California Near Bottom, Texas Near Top in Graduation Rates—And Your Point Is?

The U.S. Department of Education has just published state-by-state high school graduation rates that are, for the first time ever, based on uniform accounting measures, according to the Los Angeles Times. California ranked 32nd in overall high school graduation rates for the 2010-2011 school year (tied with Washington, Utah and West Virginia), with only 76% of its high school students graduating on time. Iowa had the highest graduation rate, 88%, followed by Wisconsin and Vermont at 87%. Texas and Tennessee were tied for fourth with Indiana, Nebraska, New Hampshire and North Dakota, with a rate of 86%.

While California was one of ten states with worse graduation rates in 2009 than in 2002 (others were Nevada, Connecticut, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Nebraska, Arkansas, New Jersey and Rhode Island), the graduation rate between 1998 and 2008 actually climbed from 67.5% to 73%, according to a report in Thoughts on Public Education (TOPED). The TOPED article points out that in 2005 the state’s graduation rate was 78.1% and then suddenly dropped to 62.7% in 2007 and then was back up to 73% in 2008, suggesting that accounting methods, rather than pedagogy was at play. One notable factor that likely contributed to the drop between 2005 and 2007 was the implementation of the California High School Exit Exam (CAHSEE) in 2006 as a new graduation requirement.

The TOPED article also notes that the U.S. Department of Education has used three different formulas for calculating completion rates in recent years and that all were flawed and skewed by politics. The most recent data is being touted by the Dept. of Ed as the most consistent and reliable to date, as it relies on the same metric from state to state rather than the previous methods which relied on self-reporting data from each state that were calculated using a variety of different methods.

The new method uses a 4-year adjusted cohort graduation rate, according to the U.S. Department of Education, which is based on the number of students who graduate in four years with a regular high school diploma (in contrast to a GED) divided by the number of students who form the adjusted cohort for the graduating class. Put more simply: the number of students graduating in four years divided by the number of students who entered high school as 9^th graders. The cohort is adjusted by adding students who transfer into the cohort and subtracting those who transfer out, emigrate out of the country or die.

This still leaves considerable wiggle room for states to game the system. States can boost their graduation rates by having easier exit exams (or none at all) and fewer graduation requirements. There are also numerous ways states can also subtract out students who would be likely to drop out, thus increasing the percentage of students graduating. The Texas Tribune reports that school officials in that state have reported student withdrawals using more than twelve different “leaver” codes, several of which allow students to not be counted toward the state’s graduation rate. For example, students who are removed from public school to be home schooled are no longer counted toward the four-year graduation rate.

This is not a trivial point as Texas has both an unexpectedly high graduation rate and a documented history of cheating. The majority of states with high graduation rates (80% and above) have relatively low childhood poverty rates (less than 20%), though Texas has both a high graduation rate (86%) and a high childhood poverty rate of 27%, according to data from Kids Count. In 2006, a study by Harvard, UT Austin and Rice University determined that Texas was inflating its graduation numbers by allowing districts to not count students who left school for a wide variety of reasons. After this report became publicized, the state began using the federal definition, which still allows them not count student who leave school for a variety of reasons.

It Might Be Fascist, But At Least The Kids Are On Time

Proponents credit Texas’ creativity and innovation for its four-year rise in graduation rates, particularly its emphasis on accountability. One of these “innovations” has been the adoption of radio frequency identification (RFID) tags for students by many of the state’s school districts. The RFID tags allow schools to monitor students’ every move and quickly pinpoint whether or not they are in class. This can lead to quicker and more accurate identification of truancy, one factor that contributes to students dropping out. The plan was covered by Wired's Threat Level blog, and has garnered increasing attention in light of a lawsuit by a student who was suspended for refusing to carry her RFID tag.

While the RFID tags may lead to more efficient reporting and improved attendance, resulting in increased revenue for schools that are funded based on average daily attendance (ADA), the RFID tags are unquestionably an invasion of privacy. They allow administrators to know how often students go to the restroom and how long they spend there. They also allow administrators to know how often and how long children meet with counselors or school safety advocates, meetings that are supposed to be privileged and confidential. This could cause some students to avoid emotional assistance or counsel when needed. Perhaps the most insidious and oppressive aspect of the use of RFID tags in school is that it conditions children to accept a world in which surveillance, social control and a lack of privacy and civil liberties are the norm.

What is the Significance of the New DOE Graduation Statistics?

The new federal formula for calculating high school graduation rates was intended to make graduation data collection uniform from state to state so that valid comparisons could be made. However, because the new formula still allows states to define for themselves what counts as a “drop out” or a “leaver,” and to create their own graduation requirements, valid comparisons are not possible.

The primary reason why graduation rates are even in the national spotlight is because of the general hysteria about our “failing schools”—a myth (or at least a gross exaggeration) that has been used by free market education “reformers” to justify the privatization of public education.

In reality, graduation rates have been steadily climbing across the nation, and they have been doing so for the past 140 years. In 1870, the first year in which records were kept, only 2% of students graduated from high school. By 1940, half of all students were graduating from high school. By 1969, 77% of students were earning diplomas. Since then, there have declines and rises in the graduation rate, with a general rising trend over the last decade.

Those who worry about graduation rates seldom look at the actual reasons why students drop out. In the 1940s and 1950s, many students were dropping out to enter the work force, raise families or join the military. Poverty has also played a large role, with lower income children entering school far behind their more affluent peers in pre-reading and other academic skills (see here and here). This gap grows over time as they have less access to enriching extracurricular and summer activities and increases the chances that they will drop out of school. Anti-poverty programs in the 1960s helped mitigate this to some extent, but childhood poverty rates began to rise again during the Reagan years and this likely contributed to the declines in graduation rates seen in the 1990s.

Cheaters Prosper: Disgraced Crescendo CEO Wins $240,000 Settlement

The Crescendo cheating scandal in Los Angeles is old news (see here, here, and here). All of Crescendo’s schools have since been closed, their teachers let go, and their 1,400 students forced to relocate as a result of the 2010 scandal in which teachers were given advance copies of the state standardized exams to help better prepare their students. However, two separate investigations have now blamed the organization’s founder and CEO, John Allen, for ordering his schools’ principals to implicate the teachers in the scam.

The Los Angeles Times quoted an anonymous former Crescendo administrator who said, "He [Allen] said anyone who doesn't get with the program, this will be their last day at Crescendo." The Times article went on to say that most principals complied, according to an unreleased internal Crescendo report. The scandal broke when teachers reported the cheating attempts to LAUSD officials.

Despite LAUSD’s knowledge of the scandal, Allen was kept on as head of the charter network due to the help of Marguerite Poindextor LaMotte, a friend of Allen’s and a member of the Los Angeles School Board. LaMotte even got then Supt. Ramon Cortines (who is now enmeshed in his own sexual harassment scandal) to back Allen and keep the Crescendo schools open. However, once the scandal became public, LAUSD had to do damage control and gave Allen a 6-month, unpaid suspension, while still allowing him to come back as an administrator. The principals received wrist slap suspensions of 10 days.

While Allen supposedly admitted his guilt to a Crescendo trustee, he apparently did not admit guilt publicly and has since sued for wrongful dismissal, arguing that the allegations of testing irregularities were "unfounded." In April, he settled with Crescendo for $245,000 of their remaining assets.

End Due Process for Abusive Administrators?

One of the most vitriolic and idiotic elements of the Ed Deform and Teacher Bashing movements is their assertion that the schools are filled with terrible or dangerous teachers who are impossible to remove because of tenure and due process protections and that these parasites force novice teachers (who are all presumed to be better than their more senior colleagues) out of jobs.

But what about administrators who lack the time or competency to effectively monitor and evaluate their employees or who wield evaluations as a weapon to harass teachers they do not like? The fact is that administrators themselves can be incompetent, abusive and even guilty of criminal misconduct.

Should we end due process, seniority and tenure for administrators?

Oh yeah, they don’t have these protections. They have something better: status and power.

Consider the case of Ramon Cortines, former superintendent of LAUSD, SFUSD, Pasadena and New York. He was accused of sexually harassing a colleague and allowed to retire with benefits, while LAUSD was forced to pay out $200,000, plus lifetime health benefits worth $250-300,000 to Scot Graham, LAUSD’s former director of leasing and asset management, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Cortines, like other high powered abusers, denied that he harassed anyone, but admitted that he engaged "adult behavior," and insisted that it was consensual. Yet Graham had complained of Cortine’s behavior to superiors on three occasions. Meanwhile, the district refused to investigate and encouraged him to drop his complaints.

While the out-of-court settlement precludes us from ever knowing whether Cortines was guilty of wrongdoing, some are asserting that the large size of the settlement is an indication of his guilt and the district’s fear of going to court and losing. What is clear is that Cortines enjoyed the protection of his district, which refused to pursue the allegations, investigate his behavior, or otherwise threaten his professional or social wellbeing.

San Francisco Breeding Ground for Corrupt, Inept and Abusive Administrators

Not long after Cortines left San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD), the Bill Rojas administration oversaw the misallocation (and theft) of millions of dollars from the district. Up to $68 million disappeared into the hands of nonteaching staff, including several who were indicted. Rojas ultimately fled to Dallas, bringing with him several of his loyal criminal cronies, where he managed to continue his incompetence and corruption while evading the long arm of the law. William Coleman, who was Rojas’ No. 2 guy in SFUSD and continued in Rojas’ new administration in Dallas, eventually pled guilty to charges of attempting to influence a grand jury. However, while Rojas was fired from his job in Dallas, he quickly landed a job at a for-profit charter school in Boston, proving that no bad deed goes unrewarded.

At SFUSD, Rojas was followed by Arlene Ackerman who finagled a $250,000 salary, plus a $2,000-a-month housing allowance and $375,000 severance package, payable even if she quit, which she was forced to do not long after taking over. As superintendent of SFUSD she pretended to clean up the district’s sloppy financial records and the scandals of the Rojas years, while completely missing Trish Bascom’s embezzlement scheme which was occurring right under her nose. This blunder was no doubt due to her obsession with quashing dissent and getting her underlings to toe the line. “I can’t continue to tolerate the dissension,” she said about her SFUSD staff and teachers.  Part of her strategy for reducing dissent was to spend $400,000 a year of district money on a PR firm to put a positive spin on her leadership, money that should have gone to classroom instruction.

Ackerman then went on to head Philadelphia public schools where she secured a raise that pushed her salary higher than those of the mayor or governor. While in office she gave a $7.5 million no-bid contract to cronies at IBS Communications to install surveillance cameras despite previous work with the district that involved cost overruns 12 times what they had originally estimated.  She then scapegoated underlings for the scandal and squeezed the Philadelphia school board for a $900,000 buyout package to get her to resign and go away.

Cheaters Prosper

In Washington, D.C., schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee presided over one of the largest cheating scandals in the nation. In Atlanta, Superintendent Beverly Hall oversaw an even larger cheating scandal. In both cases the administrators threatened to fire teachers if test scores didn’t go up. In both cases, there were abnormally high rates of erasures and implausibly high improvements in test scores.

Rather than relying on independent outside evaluators, both Rhee and Hall conducted their own biased internal investigations that not surprisingly absolved them and their districts (see New York Times), despite the flagging of numerous schools by McGraw Hill for the suspicious erasure patterns (see USA Today report). The State Superintendent of Education also recommended that the scores of many D.C. schools be investigated because of their unusually high gains, something Rhee’s administration refused to do.

Rhee was never fired, punished or held accountable for the cheating scandal. She did resign when the mayor who had appointed her, Adrian Fenty, lost his re-election bid. Yet she remained the darling of the right wing Ed Deform movement, securing millions of dollars in donations to her bogus student advocacy non-profit, Students First, and numerous $50,000 speaking engagements. To her supporters she is still seen as a hero who took a tough school district and turned it around by being tough on teachers and their unions. It doesn’t matter to them that those “gains” were fabricated because they don’t really care about improved educational outcomes for children. What is most important to them is improved business opportunities, something that Rhee has championed through her support of high stakes testing, private charter schools and her general attacks on unions.

