Category Archives: miracle schools

Charter schools, Crisis, Education, education reform, Florida Miracle, miracle schools, Science of Reading, Teach for America, VAM

The “Manufactured Crisis” and the Repeated Failure of Education Journalism [UPDATED]

February 14, 2023 plthomasedd

For people not in the field of education, A Nation at Risk is either a hazy (or nonexistent) footnote of history or a pedestrian (and obvious) claim that didn’t need a government committee to announce—US public education is a failure.

However, for all its fanfare and eager media coverage, the real significance of the politically driven report is that it set in motion a pattern still vibrant in 2023; mainstream media is constantly fanning the flames of “manufactured crisis.”

A Nation at Risk was a media, public, and political hit, but scholars were quick to note that the claims in the report were overstated, oversimplified, and lacking any credible evidence [1].

In short, manufactured.

From the early 1980s and into the 2020s, mainstream education journalism has hopped feverishly from crisis to crisis and endorsed boondoggle after boondoggle—never once stopping to say “My bad!” or to pause, step back, and reconsider their template.

David Labaree concludes:

When the state takes the quantified depiction of schooling that educational researchers provide and uses it to devise a plan for school reform, the best we can hope for is that the reform effort will fail. As the history of school reform makes clear, this is indeed most often the outcome. One reform after another has bounced off the classroom door without having much effect in shaping what goes on inside, simply because the understanding of schooling that is embodied in the reform is so inaccurate that the reform effort cannot survive in the classroom ecology. At worst, however, the reform actually succeeds in imposing change on the process of teaching and learning in classrooms. Scott provides a series of horror stories about the results of such an imposition in noneducational contexts, from the devastating impact of the collectivization of agriculture in the Soviet Union to the parallel effect of imposing monoculture on German forests. The problem in all these cases is that the effort to impose an abstract technical ideal ends up destroying a complex distinctive ecology that depends on local practical knowledge. The current efforts by states across the globe to impose abstract technical standards on the educational village bear the signs of another ecological disaster.
The Lure of Statistics for Educational Researchers

As a result, a stunningly harmful pattern has emerged:

Amanda Ripley was wrong about Michelle Rhee.
Jay Matthews and Paul Tough were wrong about “no excuses” charter schools and Teach For America.
David Brooks was wrong about “miracle” charter schools (and everything else).
[Insert journalist] was wrong about Common Core and VAM.

And now, rest assured it will come to pass, Emily Hanford and Natalie Wexler are wrong about the “science of reading.”

Remember Waiting for Superman?

Sold a Story and The Truth about Reading are the same melodramatic misinformation campaign depending on an uninformed public to sell yet another educational crisis.

There will be no reckoning; there never is.

But some day (soon?) the “science of reading” histrionics will be a faint memory while everyone scrambles to the next education manufactured crisis.

The only things not to be addressed, of course, are the actual needs of students, teachers, and universal public education.

[1] See Gerald Bracey, Gerald Holton , and David Berliner and Bruce Biddle (who coined “manufactured myth”).

education reform, Educational Research, miracle schools, No Excuses Reform, reading, Science of Reading

The Return of Missionary Zeal in Education Reform: “Science of Reading” Edition

January 25, 2023 plthomasedd

Increasingly, I am contacted by email or spoken to in person by teachers with a similar and disturbing series of experiences.

These teachers ask to remain anonymous out of fear of retaliation because they have already been reprimanded or dismissed for simply asking questions about their school/district’s implementing the “science of reading.”

One recent communication I received represents well that pattern (I am paraphrasing and reducing specifics to protect anyone trying to identify the specific teacher, and this is representative of dozens and dozens of similar communications).

The teacher has been a literacy educator well over a decade and also has earned a doctorate. A few years ago, this teacher had a first experience with LETRS training being required for university faculty where they were on one-year contracts.

After asking about why LETRS was being required and noting that the research base doesn’t support that training as effective, the teacher was shunned by their administrator and then their contract wasn’t renewed.

Before leaving that school, they noticed some faculty had simply stopped attending the training, but the administrator sought other faculty to log in to complete that training. The teacher grew concerned that there seemed to be some incentive for simply having many faculty trained.

At a new school, that teacher was immediately required to go through LETRS training. They described the training as a “cult” experience in which professional educators were handed pipe cleaners and asked to make models of the “simple view” of reading (Scarborough’s rope).

While I have repeatedly documented (along with several other scholars; access materials HERE) that the “science of reading” movement is primarily over-simplified narratives and misinformation, I want here to address that the central flaw in the movement is one we have seen in recent history regarding education reform: missionary zeal.

It is important to emphasize that I am aware of no one who rejects that a body of reading science/research exists and that should be a significant part of what drives classroom practice.

However, the media-driven SOR movement and the political consequences of that advocacy that has resulted in SOR-labeled policy are oversimplified and misguided versions of that research base.

And that new policy is often unscientific and harmful such as the pervasive implementation of grade retention.

Further the SOR movement fails to ground the narrative in the history of the field of reading and education reform.

For example, during the “miracle” school/teacher era spanning from George W. Bush through Barack Obama, missionary zeal drove Teach For America, charter schools, “miracle” school claims, and value-added methods for evaluating teachers.

At the core of these connected elements of education reform is a missionary zeal that ultimately failed to produce what was guaranteed, primarily because the reformers misidentified the problems and offered misguided solutions. In the case of the SOR movement, the same mistake is being made by claiming that reading science is simple and settled.

Currently, the “science of reading” movement has fallen into the missionary zeal trap as represented by The Reading League:

The similarities in these two recent movements are important and damning:

The criticisms I have raised are directly targeting the missionary zeal and misinformation found in the media story [1] and the political reaction [2] to that false narrative.

Reading proficiency in the US is about the same now as well before anyone implemented balanced literacy or current popular (and demonized) reading programs. And persistently over the last 80 years, scholars have lamented the “considerable gap” between research and practice in all aspects of K-12 education.

Throughout those 80-plus years, no one has ever been satisfied with student reading achievement regardless of the reading theory being implemented or the reading programs being adopted.

And teacher preparation has been significantly hampered for the past 40 years by top-down accountability mandates that have reduced most teacher certification to more bureaucracy than preparation. A dirty little secret that SOR advocates ignore is that how teachers are prepared to teach reading matters little because most teachers are bound to reading programs and reading standards once they enter the classroom. A huge gap exists between how teachers are prepared and how they are allowed to teach.

But manufacturing a crisis, perpetuating melodramatic stories, and casting simplistic blame are doing the same things we have done in education reform for decades without ever truly supporting teachers or better serving all students.

Just like the TFA and charter/”miracle” school era immediately behind us, the SOR movement is anti-teacher and anti-schools. The public and political leaders have been well primed since the 1980s to believe that schools are horrible and that teachers are incompetent. Regardless of what SOR advocates intend, that is what most people hear.

