David Safier

by David Safier An excellent op ed in today's Star is worth a look: Richard Gilman's State leaders turn blind eye to socio-economic factors at 'bad' schools. Since BfA readers have seen this issue covered in my posts, I won't go over the column in detail. Gilman argues, with convincing facts and figures, that state … Read more

by David Safier

Another collection of education articles cluttering up my desktop.

• I posted yesterday about an online database listing specific and private information schools collect about students which willl be used by private education companies. It's a developing story. It looks like the U.S. Ed Department wrote regulations in 2011 allowing release of student information without parental consent. Now Louisiana, one of the states cooperating with the nonprofit inBloom that's collecting the student information and putting it on the Amazon cloud, is withdrawing its students' data. We'll see if other states withdraw from this dangerous venture as well. (At this point, Arizona isn't participating in the data sharing.)
• Objections to the Common Core are mounting, and not just from the far right which sees this as one more link in the vast federal conspiracy chain. Progressive educators are worried both about the push for an overly prescriptive curriculum and an increased emphasis — if that's possible — on standardized testing. Case in point: a column in Education Week, Time for Teacher Unions to Hop Off the Common Core Train.
• Third graders won't move onto the fourth grade in Arizona beginning next school year if their scores on a reading test are too low. This is one of the many education "reforms" brought to Arizona from Florida. Since it's already a done deal, the important questions about implentation are: where will the required reading line be drawn and what kind of extra enrichment will be given to the students who are held back?

by David Safier

Arizona is the Wild West of Charter Schools, so it's fitting that a line from a John Ford western so neatly sums up the way Arizona's BASIS charter schools are praised by the conservative "education reform" crowd and how they're covered by the media: "When the legend becomes fact, print The Legend."

The essential BASIS Legend, repeated endlessly by the education privatization crowd, goes something like this: BASIS Charter schools prove students in the U.S. can achieve at world-class levels if a school maintains high standards and high expectations. BASIS is a public school that has to take all applicants, yet its students' achievement soars above the failing "government schools." BASIS has been recognized as the best high school in the nation on a number of occasions and equals or exceeds the international test scores of the highest achieving countries.

The problem with The Legend is, it ignores the fact that BASIS students are a highly select group, especially by the time they make it to high school. Students who can't make the grade fall by the wayside before they make it to their senior year. Most of the students who succeed would excel wherever they were — district, charter or private school. BASIS' reputation for excellence has far more to do with the students
who manage to survive the schools' rigor than the quality of the
education offered. If you have reasonably good teachers presenting demanding material to the top-level students who survive at BASIS, you can be guaranteed they'll ace all the tests that come their way.

If you want to create a reasonably accurate comparison between BASIS and a "government school" — a school that's part of a school district — compare it with TUSD's University High, which is also composed of select students and also scores high on national rankings. The only reason you hear so much more about BASIS than University High is because the BASIS Legend is a perfect — and perfectly inaccurate — way for the conservative "education reform" movement to demonize traditional public education and show how good education can be if you take it out of government's hands. An obscenely well funded coalition of organizations exists to sing the praises of schools like BASIS as part of their continuing efforts to push their privatization agenda.

by David Safier Michelle Rhee, serial liar and obfuscator, is the ex-D.C. Ed Supe who garnered national attention for raising DC test scores only to become mired in allegations of cheating on the tests. In the no-consequences world of Republican "education reform," Rhee remains a star and heads "Students First," heavily funded by the usual … Read more