School Vouchers Pay For Religion At Expense Of Math

The 'Christian' Dogma Pushed by Religious Schools That Are Supported by Your Tax Dollars

If you live in a state with a voucher or corporate tax credit program funding "school choice," your state's tax dollars are funding the teaching of religious supremacism.

Are your state’s tax dollars funding the teaching of religious supremacism and bigotry? What about creationism? The answer is undoubtedly yes, if you live in a state with a voucher or corporate tax credit program funding “school choice."

Religious schools across the nation are receiving public funds through voucher and corporate tax credit programs. Many hundreds, if not thousands, of these schools use Protestant fundamentalist textbooks that teach not only creationism, but also a religious supremacist worldview. They offer a shocking spin on politics, history and human rights.

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by Rachel Tabachnick via Alternet

Charters And Vouchers Are An Excuse Not To Fix Real Issues

Paul Karrer: Schools lose with Race to the Top

A letter to my president, the one I voted for.

Your Honorable President Obama:

I mean this with all respect. I'm on my knees here and there's a knife in my back and the prints on it kinda match yours.

You're righting the wrong guys with your Race to the Top program, which provides grant money that "might" go to schools if they comply with unproven, absurd draconian "reforms" such as shuffling teachers around.

You're hitting the good guys with friendly fire.

I teach in a barrio in California. It's a public school. I have 32 kids in my class. I love them to tears. They're fifth-graders. That means they're 10 years old, mostly. Six of them are 11 because they were retained. Five more are in special education and two more should have been.

I stopped using the word parents when I talk with or about my kids because so many of them don't have them.

Amanda's mom died in October. She lives with her 30-year-old brother (a thousand blessings on him). Seven kids live with their grandmothers, six with their dads. A few rotate between parents.

Fifty percent of my 10-year-olds have visited relatives in jail or prison.

Do you and Arnie Duncan understand the significance of that? I'm afraid not. It isn't bad teaching that has taken things to the current stage. It's poverty. We don't teach in failing schools. We teach in failing communities.

It's called the ZIP code quandary. If the kids live in a wealthy ZIP code, they have high test scores. If they live in a ZIP where the people are poor, guess how they do.

We also have massive teacher turnover at my school. Now, we have no money. We haven't had an art teacher or music program in 10 years. We have a nurse twice a week.

And due to No Child Left Behind, we are punished most brutally. Did you know that 100 percent of our students have to be on grade level? That's like saying you have to get along with 100 percent of your cabinet (and unlike my kids, your cabinet gets to quit).

You lived overseas, so you know what conditions are like in the rest of the world. President Obama, I swear that conditions in my school are Third World. We had a test when I taught in the Peace Corps. We had to describe a glass filled to the middle. We were supposed to say it was half full. Too many of my kids don't even have the glass.

And then, of course, there are the gangs. They are eating my kids, their parents and the neighborhood.

One of my former students stuffed an AK47 down his pants at a local bank and was shot dead. Another one of my favorites has been incarcerated since he was 13. He'll be 27 next month. I've been writing to him for 10 years and visiting him in Level 4 maximum security—he's in chains behind bullet-proof glass—in Salinas Valley State Prison.

Do you get that it's tough here? Charter schools and voucher schools aren't the solution. They are an excuse not to fix the real issues. You promised us so much and now you want to give us merit pay based on how the kids do, no matter their circumstances?

You're making it real hard to vote with enthusiasm.

Can you pull the knife out now? It really hurts.

Paul Karrer, who teaches at Castroville Elementary School, writes about education for this page.

Apparently Test Scores No Longer Matter. WTF?

From Jim Horn:

...Which is what happened on May 5, as the New York Times published an op-ed by racialist charter advocate and co-author of The Bell Curve, Charles Murray, who now declares that the real reason that parents should advocate for charters and vouchers should have nothing to do with test scores anymore, test scores that are made irrelevant by the facts based on factors beyond the school—and, no, he’s not talking about poverty:

Cognitive ability, personality and motivation come mostly from home. What happens in the classroom can have some effect, but smart and motivated children will tend to learn to read and do math even with poor instruction, while not-so-smart or unmotivated children will often have trouble with those subjects despite excellent instruction. If test scores in reading and math are the measure, a good school just doesn’t have that much room to prove it is better than a lesser school.