SOR advocates have falsely attacked teacher expertise, both that of K-12 teachers and that of teacher educators (many of whom had long careers as K-12 teachers); these attacks are often grounded in agendas and reports that are not themselves scientific (such as reports from NCTQ), and solutions offered (LETRS) lack scientific grounding as well.

Just as there is a robust and deep body of reading science, there are sincere educators who are engaged with that research base but also recognize that the SOR movement and SOR policy are not aligned with the complex and still developing reading science.

The SOR movement and much of SOR implementation are corrupted by missionary zeal that creates a veneer for the essentially anti-teacher elements—scripted curriculum (structured literacy), mandated retraining (LETRS), and caricatures of teacher educators, teacher education, balanced literacy, three cueing, and reading programs

An authentic embracing of reading science would acknowledge that current research is complex and evolving, that the causes of students struggling to read are also complex and include influences beyond and in the classroom (not just teacher practice but teaching/learning conditions such as class size and funding), that professionals engaging with research should raise questions and challenge conventional wisdom and traditional assumptions in order to serve the individual needs of students, that one-size-fits-all solutions for students and teachers don’t exist, and that educational practices should be grounded in teacher expertise—not journalists, parents, and politicians.

Missionary zeal is problematic in the same way as people who claim to know the mind of god (I unpack that in the newest arc of Daredevil), creating tunnel vision and arrogance while casting blame and judgment toward anyone or anything that dare raise a valid question or concern.

Just as TFA lured thousands into the program and thousands more to champion the idealistic (and unrealistic) blame-game as well as promises of miracles only to collapse under the weight of its own propaganda, SOR is following the same guaranteed-to-fail strategy.

And, yes, many good people jump on bandwagons with good intentions (I have several people I greatly admire who came through TFA), but eventually, we must all come to terms with the deeply flawed elements of this SOR movement. We must remain committed to individual student needs and teacher autonomy—not movements, slogans, and market boondoggles.

The reasons students have struggled for decades to acquire reading as well or as soon as we’d like are multi-faceted and mostly grounded outside of schools; therefore, the solutions are also complex and quite large.

From the TFA/”miracle” school era to today’s SOR movement, these false narratives are compelling because they are simple (simplistic), but they are destined to cause far more harm than good to students, teachers, and schools.

Beware missionary zeal—especially when dealing with why our schools and students struggle and what solutions advocates offer with passionate certainty.

The Crumbling Facade of “No Excuses” and Educational Racism

March 14, 2021 plthomasedd

Sarah Karp offers a long overdue and somewhat surprising opening lede for WBEZ Chicago, home to a number of charter school chains:

Chicago’s largest charter school network sent a letter to alumni this week admitting that its past discipline and promotion policies were racist and apologizing for them. The apology is notable not just as an acknowledgment of misguided policies, but as a repudiation of the “no-excuses” philosophy adopted by many charter schools during the 2000s.
Top Chicago Charter School Network Admits A Racist Past

“No excuses” ideologies and practices have been a foundational staple of charter schools disproportionately serving Black students, Hispanic students, and poor students well back into the 1990s but blossoming in the 2000s since both political parties jumped on the charter school bandwagon. By the late 2000s, mainstream media and the Obama administration were all-in on charter schools as “miracles.”

There were always two problems with the charter school mania and propaganda—data never supported the “miracle” claims (see my “Miracle School Myth” chapter), and worse of all, “no excuses” ideology has always been racist, shifting the blame and gaze onto students and teachers in order to ignore systemic inequity and racism.

“No excuses” schools always began with the assumption that Black, Hispanic, and poor students are fundamentally “broken” and must be “fixed”—an ugly and racist version of deficit thinking.

Almost a decade ago, I spoke at the University of Arkansas after the publication of my book on poverty and education; in that work and talk, I directly challenged “no excuses” ideologies and charter chains as harmful and, yes, racist.

In the wake of that talk, I was discounted and mis-characterized in Education Next, along with an equally unfair swipe at another KIPP critic, Jim Horn: “critics fear that disadvantaged parents do not know enough to choose wisely, or else do not have their children’s best interest at heart.”

Neither Horn nor I hold those views, and our criticisms were firmly and clearly grounded in arguing that “no excuses” is essentially racist and classist.

As I have documented, when I contacted the article authors about the false narrative they created around Horn and me, Maranto both admitted the framing was unfair and claimed the article would be updated; it never was.

The Noble charter chain mea culpa is likely too little, too late, but it is a serious crack in the facade perpetuated by “no excuses” advocates over the last two decades, included so-called “scholars” at the Department of Educational Reform (University of Arkansas) where Maranto works.

Many years ago, in fact, after dozens of blog posts and talks, I co-edited a volume refuting “no excuses” and proposing social context reform instead.

Jim Horn has an excellent volume confronting and dismantling the many problems with KIPP charter schools, Work Hard, Be Hard: Journeys Through “No Excuses” Teaching.

Our work, along with many other scholars and educators committed to equity and anti-racism, has been ignored and often directly attacked, primarily because we dare to name racism as “racism.”

While I am not suggesting that Noble’s confession trumps our scholarship and work that has spanned multiple decades, I do want anyone concerned about education, education reform, and educational equity to step away from assumptions and see clearly how harmful “no excuses” ideologies and practices have been for students and their teachers.

“No excuses” ultimately fails for many reasons—being trapped in “blame the victim” approaches that normalize an unspoken white and affluent standard against which marginalized populations of students are judged, and harmed.

“No excuses” has been compelling because in the U.S. we are prone to seeing all problems as individual and not systemic. But it has also been compelling because education reform has always been tragically drawn to silver-bullet solutions and the shiny mirages seen as “miracles.”

Let me stress here that currently “no excuses” has quite a number of equally racist and flawed practices entrenched all across K-12 schooling: “grit,” growth mindset, word gap, Teach for America, grade retention, and the poverty workshops of Ruby Payne.

K-12 education in the U.S. is mostly a reflection of the communities schools serve; our schools tend to house and perpetuate our social inequities, but schools do very little to overcome racism, sexism, classism, etc.

Education reform has for nearly four decades refused to acknowledge systemic inequity, choosing instead to punish students, teachers, and schools. The many policies and fads of education reform over those decades have been themselves racist and classist, ultimately doing more harm than good to students, teachers, and education.

Karp includes an important realization by Jennifer Reid Davis, chief equity officer for Noble:

“It’s important to own it,” she said. “I think you have to say it, I think you have to be honest. Part of what it truly means to be anti-racist is to be honest about the circumstances in which you are in and or created.”
Top Chicago Charter School Network Admits A Racist Past

The list is quite long still of those who need “to own it” and allow confronting racism to be the first step to ending racism in our schools and our society.

