Another flop for the Gates Foundation and for top-down reform

  "I was pretty naive about how long the process would take." -- Bill Gates

“I want the foundation to be the neutral broker that’s able to bring up the real data of what is working and what’s not working." -- Melinda Gates

Far from being an honest broker, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the world's biggest private foundation, has had the greatest influence on shaping the nation’s education policies.

During the past two decades the power philanthropy has leveraged billions of its tax-exempt dollars to inject reform policies into the public system with no public oversight or accountability.

Bill Gates, one of the top three richest men in the world, supports public education the way a rope supports a hanging man. When his imposed reform ideas fail to produce the desired measurable results, the mega-foundation does a few mea culpas and then pulls its funding, moves on to their next big reform idea and leaves school districts and even their own spawned reform groups hanging in the wind.

Last week, RAND, hired as evaluators by Gates himself, issued a massive and mostly negative evaluation of the Gates Foundation’s overblown effort to redesign teacher evaluation, compensation, and employment practices in three school districts and four charter school management organizations.

Now we're hearing reports out of their Seattle headquarters that a major shift in education investments is taking place, away from teacher evaluation to curriculum reform. What that means is anyone's guess.

This from teacher/blogger Larry Ferlazzo:

The Gates Foundation came out with a report this morning admitting that their heavy-handed, and expensive, focus on teacher evaluation was a failure. The report’s authors suggest that maybe other factors were more important for students which, of course, just about any teacher could have told Gates before the money was spent.

Back in 2016, the foundation promised there would be a major shift in its modus operandi. Melinda Gates, announced the fund was backing away from its support for Common Core standards in light of the political shift from federal to state mandates under The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA)

She claimed that she and her husband, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, "learned an important lesson" from the pushback against CCSS in recent years after pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into supporting national education standards, claiming such a massive initiative could not be successful unless teachers and parents believe in it.

“Community buy-in is huge,” Melinda Gates told the Washington Post, adding that cultivating such support for big cultural shifts in education takes time. “It means that in some ways, you have to go more slowly.”

The term "buy-in", when used by corporate-style reformers, is revealing, not just in the way it portrays the school community simply as consumers of reform, but also in the way they see themselves as reform's progenitors. 

Like Donald Trump, for whom he's expressed affinity,  Bill Gates is a great believer in strong-man, autocratic leadership and finds democratic processes too messy, expensive and time consuming for someone with his economic leverage.

It seems like every couple of years faced with stinging criticism from those most affected by their reform interventions, Gates Foundation leaders go through similar "self-adjustments" with no public accountability, while sticking to their same wrong-headed theory of change.They tweak their top-down reform funding strategies, admit (or not) they've bet on the wrong horse, leave old projects hanging, and promise next time, to be "better listeners". But how real is their self-crit? It's usually limited being "too impatient" or "too naive" about great amount of time it takes to bring the uninsightful, unwashed masses to buy into their interventions.

Back in 2012, the line under the Obama administration and with Arne Duncan running the DOE, was that bad teachers were the problem, Gates shifted its focus to discovering who these thousands of bad teacher were and how to replace them with "good teachers".

This from Chalfbeat:

Bad teachers were the problem; good teachers were the solution. It was a simplified binary, but the idea and the research it drew on had spurred policy changes across the country, including a spate of laws establishing new evaluation systems designed to reward top teachers and help weed out low performers.

Behind that effort was the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which backed research and advocacy that ultimately shaped these changes.

Remember when they ditched their $2B investment in high-school reform and small schools, claiming that their pet projects didn't produce fast enough results (standardized test scores)? Bill Gates' 2009 letter, which was posed as a self-critical evaluation, actually blamed the Gates-funded schools themselves for not being "radical" enough and indirectly, the teacher unions for not being faithful to his top-down model.

While it's become the poster child for top-down reform, the problem goes way beyond the Gates Foundation. It goes to the very nature of power philanthropies, who use their concentrated wealth to erode public space and public decision making.

PARCC TEST MEMBERSHIP DOWN TO SIX STATES AND D.C.

