Worth Reading: Bracey and Horn

Bracey at Huffington Post – Mayoral Control of Schools: The New Tyranny

[Excerpt] "The Spring 2009 issue of Rethinking Schools, said that, as Daley's man, Duncan "has shown himself to be the central messenger, manager and staunch defender of corporate involvement in, and privatization of, public schools, closing schools in low-income neighborhoods of color with little community input, limiting local democratic control, undermining the teachers union and promoting competitive merit pay for teachers."

The most important corporate involvement involves the 132-year-old Commercial Club of Chicago. Yet that organization recently published Still Left Behind, slamming Chicago's public schools as awful and that the reforms they've endured were designed to make the adults running the schools look good, not improve the lives of children. You could say the Club stabbed Arne in the back except that they did it upfront in the open, without once mentioning Duncan's name. The Club report backs up its case with many data.

Newsweek said the [Chicago] district "is mired in urban woes--and, in some cases, a sense of complacency." Complacency? Daley has had control of Chicago's schools for 13 years and Duncan was there for seven of them, but the test scores above are evidence that they didn't do much to stir anything but the public relations pot. [Make sure to read the entire thing as he also deals with dicator Bloomberg.]

Jim Horn at Schools Matter –Right Wing Sludge Tanks Gush Over Obama's "No Excuses" Philosophy

In fact, "no excuses!" is not new at all, but the title of a book by the high-powered Brahmin couple, the Thermstroms, whose 2003 No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning sounded the clarion call to declare all-out war on the deficient cultures of the black, the brown, the poor--anyone outside the acid vanilla values of a shrinking middle class scrambling for the front seats of the global economic bus. It was the official opening of the the 21st Century anti-cultural war against the weak (see Edwin Black for history of the 20th Century version), a war that is being spearheaded by the push for segregated corporate charter boot camps intended to brainwash poor children with the worldview that comes naturally to soccer-playing, carefree lads of the leafy suburbs.

The Duncanator: Need a School to Be Closed?

Somone giving you trouble in forcing mayoral control or charter schools down their throats?

Call on THE DUNCANATOR

Robots in Education

Jerry Bracey makes an offer:

I offer a dinner for two (not including me as one of the two) at the best restaurant in Port Townsend, Washington--your choice--to the first of you who actually pins Arne Duncan down on something specific. The June 2009 issue of Sunset magazine identified PT, a town of under 10,000, as "Paris on the Olympic Peninsula," so it's not a totally trivial offer. Can anyone remember anyone who is more slippery about what he's REALLY going to do than model Robot Arne? Transportation and housing to and from PT not included.

Posted as "Robots in Education" at www.huffingtonpost.com/gerald-bracey.
by Jerry Bracey

Engineers have made great advances in robotics in recent years. Everyday-robots can vacuum rugs and mop floors. More advanced models can act as secretary of education. Call it the Arne model. Boot it up and it talks and talks and talks. But it appears to lack two functions, the ability to say anything concrete and the ability to link its various sayings with the old human function known as logic.

For instance, in his June 14 speech to a National Governors Association meeting, Robot Arne said, “The genius of our system is that much of the power to shape our future has wisely been distributed to the states instead of being confined to Washington.” Yet in an interview after that talk he said, “What you’ve seen over the past couple year is a growing recognition from political leaders, educators, unions, nonprofits—literally every sector—coming to realize that 50 state doing their own thing doesn’t make sense.” A concept goes from wisdom to nonsense in a single speech!

In none of the speeches I’ve heard or read—and I’ve been tracking them pretty closely, has the robot Arne used the word “Constitution,” a document which, in the field of education is supposed to ensure that each state does its own thing.

What he does often mention, as in his speech to the National Press Club in late May, is, “What we have had as a country, I’m convinced, is what we call a race to the bottom.” That the two “we’s” obviously have different referents is of little import. What is, is that in that downward race, some 35,000 schools have been identified as “failing” under that Katrina of public education, No Child Left Behind. “Last year,” Duncan told the governors,” “there were about 5,000 schools in 'restructuring' under NCLB. These schools have failed to make adequate yearly progress for at least five years in a row.”

These are presumably the 5,000 chronically under-performing schools that robot Arne wants to close and “turn around.” Such an action raises several questions. First, just where are 5,000 excellent principals to run these schools? Have our star leaders just been waiting in the wings all this time? And what about the needed tens of thousands of ace teachers? Where are they? Are they lurking out there somewhere in the bayous of Louisiana or the sands of Nevada?

Second, Duncan told an audience at a breakfast sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor he wants “college-ready, career-ready international standards, very high bar.” (Often when he speaks extemporaneously I hear the sound of grammarian teeth-gnashing). Well, if our race to the bottom has generated 35,000 failing schools, 5,000 of which are hopeless in robot Arne’s eyes, what will a much higher bar produce?

Finally, supposing for a moment we could find all those teachers and principals, would that be enough? Even an outlet not known for its searching questions to people in positions of authority, U. S. News & World Report, caught the lack of logic here. “Would simply replacing teachers and principals work? If all the other factors in a low-achieving student’s life—family, neighborhood, social life—were to remain constant, would substituting an outstanding teacher for an ineffective teacher reverse the achievement levels? Are good teachers and principals all that is needed to turn around struggling schools, the majority of which are in impoverished communities where the parents might not have the time to help their children succeed in school?”