Charter schools, Education, education reform, Education Week, Educational Research, Equity, Grit, growth mindset, inequity, literacy, Media, miracle schools, NCLB, No Excuses Reform, politics, Poverty, Social Context Reform, Standards, Teacher Evaluation, teacher preparation

Educational Accountability and the Science of Scapegoating the Powerless

June 12, 2019 plthomasedd 1 Comment

Several years ago when I submitted an Op-Ed to the largest newspaper in my home state of South Carolina, the editor rejected the historical timeline I was using for state standards and testing, specifically arguing that accountability had begun in the late 1990s and not in the early 1980s as I noted.

Here’s the interesting part.

I began teaching in South Carolina in the fall of 1984, the first year of major education reform under then-governor Richard Riley. That reform included a significant teacher pay raise, extended days of working for teachers, and the standards-testing regime that would become normal for all public education across the U.S.

In fact, SC’s accountability legislation dates back to the late 1970s (I sent her links to all this).

As a beginning teacher, the only public schooling I ever knew was teaching to standards and high-stakes tests by identifying standards on my lesson plans and implementing benchmark assessments throughout the academic year to document I was teaching what was mandated as a bulwark against low student tests scores. State testing, including punitive exit exams, pervaded everything about being an English teacher.

Yet, an editor, herself a career journalist, was quick to assume my expertise as a classroom practitioner and then college professor of education was mistaken.

This is a snapshot of how mainstream media interact with education as a topic and educators as professionals.

I am reminded of that experience over and over in fact as I read media coverage of education. Take for example this from Education Week, Want Teachers to Motivate Their Students? Teach Them How, which has the thesis:

Most teachers intrinsically understand the need to motivate their students, experts say, but teaching on intuition alone can lead to missteps in student engagement.

A study released in May by the Mindset Scholars Network, a collaborative of researchers who study student motivation, found most teacher education programs nationwide do not include explicit training for teachers on the science of how to motivate students.

Two key elements of this article stand out: The new scapegoat in proclaiming education a failure is teacher education and the go-to failure is always about a lack of “science” in teacher education.

This article on motivation is following a media template well worn recently about students in the U.S. can’t read because teachers are not taught the “science of reading,” you guessed it, in their teacher education programs.

As I detailed in a Twitter thread, scapegoating teacher education has many flaws, and my experience and expertise as a teacher educator for almost two decades, following almost two decades as a classroom teacher, inform my understanding of how finding scapegoats for educational failure during the accountability era is fool’s gold.

How has the accountability era gone in terms of where the accountability and locus of power lie, then?

In the 1980s and 1990s, the accountability mechanisms focused on holding students accountable (think exit exams) and schools accountable (student test scores often translated into school rankings or grades, designating schools as “failing,” for example).

Keep in mind that students had no power in that process, and that schools were merely agents of the standards being implemented, again outside the power dynamics of those mandates being determined.

With No Child Left Behind spawned by the false claims of the Texas Miracle, the accountability era was greatly accelerated, including a creeping sense that the process wasn’t improving education but it was punishing students (lower graduation rates due to exit exams) and demonizing schools (most high-poverty and high-racial minority schools were labeled as “failing”).

By the administration of Barak Obama, with education policy under another false narrative (the Chicago Miracle) and false ambassador with no background in education other than appointments (Arne Duncan), the scapegoating took a turn—the problem, went the new message, was “bad” teachers and the solution was not holding students or schools accountable for test scores but those teachers (the era of value-added methods [VAM]).

As some have noted and documented, teacher bashing increased and then prompted a backlash (see magazine covers from Time for a great series of artifacts on this); it seems that VAM proved to be a false metric for accountability and that maybe teachers were not the problem after all.

With the scapegoat role now vacant, the media have discovered a new candidate, teacher education.

Let’s here recognize that once again the power context is way off in who is determining the accountability and who is being held accountable. For the most part, teachers and teacher educators are relatively powerless agents who are mandated to implement standards and assessments that they do not create and often do not endorse as valid.

Now consider another really important reason accountability in education is deeply flawed: The constant misguided scapegoating of powerless agents in formal teaching and learning is a distraction from the actual causal sources for educational challenges.

Fun fact: Decades of research from educators and education scholars have detailed that out-of-school factors overwhelmingly determine measurable student outcomes, some estimates as high as 80+% and most scholars agreeing on 60%. Teacher quality’s impact on measurable student achievement has been identified repeatedly as only about 10-15%.

Yet, the entire accountability era since the early 1980s has focused on in-school reforms only (scapegoating along the way), while tossing up hands and embracing harsh ideologies such as “no excuses” practices that argue teachers fail students with the “soft bigotry of low expectations” and students fail because they lack “grit” or a growth mindset.

Many of us have doggedly argued for social context reform, addressing socio-economic reform first and then reforming education along equity (not accountability) lines next, or concurrently. Many of us have also demonstrated that “grit” and growth mindset have racist and classist groundings that are harmful.

For those positions, we have been demonized and marginalized for decades.

So imagine my surprise when, first, the tide shifted on teacher bashing (I have 34 posts on my blog discrediting VAM and dozens on misunderstanding teacher quality) and then these articles: Better Schools Won’t Fix America (The Atlantic), The Harsh Discipline of No-Excuses Charter Schools: Is It Worth the Promise? (Education Week), and Unchartered territory: 2020 Democrats back away from charter schools (MSN).

My blog posts, however, on social context reform and poverty (157), “no excuses” reform (70), and the mirage of charter schools (80) have either mostly been ignored or are harshly (even angrily) rejected. Like my interaction with the editor discussed in the opening, my experience and expertise as an educator and education scholar have held almost no weight with those in power pr the media.

The media and journalists as generalists seem deeply resistant to learning a lesson they create over and over.

Take for a current example Karin Wulf’s examination of Naomi Wolff and Cokie Roberts; Wulf herself is a historian:

It’s been a tough few weeks for amateur history. First, journalist Naomi Wolf discovered on live radio that she had misinterpreted key historical terms in her new book, “Outrage,” leading her to draw the wrong conclusions. A week later, journalist Cokie Roberts, too, got a quick smackdown when she claimed on NPR that she couldn’t find any incidence of abortion advertised in 19th century newspapers, a claim quickly disproved by historians.

Wolf and Roberts fell victim to a myth widely shared with the American public: that anyone can do history. Whether it’s diving into genealogy or digging thorough the vast troves of digital archives now online, the public has an easy way into the world of the past. And why would they imagine it takes any special training? After all, the best-selling history books are almost always written by non-historians, from conservative commentators like Bill O’Reilly to journalists like Wolf and Roberts.

Wulf’s confronting “that anyone can do history” immediately prompted in me my experience when I first moved from teaching high school English (and adjuncting at several colleges, including being a lead instructor in a university-based summer institute of the National Writing Project) to higher education. My university was debating a curriculum change that included dropping traditional composition courses (popularly known as English 101 and English 102) for first-year seminars.

One of those first-year seminars was to be writing-intensive, and the argument being posed was that any professor could teach writing.