So, then, if the good voucher schools of Milwaukee or the good charter schools of the U.S. are made bad by “cognitive ability, personality, and motivation [that] come mostly from home,” then it is not the fault of the good voucher and charter schools, which remain good, according to Murray, even as we stock them with urban students of defective cognitive ability, personality, and motivation. Apparently it is not the fault of perfectly good medicine that the unresponsive patients remain ill. (Note that the terms “poor” or “poverty” are unmentioned in the Murray op-ed).

The real reason for parents to choose charter schools, Murray argues, is that they offer a choice of “highly traditional curriculum long on history, science, foreign languages, classic literature, mathematics and English composition, taught with structure and discipline.” Aside from the total compliance “structure and discipline” that would make the “best” urban charters entirely unacceptable to middle class parents in the leafy suburbs, the kind of curriculum-rich charter school that Murray describes is even harder to find in poor neighborhoods than the 17 percent of charters that simply do a better job at raising student test scores...

Read the whole thing at the link.

This Just In...

From Jim Horn:

Arizona Supreme Court Rules Unanimously Against Vouchers

Done.

Arizona high court rejects private school vouchers
March 25th, 2009 @ 10:12am
by Associated Press

PHOENIX - The state Supreme Court on Wednesday overturned two school voucher programs, saying they violated the Arizona Constitution.

The vouchers provided to foster children and disabled students under a 2006 law are cash grants in the form of state payment warrants provided to parents, who must sign them over to private schools their children attend.

The justices heard arguments in December on whether the programs violate the Arizona Constitution's bans on using tax dollars to support religion or to fund private schools.

The justices unanimously decided they did. Lower courts split on the issue. . . .

Vouchers and Choice: What A Crock!

You can find all kinds of support for, and blogs about, school choice and vouchers. I will not bother to give links (Jay P. Greene) because you can Google it.

The pro-voucher/choice argument is this: give parents the opportunity to go to a better performing school than the shitty one their kid is in. Let's ask what makes a better performing school. Is it the teachers? The curriculum? The principal or Board of Education? Is it the population that attends the school? Yes! The last one! The population attending the school determines the test scores, because they are the ones taking the test!

Now you may want to credit teachers for the success, or lack-there-of, but that would be sort of silly since, like I said, it is the kids who take the test, not the teachers. But don't the teachers decide what the students learn? No! We decide what gets taught (well, districts and states do that really) and how we teach it (though now that is changing as we move towards a more robotic form of teaching--watch it fail too); we do not decide if a student learns it; that should be reserved for the student and her family to decide.

So, if we institute this policy of allowing folks to choose schools based on AYP scores, many low scorers will move into high-scoring schools, diluting the populations high-scores at that school, thereby lowering scores, and giving parents a reason to now abandon the new school. It creates a vicious circle of moving students around to schools that contain differing populations with differing baseline knowledge, parental involvement, socioeconomic status and the rest.

Vouchers simply move the issue from school to school, delaying any reform we as a nation might bring to making our students better learners. I have some suggestions on how to achieve a more even playing field for our children:

1. reduce poverty
2. reduce poverty
3. fund schools fully
4. pay teachers more, then see who shows up to teach
5. bring back vocational school
6. bring back tracking
7. demand parental involvement (at home, not in my classroom. In fact, stay the hell out of my classroom unless you have something to offer that I don't have to deal with. I already have to deal with 20 7-year-olds, I do not need a nosy parent in there)
8. offer music, art, and physical education

I suppose I could go on, but you get the picture. Vouchers move the problem around. They don't solve the problem; indeed, vouchers are a response to an ill-posed question: How do we give a better education to our kids? Well, first we need kids, and families, who value an education. Let's give our country a reason to value education. One way to start is to refrain from belittling the amazing achievements of those who have graduated from rigorous institutions of higher learning. In other words, we should be in awe of anyone who makes editor of the Harvard Law Review, not try to knock him down as an elitist.

We are a country of well educated, and not so well educated folks. It used to be that the less educated dreamt of providing for their children so those children could be educated. Now it seems as though those who are not educated want the same for their children. What happened? When did we get all anti-education? And blaming teachers? Ridiculous.

I lay the problem at the feet of corporate America, who places more importance on keeping up with the Jones's and making money for their shareholders (all 9 of them) than on making America the best educated, best taken care of people in the world.

Prove Your Premise!!

I read a snippet of a story over at Schools Matter that just bolsters the correct notion that NCLB is a policy with a head-up-its-ass problem. Here is the mythbusting story from NewsReview, Reno!

Policy myths cause a lot of government’s problems, and education is especially damaged
Can a school system built on imaginary premises possibly succeed?

