The Best Laid Plans Of Mice And Mayors

Miami teacher Paul Moore ruminates on the financial crisis' impact on the business model for education. - UPDATED


Oh, they had such grand plans for public education. Homage was paid to their ideological godfather Milton Friedman. In his 1950 book Capitalism, Friedman wrote that "The privatization of schooling would produce a new highly active and profitable industry."

Their pride and joy is burning as you read. It was never sustainable but they had us going for awhile, didn't they? It was immutable. It was eternal! It was a pig with lipstick in a poke!

Oh, they had such grand plans for public education. First the masters of the universe genuflected to their ideological godfather Milton Friedman. In his 1950 book Capitalism, Friedman wrote that "The privatization of schooling would produce a new highly active and profitable industry."

Then fueled with the fire of the Reagan revolution they put the finishing touches on their devious campaign at the Business Roundtable education summit in 1989. Standardized testing would be their primary weapon. The tests would isolate urban schools first and bury them under public posturing for accountability . The corporate vultures from Edison Schools and the others would move in to pick up the pieces and impose their gospel, the business model. Vouchers and charter schools would even redirect public monies to the destruction of public schools .

Toxic wastes, like incessant testing and mindless data collection and merit pay plans, would be pumped into the public school environment to sicken both teachers and students. And bye and bye the privatizers would have their brave new education system to serve their global economy.

And they were so close. They had their blueprint for legally closing public schools, the No Child Left Behind Act, in place. Billionaire Bloomberg and his CEO sidekick Joel Klein were in control in New York City. Mayor Daley and Arne Duncan were strangling the Chicago Public Schools. Mayor Villariagosa and Admiral Brewer were trying to get their hands around the throats of the Los Angeles Unified Public Schools. Jeb Bush, in and out of office, was calling the shots in Florida. Bill Gates had succeeded in winning Washington D.C. for Mayor Fenty and he in turn introduced the nation to a new level of ruthlessness and brutality in the person and policies of Michelle Rhee. Eli Broad's superintendents dotted the landscape from Vallas in New Orleans to Crew in Miami, chirping over the achievement gap and with grave voices declaring "the children of Singapore are eating our kids lunch." Many of those pesky democratically elected school boards had been eliminated.

Then just as the campaign appeared ready to bear fruit, their rationale for being, their precious global economy, crashed! Their pride and joy is burning as you read. It was supposed to be immutable. It was eternal! When the men of the Business Roundtable came down from their Charlottesville, Virginia education summit they were imbued with the Reagan Revolution's confidence. Now that's all gone.

A forlorn John Castellani's mug has been all over TV for the last couple weeks. He's the president of the Business Roundtable. Who could have imagined that less than twenty years after their education summit these same men would appear on their knees, hat in hand, to desperately plead with every public school teacher, parent and student to give them $3,000 as their share of a $700 billion public bailout. Goodness, what happened to their vaunted business model? Somehow these proponents of data driven education have no idea what their collateralized debt obligations (CDO's) and structured investment vehicles (SIV's) are worth. Most shockingly, the poster boys for accountability who pranced around with their noses in the air chanting "no excuses" over the battered minds and bodies of poor children, now beg for sympathy and want to be rescued by their victims!

Well it will take some time to clean up this mess, and we will suffer for their folly, but there is now some light ahead. Our corporate tormentors will soon slink away to lick their wounds and we will have the chance to rebuild the public schools, make them truly places of learning. Imagine there's no pacing guides, it's easy if you try. Our time under these sanctimonious, hypocritical blowhards is over! They have forfeited their right to any influence in our schools and in our lives.

Mail your No. 2 pencils to the Business Roundtable, swords into plowshares, standardized tests into poetry contests!

Long live Douglas Avella*! http://www.talkbx.com/tag/douglas-avella/

Paul A. Moore
Miami Carol City High School

*160 students in 4 classes left the entire papers blank on a [useless] practice test at IS 318 in the Bronx. All classes were taught by Avella. Nothing happened at first but when the story came out in the press, Avella was sent to the rubber room and has since left the system. Students reported they had their cell phones confiscated, were not allowed to contact Avella, were questionned intensely and many were manipulated into giving up Avella by being threatened that they wouldn't be allowed to attend graduation (and worse.)