This change passed, and the English department and professors were relieved of sole responsibility for teaching writing.

Over the next eight years or so, the university learned a really disturbing lesson (one I could have shared in the beginning): “Any professor can teach writing” is false.

As Wulf argues about history, with writing and education, experience and expertise matter.

So here I sit again, writing over and over that the media are getting reading wrong, that scapegoating teacher education is missing the real problem.

How many years will it take until I see articles “discovering” these facts as if no one with experience and expertise ever raised the issue?

Charter schools, Education, education reform, miracle schools

New Orleans RSD Mirage, Not Miracle: A Reader

July 23, 2018 plthomasedd 1 Comment

The political/bureaucratic education reform machine that began with the bogus A Nation at Risk report under Ronald Reagan has been aided and abetted for almost 40 years now by the feckless mainstream media (MSM).

That education reform agenda has been a recurring pattern of overstated and unmerited polices grounded in ideology, but education reformers are powerful advocates, bolstering their reforms with more public relations than expertise; the MSM repeatedly falls for the hucksterism hook, line, and sinker.

In the ugly and harmful lineage of education reform “miracles”—Texas, Chicago, Washington DC, Tennessee, etc.—comes the new darling of education reform mirages, New Orleans:

Opinion | Following New Orleans’s lead on charter-school education, Emily Langhorne
How New Orleans Is Helping Its Students Succeed, David Leonhardt

Not surprising, but always disappointing, is that education-related media remain deeply misleading, and thus, complicit in an education reform movement more dedicated to dismantling than reforming universal public education in the name of equity and democracy.

Since I have been refuting these “miracle” claims for many years, I offer here a reader to discredit the two claims above, and the lingering political, public, and media fascination with charter schools and take-over approaches to education reform:

1/Brief, belated thread on the research claims about charters in this @DLeonhardt piece https://t.co/ejQslJ7yHl pic.twitter.com/3idc4GhEXr

— Matt Barnum (@matt_barnum) July 28, 2018

Charter schools, Education, education reform, inequity, Invisible Hand, Martin Luther King Jr., miracle schools, Poverty, race, racism, School choice, Segregation, sexism, social justice

Innovative Deception: The Charter Scam Chronicles Continue

August 1, 2017 plthomasedd

The school choice movement has its roots in mid-twentieth century, and was bolstered by some ugly truths about racism in the U.S. during the Civil Rights movement and public school integration.

While school choice advocacy has maintained some foundational catch phrases such as “innovation” and relied on appeals to uncritical faith in market forces over “the damned government,” school choice has also maintained two key patterns: (1) promises associated with school choice advocacy have mostly failed, and thus, (2) “choice” has morphed repeatedly into new versions to stay ahead of all the bad news about outcomes falling short of those promises.

The last decade, however, has revealed a school choice gold mine in the charter school movement that appears to blend the public’s support for public schools with the allure of parental choice.

However, on balance, charter school advocacy has proven to be mostly rhetoric and absent evidence in ways similar to the larger school choice movement.

Public and charter schools, for example, are currently plagued with rising segregation, and both embrace policies that can fairly be labeled racist and classist—leading the NAACP to maintain a strongly skeptical position about the credibility of charter schools.

And when charter schools appear to succeed where public schools do not, a careful analysis nearly always reveals that what is too good to be true is, in fact, not true.

School choice innovation, including charter school innovation, actually has little to do with education and more to do with keeping ahead of the evidence in order to maintain political and public support for finding yourself in a hole and continuing to dig.

For a glimpse into how the charter movement seeks mostly to keep itself afloat, often at the expense of children and their families, consider Paul Bowers’s Erskine College’s new role as charter school gatekeeper could change landscape of public education.

Bowers hits a key point in the following:

Across the U.S., the National Association of Charter School Authorizers has been sounding the alarm about a trend it calls “authorizer shopping,” which it calls “a growing threat to overall charter school quality.”

“Authorizer shopping happens when a charter school chooses an initial authorizer or changes authorizers specifically to avoid accountability,” the group said in a 2016 report. “A low-performing school may shop for a new authorizer to avoid closure, or reopen under a new authorizer after closure.”

Also important to highlight is, as Bowers notes, how this new phase of charter expansion linked to less or no accountability is appealing to the least effective forms of charter schools:

Two of the first schools to express an interest in the new public charter school sponsor, the Charter Institute at Erskine College, are the S.C. Virtual Charter School and Cyber Academy of South Carolina. The two schools enrolled more than 4,000 students combined in kindergarten through 12th grade last school year.

The hard truths about educating children in a free society in order to create a more perfect union, to reach and sustain an equitable democracy, are that public education has mostly failed the children who need it most because the U.S. is plagued by political cowardice and that schemes labeled “education reform” are mostly even worse alternatives (including school choice and charter schools) to the mismanaged public system.

Near the end of his life, Martin Luther King Jr. called for addressing poverty directly and thus eradicate related social inequities and empower public institutions:

In addition to the absence of coordination and sufficiency, the programs of the past all have another common failing — they are indirect. Each seeks to solve poverty by first solving something else.

I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective — the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income. …

We are likely to find that the problems of housing and education, instead of preceding the elimination of poverty, will themselves be affected if poverty is first abolished. The poor transformed into purchasers will do a great deal on their own to alter housing decay. Negroes, who have a double disability, will have a greater effect on discrimination when they have the additional weapon of cash to use in their struggle.

King’s plea has been repeatedly justified since the claims that education is the great equalizer never materializes. For example, in Equal Pay Day for African-American Women, By the Numbers Emily Crockett confronts:

African-American women only earn 64 cents to every dollar earned by non-Hispanic white men, according to the NWLC analysis; the figure for women overall is 77 cents. That’s based on the average earnings of female and male full-time, year-round workers taken from Census data.

The pay gap for Black women varies based on age and industry. Older Black women have it the hardest—the pay gap is only 82 cents on the dollar for 15-year-old to 24-year-old Black women compared to white men, but the gap widens to 67 cents and 59 cents, respectively, for Black women ages 25-to-44 and 45-to-64.

As for industries, Black women working as physicians and surgeons—a high-wage and male-dominated occupation—make only 52 cents for every dollar paid to their white male counterparts. Black women fared slightly better in lower-paid occupations, making 86 cents on the dollar in male-dominated, mid-wage construction industries and 85 cents on the dollar working as low-wage, mostly female personal care aides. …

The fact that Black women are overrepresented in low-wage jobs doesn’t help, the analysis said. Black women make up 14 percent of low-wage workers and 6 percent of the overall workforce.

Education levels don’t make much of an impact on the high wage gap between Black women and non-Hispanic white men. While more education corresponds with higher wages for both Black women and white men, Black women still make between 61 and 66 cents on the dollar compared to their counterparts at every education level [emphasis added]. African-American women have to have at least a Bachelor’s degree to make as much as white men who didn’t finish college.