I'm remembering back to 2015 when Arne Duncan's SUV took a wrong turn on the way to Ariel Community Academy in Chicago, and he was forced to get out and walk through a large group of anti-PARCC protesters, who were there to express their opposition to the new common-core-aligned exams. Duncan did not stop to speak to them.

Duncan had already launched tirades against parents who wanted their kids to opt-out of PARCC. Remember this one?

U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan told a group of state schools superintendents Friday that he found it “fascinating” that some of the opposition to the Common Core State Standards has come from “white suburban moms who — all of a sudden — their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought they were, and their school isn’t quite as good as they thought they were.” -- Washington Post

Fast-forward to today. Duncan's gone and apparently so is PARCC -- at least from most states. The PARCC consortium, apparently feeling the burn, has chosen a new nonprofit to manage the business of maintaining and administering its test: New Meridian Corp., a brand-new organization led by people from various strands of the assessment world.

The Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, has lost most of its original state members. Only six states and the District of Columbia are using the test this year, and that number will drop by one more next year.

EdWeek reports: 

Its president and CEO, Arthur VanderVeen, who has spent the past 14 years at Compass Learning, the New York City Department of Education, and the College Board, told Education Week that he and his team interviewed the leaders of 14 states—current and former PARCC states, some who use Smarter Balanced, and some who haven't used either consortium test—to get a sense of their testing priorities.

 Sustainability has been an issue for both consortia as the end of their federal funding near drew. That $360 million was meant only to support the design of the tests. Once they made their operational debut, in 2014-15, financial responsibility for sustaining the tests shifted to the states. Both consortia have lost membership, but Smarter Balanced has maintained a larger stable of states using its test—14 this year—than has PARCC.

McGraw-Hill folds it cards. Can't compete in current high-stakes testing market.

McGraw-Hill/CBT is pulling out of the $1.1 billion high-stakes testing market. The reason? Too much volatility. It seems that the wave of political protests and the parent opt-out movement have forced McGraw to move to greener more peaceful pastures. And, as the common-core tests have rolled out, the overall market for state assessments has largely flatlined

According to EdWeek:

The market has also proved volatile, fraught with legal protests, mounting opposition from parents and politicians to testing, and major disruptions in online assessments for which vendors, including McGraw-Hill Education/CTB, have been blamed.

“Let’s be clear—people in the assessment industry are not living in poverty,” said Scott Marion, the associate director of the National Center for the Improvement of Educational Assessment, which consults with states and districts on testing. Yet the profit margins, he said, are “thinner than a lot of people want to believe.”

McGraw-Hill apologized in 2013 for interruptions after its digital testing service disrupted exams in Indiana and Oklahoma. About 3,000 students in Oklahoma lost their connections to the testing provider’s servers. And nearly 80,000 out of a half million Indiana students who took the company’s tests in the spring had their testing postponed and about 30,000 were kicked off of the testing platform on a single day of testing. One Indiana charter school has said the errors are to blame for its F grade from the state.

Twenty years ago, McGraw-Hill Education, Harcourt, and Riverside Publishing controlled large portions of the summative-testing market. Today, all of those companies have either largely abandoned that market or been absorbed by other testing entities.

Gates $2.3B driving Common Core as a 'de facto and de jure national school curriculum'

The new curriculum driven into law by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, the Common Core Standards, is a product of massive spending on an unprecedented historical level by Bill Gates.

Guerin Lee Green at the North Denver News reports that Gates has spent $2.3 billion pushing the Common Core. More than 1800 grants to organizations running from  teachers unions to state departments of education to political groups like the National Governor’s Association have pushed the Common Core into 45 states, with little transparency and next to no public review.

The Common Core now represents a de facto and de jure national school curriculum, something theoretically prohibited by federal law. But the Common Core comes with common high-stakes tests and common textbooks, making the standards far more than standards.

The Gates involvement, profiteering by testing publishers like Pearson and the heavy-hand of federal coercion in the Common Core has aroused political opposition from right and left, as well as from education experts who have called the standards inappropriate developmentally, pushing young children into material they aren’t ready for.

