The 35 year Chilean charter school experiment that never worked

http://dianeravitch.net/2013/08/12/chile-the-most-pro-market-school-system-in-the-world-part-1/

http://dianeravitch.net/2013/08/13/chile-the-most-pro-market-school-system-in-the-world-part-2/

http://dianeravitch.net/2013/08/14/chile-the-most-pro-market-school-system-in-the-world-part-3/

For those in this country who truly care about their kids education, need to read about this 35 year saga of a failed charter school experiment which began with Milton Friedman and his Chicago boys and their teachings. Then those teachings were transferred to the narrow South American Country of Chile where a military coupe was under way deposing the original government, spear headed by the CIA, where the Dictator Augusto Pinochet took over. After Fiedman's visit with Pinochet, the dictator decided to take Friedman's advise by using a market based school system approach to education. After 35 years of Charter school education, it proved disastrous. Makes you wonder why we have them here.

 

Reads like a three-part NEA wish list.

Like the NEA, this knucklehead hates testing. If you don't test, how do you measure performance? IUf you don't measure performance, how do you manage it?

Sounds like this shill want money mindlessly thrown at teachers' unions. Just like Chicago and Detroit.

 

Compared to what? Chile was dirt poor when they enacted friedmans policies. They have enjoyed steady growth since then and are one of the wealthier countries in the region and thei education has been advancing quickly. You leftists like to act like chile was so prosperous back when the government ran the schools and the economy.

He didn't talk to Pinochet. He had students, that were Chilean, that went back to Chile to help Pinochet to run the economy. They used his ideas, he never advocated military coups, and you won't produce anything to that effect either:

[video=youtube;dzgMNLtLJ2k]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzgMNLtLJ2k[/video]

Literacy rates are improving in Chile:



Huge growth trend for the last 30 years after the Friedman reforms put in place. Made for a much better society with greater social mobility:



That blog is ridiculous:

Redistributive policies my ass. The currency had to come under control,, when it did it made lots of people officially poor, but they were poor before just poverty definitions weren't keeping up with Chile's then hyperinflation. The hyperinflation cured caused a Hangover Effect, a well documented economic phenomena when you restrict currency to bring inflation under control. We had a recession too in the early 80s because of it, ours was a small problem and we had a shallower recession. They had a larger one. After though they went and are still on a 30 year growth surge that will leave them the richest nation in Latin America per capita in your lifetime and outpacing the region.

The other countries that have Friedman's ideas include Botswana, and Hong Kong. Why don't you hear the left complain about them? No dictator story to try to make the right guilt by association? Give me a break.

Wow. OECD average - Chile - very poor one generation ago. Very promising future one generation out.

And look at what their completion and graduation rates are looking like, climbing all the time:



Better growth then the NEA has been producing, here are ours, you will notice more Chileans graduate high school, then Hispanic Americans:

 

Okay, first of all, quotes may not be my thing, but please use proper grammar in replying to my posts. It will make it much easier than guessing as to what you are saying please. Missing a beat or two I do myself. But not all the time.

Now, the best I can tell here, my post was deliberately disabled with twists and spins. First, you are making the claim that I said Pinochet was taking Friedman's advise, as if they had a one on one conversation. I never said they talked together about overthrowing the government or changing the school system. Pinochet took Friedman's advise from his talks when visiting there.

And secondly, I don't recall mentioning the economic status of the country of Chile.The article may highlight that, but that is not my focus here with my OP. I am specifically talking about and targeting how the Charter schools have destroyed the school system there. My links prove how a failure the charter schools have been from a statistical point of view. Their testing methods under charters were done through cheating to get the graduation results, but the kids actual abilities are way below the levels to be applied to good universities. Charters are nothing but assembly line businesses to run kids through a school system strictly for profit. And who pays for being uneducated? The parents and their kids. Those stats you post are bogus. They are a result of continuous cheating and manipulating to continue the charter scam. In real life, those figures are much lower when faced with the challenge of going further with their education. The kids are just not qualified compared to the fabricated charts that try and paint a different picture. It's assembly line teaching. The same thing is going on here in the U.S.