By Dennis Myers

Richard Rothstein spent three years as education columnist for the New York Times, giving a popular audience an unaccustomed look at the work of a scholar in sharp, to-the-point essays that challenged conventional wisdom and corrected public policy assumptions. Reading them and his current work as an associate at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., one gets the impression of a very patient man. Although he must deal constantly with public policy myths—things we all know to be “true” but are not—he keeps plugging away trying to dispel them."All I can do is keep on telling the truth as I see it, and others have to do the same,” Rothstein says. “In the long run, I have to hope the truth wins out.”

The number of myths on which so many public policies are built raise serious questions about whether those policies have any hope of succeeding. In education, there are a number of myths that have been repeated so incessantly by press and politicians that they have become “true” in the public’s mind. Samples:

• Business uses performance pay, so schools should do the same

• Schools are violent

• Parents and students are fleeing public for private schools

• Schools should use the kind of numerical goals that business uses

• Charter schools outperform public schools

In fact, business generally avoids performance pay, schools are the safest places children frequent, private school enrollment is declining, business recommends against numerical goals, and public schools generally perform better than charter schools.

Take just one of them—numerical goals, which were actually written into the No Child Left Behind Act in the belief that they are an accepted business practice. In fact, it reflects a practice that has long since passed out of fashion in the business world, which found that it focused workers on process instead of outcome and generated fear in the workplace, low productivity, and customer alienation.

Using modern research methods, the business community discovered that when a worker must have numbers to show, she or he will crank them out by some means, at the expense of careful workmanship and productivity. Legendary statistician W. Edwards Deming, who in the postwar years gave Japanese management the methods of design, product quality and sales that brought that nation to commercial dominance and later swept the United States, wrote in his book Out Of the Crisis, “A numerical goal leads to distortion and faking, especially when the system is not capable of meeting the goal. Anybody will meet the quota (goal) allotted to him. He is not responsible for the losses so generated. Sears Roebuck waded into trouble in 1992 by allotting goals to their Auto Service Centers. Agents tried to meet the goals set for them. They did, to the detriment of the customer and of the reputation of the company.”

Insurance consultant John Pryor tells the companies he advises, “Focus first on the underwriting or claims or audit processes—and the quality of their delivery from the customer’s perspective—and then it can be determined if productivity is optimum.”

Yet numerical goals—what Rothstein calls “goals distortion” are a basic part of U.S. education policy.

Our peaceful schools
In 1998 during the spate of heavily publicized school shootings around the nation, the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice checked some figures on school violence against figures provided by the National Climatic Data Center. “To give the reader a sense of the idiosyncratic nature of these [school violence] events,” the CJCJ reported, “the number of children killed by gun violence in schools is about half the number of Americans killed annually by lightning strikes.”

Nothing has changed since then. There were more deaths on school grounds 32 years ago, when there were 80 million fewer people in the United States than there are today—usually less than 50 annually. Of home, the 7-Eleven, the park, school is their safest environ—far safer than the home, where as many children are killed in family violence every three days as died at Columbine. But the myth lives on.

Rothstein has been a one-person myth-buster in the education field by doing what reporters are supposed to do—checking the facts and statistics before reporting a “trend” (which may be the most abused word in journalism).

When in the early years of the Bush administration members of Congress were arguing that the private sector uses performance pay, so schools should do likewise, Rothstein went looking for companies that did so. He talked to firms like Wal-Mart and Cisco Systems, consulted Harvard Business School, called private and commercials schools. All told him the same thing. “The private sector does nothing of the sort,” he said. He even called John Chubb at Edison Schools Inc., the largest firm that tries to get contracts to commercially operate public schools. Chubb said using test scores to influence pay was a mistake. (Rothstein does acknowledge that “stockbrokers and sales clerks are paid on commission” but says the hardball sales tactics the practice fosters “should be intolerable where children are concerned.")

What George Bush, in his 2000 campaign, called parents voting with their feet—taking kids out of public and into private schools—did not escape Rothstein’s notice. He found that the actual number showed enrollment falling in private schools at every income level.

The charter school myth has been examined in depth, with Rothstein a part of it. In their book The Charter School Dust-Up, authors Martin Carnoy, Rebecca Jacobsen, Lawrence Mishel, and Rothstein examined 19 studies in 11 states and the District of Columbia, and then folded in data from the 2003 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests. Their conclusion: “There is no evidence that, on average, charter schools outperform regular public schools. In fact, there is evidence that the average impact of charter schools is negative.” (Their study also found that a claim that charter schools serve more disadvantaged students than public schools was false.)

