Showing posts with label Geoffrey Canada. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Geoffrey Canada. Show all posts

Wednesday, October 13, 2010

O Canada, So Inglorious and Untrue

Hey, I get to sing the Canadian national anthem at hockey games when a Canadian team is in town. Now it has new meaning.

How interesting that the two big heroes in Waiting for Superman - Michelle Rhee and Geoffrey Canada - have had their reps seriously tarnished since the release of the film. Rhee of course was the iceberg hitting the bad ship Fenty, as she proved she could take down entire political careers with a single bound. Superwoman indeed.

What is there to say about a guy who distorts - and I'll even go so far as to say lies - about the reasons for the claimed success of his school? Nothing is more revealing that Geoffrey Canada has a political and not an educational agenda than this statement: Successful charters have demonstrated that a longer school day and year, increased accountability and a reliance on data to drive instruction can help children who have fallen behind."

So, O Canada, who makes outrageous claims the Harlem Children's Zone "success" is due to his ability to fire any teacher he wants when in fact the major success is his concept of cradle to college services to the kids - health, social work, etc. And those low class sizes? And that second teacher in the room? Fagetaboutit.

We should all be celebrating the concept of increased services to the kids and Canada himself for having raised money to be able to do it. But when he then goes and negates that achievement - fagetabouthim.

Now that his test scores are not what they should be considering creaming and services, the edubusiness crowd is raising doubts. We shouldn't be cheering that these services would are questioned because of questionable test scores. But bottom liners are bottom liners. It's like saying if you don't get a month of cloudy days and no sun tan to show for it you might as well turn off the sun.

Canada is being hoisted on his own petard.

I'm not sad for him. Instead of making the case that all students should receive these services and fighting for them, he joined in the attack on public schools, their teachers and their unions, claiming it wasn't the fact that he had so much money at his disposal but because there was no union in his schools.

The NY Times' Sharon Otterman has an interesting piece on Canada's HCZ. Don't you love this one:
Last week, Mr. Canada was in Birmingham, England, addressing Prime Minister David Cameron and members of his Conservative Party about improving schools.
England? Aren't there problems here to solve? POLITICAL AGENDA!!!!

Now, here he actually contradicts his other message with something we can support as Otterman writes:
A drop-off occurred, in spite of private donations that keep class sizes small, allow for an extended school day and an 11-month school year, and offer students incentives for good performance like trips to the Galápagos Islands or Disney World.
The parent organization of the schools, the Harlem Children’s Zone, enjoys substantial largess, much of it from Wall Street. While its cradle-to-college approach, which seeks to break the cycle of poverty for all 10,000 children in a 97-block zone of Harlem, may be breathtaking in scope, the jury is still out on its overall impact. And its cost — around $16,000 per student in the classroom each year, as well as thousands of dollars in out-of-class spending — has raised questions about its utility as a nationwide model.
Mr. Canada, 58, who began putting his ideas into practice on a single block, on West 119th Street, in the mid-1990s, does not apologize for the cost of his model, saying his goals are wider than just fixing a school or two. His hope is to prove that if money is spent in a concentrated way to give poor children the things middle-class children take for granted — like high-quality schooling, a safe neighborhood, parents who read to them, and good medical care — they will not pass on the patterns of poverty to another generation.
“You could, in theory, figure out a less costly way of working with a small number of kids, and providing them with an education,” Mr. Canada said. “But that is not what we are attempting to do. We are attempting to save a community and its kids all at the same time.”
I would say bravo to this last statement. So why try to make it seem like something else when talking out of the other side of his mouth?

Accountable Talk gets into this in his post: Superman Gets Riddled With Bullets
the Harlem Children's Zone schools didn't fare so well with the recalibrated ELA and math tests. They also didn't score well on the city's report card, with one school scoring a C and the other a B. Remember, these are the schools touted ad nauseum by Waiting for Superman and the Oprah show as the model we all should follow. Here's some reporting by the Times that makes the point a bit sharper:

But most of the seventh graders, now starting their third year in the school, are still struggling. Just 15 percent passed the 2010 state English test, a number that Mr. Canada said was “unacceptably low” but not out of line with the school’s experience in lifting student performance over time. Several teachers have been fired as a result of the low scores, and others were reassigned, he said.