This equity gap along race and gender lines is a lingering and powerful fact in the U.S.

Education reform, then, especially under the guise of school choice/charter schools, is once again failing to address directly the root causes of why we believe public education needs reform in the first place.

The only real innovation among the charter school advocates is how many ways they can avoid the hard truths about reforming schools and the impotence of education to overcome social inequity and injustice.

Education, education reform, Florida Miracle, grade retention, miracle schools

Think Tank Advocacy Reports Not Credible for Education Policy: SC Edition

April 25, 2017 plthomasedd Leave a comment

The Palmetto Promise Institute‘s report authored by Adam Crain, Money doesn’t translate into student results, is a follow-up to their 2013 report also comparing South Carolina education to Florida education reform.

Although this report offers several charts detailing an analysis of SC and FL National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests data (some of which is aggregated by race, disabilities, and poverty, but focusing on 4th grade reading), the report proves to be overly simplistic and an incomplete picture of student achievement in both states—with the ham-fisted data analysis serving as a thin veneer for advocacy unsupported by valid research and a more nuanced analysis of data.

In short, this report proves to be significantly inadequate evidence to support the ideologically-driven recommendations offered at the end—recommendations this conservative think tank would make regardless of the evidence (mostly a mishmash of school choice policy). There simply is no credible link between the shallow analysis of SC/FL NAEP scores and the call for policy as solutions to the manufactured problems.

Let me outline here both the flaws of the data analysis and then the folly of the recommendations.

The foundational flaw of both reports is suggesting some sort of value in comparing SC to FL and the persistent but discredited claim that FL has successful education reform. In fact, the so-called Florida “miracle” has been strongly refuted, notably its grade-retention policy based on high-stakes test scores.

By comparison, SC is slightly more impoverished than FL, and SC (27%) has a higher percentage than FL (16%) of blacks (both metrics used in the report analysis). However, this report from PPI makes no effort to show how their raw comparisons are actually apples-to-apples, or valid.

Another analysis of NAEP data that adjusts for factors impacting test scores reveals a much more nuanced and important picture, one that exposes a huge flaw with the FL model of reform [1] and depending on test data.

While adjusted trend data on NAEP continues to show 4th grade FL reading scores better than SC scores, by 8th grade (see Table 6B1, 2013 data) SC (269.5) and FL (272.3) have nearly identical adjusted scores.

Here is a key point about FL’s retention policy: Retaining students can inflate short-term test data, but those gains erode over time. Further, grade retention [2] maintains a strong correlation with students dropping out of school and an inverse correlation with students receiving a diploma (see Jasper, 2016 [3]).

Ultimately, the data analysis and charts in this report are overly simplistic on purpose because PPI has an agenda: argue against increased school funding and promote school choice.

The report uses bold face, lazy math, and insufficient statistical methods to dramatize a baseless claim: “Simple funding comparisons indicate quite the opposite. Over the twelve year period between 1999 and 2011, South Carolina spent a total of $6,920 more per student, or an average of $692 per year.”

Without proper statistical analysis, using controls and making causal claims, this raw data approach, like the NAEP analysis, means almost nothing.

The body of educational research, in fact, shows that funding does matter (see Baker, 2016) [4].

Both, then, the NAEP analysis and the related argument that SC school funding is somehow excessive/wasteful are statistically inadequate and useless for making the recommendations at the end of the report.

Those recommendations fall into two broad categories: accountability and school choice.

SC and FL jumped on the accountability bandwagon early, about three decades ago, and remain completely unsatisfied with their educational outcomes, despite huge amounts of tax dollars and immeasurable time spent on ever-new standards and ever-new high-stakes tests.

Calling for accountability ignores the research base that shows accountability based on standards and testing has failed, will continue to fail:

There is, for example, no evidence that states within the U.S. score higher or lower on the NAEP based on the rigor of their state standards. Similarly, international test data show no pronounced tests core advantage on the basis of the presence or absence of national standards. Further, the wave of high-stakes testing associated with No Child Left Behind (NCLB) has resulted in the “dumbing down” and narrowing of the curriculum….

As the absence or presence of rigorous or national standards says nothing about equity, educational quality, or the provision of adequate educational services, there is no reason to expect CCSS or any other standards initiative to be an effective educational reform by itself. (Mathis, 2012)

The evidence on school choice also contradicts the report because choice fails to increase student achievement, but it is strongly associated with increasing segregation and inequity (see here and here).

Let’s summarize the major points of the report:

The report claims SC lags FL in academic achievement and education reform while spending more per pupil. However, the analysis offered here is an incomplete picture and statistically flawed. None of the claims made in the report are proven, and more nuanced and longitudinal analyses of NAEP greatly erode the premise of PPI’s report (grounded also in the debunked Florida “miracle” claim).
The report’s major recommendations about school funding, accountability, and school choice are all strongly contradicted by the research base, which the report fails to acknowledge.

Ultimately, as a colleague responded when I shared this report, PPI has published “a five page Op-Ed with bar graphs,” and I would add, not a very good one at that.

SC should in no way be influenced by this report when making education policy.

However, SC should heed a kernel the report’s conclusion: “The disparity between the stewardship of resources in Florida and our struggling education system in South Carolina is apparent.”

As I have detailed, while most educational rankings and comparisons prove to be hokum, what evidence from our schools and reform policies shows is that SC ranks first in political negligence.

Ironically, this report is calling for more negligence in the pursuit of market ideology.

[1] See evidence discrediting Florida “miracle” and FL’s reading policy; how SC could benefit from looking at Oklahoma, not FL; and why FL reform is harmful for students and literacy.

[2] See the National Council of Teachers of English’s Resolution on Mandatory Grade Retention and High-Stakes Testing:

Grade retention, the practice of holding students back to repeat a grade, does more harm than good:

retaining students who have not met proficiency levels with the intent of repeating instruction is punitive, socially inappropriate, and educationally ineffective;

basing retention on high-stakes tests will disproportionately and negatively impact children of color, impoverished children, English Language Learners, and special needs students; and

retaining students is strongly correlated with behavior problems and increased drop-out rates.

[3] Jasper’s abstract captures the ultimate failure of FL’s reform:

In 2003-2004 approximately 23,000 third graders were retained in Florida under the third grade retention mandate outlined in the A+ Plan. Researchers in previous studies found students who were retained faced difficulty in catching up to their peers, achieving academically, and obtaining a high school diploma (Anderson, Jimerson, & Whipple, 2005; Andrew, 2014; Fine & Davis, 2003; Jimerson, 1999; Moser, West & Hughes, 2012; Nagaoka, 2005; and Ou & Reynolds, 2010). In this study I examined educational outcomes of students retained in a large southwest Florida school district under the A+ Plan in 2003-2004. I used a match control group, consisting of similarly nonretained students, who scored at level one on the Grade 3 Reading FCAT. I then compared the control group to the retained group. I also compared achievement levels on the Grade 10 Reading FCAT of the retained and non-retained group. I evaluated longitudinal data, for both the retained and non-retained students, and found 93% of the retained students continued to score below proficiency (below a level 3) seven years after retention on the Grade 10 Reading FCAT as compared with the 85.8% of the non-retained students. I also compared standard diploma acquisition of the retained and non-retained group. The non-retained group was 14.7% more likely to obtain a standard high school diploma than the retained group. Finally, I used data from previous studies to extrapolate economic outcomes.