Articles on Ed Notes on the Avella story in chronological order beginning in May 2008.

http://ednotesonline.blogspot.com/2008/05/bronx-teacher-refuses-to-test.html

http://ednotesonline.blogspot.com/2008/05/support-for-doug-avella-builds.html

http://ednotesonline.blogspot.com/2008/05/dear-joel-klein-letters-on-student-test.html

http://ednotesonline.blogspot.com/2008/05/where-is-leo-casey-and-edwize-on-test.html

http://ednotesonline.blogspot.com/2008/06/ask-uft-to-make-testing-boycott.html

http://ednotesonline.blogspot.com/2008/06/more-nyc-students-boycotting-tests.html

Worth Reading....

...on teacher quality, the corporate model, pay for performance, NYC school governance, mayoral control, and commentary on Rotherham/Eduwonk tripe
These seem to be some of the push button policy issues facing educators, often promoted by pseudo educators looking to gain control of the public schools (for fun and profit.) Here are some selections and links for you to explore if you want to get a better sense of the debate.

The Offal Truth
On the recent Rotherham piece in the NY Times - look for a guest column at ednotes tomorrow. Meanwhile, Susan Ohanian came up with this comment:
Rich Gibson provides a valuable commentary on education offal offered up by the NY Times.
http://susanohanian.org/show_atrocities.php?id=7878


Teacher Quality Rears It's Ugly Head
I don't agree with the stress on "teacher quality" because there's no clear way to measure that factor. Some use SAT scores or how high in their class they finish or test scores of their kids or how nice they dress or just plain voodoo. Teacher quality is often reflected as a snapshot at a certain time, a certain day, a certain year, a certain class, a certain child in the class (have you seen how teacher quality improves when that one kid who has been tormenting you and the other kids moves?)

Sean Corcoran, guest blogging at Eduwonkette, seems to be on board with the TQ issue and sees higher pay as a way to attract higher quality teachers. It seems to make sense but I don't necessarily agree here too. We often see this point made by NYC Educator who often attributes the quality of his daughter's suburban education to paying teachers a high salary. Again I disagree. Offer those same teachers a 25% raise to go to one of the 10 most difficult schools in NYC to teach at and let's see how they do.

Seean Corcoran wrote on March 6

A large and growing body of research has demonstrated that teacher quality is one of the most (if not the most) important resources schools contribute to the academic success of their students. At the same time, the average quality of teachers has steadily fallen over time, and an increasingly smaller fraction of the most cognitively skilled graduates are choosing to teach (for more on this see here).

Vanderhoek believes that significantly higher salaries will bring these top graduates back to the classroom, and he may be right. Economists have linked this steady decline in teacher quality since 1960 to the rise in career opportunities for women and the sizable gap between teacher salaries and those of other professionals.

Read the full piece with all the interesting comments here.

Diane Ravitch on corporate models for schools
Diane Ravitch to Deborah Meier on their Edweek blog:

Who controls our schools? Should the schools adopt a model of operations based on "results" (test scores) and "incentives" (paying teachers, students, and principals for higher test scores)? Are test scores the "profits" of the school system? Who are the stockholders?

Full story here.

Ravitch references Eduwonkette's exploration of whether pay for performance creates success in the corporate world (can you spell E-N-R-O-N?)

Pay for Performance in the Corporate World

We often hear that education needs to operate more like the private sector. But few corporations tie their employee bonuses to quantifiable output in the same way that some performance pay plans tie teacher pay to scores. (See How Does Performance Pay Work in Other Sectors?)

For those who believe that corporate employees rise and fall based on the fates of their companies, here's a story ripped from the headlines: Washington Mutual is shielding executive performance pay from the housing crisis fallout. From the Wall Street Journal article:Read the full post here.

Eduwonkette references Richard Rothstein's paper:
Holding Accountability to Account: How Scholarship and Experience in Other Fields Inform Exploration of Performance Incentives in Education

Download a pdf of Rothstein's piece here.


Diane Ravitch on the History of Public School Governance in NYC
Download Diane's pdf here.
The mayoral control issue is going hot and here in NYC, with most critics still lining up for a continuance with checks. Ed Notes and ICE are moving more towards a very localized system for at least elementary and middle schools with real control residing in the hands of teachers and parents at the school level. We know this is pie in the sky but we think the ideas should be out there for the next time the system they install in 2009 fails and they have to come up with something else. I'm all ready for the battles in 2017.

The Worst Book of the 21st Century - a review

Susan Ohanian Notes:

Gary Stager offers a must read commentary on pop business book authors who claim to offer insight into learning.

by Gary Stager

New notes to accompany my review...

As I attend my second conference in as many weeks where the keynote speaker is Daniel Pink, I feel duty bound to share some of my thoughts on why his popular pop-business book, "A Whole New Mind," may be the worst book of the 21st Century.

The book certainly contains little if anything to offer school leaders.

Recently, a lot of edubloggers were excited about a magazine discussion between Tom Friedman and Daniel Pink. Their performance was self-congratulatory, self-serving and intended to sell more of their respective books. Their cross-promotional exercise was brilliantly executed my two masterful self-promoters.

Read Gary's (who as a young 'un was in the local LOGO Users group here in NYC back in the 80's) at Susan's place here.

Happy Reading - if you have the stomach!

Who Ever Thought Stressed Out Teachers...

.... is a good thing for kids?

In the corporate world stress may be looked at as a beneficial (I don't agree). But stressed workers doesn't have an emotional impact on widgets. But our widgets walk and talk - and are little or even if big, still not fully mature. Think they're not affected by the national mania for turning schools into mini-corporations?

Middle school blogger Have A Gneiss Day writes:

Administration is barely holding it together. Most of the staff is living on the edge (except for the ones that are either too new or too arrogant to care). What bothers me most is our stress is slowly but surely finding its way to the kiddies.

And NYC Pubic School Blue wrote:

chronic teacher fatigue?

CTF? I doubt the AMA recognizes such a condition, but if they did - I suspect I'm suffering from it.

Perhaps it's just the ELA prep that's getting to me. The simulation exams, the "incorporation" of testing skills in all subjects, the "pumping them up for the exam" hype ... it's all a bit much. The kids are trying their best; that I have to admit. But even they begin to become tired and need an outlet. Unfortunately, that seems to be exactly at the time of my class. So today's chatty class got the consequence for not completing their work. A 30 minute lunch detention. 30 minutes of agony for me. But once you say you're going to do issue a consequence, you have to follow through. Even if that means a loss of one's own lunch.

I'm slipping further and further behind in the curriculum due to this damn test. I can't wait for it to be over.

Here's an idea for all the gaggle of Whitney Tilson-like ed reformers. Let's do stress tests on kids and rate schools A-F based on the lowest (or highest in BloomKleindom) scores.

Last Chance at English High: We are Not Alone

As has been done all over the nation, they make cosmetic changes (certainly necessary) but assume things like changing the name of a principal to head master or paint the building or "demand more of teachers" will be enough instead of a long-term plan to inundate the school with resources.

Jeff Kaufman posted this article from the Boston Globe to ICE-mail with this comment:

Interesting article forwarded by a friend in a closing school….as he wrote, “we are not alone.”

First read George Schmidt's Comment:

1/13/08

Jeff:

Sixty-six percent of students had failed at least one class. More than a quarter had failed five of their six classes. Nearly half of the ninth-graders were failing. More than a third of them were absent regularly. A teacher groaned. "That's kind of crushing." The lights flickered on. The assistant headmaster delivered an inevitable message: Teachers would have to do even more.