Even more shocking than these pitiful results is the fact that these schools are blessed with advantages that city public school teachers can only dream of, to wit:

In the tiny high school of the zone’s Promise Academy I, which teaches 66 sophomores and 65 juniors (it grows by one grade per year), the average class size is under 15, generally with two licensed teachers in every room. There are three student advocates to provide guidance and advice, as well as a social worker, a guidance counselor and a college counselor, and one-on-one tutoring after school. 
I remember reading that O Canada responded with the same "At least we're better than Rochester" excuse BloomKlein have been using to defend their test scores as being better than the rest of the state. The NY Post even made this point again the other day in it's confused meandering over the test score issue, running around like headless chickens trying to attack everyone but BloomKlein. Oh, Canada said that his school did better than the surrounding public schools, giving me a stitch in my side from laughing too hard.

Mr. Talk is also astounded:
Are you kidding me? Two teachers in a class? Class sizes of 15? And you get those dismal results? This is a disgrace. THIS is the solution to all our educational problems? This is the model the entire nation is supposed to follow? And let's not forget that in order to get even these awful results, Canada dismissed an entire grade that wasn't meeting his "standards".

In my school, we have class sizes that range from 28 to 35, with just one teacher per room. We don't have any huge grants from billionaires or backing from Oprah, but our passing percentage was over four times higher than the results posted by the Times. And yes--we are those dreaded public school teachers who must be gotten rid of in favor of the charter school teachers that Mr. Canada prefers.
I left this comment at AT's Blog:
Let's not confuse Canada's educational vision, which I would think we want for all our kids, with his craven political attempts to vilify teachers and the unions. On the NBC Education Nation Harlem teacher Brian Jones went straight at Canada and he got real nasty - attributing his "results" to his ability to fire teachers instead of providing cradle to grave support. I don't care if his results are crappy - support for teachers and kids is what we want and if the scores don't show it right away we still should be fighting the bottom liners who want "results." Shame on Canada for playing this game and getting hoisted on his own petard.
Make sure to read the Amsterdam News take down of O Canada.

Leonie posted this: "Canada rebuts NY Times in Daily News"
Boy, the corporate reformers have a steady (and immediate!) pipeline into the oped page on the Daily news. They should rename the page in their honor.

 Oh, Canada has the nerve to say: "Successful charters have demonstrated that a longer school day and year, increased accountability and a reliance on data to drive instruction can help children who have fallen behind." 

Right, It's not the smaller class sizes or the 2nd teacher in the room. Nothing exposes Oh, C as a political operator rather than an educator than his blatant attempt to disguise what is really working in his own schools. "You see, we can get poor kids to do well with the same money," is the major refrain of the ed deformers. But I am repeating myself.

WfS Impact: Gates/Broad/ deformers aim for a WfS DVD in every pot
I think that the impact of Waiting for Superman has not been all that bad for the Real Reformers as it has forced people to take at closer look at the ed deform movement. WfS itself is a highly paid for (Gates just gave 2 million for promotion - the new Gates initiative will be a WfS DVD in every pot.

Here's a lovely update from Leonie on the progress of the WfS film:

Thankfully not doing so well and perhaps will be out of theaters soon…doing about as well as Aristocrats, movie about a dirty joke.  Perhaps that’s why they are giving out free tickets to CEC members etc. 

Waiting for Superman to Profit

Seventeen days after its debut, Davis Guggenheim's "Inconvenient Truth," starring Al Gore, had grossed $2,921,406 -- not huge, but a respectable amount of money for a documentary that would go on to win an Academy Award.
Guggenheim's latest effort on education policy, "Waiting for Superman," isn't fairing as well. Seventeen days after its debut, it has grossed $1.4 million. 
It's a great film, and it had all the buzz in the world, including major magazine cover stories, a tie-in election (the Washington, D.C. mayoral race), and an extensive media engagement campaign. But it isn't making a splash. 
By way of comparison, Michael Moore's "Farenheit 911" grossed more than $72 million. By comparison, "Waiting for Superman" is keeping pace with "The Aristocrats," a film about the dirtiest joke every told.

For those in the industry, the per-screen averages show the same twist. 
One big difference is that "Waiting for Superman"'s producers seem to have made a dedicated decision to screen the film for elite audiences. When you're grossing $50,000 a day, private screenings for teachers and education bureaucrats take away from your target audience.
Also, there's no Al Gore.
Leonie Haimson

Tuesday, October 5, 2010

Brian Jones at HuffPo: What I Learned at NBC's Education Nation Summit

A Real Reformer speaks out:

Brian Jones

Brian Jones
Teacher and activist Posted: October 4, 2010 01:13 PM

What I Learned at NBC's Education Nation Summit

Last week I participated in a panel discussion at NBC's Education Nation summit.
For those who missed it, Education Nation was effectively a two and a half day-long meeting of the minds for those who see privatization as the last word in fixing America's public schools. They are known as the "reform" movement.