[4] Baker’s analysis has key points detailed in the Executive Summary (p. i):

baker funding 2016.png

Charleston Post and Courier, Education, education reform, Educational Research, miracle schools, race, racism

UPDATED: Beware the “Miracle” School Claim: “Why not tell the whole story?”

April 17, 2017 plthomasedd 2 Comments

UPDATE 19 February 2019

With Seanna Adcox’s Bill seeks to expand successes of Charleston’s Meeting Street Schools (Post and Courier) and the release of SC state report cards, it is time to completely unmask how Meeting Street (and other charter schemes) float on claims absent evidence.

Just consider a few report card comparisons among elementary schools with similar poverty indexes (PI) in Charleston:

Mt. Zion: PI 87.32 and report card of Average 42
Angel Oak: PI 76.56 and report card of Average 43
Meeting Street: PI 88.7 and report card of Average 45
Minni Hughes: PI 91.53 and report card of Average 45
A.C. Corcoran: PI 83.72 and report card of Average 48
St. James-Santee: PI 89.53 and report card of Average 52
Edith L. Frierson: PI 90.24 and report card of Good 59

If Meeting Street is a miracle school (it isn’t) then so are these schools, but the cold hard truth is charter schools are mostly advocacy absent evidence.

The media and politicians must stop promoting the propaganda at the expense of students and the public.

UPDATE 19 April 2017

Since my post below, Benjamin Navarro, founder of Meeting Street Schools, submitted a Lady Macbeth-esque protest about the article linked below.

Navarro, I believe unintentionally, poses a very important question while challenging how the Post and Courier reported the excessive suspensions at Meeting Street Elementary @Brentwood: “Why not tell the whole story?”

While Navarro bristles at the suspension data, he is quick to offer a partial story about data he prefers, test scores:

And most important of all [emphasis added], why not talk about the enormous impact that Brentwood’s higher test scores have on the likely outcomes for these children? Why not report the fact that our students scored in the 71st percentile in reading and 73rd percentile in math (almost eliminating the bottom quartile), while other North Charleston Title One schools scored on average in the 42nd and 39th percentile respectively in 2016?

So let’s have a shot at the whole story because that is the problem with Meeting Street Elementary @Brentwood, with all so-called alternative approaches to public schools such as charter schools.

Currently, South Carolina is not holding schools accountable by the usual school report card until fall 2018. But the media, in fact, has been reporting glowing depictions of Brentwood, depending almost entirely on the school’s founder and leaders who are incentivized to paint the best picture possible of their experiment while concurrently (and dishonestly) falsely trashing Charleston public schools (see Navarro’s letter).

Navarro’s reference to test scores looks impressive; yet, he fails to provide the whole story about that data—and as I detail below, virtually every time the whole story comes out about miracle schools, that whole story proves there are no miracles.

Here, then, is what we need to know:

What test data are being cited? It is likely he is citing practice test data (such as MAP and ACT testing). We must confront if we truly believe that intensive test-prep and test scores are what any child deserves from formal schooling, if these claimed higher scores are from test prep, and why we allow this reduced form of education for poor and black/brown students while affluent and white students receive advanced courses, gifted programs, and all sorts of enrichment.
What is the attrition rate for Brentwood—the number of students originally enrolled compared to the number of students tested? Are suspension/expulsions and counseling out creating skewed test score data?
What percentage of English language learners (ELLs) and students with special needs are being tested, and then, are data from Brentwood being compared to other schools with similar demographics (and not just all Title One schools)?
Has Brentwood controlled for the extended school day/year to account for these claimed higher test scores, or are we being asked to compare student data under different conditions of learning? More teaching and learning time should produce higher scores; thus, Brentwood may have higher scores while not being able to claim that anything other than more time created that difference.
If, as advocates and Navarro claim, some unique practices by Meeting Street are causing greater student achievement, how can they prove those practices are causal and then that they are scalable? For example, what is the per-pupil expenditure, what are class sizes and student/teacher ratios, and what can Brentwood do that traditional public schools cannot (such as refuse to serve ELLs or special needs students)?
What race and social class biases are driving our willingness to create schools for high poverty and black/brown students that are committed to “no excuses” and zero tolerance discipline practices?

Advocates for Brentwood, including Navarro, are trafficking in partial stories by failing to be transparent about their claims of miracles while refusing to accept data that tarnishes those claims.

Until all of the questions above are answered by making that data transparent to independent analysis (not by those invested in the success of Brentwood), we are forced to suffer under partial stories that serve no one well.

Original Post: Beware the “Miracle” School Claim

Published on Easter Sunday 2017 in the Post and Courier, Paul Bowers offered what I suspect will be a slow and painful series of unfortunate evidence that will discredit claims of educational miracles at Meeting Street Elementary @Brentwood; in this case, the public/private partnership elementary school has a unique and extreme suspension problem:

Meeting St suspensions copy

As a public/private venture, as a school choice and reform mechanism, Meeting Street Elementary @Brentwood is trapped in the need to advocate, sell its process. And since South Carolina has not held this experiment to the traditional school report card transparency, we are left only with the claims of school leaders.

However, we have well over a decade of “miracle” school bluster, all of which has been dismantled—suggesting that, I am sorry to say during this holiday season, there are no miracles.

While the school report card based mostly on high-stakes testing data is a significant failure of education reform, South Carolina’s report card system has included a key way to know if schools are in fact outperforming other schools, using the “Schools with Students Like Ours” metric (which I have detailed multiple times exposes that charter schools are no different, and possibly less effective, than traditional public schools in our state):

However, analyses from two years of report cards for charter schools in SC reveal the clear picture that more investment is not justified (see below for complete analysis of both years’ comparisons):

Using 2011 SC state repost cards and the metric “Schools with Students Like Ours,” charter schools performed as follows: 3/53 ABOVE Typical, 17/53 Typical, and 33/53 BELOW Typical.

Using 2013 SC state repost cards and the metric “Schools with Students Like Ours,” charter schools performed as follows: 2/52 ABOVE Typical, 20/52 Typical, 22/52 BELOW Typical.

And thus, this disturbing suspension data about an elementary school are just the beginning of what I can predict will happen as the evidence grows against the claims of this school somehow is accomplishing what other schools have not, cannot accomplish.