Sad thing is that nobody in the article seems to be willing to say that all the "standards and accountability" pushing by the "headmaster" simply cracks up against the realities of poverty, just as Rothstein and others would have suggested. There is an element of unreality in that interview in the principal's (headmaster's) office with the girl who wanted to drop "AP Biology". If the headmaster had so many answers, why didn't he just get the people who are pushing the corporate "school can do it all" solution he's implementing to provide child care for the student's family? Instead, he packs up his data driven data sets and heads into a classroom to bully a teacher.

George Schmidt
Chicago


Boston Globe:

LAST CHANCE FOR ENGLISH HIGH
Harsh realities Amid visions of a turnaround, overwhelmed teachers find that a new approach can't solve all the old problems

By Tracy Jan, Globe Staff | December 27, 2007

Second in an occasional series.

In the hallway outside her classroom, Marlene Diaz disappears amid the swirl and din of students. It is five minutes past class time. The young English teacher shouts to be heard. Her voice is hoarse, as it has been many afternoons this year. "You're late," she calls. "Let's go, let's go!"

She herds a group into the classroom and closes the door. She makes a mental count of the empty seats; five of 17 students are not there. A knell of frustration rings inside her. She takes a breath and marshals her stamina. It is her last class of the day.

"Good afternoon, my seedlings," she says and walks the rows of tables, handing out photocopied pages. She has been trying to teach her ninth-graders to write basic essays, and it has not been easy. Some of them have only a rudimentary grasp of grammar and language. Several are repeating the class after failing in previous years. Today, she hopes to inspire them with examples of good writing.

As Diaz launches into her lesson, a boy draws circles on his desk with a blue pen. A girl points her cellphone camera at a classmate and says, "Do something stupid." Another girl lays her head in her arms on top of her backpack and shuts her eyes.

"You lost a soldier," a student says to the teacher.

Diaz walks over and taps the sleeping girl's head with the stack of papers in her hand.

"Yo," the girl responds, without looking up.

"Miss," another girl says to Diaz. "Nobody's paying attention to you."

The words might as well have echoed through the halls of the school, taunting the teachers and administrators who just three months earlier had begun the year with a giddy hope of reversing the academic decline of one of the worst-performing high schools in the state.

Decaying for decades, The English High School in Jamaica Plain, the nation's oldest public high school and once one of Boston's best, was threatened with closure by the state last year. But education officials decided on a last-ditch attempt to turn the 186-year-old school around.

State officials gave the school's headmaster unprecedented power to manage English, and a year to show improvement. The headmaster lengthened the school day, started tutoring centers and study skills classes, and pushed students to enroll in college-level courses. He dismissed teachers he believed were not committed to his mission and hired enthusiastic ones who said they were. He told the faculty he would demand more from them than ever. And after weeks of intensive preparation over the summer, teachers arrived at a freshly painted school this fall with a belief they could achieve the headmaster's ultimate goal: Graduate every senior and get them into college.

But a third of the way through the school year, a new reality is setting in. Teachers, shouldering the main burden of reforming the school, are confronting the fact that many of the students lack even the most basic skills. And in a school that serves many students from poor or immigrant families, the challenges of dealing with difficult home lives has proved daunting.

Some teachers are exhausted and overwhelmed. Two of more than two dozen new teachers have quit.

"This was going to be the year where everything changes," said Diaz, who is in her third year at the school. "Now, frustrations are setting in."

In coming days, teachers would receive an even grimmer picture. Assembled in a darkened classroom, they watched as a staccato of sobering statistics about the recently completed first term were flashed on a screen:

Sixty-six percent of students had failed at least one class. More than a quarter had failed five of their six classes. Nearly half of the ninth-graders were failing. More than a third of them were absent regularly.

A teacher groaned. "That's kind of crushing."

The lights flickered on. The assistant headmaster delivered an inevitable message: Teachers would have to do even more.

Two months earlier, veteran math teacher Jerry Gallagher sat alone at his desk, aimlessly flipping through the syllabus for his calculus class. It was back-to-school night, when teachers had planned to show off the school's all-out effort.

Teachers had called parents to invite them to the event and sent letters home with students. Teachers spruced up their classrooms. Secretaries put out plates of pastry and fruit.