Yes, NBC eventually conceded that some teachers needed to be sprinkled around the summit, and even some union leaders. But organizations such as Class Size Matters, or the new social justice-oriented leadership of the Chicago Teachers Union, or educators who promote progressive pedagogy, such as Rethinking Schools were, unfortunately, not included.

I was invited to speak on the recommendation of Steven Brill, who moderated the panel, and whom I originally met last year when he came to my school to research his latest feature article for the New York Times Magazine.

The "reform" line of thinking goes like this: The main problem with the schools is that the teachers have no incentive to work hard, and they are protected by a union; if we remove the union, teachers can respond to individual financial incentives and great things will become possible. That, wrapped in a powerful emotional package, with clever cartoons and brilliant editing, is the message delivered succinctly to the general public in the new film, "Waiting for 'Superman' ".

It occurs to me that this is a rather convenient storyline for the recession. Just as millions are losing their homes and facing endless months of unemployment, along comes a "movement" of billionaires -- Bill Gates, Eli Broad, Mark Zuckerberg -- fighting for "justice". The rich, you see, are altruistic. They're high-minded, they don't think about themselves, just the children. Meanwhile, the teachers, so the story goes, are the greedy ones. The teachers are selfish and self-interested. Really, it's a wonder we trust them around children at all.

If you were quite angry with Goldman Sachs a few months ago, don't be. They just gave Geoffrey Canada $20 million to build another charter school. If you thought that all these foreclosures and layoffs were caused by the wealthy, then "Waiting for 'Superman' " will tell you it's the opposite: it's the schools (specifically, the teachers in the schools) that are dragging down our neighborhoods.
My panel, "Good Apples: How can we keep good teachers, get rid of the bad ones, and put a new shine on the profession?" fit neatly into that narrative.

You can watch the panel online here and judge for yourself. Below, I simply want to develop a few points that were raised in the discussion.

How to train great teachers? I dared to suggest that it takes time to become a great teacher. Geoffrey Canada cut me off, saying, "We don't have time! We can't wait another ten years!" (He later backtracked and admitted that it takes time for a teacher to hone their craft.)

Yes, we have to have a sense of urgency. No one feels that more than parents. But he who shouts loudest about the problems doesn't necessarily have the answers.

"Waiting for 'Superman' " paints Canada as a kind of educational Chuck Yeager -- the pilot who first broke the sound barrier. So he seemed particularly incensed that I brought up the fact that after New York's test scores were re-scaled last year, only 38 percent of his students in Harlem Children's Zone 1 fell within the benchmark for "proficient" reading ability. Canada tried to change the subject to the better scoring Harlem Children's Zone 2.

But even if we assume that he's doing something wonderful, then we have to ask the question: what does it take to do that something wonderful? Apparently it takes the kind of wrap-around services that Canada aspires to provide his students from the cradle to graduation, such as health care. And, we should note, it apparently takes tens of millions of dollars.

Yet, while taking large checks from Wall Street on one hand, Canada insists that "it's not about resources" on the other.

I argued that wealthy people, who spend five figures on their own children's education, insist on small classes, beautiful facilities, and experienced teachers. I mentioned that the Harlem Children's Zone flagship building on 125th Street is beautiful, and that all children deserve such attractive surroundings.
Canada countered that his highest performing school is in a building with no windows. Then why, I wonder, does he need $20 million for new construction, especially when Harlem has the lowest school utilization rate in the city? Still, Canada insisted, "It's the not the building that drives teaching, it's what's going on inside those classrooms; not whether or not kids have a window to look out of, which ours don't."

Here we have a message honed to perfection... for the wealthy: the unions are the problem; the teachers need to be cheaper; give me money now for a few beautiful schools that can help break the unions and open up the education market; but don't worry, we don't want too much; we certainly don't want what your children have.

That's what I learned from NBC's Education Nation Summit. Beware CEOs who say teachers are the problem. And beware CEO solutions. You might find yourself in a room without windows.
WHAT YOU CAN DO: Educators dedicated to real reform in NYC can be contacted at http://www.waitingforsupermantruth.org/
Follow Brian Jones on Twitter: www.twitter.com/brainyandbrawny

See Ed Notes interview with Brian at the Real Reformer Rally at the opening of Waiting for Superman.