The magazine stops short of describing the full range of the problems kids in impoverished neighborhoods face: lack of adequate prenatal care, ingestion of alcohol and drugs, having only one parent, food insecurity, toxins such as mercury and lead, and inadequate or missing health care (that kid who’s having trouble learning to read might need an eye doctor; the kid who’s inattentive might not be able to hear what the teacher is saying; the kid who can’t concentrate might have a head full of tooth cavities).

Finally, robot Arne told the governors he was throwing $350 million into test development to back up the new high standards because, “I think in this country we have too many bad tests.” I’m sure ETS, CTB-McGraw Hill, Pearson, etc., loved that one since they make most of them, but if that’s true, then logic might make one wonder if those “bad tests” were the right instruments to identify the bad schools. But as I said at the start, Robot Arne doesn’t do logic.

And it’s too bad the reporter covering the talk didn’t ask Arne what a “good” test would look like. That question would have produced a deluge of clichés (”tests that measure whether students are mastering complex materials and can apply their knowledge,” etc.), but nothing specific because, as I said at the start, Robot Arne doesn’t do concrete.

Graphic by David B.

Gerald Bracey on The 'Fastest Growing Occupations'

From Susan Ohanian:

This is the text of an invited address given by Gerald R. Bracey at the annual convention of the American Educational Research Association in San Diego on Tuesday, April 14, 2009. Dr. Bracey was invited to give the "Charles Degarmo Invited Lecture" to AERA. Dr. Bracey explained in an e-mail two days before he delivered the address,"What follows are the first few pages of an invited address I will give at the annual convention of the American Educational Research Association in San Diego on Tuesday. The pages quote a lot of statistics from President Obama and Secretary of Education Duncan and then show that the statistics are all wrong. It pains me to do this since I campaigned for Obama, canvassed for him, donated to the campaign and, of course, voted for him. But listening to what he says about education, it is easy to see why Diane Ravitch said that in education, Obama is a third term for Bush and Duncan is Margaret Spellings in drag.

I've excerpted Bracey on the point that most jobs in the future are fairly low level, a perfect way to explain the way the ed deformers are trying to fool the public into believing college is necessary while at the same time setting up a school system focused on test prep and narrow skills. What they are doing is serving Walmart and McDonalds future low-skilled employees.

What about those 30 fastest growing occupations? I’ve never seen that statistic presented in quite that way, but it also means that half of the 30 fastest growing jobs DON’T require a B.A. or better. But, the signal point about this statistic is that the 30 fastest growing jobs don’t account for many jobs. And the few that do are occupations like personal care aides, home health aides, nursing aides — low-paying service sector jobs needed in and for an aging nation.

Retail sales accounts for more jobs than the top ten fastest growing occupations combined. For every systems engineer needed by a computer firm, Wal-Mart needs about 15 people on the floor. The ten occupations accounting for the largest NUMBER of jobs in a Bureau of Labor Statistics projection from 2006 to 2016 were retail sales, cashiers, office clerks, registered nurses, janitors and cleaners, bookkeeping clerks, waiters and waitresses, food preparers and servers, customer service representatives, and truck and tractor drivers. I will show the falsity of Miller's and Duncan's linking of education and economic crises in detail later in the talk, but it terrifies me that our new President and Secretary of Education have apparently bought into the old falsehoods.

Little wonder that Diane Ravitch said that in education Obama was a third term for Bush and that Duncan was Margaret Spellings in drag.

Obama and Duncan seem to be following the long-established line that you can get away with saying just about anything you choose about public schools and no one will call you on it. People will believe anything you say about public education as long as it’s bad.

The real causes of the current economic mess

I think one of the reasons we see so many such comments is captured a bit in the first two quotes. Neither Miller nor the President could bring himself to actually blame the schools for today’s economic catastrophe, but they laid on them some of the responsibility for any recovery. There is a long history of trying to link test scores to a nation’s economic health. That notion needs to become extinct

Let’s take a moment to reflect on the causes of the current mess. Banks used very little capital of their own to buy extremely risky real estate assets, granting subprime mortgages and mortgages on overpriced houses, often without even making credit checks. Then they used virtually unfathomable instruments such as credit default swaps to insure against loss. But insurance companies that insured those risks, like AIG didn’t have the capital to pay off the swaps when the banks’ bets went bad. The situation has produced a slight reworking of the opening rhetorical flourishes of that landmark document, "A Nation At Risk:"

We feel compelled to report to the American people that the business and financial foundations of our society are being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a Nation and a people. What was unimaginable a generation ago has begun to occur—companies that extolled themselves as models of excellent practices have deceived the American people with sloppy, undisciplined, and greedy practices that are driving Americans out of their homes, threatening their retirements, and dashing their hopes of a financially secure future. Indeed, if an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre corporate financial performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.

Read it all: http://www.susanohanian.org/show_commentaries.html?id=661

Note, especially to subscribers:
Make sure to check the Ed Notes side panel for daily updates and other important information.