According to NDN, private groups like the Aspen Institute, the Colorado Legacy Foundation, Colorado Children’s Campaign, and Stand for Children received millions in Gates grants at a time when Colorado schools were facing massive budget cuts.

The Colorado Department of Education is one of the largest Gates recipients in the nation, receiving more than $22 million to push the new standards, text books, PARCC testing and charter schools.

*Also see Lyndsey Layton's Washington Post piece: How Bill Gates pulled off the swift Common Core revolution

Billions at stake as testing profiteers collide

Pearson is the "800-pound gorilla" in state testing. -- Barry Topol, the managing partner for the Assessment Solutions Group,

EdWeek reports:

Two of the biggest names in testing are locked in a dispute over one of the most coveted jewels in the K-12 market: the right to oversee a suite of assessments in California, a state with about one-eighth of the country's students.

$1.2 Billion Market

California is one of 18 states giving tests created by the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium, a group of states that has designed exams aligned with the common-core standards.

Smarter Balanced is leaving the administration of those tests to individual states. California asked vendors to bid to administer its common-core exams in English/language arts and math, and for testing work in science and other subjects over the next three academic years, starting in 2015-16.

The overall market for summative assessment—typically defined as tests designed to measure student academic progress at the end of a school year or a course—stands at about $1.2 billion a year, said  a Danville, Calif.-based company that consults with states on testing. So a California contract potentially worth up to $80 million a year represents a big piece of that pie.

RACE TO TOP IS GOING BUST. BUT PEARSON HANGS ON.

"Pearson is the McDonald’s of education." -- Sir Michael Barber, Pearson Chief Education Adviser

It's too early to tell what kind of impact the latest $1.1 trillion spending bill will have on education funding in general. One thing we know is that Arne Duncan's Race To The Top funding to cut down to zero. There is also no funding in the bill for Common Core standards. That's not good news for all those politically-connected companies that have bellied up to the DOE trough for the past six years to cash in on Duncan's and RTTT's testing and charter school mandates.

The biggest is Pearson, the British conglomerate that dominates Common Core testing and text book publishing fields. But Pearson is having troubles of its own. Alan Singer, writing at Huffington (Pearson Education Can Run, But It Cannot Hide), reports that Pearson Education is closing its foundation, is under investigation by the FBI for possible insider dealings in the Los Angeles John Deasy/iPad scandal, that the company is being sued by former employees for wrongful termination and that its PARCC exams are losing customers.

But don't pass the hat for poor Pearson just quite yet. A report out of Dubai has Pearson, despite the dark cloud over its head, winning a competitive bid by the OECD to develop the frameworks for Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2018. PISA is widely recognized as the benchmark for evaluating education systems worldwide by assessing the skills and knowledge 15-year-old students will need in their further academic education or for joining the workforce, said a statement. The PISA exam has become the scoring mechanism to determine which of dozens of competing nations supposedly have the best education systems. The exam is administered every three years in around 70 participating economies world-wide. So far neither Pearson nor OECD is saying how much money is involved in the deal.

A blockbuster contract Pearson signed earlier this year to deliver the new PARCC Common Core exams based its pricing on a minimum of 5.5 million students nationwide taking the tests next spring. But several states dropped out, leaving just under 5 million students to take the exams. (Another 325,000 children in Louisiana will take a modified test that uses PARCC questions but is delivered by another vendor.)

At that volume, Pearson will earn a minimum of $138 million in the first year of the contract. But because the contract was crafted in anticipation of a higher revenue flow to Pearson, PARCC member states have agreed to scale back the amount of work the company must do on the exams.

Big shake-out in the test-prep industry predicted as SAT is revamped

The College Board is going to "radically revamp" the SAT — with the goal of putting SAT test prep companies out of business and aligning the test to the Common Core academic standards. But as long as Common Core is chained to high-stakes standardized testing, test-prep will continue to trump authentic classroom teacher and assessment.

According to Politico,

The overhaul reflects deep concern — among students, parents, teachers and college admissions officers — that the SAT did not fairly reflect the work teenagers did in school. It stems as well from a concern that the proliferation of pricey SAT tutoring services gave the wealthy a leg up over the meritorious.