More than an hour had passed. Not one parent stepped foot in Gallagher's classroom. The food in the school lobby sat mostly untouched.

Gallagher bowed his head and sighed.

"Just because we're doing something brand new doesn't change the dynamics," he said.

That was October, when teachers were beginning to understand the magnitude of the job they had undertaken and perceive that some of the school's most ambitious efforts were already suffering.

Attendance, after a brief spike early in the year, slipped to 85 percent in the first term, back to last year's level and far short of the state standard of 92 percent.

Frustrated by the increased amount of class time and homework, some students have simply left. Since the start of the year, more than 100 of English High's 800 students have transferred to other schools or been discharged because they stopped coming to class.

"These kids have been so accustomed to getting by doing the minimum that when somebody tells them that's not good enough, it can get stressful," said Junia Yearwood, a veteran English teacher.

It has taken a toll on teachers, too. Diaz has struggled to keep her frustrations in check. But at the same time, walking through the hallways near her classroom, she has also taken heart.

On one wall are the names and photos of newly elected student officers, members of the school's first student government in four years. On another bulletin board are the names of 28 students who have been inducted into the National Honor Society - more than in recent years.

She was especially touched by notes tacked to another wall - Thank you letters, written by students after teachers and an assistant headmaster staged a huge Thanksgiving meal in a school hallway the day before the actual holiday. Students and teachers had hauled desks from classrooms and placed them end-to-end, draped them with blue table cloths and piled them with roasted chickens and pies. Nearly 400 students feasted and relished what seemed to be a new kind of bond with teachers.

"I remember when I first came to English High, I didn't feel it was the best," one girl wrote. "I wanted to change schools so badly, but I feel I have a chance for my last year with you by my side."

Diaz hopes at least some of her students feel that way. Sometimes they behave so badly in class that she has been reduced to counting loudly to regain their attention. Already, she is worried that some may be on a track to fail. It eats at her and makes her think of her own youth. Raised by immigrant parents in a Dorchester housing project, Diaz had felt intense gratitude for the teachers who took the time to care for her and spur her on. Now 26 and in the teacher's role, she sometimes wants to scream at her students that at stake is nothing less than their lives.

"It's so overwhelming and disheartening knowing where these kids can end up, and how high the odds become when they act this way," Diaz said.

One afternoon in November, a teacher pulled Fred Daniels out of his world history class and walked the senior to a small classroom set aside this year for tutoring students who fall behind. The teacher introduced Daniels to a clean-cut Boston University business student named Edwin Pimentel.

Pimentel is one of 15 tutors at English High's two new Learning Centers. He is 18, a year younger than Daniels.

Daniels sat next to Pimentel at a round table. The tutor flipped through an orange math text Daniels had pulled from his backpack and asked him what chapter he needs help on. Daniels grinned sheepishly. He has hardly opened the book.

Daniels is in his sixth year of high school. He arrived at English last year after a string of expulsions and stints in juvenile detention. But he is bright, and determined to become the first in his family to earn a diploma. The school is determined, too. A school secretary calls him every morning at 5 to rouse him from bed.

He has done well in some classes, but he is failing Algebra II Honors. In the third week of school, the tall, muscular teen had wept in frustration in his headmaster's office and threatened to drop out of school. His algebra teacher was moving too fast, and he was too embarrassed to ask for help.

Daniels stayed in school but started skipping math.

His teacher had recently hunted him down in a hallway and offered him a deal: He would not receive the F on his first-term report card if he agreed to get help at the Learning Center.

He took it. Now, Daniels rummaged through his backpack and pulled out a stack of homework papers.

"All of this, I'm not gonna lie," he said, dropping the stack on the table. "I literally copied people to get credit."

"That's not good," Pimentel said. The tutor wrote a problem on a pad of paper and asked Daniels to solve it. Daniels went through the steps, talking out loud. The two worked, passing the pad between them.

Half an hour later, they stopped. Pimentel believed Daniels understood most of the basic principles and was not hopelessly lost.

A teacher who runs the Learning Center told Daniels he should return the following week. Daniels nodded, smiling as he left.