In some cases, legislators have enacted legislation knowing full well that it was flawed. Rothstein recalls that during the debates over No Child Left Behind, economists Thomas Kane and Douglas Staiger produced a paper showing that, under the legislation, schools would be rewarded or penalized entirely because of dubious statistics produced by inadequate testing. Months went by while members of Congress wrestled with the problem. Then, they just gave up and passed the bill anyway.

“It’s a mistake to adopt policies that you know, based on the science, cannot work effectively,” Rothstein said.

The cost
None of this would matter much if it was harmless, but it is very harmful. Though the pendulum is now swinging back, for a decade precious education dollars were diverted to expensive high tech security gear, more police and weapons, expansion of juvenile jails. Various panaceas were legislated. In Virginia, the governor proposed eliminating after-school programs, an established violence preventive.

No Child Left Behind has exacerbated long-standing education problems, such as teacher shortages.

Can a school system succeed when its policy premises are false?

Former Nevada school superintendent Eugene Paslov says policy myths are complicated—he says they are like onions, with merit to be found in some levels as they are peeled—"Some of it has merit and much of it is mythology.” It’s hard to imagine hard pressed school administrators having the time or resources to sort things out.

Washoe County School District spokesperson Steve Mulvenon says he has to spend unnecessary amounts of time helping reporters do stories about school violence in the hope that they’ll get it right, though at times he has become so exasperated that he has considered cutting off assistance to such stories. “I guess I need to keep putting the message out there on each one of these incidents, that it is an aberration, that it is unusual.”

Jay P. Greene: Still A Moron

Jay P. Greene is known as an "Education Researcher" though we will use the term loosely. Leo Casey over at Edwize has a nice explanation of some issues JayP has confounded with his moronishness.

Jay Greene and the United Cherry Pickers

Jay Greene needs a union. Anyone who works as hard as he does at cherry picking education research — a white collar version of uncreative, gritty farm work — could use the collective power of an organization that unites all cherry pickers in common cause. Just picture it: a picket line of Greene, Hoxby, Moe and Peterson, marching in line outside of an AERA convention, with signs declaring “Unfair To Educational Research Cherry Pickers” — all carefully written on oak tag paper bought at Wal-Mart.

How could life as an educational research cherry picker be so tough, the reader might ask, that Greene would have to resort to the usurious rent seeking of nefarious monopoly power? How could he end up hitchhiking on the road to serfdom?

Here’s how: Serious research conducted by respected scholars without an ideological axe to grind has consistently found every major voucher experiment in the United States wanting. John Witte’s and Cecilia Rouse’s definitive analyses of the Milwaukee voucher program and the Indiana University studies of the Cleveland voucher program have shown no meaningful educational performance advantage for students in those two high profile, large scale voucher programs. The US Department of Education studies of the Washington DC voucher program [here and here] show no significant educational performance benefits. An overview of the current state of research on vouchers can be found here.

All of this just makes Jay Greene and his comrades in the United Cherry Pickers work harder and harder, on a desperate search through the bountiful fruit of educational research for something, anything that can be cherry picked to support vouchers. Just look at what Greene has been reduced to: glittering generalities that repeat the same tired misrepresentations, again and again, in the most unimaginative way. [He even cites research that is not on the subject of vouchers: Hank Levin will be most surprised to learn that his research "supports" vouchers.]

When the research that is there doesn’t do the job, the “have laptop, will produce junk science on demand” crowd at the United Cherry Pickers make up their own, ‘refined’ versions. In the heat of the 2000 presidential election campaign, Paul Peterson announced a “Harvard study” that found African-American students participating in private voucher programs in New York City, Dayton, Ohio and Princeton, New Jersey had significantly better results on a standardized test. Peterson’s claims went so far beyond what the actual evidence demonstrated that one of his partners in the research, the firm Mathematica, went public with its repudiation. Further research by Princeton University’s Alan Krueger and Pei Zhu cast even more doubt on the results. If you wonder what is at stake is the seemingly ‘inside baseball’ fight over peer review of research [see here and here], it is precisely this misuse of the reputation and currency of the academy to promote a policy agenda with “research” that fails to meet minimal academic standards.

So in the interests of union solidarity, let us provide the following recommendation to Jay Greene and the United Cherry Pickers: you are working too hard, take a vacation. Labor Day is coming up — we won that one for you.