First, the evidence is very clear that “high-flying schools” are extreme outliers, constituting about 1.1% of high-poverty schools. This means two things: (1) if Meeting Street does achieve some sort of high-flying status, it will be in extremely rare company, and thus, (2) outliers prove virtually nothing about what most schools can and should accomplish (outliers often include key elements that cannot be scaled to all schools).

Next, the huge caution about any claims of miracle success on test scores at Meeting Street must be couched in their extended day and academic year. This technique has driven the false but powerful propaganda from KIPP charter schools that conveniently leave out that when you identify learning as months or years of growth, and you extend the learning time, the raw data growth is actually the same growth rate as other schools.

Comparing students with more teaching and learning time to other students with less is just one way advocates of charters and miracle schools mislead the public.

Remaining questions—some linked to suspension and expulsion patterns—include how any school’s test scores are impacted by student attrition (counseling out, expulsion, etc.), the percentage of special needs and English language learners served (when compared to traditional public schools), and the impact of self-selection (which can skew even claims that a school is serving a high-poverty population of students).

Meeting Street Elementary @Brentwood will prove, once again, to be evidence of the inherent problems with education form, and no miracle at all.

Our most vulnerable students—impoverished, black and brown students, English language learners, and special needs students—are disproportionately the targets of educational reform/experiments grounded in test-mania and harsh discipline policies and outcomes (see here, here, and here).

To be blunt, good intentions of administrators and teachers in our traditional public schools have not been enough, and now, those same good intentions among reformers cannot be justification for false claims and failed policies and practices.

Practices and fads such as exit exams, “no excuses” mantras, “grit” and growth mindset, zero-tolerance discipline, and the larger accountability movement churning through standards and high-stakes testing—these have all increased the existing problems with inequity in our schools and society, and have miserably failed the students who need nurturing and effective schooling the most.

Miracle school claims are that human-sized Easter bunny; but that is just some stranger in a suit pretending to be a bunny, and it isn’t really appealing so much as something we should be very leery of approaching, especially with children.

bunny3

AlterNet, Charleston Post and Courier, Charter schools, Education, education reform, Educational Research, inequity, miracle schools, No Excuses Reform, opportunity gap, politics, Poverty, privilege, race, racism, School choice, school funding, Segregation, Standards, Teach for America, Teaching, Testing, Truthout

Education Reform in the Absence of Political Courage: Charleston (SC) Edition

February 15, 2017 plthomasedd 5 Comments

Words matter, and thus, I must apologize by opening here with a mundane but essential clarification of terms.

As I have written over and over, everything involving humans is necessarily political, even and especially teaching and learning. Therefore, no teacher at any level can truly be apolitical, objective. Taking a neutral or objective pose is a political choice, and an endorsement of the status quo.

Key to that claim is recognizing the difference between political and partisan. Partisan politics involves allegiance to and advocacy for organized political parties, notably Republicans and Democrats.

A partisan feels compelled to place party loyalty above ideology or ethics. To be political can be and should be a moral imperative.

We can avoid being partisan, even as that is political. And when many people call for education and educators to avoid being political, what they really are seeking is that education and educators not be partisan—a position that is achievable and one I endorse.

This distinction matters in public education and public education reform because all public institutions in the U.S. are by their tax-supported status at the mercy of partisan politics.

From around 1980, in fact, politicians at the local, state, and national levels have discovered that public education is a powerful and effective political football. The standard politician’s refrain is “Schools are horrible, and I can make them better!”

The current rise of the inexpert ruling class at the presidential level has been foreshadowed for more than three decades by the partisan politics around education reform—politicians and political appointees with no experience or expertise in education imposing pet reform initiatives onto public schools because these policies appeal to an equally mis-informed public.

Even with large failed crucibles such as New Orleans post-Katrina, political leaders remain committed to finding themselves in a hole and continuing to dig.

In my home state of South Carolina, infamous for our Corridor of Shame, Charleston, on the east coast and part of that corridor, continues to represent the savage inequalities that result from a combination of an inexpert ruling class and an absence of political courage.

Charleston schools reflect the most stark facts about and problems with K-12 education across the U.S.: private and gate-keeping public schools (such as academies, magnet schools, and some charter schools) that provide outstanding opportunities for some students in contrast to grossly ignored high-poverty, majority-minority public schools that mis-serve “other people’s children.”

As a result of these inequities and dramatically different student outcomes exposed by the accountability era obsession with test scores, Charleston has played the education reform game, committing to provably failed policies over and over: school choice, school closures and takeovers, school turnaround scams, overstating charter schools as “miracles,” and investing in Teach For America.

Why do all these policies fail and what ultimately is wrong with inexpert leadership? The absence of political courage to address directly the blunt causes of inequitable student outcomes in both the lives and education of students.

Currently in Charleston, the closing of Lincoln High and transferring those students to Wando High (see here and here) highlight that the gap between commitments to failed edureform and political courage to do something different persists.

The debates and controversy over how former Lincoln students are now performing at Wando offer some important lessons, such as the following:

The media and the public should be aware of partisan political code. A garbled reach for “the soft bigotry of low expectations” has been used to explain why Lincoln students’ grades have dropped while at Wando. The “soft bigotry” mantra is a conservative slur triggering the public’s belief in “bleeding heart liberals,” who coddle minorities. But the more damning part of the code is that it focuses blame on the administration and teachers in high-poverty, majority-minority schools and thus away from political leadership.
And thus, the public needs to distinguish between blaming educators at Lincoln for low expectations (again, garbled as “low standards”) and the expected consequences of high-poverty, majority-minority schools suffering with high teacher turnover, annual under-staffing, and persistent teacher workforces that are new and/or un-/under-certified. Additionally, the accountability era has unrealistic demands of these schools when compared to low-poverty, low-minority schools that have much greater percentages of experienced and certified teachers.
The apparent drop in student grades and test scores from Lincoln to Wando is extremely important data that deserve close scrutiny, but so far, that scrutiny has been reduced to partisan politics and deflecting blame. Dozens of reasons could explain the grade differences, including the transfer as well as the staffing differences between the two schools (neither of which is the simplistic “soft bigotry” argument used primarily to justify closing a community school).

The partisan political approaches to schools and education reform are tarnished by both willful ignorance and a confrontational blame game.

The willful ignorance of politicians and the public refuses to acknowledge huge social inequity driven by racism and white privilege; the blame game seeks ways to blame the victims of those inequities instead of confronting systemic forces.

What should political leaders be doing and what should the public be demanding that is different from the patterns identified above, than the policies already proven as failures?