 In a step toward that goal, College Board Pres. David Coleman announced a partnership with Khan Academy to provide free, online test prep materials — including thousands of practice problems and instructional videos. The College Board plans to train tutors and counselors to help students from low-income households to access the online test prep.

FairTest not impressed...Public Education Director Bob Schaeffer says,

“Providing free SAT prep is laudable, but it already exists through programs such as Number2.com. The partnership with the Khan Academy is unlikely to make a dent in the huge market for high-priced, personalized SAT workshops and tutoring that only well-to-do families can afford."    

Standardized tests continue to be a  lousy predictor of college success and a new study released last month by the National Association for College Admission Counseling found that students who are admitted to college without submitting SAT or ACT scores do just as well as their peers in terms of college grades and graduation rates.

Testing companies hit the jackpot on Common Core

The market for testing products and services is booming and could continue to surge over the next few years, according to industry analysts and company officials, who say that growth is being fueled by the shift toward common-core tests.

Federal education policy since No Child Left Behind has fueled the testing boom which in turn has driven even more testing down to lower and lower grades. Many states and districts have approved policies tying teachers’ and administrators’ evaluations to students’ academic progress, as measured in part by state tests—policies supported by the Obama administration through its Race to the Top program.

In an article sponsored by the Gates Foundation, Edweek's Sean Sean Cavanagh writes:

Changes in testing policy with nationwide implications are invariably “good for any provider of testing materials,” said Scott Marion, the associate director of the National Center for the Improvement of Educational Assessment, a Dover, N.H.-based nonprofit organization that consults with states on assessments. “You knew the common core was going to be a big change from what [we] had before.”

It is estimated that the current market for technology-based testing and assessment products and services in fiscal 2011 was $1.6 billion. Preliminary results that are still being analyzed show the market grew by at least 20 percent for fiscal 2012. The biggest player in the testing market is London based Pearson Publishing which has close ties to the Obama administration and Ed Secretary Arne Duncan.

Testing the real estate market

Current testing policies which rank schools on the basis of student test scores, contribute to a two-tier school system, including the racial re-segregation of schools, housing, and a widening of the gap between rich a poor. All these factors come together in a real estate market where home buyers pay a big premium to live near top-ranked schools. 

Chicago Tribune real estate writer Mary Ellen Podmolik writes:

How much more do they have to pay for a home that feeds into a top-ranked elementary school as opposed to an average-ranked school? Nationally, try an extra $50 per square foot, on average, according to the data crunchers at Redfin. 

In the Chicago area, the median price of a home near top-tier schools was $257,500, 58.5 percent higher than the median price of $162,500 for a home near an average-ranked school. 

The findings are a jolt of reality for almost 1,000 consumers who plan to buy a home in the next two years and completed a Realtor.com survey in July. More than half of those potential buyers said they'd be willing to pay as much as 20 percent above their budget to buy a home within certain school boundaries. Apparently, that's not enough to get into the best schools.

 Information on schools and test scores came from Onboard Informatics, Maponics LLC and GreatSchools, a national nonprofit. Its assessment of 2012 top-ranked elementary schools was based on test scores.

The high-stakes nature of standardized testing becomes even greater when scores are tied to the value of family homes. But according to the Baltimore Sun,

Agents say they're hesitant to talk about schools to clients for fear of running afoul of the federal fair-housing law, which bans steering based on such factors as race and gender. That increases buyers' reliance on test scores, because for out-of-towners it's one of the few easily available indicators of school quality.

Yuck, Tuck

Marshall Tucker Band

When I first got this news from a friend in L.A.,  I thought she was talking about Marshall Tucker, the S. Carolina piano tuner after whom one of my favorite '70s bands ("Heard it in a love song") was named.  But alas, it was about Marshall Tuck, the corporate f*%k, who just announced he's running for State Supt. of Education in California.

Tuck is the head of the Partnership for LA Schools and former Green Dot Charter exec. He's also big in the so-called Parent Revolution, the group behind the so-called "Parent Trigger", one of the great hoaxes ever played on public school parents and their children.

