ri-can – RI Future

September 14, 2012September 14, 2012

Progress Report: Brendan Doherty’s ‘Mostly False’ Grade; Higher Ed Access for Foster Kids; NK Firefighters

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Yesterday we wrote that David Cicilline would try to make the CD1 campaign about policy issues while challenger Brendan Doherty would try to avoid any discussion of policy and instead smear his opponent by painting him as being untrustworthy. But on Brendan’s very first attempt at this the Projo Politifact team gives him a “mostly false” grade for one of his accusations.

Doherty was on RIPR’s Political Roundtable this morning … listen for how his conservative credentials would serve as an impediment to Rhode Island if he were elected to Congress.

Rhode Island makes it harder for local foster children to access higher education opportunities than do neighboring states. It’s examples like this that make me shake my head when people think the road to economic salvation is more opportunities for the most fortunate among us rather than the least fortunate.

What’s going on in North Kingstown? First the School Committee fires its janitors and now the Town Council is accused of overworking firefighters. Locals say the political system in this middle class suburb has completely broken down.

Aaron Regunberg weighs in on Jon Brien’s loss for GoLocal, as well as what the primary says about RI-CAN’s effect on local politics. Progressives aren’t happy that the campaign for more charter schools in Rhode Island is being financed in part by Big Pharma, among other corporate interests.

Speaking of GoLocal, Dan McGowan wastes no time before previewing the general election for State House races.

Here’s the film trailer that’s helped to incite the current anti-American unrest in the Muslim world. According to NPR, “Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is walking a fine line, distancing herself and the State Department as far as possible from the video that has sparked anger and protests across the Arab world.”

Here’s Senator Whitehouse’s statement on the situation: “The attack on our embassy in Libya was a tragedy, and I join President Obama and Secretary Clinton in condemning the actions of those involved. Now, as our nation comes together to honor the service of Ambassador Stevens and his colleagues, it is fitting that we make special note of the sacrifices made by our men and women serving abroad. As the son of a career diplomat, I know that these brave individuals put public service and patriotism above all else. I am honored to help recognize their service and sacrifice in this dark hour.”

Today in 1966, the United States launched Operation Attleboro in Vietnam. Named after the neighboring Massachusetts town, it’s a historically significant military decision because the search and destroy tactic is emblematic of the United States’ missteps in the conflict.

September 6, 2012September 6, 2012

Progress Report: Spending on State House Races; RI Has a Budget Surplus; Verizon Saves Your Texts, Henry Thoreau

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greenwich cove dish — The other end of the #egriviera, the one not featured in the Projo today. (Photo by Bob Plain)

One has to like not only the name, but also the motivation, of a group backing progressive candidates for State House seats.

According to WPRI’s Ted Nesi: “People for Rhode Island’s Future spent $26,500 this week to support six pro-gay-marriage candidates (David Gorman, Gene Dyszlewski, Lewis Pryeor, Adam Satchell, Laura Pisaturo and Roberto DaSilva) and oppose six others on the ballot (Lou Raptakis, Frank Lombardi, Marc Cote, Michael Pinga, Michael McCaffrey and Dan DaPonte).”

Fight Back RI, a local group working for marriage equality, also endorsed some legislative candidates recently.

Meanwhile, Nesi goes on to report that 50CAN, a national PAC that supports the corporate charter school model for public education, is also spending money supporting local candidates. “50CAN Action Fund said it spent $44,902 on Aug. 30 supporting four candidates in next week’s primary: DaPonte, Jon Brien, Maura Kelly and Mia Ackerman,” Nesi writes. “The group’s Rhode Island chapter endorsed all of them except DaPonte.”

Rhode Island should be concerned that RI-CAN, the major proponent of the big box charter school model in the state, is supporting Brien. He’s one of the most conservative members of the General Assembly who is already a direct conduit for corporate America into our political system through his involvement with ALEC.

And spending money is only one of the ways in which the corporate charter school agenda is trying to influence local politics. Ed Fitzpatrick looks at the race for Senate District 3, which pits former RI-CAN executive director Maryellen Butke against Gayle Goldin, who works for the Women’s Fund of Rhode Island.

Here’s one of the biggest problems with our political process: many pretend that the state is broke but it isn’t. In fact, it turns out Rhode Island enjoys a $115 million surplus in its budget this year.

Yet still, the state is cutting services that help those hardest hit by the recession.

Such contradictions are just one of the many reasons we should discount blowhards like Harriet Loyd of RISC … especially when she uses inflammatory rhetoric like trying to “eradicate” incumbents.

Speaking of nonsense from GoLocal, there is so much that is offensive about this story and the way it is presented, I hardly know where to start. How about with the stock photo of the bloody knife? GoLocal could write the same story about any weekend night on the East Greenwich waterfront, but I think it’s safe to say it wouldn’t.

Verizon is keeping a copy of the texts you send, and if asked they’ll share them with law enforcement.

Bill Clinton’s line of the night at the DNC: “We believe ‘we’re all in this together’ is a better philosophy than ‘you’re on your own.'”

Elizabeth Warren had a pretty good one too when she explained how corporations are not, in fact, people.