 

With your method we end up with dull, uncreative students and teachers who don't teach but instead have their students practice rote memorization. Students don't come to their teachers with real questions, it's all about what is going to be on the test and what they need to memorize. It's a guaranteed loser every time if you are actually trying to fight stagnation. But maybe you're right, maybe we should use the "Waiting For Superman" method when students fail to perform and expel entire classes when they threaten performance statistics.

 

OK, Werner Von Braun. You don't like testing and teachers' grading is too subjective.

How do YOU propose to measure progress?

 

Cheating and "teaching to the test" are common occurrences in unionized government-run schools in the US.

 

I have to agree with johnmayo. This bloger Mario Waissbluth is an idiot. In part 1 he complains about testing. Then in part 2 he complains about low scores on tests. Well which is it? Do you want people to teach the test to get a higher score, or do you want them to stop teaching the test?

He complains that public school enrollment has dropped from 80% to 37%.... but then in part 2 admits "It should be said that, as in the economy, in education there have been some promising results. Attendance to basic school, high school and tertiary education is similar to the OECD average".

So attendance is up compared to the Chilean past, and now compares to other OECD countries, but it's still horrible because public school enrollment is down to 37%.....? So it would be better to have fewer kids enrolled in school, as long as more of them were in crappy public schools?

He also whines that "The children in the lower half are, on the average, getting out of high school without understanding what they read." Isn't the lower half going to the free-public schools? And would not that be the very reason enrollment in free public schools is declining?

So basically he's complaining because more kids are getting better education by avoiding the free-public school system.

Here's a hint dude.... I had a guy in 11th grade high school, ask me how to do a math problem on his calculator. Our fully socialized government run school system is failing just as bad as your free-public schools there.

He also complained that 50% of college students drop out without a degree. Same here in the US. Welcome to normal. Get over it. Many students drop out because they discovered what they want to do with their life, and don't need a degree to do it. Others find that they hate the field they are in, and yet don't know what they want to do, and thus drop out.

My sister discovered that she actually loves being a stay at home mother, with her 5 children. She dropped out, and now years later, is considered finishing up her degree. Again.... a 50% drop out rate is *normal*. Has nothing to do with the evil capitalist free-market system.

Also he mentions that teacher pay in public schools is 40% of an Engineer or Doctor. Well no freakin duh. Same here with our fully socialized public school system. Both my parents were teachers, while my uncles were an Engineer and a Doctor. Each of my uncles made over $120,000 a year, and my parents combined income was $120,000 a year. Dude.... an engineer is worth more than a teacher. Welcome to the real world.

Also he seems to ignore that teachers at private schools earn more than public school teachers. If he really wants teachers to earn more, he should support more private schools, and fewer public ones.

Lastly he talks about the wealthy 1%, and the Gini, and HDI, and income inequality. None of that matters. The goal of education, is to educate. Not to fix income inequality. If I go to school to learn about Music Therapy, I'm going to earn $25,000 a year. Because what I learned to do, isn't worth that much. It's not education's job to fix my income. It's my job to fix my income. An Engineer, or CEO of a company, *SHOULD* earn more than some guy who can play the flute. Our income is NOT going to be equal, and it shouldn't. Education isn't here to fix that. Nor will it, no matter what you think.

I didn't bother to read part 3. There was more than enough discrediting material from the first two.

Again, this guy a freakin moron. It's amazing how often these 'Professors' tend to be more stupid arrogant and dumb than their own students. I don't know what area this guy is a 'Professor' in, but he needs to go back to that area, and stay there. He looks more retarded with every sentence he writes in this blog.

 

What don't you think kids should know that is taught on standardized tests?