"I'm trying to be optimistic about my future," he said in the hallway. "But everything in the past is catching up to me. I guess I set myself up for failure."

Daniels did not return to the Learning Center the following week - or the one after that.

Valeria Cabrera stood in the front office waiting to meet with her headmaster early one November morning. Her brimming backpack pulled her posture ramrod straight. She cradled a stack of binders.

The 17-year-old had fought hard on the first day of school for a full slate of advanced courses. But two months later, she felt pressures mounting. She wanted to drop Advanced Placement biology.

Twice as many students are enrolled in college-level courses this year. And no one drops an AP class without the headmaster's permission.

José Duarte motioned the girl into his office. Cabrera is ranked third in her senior class of 165, a new member of the National Honor Society and a winner of a statewide college scholarship because of her high MCAS scores.

Duarte was counting on students like her - a first-generation immigrant from the Dominican Republic whose dream is to attend a school like Princeton - to succeed. English High has not had a Princeton admission since the 1970s.

Cabrera sat with her arms crossed. "Do you know I have four AP classes?" she asked Duarte.

He nodded and smiled. "I put you in them."

"That's like six hours of homework every night," Cabrera said, then ticked off her other responsibilities: baby-sitting her younger brother, college applications, a class at Harvard Medical School.

"I hate to see you drop AP biology, for someone who wants to go into the sciences," Duarte said.

"It damages my other classes," she said.

"Let me push you back," Duarte said. "For the next two weeks, let's put you in the Learning Center."

"But . . ."

Duarte cut her off. "Don't just say no."

"But no," Cabrera said. "Sometimes there's a line."

Duarte knows about a line. After overseeing English High the last eight years, he knows it well.

The next week, he allowed Cabrera to drop AP biology and pick up AP Spanish - a language in which she is already fluent.

Diaz hurried down the hall to borrow a dustpan from a fellow English teacher.

"Have they come yet?" she asked.

The teacher nodded.

Diaz wore gray slacks, an argyle sweater vest, and a crisp white blouse, not her usual end-of-the-week outfit of jeans and blue English High sweatshirt. Earlier in the day, she had frantically decorated a bulletin board. She dusted and swept.

State observers, on their first visit to gauge the school's progress, were due shortly at her sixth-period class. How many of her students would show up? Would they be ready to present the essays they had spent more than a month perfecting?

The assignment had seemed simple. She had asked each student to pick a subject they know well and explain it in writing.

When she had made the assignment in October, she had allotted two weeks. But day after day, the students struggled to organize their thoughts and express themselves on paper. She gave deadlines, but extended them when students didn't finish.

The bell rang and students filed in. Diaz counted eight students. Nine were absent.

"Are you ready? Are you ready?" she asked.

The door opened and five state and district officials, including the headmaster, walked in. They wore suits and carried folders. Diaz flushed. Her ears started ringing. She began writing on the board but caught herself misspelling a word. Silently, the officials sat in a row at the back of the room, arms crossed, chins in hands.

A boy volunteered to present his essay. He stood at the front of the room and began reading from a piece of paper. He paused frequently and took deep breaths.

When he finished, a girl peeked in her notebook, where she had written questions that the class had come up with earlier and raised her hand. Why did he choose to write about surviving high school? she asked.

The boy said he had heard rumors in middle school that seniors would flush freshmen's heads down the toilet. The panel of officials chuckled. Diaz relaxed. After a parade of other presentations, the officials left the classroom as wordlessly as they had entered.

Diaz was grateful, even proud, of her students' efforts. They had shown mastery of some of the basic writing techniques she had been trying to teach them. She gathered the students at the front of the room, where they buzzed in triumph. "Great job, you guys," she said before dismissing the class.

Alone, Diaz gathered her students' papers and treated herself to a piece of the Puerto Rican candy she keeps in a locked cabinet by her desk. She savored the victory of her students' success. But even as she did, she thought about the difficult road ahead. The essay was but the first of at least five essays the students would have to write before June. It was already nearing Christmas. She would need to be tougher.