On this day in 1847, Henry David Thoreau leaves Walden after two years of living deliberately and moves in with Ralph Waldo Emerson.

July 3, 2012July 3, 2012

Butke’s Campaign Puts Focus on Education ‘Reform’

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Maryellen Butke’s campaign for state Senate will raise an interesting debate about the relationship, or lack thereof, between the so-called education reform movement and the progressive movement. While in name they may sound like close cousins, in practice they are often not.

Education reformers (or deformers, if you don’t like what they do) often push for charter schools at the expense of existing public schools, and charter schools often don’t allow its teachers to bargain collectively, putting the movement at odds with organized labor and often attracting big money from union-busting corporations.

By running for state Senate – especially for legendary progressive legislator Rhoda Perry’s seat – Butke’s campaign will become ground zero for this debate in Rhode Island for the next few months.

Yesterday, in a post about Senator Rhoda Perry retiring, I mentioned that Butke is a liberal who supports charter schools. Two of RI Future’s regular contributors, who follow education issues closely, quickly took umbrage with my description.

“I think a more accurate description of Ms. Butke’s positions would be pretty politically liberal on some issues and extremely conservative on others, particularly labor and education (her primary focus), where she and her Wal-Mart and Wall Street-funded organization have championed right-wing policies that have and will do major damage to public education in RI,” wrote Aaron Regunberg.

Pat Crowley, who works for the state’s largest teachers’ union, followed suit: “Got to agree with Aaron here. Labor issues can’t simply be shoved to the side. Especially when so many teachers are women, and so many retirees are women, the attack on their voice on the job is part of the national war on women. How liberal is that?”

Then, interestingly enough, Butke got a chance to respond with a guest post on Ted Nesi’s blog. She wrote:

I have never considered my views on education liberal or conservative. Though a lifelong progressive, it never occurred to me that teaching and learning in public schools was a partisan issue. At its core, education reform is about improving educational outcomes for kids. How could anyone – Democrat or Republican – disagree with that?

As it turns out, education is one of the most politicized debates we are having in this country today. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Those of us who believe in the tenets of change aren’t interested in partisan politics. We believe in accountability for the adults responsible for our children’s futures, in high-quality public school choices for parents regardless of demographics or geography, and in flexibility to let principals and teachers do whatever it takes to improve student achievement. This doesn’t mean we are anti-union and it doesn’t mean we have negative feelings towards teachers.

My feeling is that Regunberg, Crowley and Bukte somehow need to reconcile their somewhat disparate points if Rhode Island is to holistically improve the education it offers. We need to offer a better education to all students without making life any tougher for our hard-working teachers, who hold one of the most important jobs in our community. That’s the progressive solution to reforming public education.

I believe Butke when she says she isn’t anti-union per say, but some of the people that pay her salary and fund the organization she works for certainly are. That can be a tough dichotomy to reconcile.

Butke and I have long talked about getting together for a big picture discussion on how the charter school movement fits – or doesn’t – with the progressive movement. Here’s hoping that this post and her candidacy helps to make that happen … and that they can help Rhode Island to figure out how it wants to reform public education.

April 21, 2012April 21, 2012

GoLocal’s Creative Use of Statistics in Ed. Rankings

Here’s a math question for you. What’s wrong with this statement from GoLocal’s latest (exclusive!) attack on public education?

Rhode Island spends more per student than most other states, ranking in the top ten nationally, but it’s 32nd in the country for student achievement, according to a GoLocalProv analysis of data for all 50 states… In an effort to fairly measure the effectiveness of education spending, GoLocalProv ranked each state by how much it spends per pupil.

Small wonder that’s an “exclusive.” It’s also an incredibly sophomoric method of comparison and reflects a fundamental lack of understand of statistics. None the less, the corporatization crowd jumped right on it as proof of their foregone conclusions:

“This data highlights the stark reality that although we invest heavily in public education in our state, our performance remains unacceptably low,” said Maryellen Butke, Executive Director of RI-CAN, an education reform group.

She added: “People should be asking how we’re spending that money and how much of it is reaching classrooms.”

Well, she’s half right. People should be asking how we’re spending that money and how much of it is reaching classrooms. Those that do, already know the answer to my initial question about the mathematically challenged GoLocal analysis.

If you’re still not with me, ask yourself this: How fair is it to make comparisons on spending as if the cost of living doesn’t vary state to state? One would expect high cost states to have higher per student spending as well. Surely a reputable analysis would attempt to account for that. In fact, of the top ten high cost of living states only California and Hawaii do not also appear in the top ten spenders per pupil… and Hawaii is 11th. What a shock, eh? Turns out you have to pay people more to work in areas where their costs are higher, and schools aren’t magically unaffected by regionally variable expenses like fuel, real estate, etc. The conclusion one would have to draw is that RI spends roughly an average amount per pupil and gets roughly average results. Nothing to crow about, but hardly the crisis these corporate shills would have us believe.

Say I wonder what the average pay is for a journalist in the rural south? I’m guessing there’s “proof” there that Beale is overpaid.

