Race to the Bottom

Uncovering the Secret Forces Destroying American Public Education

Luke Rosiak

• Publisher: Broadside e-books
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780063056725
• eBook ISBN: 9780063056732
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Everyone wants: High schoolers to graduate well-prepared for jobs. Improved STEM literacy. Greater achievement for inner-city children. Happiness for all children. So why are liberals spending billions of dollars working against those goals?

In Race to the Bottom, Luke Rosiak uncovers the shocking reason why American education is failing: Powerful special interest groups are using our kids as guinea pigs in vast ideological experiments. These groups’ initiatives aren’t focused on making children smarter—but on implementing a radical agenda, no matter the effect on academic standards.

Nonprofits pump billions into initiatives meant to redress racial inequities. Rather than fixing the problem, districts with a big gap between white and black test scores hire consultants who claim the tests are meaningless because they are “racist.” These consultants’ judgments allow school districts to ignore their own failures—ultimately hurting minority students and perpetuating racism.

That is just one example. Drawing on his years in investigative journalism, Rosiak did a deep dive into school files, financial records, and parents’ stories. What he found is that nonprofit influence has crept into the educational bureaucracy all over America. Corrupt school boards and quack diversity consultants abound. Teachers drawing government pay claim it’s unsafe to return to in-person school, but “double dip” teaching in-person private classes. And amid all this focus on money and equity, academic standards are crumbling, which hurts American kids in ways we’ll be suffering for decades.

Race to the Bottom is the first comprehensive exposé of the way radical ideology and self-serving administrators are destroying academic quality in America’s K-12 schools. Rigorous and deeply-researched, this is essential reading for anyone who cares about the future of our kids.

1

Cheating Math

Here is the first thing to know about educators: they are failing miserably. The academic performance of American kids is terrible and has been for a long time. Educators apparently do not know how to fix it; nothing they have tried has worked.

As a result, the education industry has settled on finding ways to look good rather than be good. Since most people cannot see what is happening inside classrooms, superintendents and principals live and die on statistics that attempt to gauge a school’s quality. They play an Enron-like numbers game, finding ways to juke the stats and mask problems. This helps their careers, but harms kids.

GRADUATION DECEPTION

Weeks before the 2016 election, President Barack Obama announced a significant achievement: the nation’s high school graduation rate had reached an all-time high of 83 percent. Ever since the Bush administration ordered states to begin calculating graduation rates in a standardized way in 2008 and this data began being published as of the 2010–11 school year, the rates had risen nicely every year. American education appeared to be on the upswing.¹

“The high school graduation rate has risen steadily over President Obama’s time in office, growing by about four percentage points since the 2010–2011 school year,” the White House proclaimed. “This increase reflects important progress schools across the country are making to better prepare students for college and careers after graduation.”²

Obama made the announcement at Benjamin Banneker Academic High School in Washington, D.C., a city he identified as the poster child for this triumph. “The District of Columbia made the greatest amount of progress in the Nation, improving its graduation rates by seven percentage points,” the White House noted, adding that the district had “received support through Race to the Top—the Obama Administration’s signature education reform initiative.”

At nearby Ballou High School several months after Obama’s 2016 speech, every one of the school’s 190 seniors was accepted to college—remarkable considering that the previous year only 3 percent of students (including the now-seniors) had managed to pass their citywide English exams, and not a single student met the math standards.³

“The class of 2017 at Ballou will go down in history. They are the first class to be accepted, entirely, to college,” NPR heralded. “For months and months, staff tracked students’ success, often working side by side with them in the school library on college applications. . . . Then there was money. Grants, donations and district funds took students on college tours around the country. The school kept spirits and motivation up with pep rallies, T-shirts and free food.”

Student Trayvon McKoy said, “Everyone walks around with their heads high now.” He was off to study music production at Bethune-Cookman University, a Florida school that would be put on probation by its accreditor the next year.⁴

The only problem, as NPR realized months after it published its inspirational tale, was that Ballou’s success was built entirely on large-scale malfeasance.

In reality, all but eleven of its esteemed graduates were truant so often that the courts should have been notified. Half were truant for more than three months, which, according to district policy, meant they should have failed. Two months before graduation, only fifty-seven students were on track to graduate. One hundred sixty-four walked across the stage two months later.⁵ How was this possible?

