving free or reduced-price lunches, English language learners, and special education students) from graphs provided by the report, and then subtracted the pass rates from each other. HIGH NUMBERS ARE BAD because they show large gaps in proficiency rates. Low numbers are good. Notice that there has been almost no change since mayoral control; some lines go up a tiny bit, some go down a bit, others waver back and forth a bit. Not a success story.

2. Ratings for teachers remain very much dependent on what students they teach. Many millions of dollars and enormous effort has been spent to devise supposedly scientific ways of measuring teacher effectiveness — i.e. VAM and IMPACT. Every single teacher remaining in DCPS has either been hired under Their Chancellorships or has been repeatedly measured as efffective or better. Yet the ratings for teachers at schools with high poverty rates, and in wards 7 and 8, remain much lower than those at schools with low poverty rates and in ward 3. Repeat: these low-ranked teachers are not holdovers from the ‘bad old days’ – they are either brand-new hires or have been repeatedly measured as good or excellent under IMPACT. (One bit of data: at my last school, from which I retired 5 years ago and which has over 100 faculty and administrators, only about 5 or 6 teachers remain from my time there.) I copied these two tables directly from the report:

3. Now that we have 60-odd publicly-funded local school districts in Washington DC, most of which [the charter schools] are not required to provide much of anything in the way of data, we no longer have any effective way of saying what are good practices and which are poor practices, because we have no city-wide way of describing what is going on.

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4. The report generally omits any data from before 2007, and in some cases before 2009, which makes it hard to compare pre-mayoral control and post-MC. The exceptions are with some NAEP data, in which it is clear that any progress post-PERAA is indistinguishable from progress before PERAA. See these four graphs, which could have been taken from my blog but are again from the National Academy of Science report (I added the stuff in red for emphasis):

5. The report totally omits the contractual obligations entered into by Rhee and Henderson with the Broad, Arnold and other foundations back in 2007 when they laid out 60-some goals they said they would meet by 2014. As you may recall from looking at my blog or what Erich Martel wrote on the topic, their success rate in meeting those goals (regarding things like NAEP and CAS scores for the most part) was approximately TWO PERCENT. Not 20%. But 2%. And I was being generous.

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6. Finally, despite all the really damning data in the report, I predict that the Washington Post and others of their mindset will proclaim that it shows that mayoral control has been a wonderful success.

PS, here is the link so that you can download your own copy of the 341-page report:

http://www.nap.edu/download.php?record_id=21743

An inspiring interview with Diane Ravitch

Read it here.

A quote:

[Interviewer]: My biggest disappointment with Barack Obama is his education policy. He had Linda Darling-Hammond as his consultant during the 2008 election, and we get Arne Duncan.

[Diane Ravitch]: That was bait and switch. The greatest disappointment of this entire situation, which I consider to be a direct assault on the very principle of public education in America, is Barack Obama. In the state of the union, the president said that he didn’t want teaching to the test, but he wants teachers who don’t get the test marks to be ousted. He pretends to be completely detached and almost as though he doesn’t know what Arne Duncan is doing. Arne Duncan is doing what Barack Obama wants him to do, and they are doing what the Wall Street hedge-fund managers want them to do. They are pushing a privatization agenda, there’s no question about it. Obama always said if the unions were under assault, he would put on those walking shoes. Did you see him in Madison, Wisconsin? I didn’t. In fact, I was in Madison, Wisconsin to speak at the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, and I happened to be there right in the middle of that great demonstration. On Twitter I was exchanging tweets with Justin Hamilton, Duncan’s press secretary at the time, and I challenged him to march together around the State House. Arne and the president were in Miami with Jeb Bush celebrating the turn-around of Miami Public High School, which in a month received notice it was going to be closed. I mean, it was all a sham. We are surrounded by so many frauds, hoaxes, and shams. Arne has been a leader in perpetuating the hoaxes, and the president has been right there by his side. Arne Duncan is a guy who’s dedicated to persuading people that Michelle Rhee is right. He’s the worst Secretary of Education in our history.

A closer look at charter and regular public school enrollments, percentages of students at risk, and percentages of students ‘proficient’

Here is another look at the brand-new data concerning four variables in the District of Columbia schools, about which I wrote a couple of days ago. The difference here is that the dots representing the schools are more-or=less proportional to the size of the student body.

1. Is this a regular public school, or a charter school (blue or red):

2. What fraction of the kids at that school are officially considered to be At Risk? (That’s the scale along the x-axis at the bottom of the page)

3. What is the average percentage of the kids at that school are ‘proficient’ in reading and math on the DC-CAS? (That’s the scale along the y-axis at the left-hand side of the page)

4. How big is the school? (That’s the size of the dot, more or less; the legend is at the bottom left-hand corner of the graph)

Time spent looking carefully at this graph will be well-spent. If you click on it, it will expand.

It will certainly show that charter schools have not revolutionized education for the better in DC: for both types of schools, there remains a very strong, negative correlation between the percentages of kids At Risk and ‘pass’ rates on the DC-CAS.

Note that most schools have between 200 and 500 students and that most of the ones that are smaller are actually charter schools. As I wrote a couple of days ago, the schools with the largest fraction of At-Risk students (say, over 2/3 of the student body) are almost all regular DC public schools.

On the second graph, which is otherwise identical to the first, I’ve labeled some of the larger schools.

Here is the one with names of some of the larger schools, so you can see how individual schools fall on this graph.

(Sorry, I there was not enough room to label every single one, and my non-existent HTML skills won’t allow me to make it so that any of the dots are clickable. If any of my readers know how to do that and would like to offer to make that happen, then please let me know in the comments.)

And here is the entire data table. So you can see where every single school lies on these three dimensions.

(PS: I added a few more names of schools and corrected four other small errors, two pointed out by an alert reader.. 2/22/2015)