 

As if GINI mattered. He also skipped that graduation rate has climbed dramatically and literacy is up and income levels across the board etc... As of because chile is getting ORCD rates only, (and a 32% higher graduation rate then our Hispanic students), it is a failure. Well a generation ago half off chile couldn't read. A good portion of these children's parents are illiterate and try are still competing. If this isn't what a success story looks like what does?

 

You do realize I hope that Ravitch was for years one of the leading proponents of Charter Schools. She oversaw the setting up of many such schools. Then she started to actually look at the results, and they were disastrous for students and communities. Yes, there are quite a few good Charter Schools, just as there are quite a few excellent Public Schools. But overall Charter schools are subject to much more corruption, much more manipulation of test scores, financial fraud, and poor results for students.

 

They are common occurrences wherever you have high stakes testing, whether Unionized or not. Such cheating and teaching to the test are driven by administrators not the teachers, since it is the Administrators who will lose their jobs first (administrators are not unionized, by law they cannot be). In fact you are more likely to find such behaviors in non-unionized schools, since teachers have no power to negotiate working conditions which includes things like curriculum development and teaching practices. To claim that this kind of behavior is caused by Unions is unfounded and just plain nonsense.

 

I really don't think there should be so much focus on standardized testing period, but another problem is that a lot of these tests just don't test knowledge, like the SAT. The SAT essentially just measures how well you understand the questions on the test and spot the obvious tricks in the questions designed to trip you and make you fail, but it doesn't really test knowledge except for maybe some of the harder math questions. How many countless hours do parents and students spend worrying over how a bad SAT score means a life as a janitor or burger-flipper? I see it all the time in my community, but is it really that pertinent later in life? I know plenty of kids that didn't do great on the SATs and turned out just fine. Obviously, the SAT is only one test but it is the one that all high school students have to take, and I wish that if our schools are going to revolve around standardized tests that we can at least do better than the SAT and create a test that actually tests knowledge learned in high school. From what I understand the ACT is different and more knowledge-based.

 

By keeping profit away from education. It pollutes and steers real education away from our youth. When a for profit school commandeere's over an educational system, making money takes precedence. Not education! The Chilean experiment proved that.

 

It isn't made to test knowledge, it is made to test analysis and comprehension.

I am not sure you answered the question for people who are against school accountability because it encourages teaching to the test. what high school required tests, (SAT and ACT are not), do you think tests a skill set that a student shouldn't have to master? What part of the teaching to the test don't you like?

What does creative teaching look like and why wouldn't it help a student on a standardized tests.?

What is more important, knowledge or intelligence; when testing a students scholastic aptitude?

 

Their results are better then before. Markedly so. They have a higher graduation rate among Hispanics then we do. What failure specifically are you talking about?

Most private schools are non profit.

If the service is bad and they don't like the school they can just switch. And they are, increasingly away from public schools. Up to 32% according to your blog have left for charter schools. You don't know those kids or the names of the schools. How are you so sure thy all made the wrong choice?

Voucher programs have been working as well in chile as they have in Sweden and every other country it is practiced, and the freer the system the better the results. Sweden is probably the best model out there. Trouncing our schools, something that they could not say in the past.

 

Just because the people teaching our kids are actively trying to cover up complacency, doesn't mean we should stop looking.

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Do the bad charter schools stay open?

Do the bad public schools stay open?

 

Honestly, I'm not entirely in favor of standardized tests. I understand the reasoning, but the results are not always a positive.

It is entirely possible to teach a child how to take a test, and then they can take the test, and still not know the fundamentals and problem solving skills.

For example, you could be asked what the value of Pi is, and be able to answer 3.141, and yet not know how that number was reached. Teachers are often encouraged to teach what answer the test will be looking for, without teaching the whole of algebra.