Tuck will be running against the incumbent Tom Torlakson, who I'm sure will be baited for being a "union lover" (a Class 1 felony in some parts of the state). Tuck will most likely have a huge pot of money in his war chest coming from the likes billionaire boys clubbers like Broad, DFER and other corporate reformers.

According to the L.A. Times:

Under Torlakson and Gov. Jerry Brown — who also enjoyed teachers union support — the state has bucked national trends in education policy. Top state officials, for example, have resisted efforts to make students' standardized test scores a major component of a teacher's performance evaluation. 

Running against Tuck, I wish him luck.

How many more of these studies do we really need?

Well, it's another week and there's another study showing once again that charter schools fail to perform better than the traditional public schools they are being touted to replace.  Of course the whole premise behind comparing and rating large categories of schools, based on a selected group of standardized test scores makes no sense and needs more debunking.

This latest study, coming out of Stanford's CREDO group finds:

56 percent of the charters produced no significant difference in reading and 19 percent had worse results than traditional public schools. In math, 40 percent produced no significant difference and 31 percent were significantly worse than regular public schools.

Pearson

Charters actually come out slightly better in this year's CREDO study then they did in 2009. But charter school cheerleaders like Scott Pearson, are downright giddy over reportedly (I always add in that word when talking about D.C. test scores in the post-Rhee era) improved charter reading and math scores in the District. Pearson, who comes out of Arne Duncan's Dept. of Education, gets paid $180,000/year to say stuff like this:

“We’re popping the champagne corks here,” said Scott Pearson, executive director of the D.C. Public Charter School Board. “We think it’s a very strong affirmation of the power of charter schools when they’re done right.”

Yes, Mr. Pearson. All schools do better when "done right". Such are the research-based inanities of the champagne-popping charter hustlers.

Side note about Pearson -- he's a former executive at Mitt Romney's Bain Capital. Perfect!

Atlanta's testing scandal

I highly recommend these two excellent articles on Atlanta's testing scandal: Atlanta test cheating: Tip of the iceberg? by Valerie Strauss in the Washington Post and Ex-Schools Chief in Atlanta Is Indicted in Testing Scandal by Michael Winerip in the New York Times. Both emphasize the connection between the widespread testing scandals and current policies and practices associated with corporate-style school reform,  No Child Left Behind and Race To The Top.

Writes Strauss:

In New York City, for example, Joel Klein became chancellor of the largest public school system in the country in 2002 and proceeded to institute a no-excuses mentality, attacking teachers unions, closing public schools and pushing the expansion of charter school. He touted a rise in standardized test scores, until, that is, it became clear that the test score improvements were phony. In 2010, state officials revealed that scores had been inflated, and thousands of parents who thought their children were performing on grade level learned that they weren’t. Klein quickly left his job and went to work for Rupert Murdoch.

Writes Winerip:

What made Dr. Hall just about untouchable was her strong ties to local business leaders. Atlanta prides itself in being a progressive Southern city when it comes to education, entrepreneurship and race — and Dr. Hall’s rising test scores were good news on all those fronts. She is an African-American woman who had turned around a mainly poor African-American school district, which would make Atlanta an even more desirable destination for businesses.

Pearson profits while parents protest N.Y. test madness

PARENTS UNITED From left, Lori Chajet, Abby Subak and Martha Foote outside Public School 321 in Brooklyn.

The New York Times reports today that many N.Y. parents are opting out of field testing the state's new round of standardized tests related to the Common Core standards.

Brooklyn parent Lori Chajet says:

“I want my school to use tests to help instruction, to help find out if kids don’t know fractions. I don’t want my child to feel like her score will decide if her teacher has a job or not.”

NUY says the tests are not cheap: Pearson, the company that creates the standardized exams and the field tests, charged the state about $7 million for testing services for the 2012 calendar year — 30 percent of that budget went toward field testing.

A group of parents talked about their concerns on the sidelines of soccer fields and during dance classes. And they came together in groups like Parent Voices, New York.

Jen Nessel leads the newly formed Community Action Committee of the P.A. at the East Village Community School in Manhattan. The group came together after the field tests in June, when nearly all parents in the school signed a letter, delivered to the principal, stating that they would decline to have their children take the test.

Officials said they weren’t concerned that large numbers of children would skip the field tests this month. “The numbers of the people who were boycotting in June were small,” Ms. Lopatin, of the city Education Department, said. But activists say that the boycott is just one step in changing the way schools approach testing and how parents and families fit into the conversation.

Testing contractors bleeding La. schools dry

John Kennedy, state Treasurer, holds two books listings contracts for the Department of Education. Kennedy spoke with the News-Star Editorial Board on May 23. / Margaret Croft/The News-Star

The Louisiana Department of Education is spending more than $132.9 million with two out-of-state companies for standardized tests.The department has 70 current contracts worth more than $1 million each. That adds up to $282 million, more than half of which goes to contractors outside of Louisiana.
 
The biggest beneficiaries of current contracts are Minnesota-based Data Recognition Corp. for $93.1 million and California-based Pacific Metrics for $39.8 million. The six current contracts for the two companies account for $132.9 million. According to its website, Pacific Metrics develops online student assessment systems with items aligned to the Common Core State Standards in English, language arts and mathematics. -- NewsStar.com

Big money to be made in the teacher evaluation biz

Education reforms translate into big money for private groups writes Sarah Garland in the Oct. 24th American Prospect. Following the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act, states paid millions of dollars annually to companies to develop and administer the standardized tests required under the law. Companies also cashed in on a provision mandating tutoring for students at struggling schools. Now, a movement to overhaul the teaching profession is creating a new source of revenue for those in the business of education.
Among those cashing in on teacher evaluation, according to Garland,  are: 

• Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 
• American Institutes for Research 
• The New Teacher Project (TNTP)
• National Institute for Excellence in Teaching
• Mathematica
• Pearson
• Learning Sciences International

“There simply is not as much [money] to be made from professional development, or system design, as there is in testing students,” Charlotte Danielson, a researcher who developed a well-regarded teacher observation method that has been adopted by districts around the country, said in an email.

“There are real dangers,” said Monty Neill, director of FairTest, a group critical of standardized testing. “While observations make good sense, if you start bringing in outside people…you’re more likely to end up with arbitrary and capricious decisions from which someone makes money.”

Corporate school "reformers" engineered Atlanta cheating cover-up

Garrett

“School systems, like businesses, must also look at the return on their investment,” wrote Georgia Power’s former CEO, Mike Garrett and UPS’ Evern Cooper Epps. “Any honest dialogue about salaries must be based on that principle.”

The city’s chamber of commerce and another business group took control of the district’s investigation last year into irregularities on state-mandated tests. Executives at the Metro Atlanta Chamber set the parameters of the inquiry and largely selected the people who ran it. Later, they suggested ways to “finesse” the findings past the governor.

Business leaders published opinion pieces and letters to the editor defending [Supt. Beverly] Hall before cheating inquiries were complete; calls for the superintendent to resign, they said, could undermine the district’s progress. And just as they had lobbied almost a decade earlier to give the superintendent more autonomy from the Board of Education, this year they sought new power for the governor to remove recalcitrant board members. -- AJC 7/17

A Feb. 15, 2010 memo drafted by a chamber executive, reads:

“It [cheating scandal] also has implications on the business community, many of whom ... are heavy investors, and on the economic development community who touts the superintendent and school board’s recent awards as best in the nation.” 

Seventeen months later, a state investigation has revealed that many of the school district’s claims of academic progress were, in fact, based on systemic wrongdoing.

GE’s vice chairman, John Rice, who was based in Atlanta, became one of Hall’s closest confidants. Her emails, obtained through the Georgia Open Records Act, show she frequently consulted Rice on matters large and small. He offered advice on managing stress, for instance, urging her to not read critical editorials.

Once the cat was out of the bag, the same corporate "reformers" that had used Hall as their front person and who had funneled big bonuses her way, unceremoniously dumped her and threw he under the proverbial bus.