Hall, who has since retired, may not get off so easily. There is currently a grand jury investigating the scandal and District Attorney Paul Howard has not yet determined whether to file charges against her. (See Atlanta Journal Constitution 4/22/12). However, her former top adviser Kathy Augustine resigned after one day on the job as superintendent of the DeSoto Independent School District, with a severance deal worth $188,000, which is a far cry from punishment for her role in the Atlanta cheating scandal. Three other former superintendents are still on the Atlanta Public Schools payroll earning six-figure salaries.

Fox Guarding Hen House: Rhee Buddies Up to Duncan During Investigation of DC Cheating Scandal

Michelle Rhee was the chancellor of Washington, D.C. schools from 2007 to 2010, during the time D.C. school officials cheated to raise test scores. The Office of the Inspector General in Arne Duncan’s Education Department has been investigating the case for the past six months. Considering how much the outcome the investigation could influence her career, it would seem a no-brainer that Duncan should not be fraternizing with her.

Nevertheless, the two sat side by side last month, as two of four featured panelists at an education conference in Washington. The conference was about the use of educational data.

Supposedly they did not talk about how to exploit educational data to further one’s career, as both Duncan and Rhee have done, or how to massage the numbers and game the system, as Rhee and her underlings supposedly did. It is also unlikely that the panelists discussed how much of a cash cow the testing and accountability mania have become for test and textbook publishers or revealed how much of their personal portfolios are invested in these companies. They most certainly did not talk about how little the tests and their data reveal about the quality of teachers and schools or how they undermine the quality of education by focusing on memorization and multiple choice guessing, while taking away class time and resources from arts, music, science, critical thinking and inquiry.

As the New York Times correctly pointed out today, Rhee’s reputation as a national leader of the education reform movement is based on the inflated D.C. test scores.

In March, USA Today published the results of an investigation of the D.C. schools that found unusually large gains at 41 schools and a suspiciously high rate of erasures on tests. This was one-third of the elementary and middle schools in the district.

In a rather amateur attempt to redirect blame to the Times, Duncan’s spokesman Justin Hamilton said, “It’s irresponsible for a New York times columnist to presume guilt before we have all the facts,” as if by not appearing publicly with Rhee Duncan might be biasing the jury.

The problem is that there is no jury—at least not yet.

This is an investigation by Duncan’s office. By socializing with a suspect under investigation, it gives Duncan and the entire Department of Education the appearance of being in bed with her, biasing the investigation and destroying what little confidence the public may have had that they would get to the bottom of the scandal or prevent any further cheating.

Why I Hate Charter Schools

Educational Cash Cow? (Image by the kirbster)

The California state charter school association just received a $15 million grant from the Walton family with the goal of adding 20,000 new charter school students in Los Angeles and 100,000 statewide, the Los Angeles Times reported this week.

Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) already has more charter schools (183) than any other school district in the country and is poised to add many more with the infusion of funds. And the corporate education vultures are already circling, hoping to grab a piece of the carrion.

My niece once asked me why I am so critical of charter schools and I suppose now is as good a time as any to answer her question:

Let’s start with the funding. Why is it that the Waltons have $15 million to give away to private entrepreneurs so they can start private schools funded by taxpayers, but nothing for traditional public schools?

The Waltons are worth $26 billion, according to the latest Forbes 400 list, making them the 10^th wealthiest family on the planet. They benefit from some of the lowest personal and corporate tax rates in history, a taxpayer giveaway that not only increases the wealth gap, but starves states of revenue that could be used to improve public schools. Instead, the Waltons can wave their fingers at the “failing” public schools, and appear like generous saviors when they give away a tiny fraction of this wealth to private charters.