April 12, 2012April 12, 2012

Charter School Takes Issue with RI-CAN Report Cards

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Not everyone is thrilled with RI-CAN’s new report cards on Rhode Island public schools. Most notably, The Learning Community, a Central Falls charter school that serves students from there, Providence and Pawtucket.

“RI-CAN talks about putting kids and parents first, but their report card system seems to be primarily a public relations tool, not a source for accurate school data,” according to a response issued by the charter school to the report cards. “RI-CAN’s system undermines the school performance measures proposed by the Rhode Island Department of Education, and discredits the tremendous effort that Rhode Island students, teachers and administrators are devoting to improving student achievement based on accurate information.”

Kath Connelly, declined to elaborate on their analysis, but did give us permission to reprint their response:

One School’s Views on the RI-CAN Report Card System

As advocates for public education, The Learning Community has grave concerns about the RI-CAN school report cards that evaluate every Rhode Island public school based on faulty methodology. RI-CAN claims that their report cards “are designed to help families in Rhode Island access online information about their local schools” when in truth the report cards spread misinformation to concerned citizens. Instead of providing access to accurate data, RI-CAN summarizes a school’s performance by using only one grade level’s achievement on state standardized tests and mathematically incorrect calculations.

No efforts at holding schools accountable will succeed unless the measures used are fair and accurate. It is worth mentioning that we are expressing our strong opposition to the report cards despite the fact that The Learning Community ranked in the Top 10 schools in Rhode Island on 7 of the 14 indicators.

The methodological deficiencies of the RI-CAN report cards render them at best useless and, at worst, harmful to our state’s efforts to support the education of every child.

Every school’s “overall student performance” score is really based on the scores of only one grade level. For example, RI-CAN’s measure for an elementary school is based on the performance of the 5th grade only. This means that the scores of 40 students might represent a school where 300 students were actually tested. Investors would not judge the success of a business on one quarter of financial data. (Three of RI-CAN’s four report card scores are based on the performance of only one grade level.)

RI-CAN’s approach to measuring school performance is dated and has been discredited nationally as too narrow. RI-CAN’s report cards rely solely on state standardized test data and do nothing to portray the context of each of our state’s schools—even though these data are readily available through the state’s nationally recognized Information Works! system. Recognizing that excellent schools involve more than just a single test score, report card systems in Washington, DC, and New York City, while controversial, at least included a range of data points to evaluate schools.

RI-CAN misuses basic math. RI-CAN’s “student subgroup performance,” “achievement gap,” and “performance gains” measures rely on combining the performance of multiple groups of students into a single score. Instead of doing the basic math to determine an accurate score, RI-CAN took a short cut and averaged a series of averages into a composite score. Consider the following example:

Low-Income Students Black Students Hispanic Students
Number Tested
20 10 40
Proficiency Rate
50 75 25

RI-CAN’s report card simply averages the average proficiency rate of the groups above, for a “student subgroup performance” score of 50% (= (50+75+25)/3). Basic mathematics, however, requires us to weight the scores based on the number of students in each group, resulting in a score of 39% (= (20/70)x50 + (10/70)x75 + (40/70)x25). If 5 students scored 100%, and 50 students scored 15%, the size of those groups makes a big difference.

RI-CAN ranks schools on faulty numbers. When researchers release data, they identify a margin of error. NECAP data includes these ranges, to let us know that a school that scored a 54 might actually be within the same range as a school that scored a 52. RI-CAN, however, chose to rank schools based on a single number—identifying distinctions even when there is no statistically significant difference between the schools’ performance. (In the performance of subgroups, which have even smaller numbers of students, the lack of a margin of error is even more distressing.)

The RI-CAN system is unfair to urban schools. Because the RI-CAN report cards are based on a single grade level, schools with few students in that grade who are low-income or Black or Hispanic will not have a score for those subgroups. Many suburban schools are not given any score for “student subgroup performance,” whereas every urban school is. By contrast, the RI Department of Education, recognizing the unfairness of this approach, is preparing to hold nearly all schools accountable for subgroup performance.

We are also distressed that at a time of limited public resources, RI-CAN has chosen to create its own faulty system instead of working collaboratively with the state and other education advocates to get the real data about the real challenges and successes in our communities in the hands of citizens.

So what can you do to get more useful and accurate information about the public schools in your neighborhood? Here are few sources that are more reliable:
1.   Visit InformationWorks! which includes a range of data on every public school in Rhode Island. http://infoworks.ride.ri.gov/
2.   Read the complete NECAP scores for the schools you care about. More information here: http://www.ride.ri.gov/Assessment/Results.aspx.
3.   Visit the schools in your neighborhood. No score can capture the spirit of a school or the kindness of a teacher. Ask at your local school what you can do to learn more or how you can help.

If you are curious about the RI-CAN system but do not want to sign up to “be a member of RI-CAN,” feel free to log on as:
Username: thesetwohands Password: thesetwohands

RI-CAN talks about putting kids and parents first, but their report card system seems to be primarily a public relations tool, not a source for accurate school data. RI-CAN’s system undermines the school performance measures proposed by the Rhode Island Department of Education, and discredits the tremendous effort that Rhode Island students, teachers and administrators are devoting to improving student achievement based on accurate information.