Teachers said administrators pressured them to change kids’ grades and pass no-show students. D.C. also allowed students who failed a class to make it up with something called “credit recovery” courses. Ballou would enroll students in these courses concurrently with the actual class—before they had even failed—indicating that one required far less effort than the other. “They go, ‘Oh, I ain’t gotta do no work in your class; I can just go over here, do a little PowerPoint, pass and graduate,’” music teacher Monica Brokenborough said. “That’s setting that kid up for failure just so you can showboat you got this graduation rate.”⁶

When standardized test results were released later, they were little different from previous years: while every Ballou senior may have been accepted to college, not a single one had met the modest math standards necessary to score as “college- and career-ready” on the citywide exam, which was administered just before graduation.⁷

The fact that everyone was admitted to college did little to improve anyone’s life. One hundred eighty-three seniors were accepted to the University of the District of Columbia, but only sixteen actually enrolled for the fall semester. One who made it to a four-year college admitted she did not want to be there. “I don’t want to. I could care less,” she said.⁸

The real scandal was that this was no aberration. As Obama stood in D.C. and lauded the rising graduation rate, similar maneuvers were responsible for increases throughout the country.

That could be seen even without leaving the D.C. area. Prince George’s County, Maryland, one of America’s wealthiest black-majority counties, showed an 8.5 percent rise in graduation rates over the four years leading up to 2017. Its chief executive paraded with banners and pom-poms to celebrate. But these stats were the result of outright fabrications by administrators.⁹

Two weeks before graduation day, 42 percent of DuVal High School seniors were set to fail. Counselor Troy Sibila wrote to teachers at 10:30 p.m. on May 10, 2017: “If there is any last-minute, (rub a genie in a bottle), assistance you can [provide to] help our future scholars, please assist.” On May 24, nearly 92 percent of seniors walked across the graduation stage. “I did what I was ordered to do,” Sibila said later. “It was coming from the CEO’s team.” Counselor Yvette Thomasson, who, like Sibila, was fired after the scandal came to light, said she should get her job back because “[w]e did what we were told to do, help at-risk kids.”¹⁰

Whistle-blowers presented school board members with evidence that at schools across the county, courses students had never taken were added to their records, and administrators altered grades. Only four of the fourteen school board members chose to act on the evidence. The revelations forced the district to clean up some of its practices, and half of its graduation-rate gains evaporated the next year. The remaining half may be explained by the fact that misconduct still had not stopped. State auditors found that more than 60 percent of 2018 graduates had so many unexcused absences that they should not have qualified for a diploma.¹¹

In neighboring Montgomery County, Maryland, similar loopholes were in place. Students who failed state-mandated exams could still graduate by completing a “bridge project.” Brian Donlon, a social studies teacher at Richard Montgomery High School, alerted his supervisors that kids were given bridge project worksheets filled out in advance. When the school did nothing, he went to the state. The state did not act, either. Maryland State Board of Education member David Steiner said he feared “an almost total absence of consistent or defensible standards” for so-called bridge projects. Bureaucrats could not tell him whether they had ever declined to rubber-stamp a bridge project with a passing grade.¹²

The gambit to take kids who were illiterate or refused to set foot in school and transform them into glowing statistics for administrators and politicians—without actually improving the kids—also spawned a lucrative industry for for-profit companies. In 2013, Chicago faced a near 62 percent graduation rate. It contracted with the for-profit EdisonLearning to operate special schools, and the rate increased to nearly 79 percent by 2019.¹³ In 2011, the company paid basketball legend Magic Johnson to license his name and encouraged youth to “Join Magic’s Team.” If someone showed interest in one of its schools, call center employees dialed three times a day for forty-five days to get him or her to enroll. In 2017, the company paid students in gift cards for referring others. It paid pastors of African American churches in Chicago’s South Side to recruit students. A similar firm, called Accelerated Learning Solutions, told employees to “bring a gift” to Florida high school guidance counselors. They also reminded them of the real gift: by offloading bad students to their for-profit school, their own school’s statistics would look better.¹⁴

What magic were these for-profit companies doing to make up years of learning in just months? To hear them tell it, it was technology. Their students engaged in self-directed learning on computers. In practice that meant this: In a strip mall in Columbus, Ohio, three students sat in a massive computer lab, surrounded by empty seats. The computers presented multiple-choice questions, and students would “keep clicking till they got it right,” as graduate Corey Timmons explained. Students often did not even read the questions, but if they did ask for help, teachers would say, “Just google the questions and do the best you can.” Though only three students attended the required hours that day, Edison billed taxpayers for educating 171 full-time that month. After a student enrolled, there were no thrice-a-day phone calls begging him to show up.¹⁵

Did educators really believe that students who had spit in their faces, cut class for months, or struggled to write had suddenly become high achievers? At Brooklyn’s John Dewey High School, a credit recovery program that allowed “failing pupils to get passing grades by playing games, doing work online or taking abbreviated programs that critics argue lack academic rigor” was called “Easy pass” by students. Principal Kathleen Elvin had brought the graduation rate from 56 percent in 2009 to 74 percent in 2014, until teachers blew the whistle on a grade-fixing scam in 2015. Hundreds of students had been placed in fake classes, with one teacher purportedly teaching fifty-two classes in a semester. Elvin was not disciplined, perhaps because a disciplinary trial would show that New York City’s Department of Education headquarters was complicit. Instead, the headquarters hired her, giving her a $157,000 job in the central office; her salary grew to $184,000 in 2018, her last full year before retiring. City council member Robert Holden said similar activity was happening throughout city schools. “They’re doing it to make their bottom line look good. That’s the definition of organized crime. That’s what the [New York City] DOE has turned into,” he said.¹⁶

SUBJECTIVE GRADING

Similar efforts to show positive outcomes occur through lowering standards. For the 2012–13 school year, 37 percent of Colorado’s high school graduates needed remedial courses in college, a sign that a high school diploma did not mean much. But that was for colleges and employers to deal with. To improve their reported high school graduation rate, state officials soon eroded standards further, eliminating science and social studies requirements. In 2015, the Los Angeles school board lowered the “passing” grade for college preparation courses from a C to a D.¹⁷

In the education world, fads with names like “Social and Emotional Learning (SEL)” and “Standards-Based Assessment (SBA)” are common. These trendy educational “pedagogies” generally have one thing in common: they use subjective measures, result in grade inflation, and sometimes obscure record-keeping that would show whether kids knew basic math, science, and reading.

In wealthy Arlington, Virginia, elementary schools abolished letter grades, complaining that “‘ABCDE’ grading drives students towards ‘A.’” The grades were replaced with three “standards-based assessment” categories: “Approaching Mastery,” “Developing Mastery,” and “Insufficient Evidence.” The worst grade a student could get seemed to condemn the teacher for being obtuse: “The teacher does not have evidence to determine a student’s mastery level for this skill.” At the high end of this scale, there is no objective way of measuring mastery. “Because every student is unique, SBA accepts any demonstration of skill as valid, so teachers use a wide array of student work examples, artifacts, conferences, and analyses to meaningfully understand each learner.” The policy is described as “research-best practices-based.” Under “References,” it lists an article published in Slate titled “The Case Against Grades: They Lower Self-Esteem, Discourage Creativity, and Reinforce the Class Divide.”¹⁸

In San Francisco’s school system, an in-house professional development training program called “Grading for Equity with Synergy and Google Classroom” told teachers to grade on an SBA scale of 0–4 instead of 0–100. The trainer explained the benefits: “Mathematically, the idea that it’s going to be working a little bit more in the student’s favor” for bad students, noting that a student who simply does not complete a third of his work would get the equivalent of a C+. In “the inequitable kind of standard style,” he said, he would get an F.

Whether grades were inflated through fraud or “pedagogies,” reality threatened to catch up in the form of one pesky thing: state standardized tests. There was often little correlation between a student’s grade on his report card and his score on the test that measured the same content. At the Science School for Exploration and Discovery in the Bronx borough of New York City, 94 percent of students passed their math classes in the 2017–18 school year, but only 2 percent passed their standardized math exams. At nearby Harbor Heights Middle School, every student passed their English classes, but only 7 percent passed the state exam. Similar figures abound. A New York school spokes...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1. Cheating Math
• 2. The Mathematician
• 3. School Board
• 4. Riots
• 5. Don Quixote
• 6. Critical Race Theory
• 7. Race to the Bottom
• 8. Funding
• 9. Brainwashed
• 10. Child Activists
• 11. Foundations
• 12. Arabella Inc
• 13. The Crisis
• 14. One Fairfax
• 15. Social Engineers
• 16. Bootleggers and Baptists
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• About the Author
• Copyright
• About the Publisher