Charter schools are often created, funded and run by private corporations with the primary goal of turning a profit, even if that comes at the expense of school safety, supplies, curriculum, pedagogy and teachers’ working conditions. In order to turn a profit, the funding they get from school districts, the state and philanthropies must be greater than their expenditures. In order to make this happen, they generally pay teachers less than district schools pay. However, they also often cut back on academic resources, equipment and infrastructure.

Charter schools receive funding from the districts in which they operate, yet they are allowed to follow different rules than traditional district schools, with less oversight by parents, teachers and community. This sucks money away from districts at a time when they are seeing declining revenues from states and local property taxes. They can (and often do) cherry pick students who they think will perform better on standardized tests to boost their image so they can attract investors and new students. Many push out or block special education students and English Language Learners from enrolling. Traditional public schools must accept all students, regardless of socioeconomic status, ethnicity or physical or mental ability.

Charter schools are used as a wedge to justify the defunding of traditional public schools. As the state of California and city of Los Angeles continually cut education funding, charter schools continually receive large infusions of cash from billionaires like the Walton Family, Eli Broad and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, making them seem more appealing to parents who are frustrated with the crumbling, underfunded traditional schools. As their children transfer from traditional public schools to charters, the public schools lose even more funding, since their funding comes from the state on a per pupil basis, thus further whittling away at their viability.

Charter schools are an ineffective solution to the pseudo-problem of failing schools. First, there have been several studies that indicate that charter schools do not perform any better than traditional public schools and many perform much worse. However, it is also simply untrue that we have a failing education system. What we have is a failing socioeconomic system in which a tiny minority is allowed to possess the overwhelming bulk of the nation’s wealth, while millions are allowed to live lives of privation, want and misery. This is particularly true for children, who are bearing the brunt of the recession. In California, for example, 25% of all children live in families that are suffering food insecurity. Poverty is the single most significant factor in determining academic success (see here, here and here). If we want to end the achievement gap, we must end poverty and close the wealth gap.

Charter schools are exempt from closed-shop policies that exist in many school districts, allowing them to hire nonunion teachers at lower wages. This is not only abusive to their own teachers, but it places a downward pressure on district and community wages, too, as the percentage of higher wage district jobs are replaced by lower wage charter school jobs. Charter schools also tend to hire less experienced teachers and place greater demands on them than other district schools, resulting in higher rates of attrition.

Because charter schools typically operate without union contracts, employees can be fired much more easily and arbitrarily, even for trivial issues like having a political bumper sticker or because an administrator dislikes a teacher’s hair style. This increases the likelihood that teachers will go along with ill-conceived school policies, even when they undermine student success or safety, out of fear of being reprimanded or fired. We can presume that the teacher whistle blowers who spoke out against cheating administrators at Crescendo schools in Los Angeles were particularly courageous. However, they were also unique in that they were members of United Teachers Of Los Angeles (unlike the majority of LA charter school teachers) and had union backed due process protections.

As the number of nonunionized charter schools increases, the percentage of union jobs decreases, thus weakening the labor movement and the collective strength of workers. This is significant not only in terms of the downward spiral of wages, but also in terms of the ability of teachers to fight for the best academic conditions for their students. For example, when teachers unions fight for safer working conditions, they are necessarily fighting for safer learning conditions for students, as well. When teachers unions win higher wages, they make it easier for their districts to hire and retain the best teachers, since teachers will want to work and remain at jobs in which they are well paid.

It is no coincidence that the Waltons are big backers of charter schools. Wal-Mart opposes unionization of its own business and has vigorously resisted organizing efforts at Wal-Mart stores. The same is true for Gates and Broad, the other largest backers of charter schools and privatization. The Times notes that roughly 60% of the state charter association's annual $15-million budget comes from the Michael and Susan Dell, Bill & Melinda Gates, Fisher and Broad foundations.

In other words, the charter movement is largely a billionaire-funded cash cow that has much more to do with corporate profits and union busting than the improvement of educational outcomes for children. Even Goldman Sachs, hedge fund managers and other Wall Street financiers have been getting in on the game, not just for the potential profits to be made, but also to take advantage of the lucrative New Markets tax credit.