Recognize that in-school only reform creates two serious problems: (1) unrealistic demands with high-stakes consequences produce unethical behavior among otherwise good people (see the Atlanta cheating scandal), and (2) since out-of-school factors overwhelmingly influence measurable student achievement, even the right in-school only reform is unlikely to result in measurable improvement.
Interrogate the proclaimed cause of low student achievement—”low expectations”—and instead seek to understand the complex reasons behind that low achievement by poor and black/brown students based on available evidence that includes carefully interviewing the administrators, teachers, and students involved.
Advocate for public policy that addresses serious inequity in the lives of children—policy impacting access to health care, a stable workforce, access to safe and stable housing, and high-quality food security.
Refuse to ignore needed in-school reform, but reject accountability-based reform for equity-based reform focusing on equitable teacher assignment for all students, articulated school funding that increases funding for schools serving struggling communities, guaranteeing the same high-quality facilities and materials for all children regardless of socioeconomic status of the communities served, and eliminating gate-keeping policies that track high-needs students into test-prep while advantaged students gain access to challenging courses such as Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate.

Ultimately, the absence of political courage in SC and across the U.S. is where the real blame lies for inequitable student achievement along race and class lines.

Many students, the evidence shows, are doubly and triply disadvantaged by the consequences of their lives and their schools.

Trite and misleading political rhetoric, along with “soft bigotry of low expectations,” includes soaring claims that a child’s ZIP code is not destiny.

Well, in fact, ZIP code is destiny in SC and the U.S.; it shouldn’t be, but that fact will remain as long as political leadership chooses to ignore the expertise within the field of education and continues to lead without political courage.

Political courage requires direct action, even when it isn’t popular, and refuses to deflect blame, refuses to wait for what market forces might accomplish by taking the right action now.

Political courage, as James Baldwin expressed, embraces that “[t]he challenge is in the moment, the time is always now.”

For More on Political Courage

Support Betsy Devos Shoot Yourself In The Foot, Andre Perry

Black Activists Don’t Want White Allies’ Conditional Solidarity!, Stacey Patton

Education, IAP, miracle schools

NEW from IAP: Learning from the Federal Market‐Based Reforms: Lessons for ESSA

July 7, 2016 plthomasedd 1 Comment

Learning from the Federal Market‐Based Reforms: Lessons for ESSA

Edited by:
William J. Mathis, University of Colorado, Boulder
Tina M. Trujillo, University of California, Berkeley

A volume in the series: The National Education Policy Center Series. Editor(s): Kevin G. Welner, University of Colorado – Boulder. Alex Molnar, Arizona State University.

Published 2016

Over the past twenty years, educational policy has been characterized by top‐down, market‐focused policies combined with a push toward privatization and school choice. The new Every Student Succeeds Act continues along this path, though with decision‐making authority now shifted toward the states. These market‐based reforms have often been touted as the most promising response to the challenges of poverty and educational disenfranchisement. But has this approach been successful? Has learning improved? Have historically low‐scoring schools “turned around” or have the reforms had little effect? Have these narrow conceptions of schooling harmed the civic and social purposes of education in a democracy?

This book presents the evidence. Drawing on the work of the nation’s most prominent researchers, the book explores the major elements of these reforms, as well as the social, political, and educational contexts in which they take place. It examines the evidence supporting the most common school improvement strategies: school choice; reconstitutions, or massive personnel changes; and school closures. From there, it presents the research findings cutting across these strategies by addressing the evidence on test score trends, teacher evaluation, “miracle” schools, the Common Core State Standards, school choice, the newly emerging school improvement industry, and re‐segregation, among others.

The weight of the evidence indisputably shows little success and no promise for these reforms. Thus, the authors counsel strongly against continuing these failed policies. The book concludes with a review of more promising avenues for educational reform, including the necessity of broader societal investments for combatting poverty and adverse social conditions. While schools cannot single‐handedly overcome societal inequalities, important work can take place within the public school system, with evidence‐based interventions such as early childhood education, detracking, adequate funding and full‐service community schools—all intended to renew our nation’s commitment to democracy and equal educational opportunity.

CONTENTS
Foreword, Jeannie Oakes. SECTION I: INTRODUCTION: THE FOUNDATIONS OF MARKET BASED REFORM, Purposes of Education: The Language of Schooling, Mike Rose. The Political Context, Janelle Scott. Historical Evolution of Test‐Based Reforms, Harvey Kantor and Robert Lowe. Predictable Failure of Test‐Based Accountability, Heinrich Mintrop and Gail Sunderman.SECTION II: TEST‐BASED SANCTIONS: WHAT THE EVIDENCE SAYS, Transformation & Reconstitution, Betty Malen and Jennifer King Rice.Turnarounds, Tina Trujillo and Michelle Valladares. Restart/Conversion, Gary Miron and Jessica Urschel. Closures, Ben Kirshner, Erica Van Steenis, Kristen Pozzoboni, and Matthew Gaertner. SECTION III: FALSE PROMISES, Miracle School Myth, P. L. Thomas. Has Test‐Based Accountability Worked? Committee on Incentives and Test‐Based Accountability in Public Education(Michael Hout & Stuart Elliott, Eds.). The Effectiveness of Test‐Based Reforms. Kevin Welner and William Mathis. Value Added Models: Teacher, Principal and School Evaluations, American Statistical Association. The Problems with the Common Core, Stan Karp. Reform and Re‐Segregation,Gary Orfield. English Language Learners. Angela Valenzuela and Brendan Maxcy. Racial Disproportionality: Discipline, Anne Gregory, Russell Skiba, and Pedro Noguera. School Choice, Christopher Lubienski and Sarah Theule Lubienski. The Privatization Industry, Patricia Burch and Jahni Smith. Virtual Education, Michael Barbour. SECTION IV: EFFECTIVE REFORMS, Addressing Poverty, David Berliner. Racial Segregation & Achievement, Richard Rothstein. Adequate Funding, Michael Rebell. Early Childhood Education,Steven Barnett. De‐Tracking, Kevin Welner and Carol Corbett Burris. Class Size, Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach. School–Community Partnerships, Linda Valli, Amanda Stefanski, and Reuben Jacobson. Community Organizing for Grassroots Support, Mark Warren. Teacher Education, Audrey Amrein‐Beardsley, Joshua Barnett, and Tirupalavanam Ganesh. SECTION V: CONCLUSION.

Miracle School Myth

P.L. Thomas, Furman University

Abstract

The accountability era of education reform began under President Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s, spurred by the Nation at Risk report. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, education reform driven by accountability, standards, and high-stakes testing remained a state-based process, but during George W. Bush’s time as governor of Texas, the seeds of national accountability were sown, labeled the Texas “miracle” and providing the framework for No Child Left Behind. “Miracle” school narratives—including the Harlem “miracle,” the Chicago “miracle,” and other claims of “miracle” reform/policies (DC public schools, charter schools) and reformers (Michelle Rhee, Geoffrey Canada)—have followed a predictable pattern: claims of “miracles,” use of those claimed “miracles” to advance particular state and national education policy, media endorsing the “miracle” claims, a nearly universal refuting of credibility of those “miracles,” and political, media, and public failure to recognize the debunking.

dr. p.l. (paul) thomas