60% NYC's Bloomberg schools did WORSE than regular schools

[yurbud]

The mass firing and school closings have not only been a signature "reform" of Mayor Bloomberg, but of Arne Duncan's reign in Chicago.

A lot of us have been frustrated with Obama's compromises with the corporate agenda on other issues, but on K-12 education, apart from giving it more funding than Republicans would, there has been no compromise: Obama has been on the same page as the right from the get go. When conservatives praised his choice for Secretary of Education, it was clear our kids would be treated with all the loving care of a side of beef or pork bellies on a commodities exchange.

Charter schools have already been proven to be worse more often than better than traditional public schools, and now this transparently union-busting tactic has been shown to hurt kid's education.

Isn't it time for Obama to admit he was wrong and change course on K-12 education?

And shouldn't Democrats in Congress stop voting FOR this agenda and STOP taking the money of those pushing it?

It might be too late to primary incumbents this year, but how hard would it be to knock one out with a slogan like "I won't sell your kids eduction down the river"?

Ironically, the starting point for the sale of this education "reform" agenda was that our public schools were failing. Now by several objective measures, corporate based education reform has failed.

It's time to put a fork in it and go back to letting educators and educate our kids and let Wall Street go back to doing what it does best--picking grown ups' pockets.

Just leave the kids alone.

Copy and paste this to the White House and your Congress people. They might not do anything, but at least they can't claim ignorance.

The headline summarizes the story: "Bloomberg's New Schools Have Failed Thousands of City Students: Did More Poorly on State Reading Tests than Older Schools with Similar Poverty Rates."

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...When The News examined 2012 state reading test scores for 154 public elementary and middle schools that have opened since Mayor Bloomberg took office, nearly 60% had passing rates that were lower than older schools with similar poverty rates.

The new schools also showed poor results in the city’s letter-grade rating system, which uses a complicated formula to compare schools with those that have similar demographics.

Of 133 new elementary and middle schools that got letter grades last year, 15% received D’s and F’s — far more than the city average, where just 10% of schools got the rock-bottom grades.

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[immoderate]

1. The philosophy is to study the most successful schools in the world, and do the opposite!

--imm

[yurbud]

3. and do whatever makes money for your cronies & breaks the power of your

political enemies, in this case, teachers unions.

[Igel]

2. I find much such articles to be mostly innuendo.

They usually say something, but you don't know if they're correct.

So this article says 60% had passing rates lower than older schools with similar poverty rates.

Let's see ... What conclusions can we draw?

1. Well, that 40% of the schools had the same or similar passing rates to those of older schools with similar poverty rates. If they closed schools with lower or the same passing rates as schools with similar passing rates, this means 40% or more did better than the old schools. If the article had led with this we'd be clapping. Same facts.

2. It's likely that the schools they closed actually had worse than average passing rates, compared to schools with similar poverty rates. In that case, the real metric should be whether or not the schools they opened had better passing rates than the schools they closed. If a school had a passing rate of 10% when the average was 50%, and the replacement school had a 40% passing rate, then, you know, it's okay for it to be in that "60% had passing rates lower than older schools with similar poverty rates." I mean, the passing rate in that hypothetical example quadrupled, how's that bad?

3. How long have the schools been open? New schools sometimes flounder for a year before they get their feet and improve over a year or two. New staff sometimes get outsized results because novel approaches tend to up results, but they taper back down to baseline after a few years. Yes, that utterly obliterates falsifiability unless you have so many observers around to document exactly what's going on that the observer's paradox kicks in big time. Oh--that doesn't make it any better, does it? So we just have deal with it. It's education, not chemistry or physics, and certainly not mathematics.

These complaints are usually based on one of two things. The first is that the parents and community liked the old school. The teachers, the administration, the principal, how it was run, the fact that they had gone to that school or that other kids had, etc., etc. The new school's an intrusion, a change, an imposition, farther away, inconvenient, looks depressing, isn't yellow but blue, didn't hire your nephew's girlfriend .... The second is that there's a competing claim for how to reform the schools, and since that competing claim, in theory, gets really good results any lesser results are a detraction from what the glory of the universe could be. The good is the enemy of the perfect, and since nobody want to fight the "good" it must be reclassed as "bad". Usually community groups are based on the first kind of complaint, team up with alternative reformers, and sort of merge under the banner of the alternative reformer when most of the first kind of complaints are viewed as petty and inconsequential.

Now, I like Ravitch. I liked her when I thought she was being data-based and wound up wrong, but still not as wrong as she was quoted to be. I like Ravitch now. I wish people would listen to what Ravitch says when it doesn't support their preconceived ideas because that's when what she writes is most useful. She's an honest broker, sometimes wrong but invariably trying to do justice to as much and as varied data as she can find. Sadly, she's usually quoted only in part by dishonest players who aren't interested in doing justice to the data but in doing justice to their own beliefs and long-held views. But she's also human and simply believes that her proposed reforms, based on the data, are better than Bloomberg's. They probably are. But the key word is "probably." They might not work; after all, most reforms over the last 50 years have pretty much failed, Ravitch was wrong a decade ago even when she was saying, "Aha, the data say this will definitely work." So let's go with the odds and just say they almost certainly wouldn't work, at least not long term (where "long" = 5 years; we have low standards for these things). In any event, they weren't the reforms chosen and implemented. Implementing Ravitch's wouldn't undo the expense of the older reforms and would cost money.

[yurbud]

4. on corporate backed ed reform the real question is whether they even have

kids best interests at heart.

When you look at what the same people on Wall Street did to our manufacturing base, our housing market, what they have done with for profit health insurance, and what they are continually trying to do to Social Security, the odds that they are being altruistic in this case are extremely low.

[yurbud]

5. When Rupert Murdoch is one of the big players, a guy whose news makes people stupider

that is not a good sign.

[yurbud]

6. the even more basic question is how does changing from 100% of ed funding going to ed

to some portion of that being skimmed off in profits going to help kids?