Both my parents were public school teachers, and especially my mother often remarked that she found herself going over standardized test answers over and over again, instead of .... teaching.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, you have private schools, like Columbus Academy. Which consistently perform slightly lower on standardized tests than top suburban schools. Yet they are also rated the best school in all of central ohio to have your kids in. THe reason is that the kids are simply educated at the best possible rate. They don't stay at the standardized test level, in order to get good test results. I know this because I was invited to go there, and I discovered that their 9th grade students were learning the exact same things I was as a Senior at the public schools. They were a full 3 years ahead of public school students.

If you have two groups of students, one which is being taught the material that very year, and another group that was taught that material 2 years ago, which is going to do better? The group that's fresh and learning it now, or the group that learned it 2 years ago? Obviously the fresh group is going to do better on the test, even though the group that's two years ahead of the curve, is actually doing better on education.

This is why you have countries like Finland, that has a top performing school system, and yet has no standardized testing at all. (or at least didn't in the past).

And lastly, the fundamental problem with standardized testing, is that it assumes all kids can learn at the same rate, or that they will choose to learn at the same rate. If a kid does not wish to learn, there is nothing you can do to force him to. Yet, that's going to show up on standardized tests, and then teachers and school administrators will get the blame, and the political fall out. As much as we like to blame teachers unions (and they do deserve much blame), the reality is they are caught in a no-win situation. They have students they can't get rid of, and yet either are not capable, or are not willing to learn, and they get stuck with the blame. This is why cheating and grade fixing is wide spread in public schools.

Not an excuse, but we do need to face the facts.

 

I would think that having a massive union behind your job, backing you with regulations and hoops administrates have to go through to fire a bad teacher, would make cheating less risky in Union dominated school districts. The Rubber Rooms in New York for example, where teachers that couldn't be fired, and yet couldn't be allowed to teach, were allowed to sit in a room collecting full pay. It would seem to me, that would make cheating fairly risk-less for the teachers.

What evidence do you have that private schools have higher levels of systemic cheating?

 

"...Finland, that has a top performing school system, and yet has no standardized testing at all."


Taxcutter asks:
How do you know that it you don't test?

 

But it didn't. That's the whole point. All the evidence, even the evidence that you yourself linked to, shows that they are fair better educated now, than ever before in the socialized non-profit past.

Even to this very day, the evidence proves the exact opposite. If non-profit schools were doing better at education, then we should see that parents are not willing to pay extra money to send their kids to for-profit schools, when public schools are free. Yet instead we see that parents are very much willing to avoid free non-profit schools, and pay more to go to a for-profit school.

Are you claiming that 64% of all parents, are actually intentionally spending money to get their children a worse education? That's not logical.

So, no, it doesn't prove that. It proves the exact opposite of what you claim.

Your cited links were of an idiot. Blogging stupidity.

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When Finnish students are tested in other countries, they perform better. Finland itself, has no standardized testing.

 

"By keeping profit away from education."

Taxcutter says:
Measure performance by non-profitability? If that were true, the wasteful unionized US public schools would be paragons of excellence.

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"When Finnish students are tested in other countries, they perform better."

Taxcutter says:
The Finns offshore their testing?

 

Even to this very day, the evidence proves the exact opposite.[/quote] If non-profit schools were doing better at education, then we should see that parents are not willing to pay extra money to send their kids to for-profit schools, when public schools are free. Yet instead we see that parents are very much willing to avoid free non-profit schools, and pay more to go to a for-profit school.

Are you claiming that 64% of all parents, are actually intentionally spending money to get their children a worse education? That's not logical.

So, no, it doesn't prove that. It proves the exact opposite of what you claim.

Your cited links were of an idiot. Blogging stupidity.

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When Finnish students are tested in other countries, they perform better. Finland itself, has no standardized testing.[/QUOTE]

 

[/quote]

You mean this kind of evidence; http://www.presstv.ir/detail/238132.html; http://www.presstv.ir/detail/238132.htmlwww.presstv.ir/detail/205542.html; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Chilean_protests

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Apprently they are well educated enough now to organize strikes and complain about what exactly?