STOP THE PRESSES!!! Before I comment on this article, a little quiz. Guess who said this outrageous nonsense:

"Maybe this demonstrates that schools alone cannot solve the very deep problems kids bring to school. You cannot assume that schools alone can raise achievement scores without addressing the issues of poverty, of homelessness and shattered families."

If you guessed Linda Darling-Hammond, Deborah Meier, Jonathan Kozol, Randi Weingarten or another union apologist, give yourself an A for effort – but you'd be wrong. It's Diane Ravitch, of course, who is doing her best to surpass these other folks in propagating an ideology that screws poor kids. (Incidentally, I've read the bios of these five folks and in their more than two centuries of cumulative experience, not one of them has spent a single day in the private sector. This really explains everything regarding their ignorance of and hostility toward basic principles of management and organization that our schools systems so desperately need.)

Is it possible that such an esteemed "scholar" as Ravitch has never visited a high-performing inner-city school and seen with her own eyes that what she's saying is demonstrably false (as I have, at well over 100 different schools all over the country)? To be sure, many disadvantaged kids do indeed have "very deep problems", but that simply means they need the best teachers and best schools to overcome the fact that they enter school with two strikes against them. When they get such teachers and schools – which, sadly, is extremely rare, as we have an immoral and despicable system in this country that systematically gives the neediest children the worst teachers and schools – we know with 100% certainty that these children can achieve at high levels and close – and even reverse – the achievement gap.

Ravitch needs to get out of her ivory tower and hop in a cab and in 30 minutes she could be at any number of schools that would disprove her foolish beliefs. But that's not going to happen – not with Randi as her best buddy, when she's so publicly committed to a certain viewpoint, and not at her age (I don't think it's controversial to say that the older people get, the less open they tend to be to contrary viewpoints and giving up deeply held beliefs). I've never seen it happen. It reminds me of Alan Greenspan, trying vainly to argue, even today, that nobody could have seen the bubble forming and that his actions didn't contribute mightily to it. It's almost sad to see once-so-highly-esteemed people become discredited, even laughing stocks…

Turning to the article…

Normally, a low-quality charter school being denied a full extension of its charter isn't worth of a STOP THE PRESSES, but this isn't just any charter school: it's the one started by Stanford's School of Education (where my father earned a doctorate, by the way) and, in particular, Linda Darling-Hammond, author of the infamous Teach for America hatchet job (my full critique of her is posted at: http://edreform.blogspot.com/2007/12/obamas-disappointing-choice-of-linda.html). LDH (along with Ravitch, Meier, and Kozol) is among the best known of your typical ed school, loosey-goosey, left-wing, politically correct, ivory tower, don't-confuse-me-with-the-facts-my-mind's-made-up, disconnected-from-reality critics of genuine school reform. (Forgive my bluntness, but I can't stand ideological extremists of any persuasion, especially when kids end up getting screwed.)

LDH and Stanford's Ed School decided to test their educational theories in the real world, starting a charter school in 2001 to serve the low-income, mostly-Latino children of East Palo Alto. I credit them for this – in fact, I think EVERY ed school should be REQUIRED to start and run, or at least partner with, a real live school. What they set out to do is REALLY, REALLY hard, so I also credit them for having the good sense to start the school via a joint venture with a proven, first-rate operator, Aspire. However, their anti-testing ideology soon got in the way of their good sense:

The two cultures clashed. Aspire focused "primarily and almost exclusively on academics," while Stanford focused on academics and students' emotional and social lives, said Don Shalvey, who started Aspire and is now with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Five years ago the relationship ended amicably and Stanford New School was on its own.

It doesn't take much imagination to guess what happened when, freed of Aspire's rigor and focus on the critical basics (like teaching children to read properly!), the ivory tower theories ran head on into the reality of East Palo Alto kids. The results were easy to predict: the school fell on its face:

…test results for Stanford New School students are almost uniformly poor. On last year's Standardized Testing and Reporting Results only 16 percent of the students were proficient or advanced in English and math, an improvement from the previous year. And in a three-year comparison of similar schools in 2007 and 2008 — the most recent state results — the school scored 6, 7 and most recently a 3 out of 10.

LDH cynically tries to explain away this failure by – surprise! – blaming both the evaluation system and the kids:

Ms. Darling-Hammond — who told the board that the school "takes all kids" and changes their "trajectory" — was angered by the state's categorization of the charter as a persistently worst-performing school. "It is not the most accurate measure of student achievement," she said, "particularly if you have new English language learners."

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Palo Alto Online article is here: http://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/show_story.php?id=16467

Here's the NYT article: