KIPP is the way the white and powerful want the poor of color to be educated — A Question for Obama: Why Does KIPP Not Look Like Sidwell?

The achievement gap has left the stadium, ladies and gentlemen, while growth models have taken the stage.  Now that the urban school systems have been blown up, thus clearing the way for the corporate charterites,  the canyon between test scores of the rich and poor is no longer of interest.  Indeed, the achievement gap has become a "mindless measure," to use the words of Jay Mathews.
....Jim Horn 

KIPP is the way the white and powerful want the poor of color to be educated... Ira Socol

This stuff is so good, I've delayed leaving for the beach to get it out there. Jim Horn put up a scathing piece the other day, including videos, at Schools Matter and followed up today. He delves into the shifting vocabulary from closing the achievement gap to the current quality teaching/value added craze and explains it this way:

this new value-added universe is not even interested in those troublesome group comparisons any longer that are based on the poverty chasm. Unless, of course, the reformers need to shut down your neighborhood school and turn it into a corporate-styled testing madrasah, i. e., charter school. Then your percentile ranking becomes a crucial tool in deciding who is in that bottom five percent that just keeps replenishing itself as the last group is scraped off to become charterized.

Jim nails exactly what the Tweed yokels are trying to pull off with their road show explaining the test score gap. Oh my God. This stuff is getting me hot. Screw the beach. Here is a section from Jim's Sept. 1 post:

Below is an open online letter from Ira Socol to the President.  I have ventured to add a few comments and a couple of video clips.

Dear President Obama,

I wanted to discuss the things you believe are "innovative in education," just so I might assure you that in this field - in the field of America's future - your administration is doing irreparable harm.

 "Students at both KIPP and Achievement First schools follow a system for classroom behavior invented by Levin and Feinberg called Slant, which instructs them to sit up, listen, ask questions, nod and track the speaker with their eyes." Yes, the first thing KIPP teaches is Calvinist church behaviour. "They all called out at once, “Nodding!"' Yes. Stare at your master. Sit still. Nod to demonstrate your compliance. Speak in unison according to the script.

Mr. President, this is not innovation. We know this formula. It drove the colonialist education systems of Wales and Ireland in the 18th and 19th centuries. It was the hallmark of British Colonial Schools from Lagos to Cape Town to Delhi. It was the path followed by the U.S. government's Indian Schools.

Read the entire piece at Schools Matter: Why Does KIPP Not Look Like Sidwell?

In today's excellent follow-up responding to Jay Mathews, including this:

Jay and the the new generation of reformers doing the same thing as the last generation (when will they become the status quo?) would rather look at test score growth over time, especially when big achievement gap closing claims by your favorite politicians do not materialize. Focusing on individual gains makes the disparity between the haves and the have-nots much easier to ignore, since this new value-added universe is not even interested in those troublesome group comparisons any longer that are based on the poverty chasm. Unless, of course, the reformers need to shut down your neighborhood school and turn it into a corporate-styled testing madrasah, i. e., charter school. Then your percentile ranking becomes a crucial tool in deciding who is in that bottom five percent that just keeps replenishing itself as the last group is scraped off to become charterized.

The New Status Quo
I love the "when will they become the status quo" line? We have been having fun with this idea here in NY by referring to BloomKlein in just that way. As a matter of fact, we have been forming a group to do street theater called "The Status Quo Players." Even thinking of tee-shirts. How's this? STATUS and QUO shirts with an arrow pointing to the left saying "I'm with QUO"? Here is the intro to Jim's piece today:

"Irrepressible" Bloggers vs. the Borg

Jay Mathews is the insider's insider on corporate education reform issues, serving as the media mouthpiece for the psychological sterilization movement of KIPP and the KIPP knock-offs.  The Elder himself, Bill Gates, carries a supply of Jay's KIPP book to hand out to anyone interested in the Oligarchs' choice of a final solution to educating the poor and the brown of urban America.

At the same time KIPP is becoming the urban model for corporate ed reform, the movement is in the process of pivoting from the the phony campaign under Bush ostensibly to close the black-white achievement gap, with the same high expectations for all, thus avoiding "the soft bigotry of low expectations," blah-blah, to a new phony campaign of assuring that poor children have the same access to high quality teachers and schools because education is now the "civil rights issue of our generation."  Blah, blah, blah.  While the pivot leaves in place the high-stakes standardized testing that declared 30-40 percent of public schools failures and charter targets under the last 9 years of NCLB,  the pivot demands a shift in what is measured by the tests and how it is measured.  The achievement gap has left the stadium, ladies and gentlemen, while growth models have taken the stage.  Now that the urban school systems have been blown up, thus clearing the way for the corporate charterites

The focus now is on "a year's worth of individual student growth" for a year's worth of teaching (much more on this later, with a feature on the Wizard of Oz, Bill Sanders).  In short, the new target of corporate ed reform is to blow up, or disrupt, the teaching profession by measuring effective teaching on how much test score growth a teacher can oversee.  And as the new CEO-led KIPP chain gangs are to replace urban public schools, so then an endless stream of non-union white missionary temps are being prepared to replace the professionals who now staff the urban schools.  Test score gains, or lack thereof, will be used to justify the firing of professionals and the use of temps from TFA and the TFA knock-offs that Arne fondly calls alternative teacher certification programs.

So Jay defends KIPP - of course. Discipline is exaggerated. Ira Socol left comments on Mathews' blog, to which Mathews responded. Here are a few excerpts but head over to the piece when you are through here to read it all.

So yes Jay, I have been in KIPP schools...I have been in KIPP schools (3) and - personally - I have found them terrifying.

But more than that Jay, I have some really extensive experience in the types of communities KIPP seeks to serve. I know these kids, and I know what they could do if they were offered the kind of educational opportunities available at Sidwell (or Cranbrook, or St. Ann's or etc).

And I know one more thing. Barack and Michelle would never send their daughters to a KIPP school, nor tolerate KIPP-style education in any school their daughters attended. As I've said, KIPP is the way the white and powerful want the poor of color to be educated. But they aren't suggesting it because that's a path to equality. They are suggesting it for just the opposite reason - they don't want the competition for their own children. 

What concerned me? An absolute lack of tolerance for mental, learning, and behavioural diversity, in classroom after classroom, corridor after corridor. Of course I come from a Special Education background, so this was far more disturbing than it might be to others. I also found the brutality of teacher-student, and especially in Indianapolis, administrator-student communication fairly shocking. If you would send your grandchildren there, you're a different kind of parent than I am.

In Chicago I saw a young teacher working one-on-one with a series of students who needed reading help. A few things stood out. The students who came to him were all, quite obviously, struggling with different aspects of the reading process. One had essentially no phonological awareness, one was really struggling with the symbols (he could not, as an example, associate the lower case letters with the equivalent upper case letters), a third read fluently but with almost zero comprehension.

The teacher, very clearly untrained in any of this, repeated the same efforts with all the kids. He was clearly operating from a script. And as his efforts inevitably failed, he became angry with the students, repeatedly blaming them for "not trying hard enough." The child with no phonological awareness was called "lazy" repeatedly. KIPP only phenomenon? Of course not, but I saw similar scenes throughout all the buildings.

in KIPP classrooms I have seen teachers encourage children to humiliate others. And this is done with the "pack" using the same words, as if scripted. You may see that as positive, I see it as hazing, and perhaps a significant reason for KIPP's rather stunning attrition rate. http://epicpolicy.org/newsletter/2010/06/new-kipp-study-underestimates-attrition-effects-0 A rate the KIPP Foundation seems to go to great lengths to obscure. 

I could go on but I'm getting giddy. Read more here:

"Irrepressible" Bloggers vs. the Borg

Stapling NY Times Ed Deformer Brent Staples

Culled from the NYC EdNews Listserve:

Another disappointing Times editorial which shows that Brent Staples lives in a fantasy world, one concocted by Bloomberg and Co. Perhaps instead of saying “Parents Need to Know” he should figure out that he needs to know the truth.

Leonie Haimson

Editorial: Parents Need to Know Published: August 18, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/19/opinion/19thu3.html


Did Brent Staples read the front-page story in the New York Times on August 16, with the headline: "Triumph Fades On Racial Gap in City Schools".."A Blow to Bloomberg"..."After Testing Threshold Is Reset, Latinos and Blacks Fall Back." Did he not read the statement by the statistician in the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics, who said that there had been no narrowing of the racial achievement gap? Guess not. 

Diane Ravitch

I spoke to Brent Staples of the Times editorial the day after the meeting. He sought me out. I explained that people just wanted to speak on the issue that there were already five public comment sessions, one each for every other item, that the bylaws allowed us to ask for a vote to open the floor, that waiting until the end of the meeting would have meant 2-3 hours, that the accountability office presentation was never on the agenda in the first place and should have been itself approved by a member vote and that even a vote on my motion was illegally denied. We needed to hear from parents who had been told for years their kids were doing well but now weren't and hear what they thought we should do to meet the needs of their kids. I never thought the PEP chair would act so deliberately to suppress the public voice.


Staples said the parents there "did children no favor". Well, I told my sons the next day that the moms who picked up a bullhorn struck a blow for freedom and for the right of every public school family to be heard and that I was grateful to them for their support.


Perhaps we should just get used to the fact that the wealthy publishers of old media are inextricably bound to the mayor and chancellor and will support him regardless of what law or rules he violates.

Patrick Sullivan

Commentary on Mike Winerip Column - Updated

Update Aug.12, 8am: Susan Ohanian gets into the people running Teach Plus.

Mike Winerip's must read regular Monday ed column - this one was another full of food for thought - (Lesson Plan in Boston Schools: Don’t Go It Alone) touched on what looks like a good thing - on the surface. Even my wife who barely notices ed stuff commented that it seems like a good idea to bring in teams of experienced teachers in schools being redesigned. So let's do a little parsing:

Earlier this year Massachusetts enacted a law that allowed districts to remove at least half the teachers and the principal at their lowest-performing schools. The school turnaround legislation aligned the state with the Obama administration’s Race to the Top program incentives and a chance to collect a piece of the $3.4 billion in federal grant money.
From Washington this makes abundant good sense, a way to galvanize rapid and substantial change in schools for children who need it most. In practice, on the ground, it is messy for the people most necessary for turning a school around — the teachers — and not always fair. Often the decisions about which teachers will stay and which will go are made by new principals who may be very good, but don’t know the old staff.

Yes, the evils of Race to the Bowels of Hell. One of the themes of the article is that many experienced teachers don't want to go to these turnarounds.

Asked about applying to one of the city’s 12 turnaround schools, Lisa Goncalves, a first-grade teacher with seven years’ experience, said, “I’d be hesitant to go alone.” 

Said Celine Coggins, the chief executive of Teach Plus, which developed the idea and is financed by the Gates Foundation: “I think teachers want to know they’re not going into a school alone as a hero.”

 Bong! Bong!! Warning bells going off - THE GATES FOUNDATION. We know things like reducing class size can't be part of this solution.

So here is their supposed solution to the problem turn arounds that dump out the old and end up with scads of newbies.

And that is the simple idea behind a new program that is being used to staff three of the turnaround schools in Boston: you don’t go alone. Rather than have the principal fill the slots one by one, the Boston schools have enlisted the help of a nonprofit organization, Teach Plus, to assemble teams of experienced teachers who will make up a quarter of the staff of each turnaround school come fall. The teams will spend two weeks working together this summer. While teaching a full load, they will serve as team leaders for their grades and specialty areas like English immersion. They will work 210 days versus the normal 185 and get paid $6,000 extra a year. On average they have eight years’ experience.

I love this line:

“It’s like jump-starting a culture at these schools,” said Carol R. Johnson, Boston superintendent of schools.

Right Ms. Johnston. Follow the Gates and ed deform mantra: "it's about changing the culture of the school, not inadequate resources" and you will end up where all the other Gates initiatives are ending up.

Well, here is what I told my wife. It won't work."What would you do," she asked?

"I'd bring in the team but leave the old staff in place. See what happens if you increase the resources of the school by say 20%. Why not? Billions are being tossed down the toilet. Let Gates fund that. But he won't. Because success would prove the ed deform plan to be as false as George Washington's teeth.

Newsweek: Shouldn't staff salaries be merit-based and depend upon sales, revenues and readership?

Reality Based Educator Nails 'em again in his post:

Newsweek To Be Sold For A Dollar

He concludes with:

I mean, fair's fair.

If that "turnaround" and performance-based strategy is good enough for the Central Falls, Rhode Island school and other schools that Newsweek urges be shut down for "failing," isn't it good enough for the hypocrites at Newsweek?

Newsweek's headline for the famed "Fire Bad Teachers" story was "In No Other Profession Are Workers So Insulated From Accountability."

Oh, really?

What about journalism?

What about at Newsweek?

Read it in full: Newsweek To Be Sold For A Dollar

And Paul Moore has this advice for one of the few lights at the Washington Post in his  

Love Letter to Valerie Strauss in D.C.:

 Ms. Strauss, you are such an earnest and able defender of the public schools, but I wonder if in times of quiet reflection you realize that those driving this blitzkrieg against universal public education in the US don't care what you write.

You can and have constructed a series of reports that are reasoned and rational and backed up by whatever honest research has actually been done in the field. And it's water off the backs of these ducks with all the money. You see the people with the money have decided it's time for the public schools to go! (Check the Venture Philanthropy Partners $5.5 million gift to KIPP so the charter chain can better serve its true mission: to discredit public schools).

On the monied attackers side the truth is of no concern, rationality holds no sway, and they laugh at your stinking research. You've got a charlatan like Gates but the rankest absurdity that comes out of his mouth is treated like a gem from an oracle because he's the world's richest man. It's repeated by all the politicians he owns, up to and including a certain President of the United States and in the case of the District a certain Mayor, until total nonsense is accepted as gospel. And then the complete sociopaths, like Michelle Rhee, are sent in to slay the heretics, read any sane person who dares to stand up for public schools.

You have my undying respect and admiration Ms. Strauss. You're one of the good people. But understand that if you were ever to write something that actually threatened to derail the rich folks, the venture capitalists, the hedge funds campaign to shutdown the public schools, your column would disappear from the pages of the Washington Post the next day. And I pray that's the worst thing that would happen to you.

I too love Valerie.

Does NY Times' Leonhardt Distort Tennessee Class Size Study?

Why did the article downplay the Project Star Study impact of class size and emphasize the teacher quality issue?

“We don’t really care about test scores. We care about adult outcomes.” - Raj Chetty, Harvard, in today's NY Times, "The Case for $320,000 Kindergarten Teachers."

Don' need no stinkin' research
Hmmm. Since I started connecting up former students from over 25 years ago, I've been thinking along the same lines as Chetty. The Ed Deformers constantly say it is all about outcomes - test scores - and we should not bring up inputs - student background, poverty, etc. because they are just excuses.

So the ultimate outcomes are how their adult lives turn out. Will BloomKlein take the blame for students who go through 12 years of their ed deforms and end up in prison? Nahhh, that would be due to their ineffective teachers.

There is some irony in that tonight and over the next few days I am going to see my former student Ernie Silva perform his one man show  (come on down) and expect to run into other former students, all of whom are almost 40 years old. I've been learning lots of things from these recent contacts– things I never got to know as their teacher. (And therein lies a follow-up to this - how much do teachers have a right to know about deep private matters and how much do they need to know to be more effective. But another time.)

One thing I learned - even though some of these students tell me I did have an impact on their lives - the reality is that I had very little impact - certainly when it comes to academics. What some do say is that I may have inspired an interest or they had a wonderful experience (one told me she took her own children on all the trips I took them in the 6th grade), but not anything that would affect outcomes as the ed deformers define it.

Back to Leonhardt.

Did the article distort the case for lower class sizes?

Leonhardt talks about a research project that followed up on the famous Tennessee Star study.

Are children who do well on kindergarten tests destined to do better in life, based on who they are? Or are their teacher and classmates changing them?

The Tennessee experiment, known as Project Star, offered a chance to answer these questions because it randomly assigned students to a kindergarten class. As a result, the classes had fairly similar socioeconomic mixes of students and could be expected to perform similarly on the tests given at the end of kindergarten.

Yet they didn’t. Some classes did far better than others. The differences were too big to be explained by randomness. (Similarly, when the researchers looked at entering and exiting test scores in first, second and third grades, they found that some classes made much more progress than others.)

Since my brain can't bear looking at these studies, I have to rely on people whose brains can (see one Leonie Haimson) and I am told that the Star Study found that the effectiveness of the teachers was very much influenced by the size of the classes. So, here comes the fun part as Leonhardt continues:

Class size — which was the impetus of Project Star — evidently played some role. Classes with 13 to 17 students did better than classes with 22 to 25. 

 Duhhh. Evidently - why so begrudgingly, Dave? Leonhardt just tosses away the class size issue, which is what ed deformers always do.

He goes on:

Peers also seem to matter. In classes with a somewhat higher average socioeconomic status, all the students tended to do a little better. 

 Double DUHHHHH!

Now here comes the whammy!

But neither of these factors came close to explaining the variation in class performance. So another cause seemed to be the explanation: teachers.

Leonhardt leaps tall buildings in a single bound. 
 
WHAT? The Starr study showed that class size had an impact on teacher effectivness which in turn had an impact on students. Leonhardt turns the outcome (better teaching) into the effect (it was the teachers themselves). And that is the whole point of the ed deformers: put the onus in teachers.

So, here comes the ed deform mantra – hook, line and sinker:

Mr. Chetty and his colleagues .... estimate that a standout kindergarten teacher is worth about $320,000 a year. That’s the present value of the additional money that a full class of students can expect to earn over their careers. This estimate doesn’t take into account social gains, like better health and less crime.

Wow! What a good guy, saying that a teacher could be worth that much. But only some teachers. Here is the fun part:

They can pay their best teachers more, as Pittsburgh soon will, and give them the support they deserve. Administrators can fire more of their worst teachers, as Michelle Rhee, the Washington schools chancellor, did last week.

Ah, yes. good ole Michelle, their hero. It has nothing to do with the higher salaries of senior teachers. Shame on Leonhardt, an economics writer.

Leonhardt tries to throw this bone so he looks to be fair and  balanced:

Schools can also make sure standardized tests are measuring real student skills and teacher quality, as teachers’ unions have urged.

Sure, "teachers unions" - meaning ed deformer Randi Weinngarten. Does Leonhardt not know about this? Important new study about huge error rates in value-added teacher evaluation

Let Chetty and his colleagues start a study of adult outcomes over the next 20 years in Washington DC, Chicago and NYC and measure Rhee, Duncan and BloomKlein's effectiveness.

Civil Rights Leaders Take On Obama/Duncan on Ed Deform?

I'm reposting from this morning with a load of updates:

July 26, 12pm - (See below for original story - not the most organized way to do this but it is beautiful outside.)
 
"This is really tough talk, and it is about time that America’s civil rights leaders are speaking up. The only question is whether anybody in the Obama administration is actually listening."

-----Valerie Strauss at The Answer Sheet WAPO blog

Valerie is fast becoming our new heroine. But more on her later.



Word is that Obama is speaking on Thursday to the Urban League to defend his ed policy and sources say that was a major part of today's cancellation. I have links to two major stories on Norms Notes:

Download here:

http://www.otlcampaign.org/resources/civil-rights-framework-providing-all-students-opportunity-learn-through-reauthorization-el

Sam Anderson responded to the email I sent out this morning:

The National Black Education Agenda (NBEA) is still operating and plan to have a national public response to the National Standards miseducation policy. Foir those who don't know about the NBEA, go to: blackeducationnow.org.

We plan to insist on a meeting with the President and the Ed Dept director. The "WE" are prominent Black educators as well as in-the-ed-trenches educators, parents and community members from across Black America.

The NAACP at their last week's convention came out with a resolution OPPOSING charter schools. This was a grassroots effort that had to fight some of the national leadership who give uncritical support to the Obama administration. I think this is a very good victory for the progressive Black educators specifically and progressive educators in general. and we should spread that resolution far and wide once it becomes public.

In Struggle,

Sam Anderson

Here is the Ed Week story with an excerpt:

Civil Rights Groups Call for New Federal Education Agenda

By Michele McNeil on July 26, 2010 10:00 AM | No Comments | No TrackBacks Seven leading civil rights groups, including the NAACP and the National Urban League, called on U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan today to dismantle core pieces of his education agenda, arguing that his emphases on expanding charter schools, closing low-performing schools, and using competitive rather than formula funding are detrimental to low-income and minority children.

The groups, which today released their own education policy framework and created the National Opportunity to Learn campaign, want Duncan to make big changes to his draft proposal for reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. 

What's even more interesting is that a big event planned to release the framework this morning in conjunction with the National Urban League's annual conference was mysteriously cancelled (or postponed, depending on whom you ask) after a lot of press releases went out last week trying to drum up interest.

 And here is some interesting analysis by Valerie Strauss, who is turning out to be MAJOR for the side of the good guys. Note her use of the word "skewer" which you have to love.

Valerie Strauss in WAPO: Civil rights groups skewer Obama education policy

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/education-secretary-duncan/civil-rights-groups-skewer-oba.html#more

It is most politely written, but a 17-page framework for education reform being released Monday by a coalition of civil rights groups amounts to a thrashing of President Obama’s education policies and it offers a prescription for how to set things right.

You won’t see these sentences in the piece: “Dear President Obama, you say you believe in an equal education for all students, but you are embarking on education policies that will never achieve that goal and that can do harm to America’s school children, especially its neediest. Stop before it is too late.”

But that, in other nicer words, is exactly what it says. The courteous gloss on this framework can’t cover up its angry, challenging substance.

But it gets better, as Valerie non only uses the word "ouch" but goes so far as a "double ouch." This may be a record for "ouches" though we can hope one day to see a dreaded triple.

“The Race to the Top Fund and similar strategies for awarding federal education funding will ultimately leave states competing with states, parents competing with parents, and students competing with other students..... By emphasizing competitive incentives in this economic climate, the majority of low-income and minority students will be left behind and, as a result, the United States will be left behind as a global leader.”

Ouch.
About an expansion of public charter schools, which the administration has advanced:
“There is no evidence that charter operators are systematically more effective in creating higher student outcomes nationwide....Thus, while some charter schools can and do work for some students, they are not a universal solution for systemic change for all students, especially those with the highest needs.” 

And there’s this carefully worded reproach to the administration:
“To the extent that the federal government continues to encourage states to expand the number of charters and reconstitute existing schools as charters, it is even more critical to ensure that every state has a rigorous accountability system to ensure that all charters are operating at a high level.” 

Double ouch.

But there’s more.

Jeez, she almost hit the triple. I'm getting orgasmic; better not to go there. 
But you go there and read it all.


I also read this morning that Al Sharpton was originally signed on to the report, but later on wasn't. Probably not any money in it for him.


------------------------
Original post

July 26, 8am
Are Civil Rights Leaders Going to Take an Anti-Obama/Duncan Position on Education?
Or were they and now are backing off?

Today a major event was scheduled that would skewer race to the top and other Ed Deform plans. The very idea of major civil rights leaders taking down the ed deform bull that people like Joel Klein and Eva Moskowitz and Michael Bloomberg are leading a civil rights battle would make a powerful statement.

Now suddenly we get this email a few minutes ago:

The briefing to release the Framework for Providing All Students an Opportunity to Learn scheduled for Monday at 10 a.m. at the Grand Hyatt has been postponed.

A copy of the framework can be downloaded at http://www.otlcampaign.org after 10 a.m. on Monday morning, July 26, 2010.

Those interested in scheduling interviews about the framework, please call Kari Hudnell or Stephanie Dukes at 202-955-9450.

I won't be home until later this morning but I suggest people call to schedule an interiew and ask why they cancelled the press event. Were pressures brought to bear by the Obama administration? Bloomberg? Billionaires like Gates and Broad threatening loss of funding? Who knows?

After burn:
Framework is here:
http://www.otlcampaign.org/resources/civil-rights-framework-providing-all-students-opportunity-learn-through-reauthorization-el

The Insidious Nature of Green's Sunday Times Article

UPDATED Mar. 8, 12 am with Aaron Pallas comment and you must read Jim Horn's piece at Schools Matter.
http://www.schoolsmatter.info/2010/03/teachers-are-built-non-school-of.html

I learned the most about teaching from other teachers. Duh!

BIGGEST SIN: CLASS SIZE ISSUES OFF THE TABLE

CHECK BIO OF MAIN CHARACTER DOUG LEMOV*.

CAN THIS GUY HOLD DOWN ONE JOB? LIKE ACTUALLY TRY TEACHING ON ONE PLACE FOR A LITTLE WHILE. GIVES YOU A BIT OF PERSPECTIVE, YOU KNOW. I THINK THAT PEOPLE LIKE LEMOV LEAVE TEACHING FULL-TIME BECAUSE THEY DON'T LOVE IT ENOUGH TO STAY.

Forgot test scores, measure the love quotient when you talk about teachers who can teach others.

There's a lot more than teacher methodology underlying Green's article which I talked about yesterday. It seem to look like not standard ed deform stuff by de-emphasizing incentives and firing teachers. But when you dig a little it is ed deform. The Times wouldn't print anything less.

A parent commented on the NYCEdNews list:

I thought the piece was generally valuable in looking at actual classroom practices and considering their relationship to content, and challenging the effectiveness of carrot-and-stick approaches to improved learning. But I was startled that she cited the "value-added" model several times without skepticism, particularly stating that teachers' stats for raising student performance are consistent over time. I thought that statistical argument had been debunked. Diane Ravitch makes a strong case in her new book that studies show that teachers' stats for improving student test scores fluctuate dramatically over time and are not a predictor of future performance.

Of course Green had to ignore the research that shows value-added is unproven because the rest of the thesis laid out doesn't work without it. The article is all about measuring by test scores. My favorite quote "he [Lemov} decided to seek out the best teachers he could find – as defined PARTLY [my emph] by their students' test scores [which can so easily be manipulated]..

Exactly what were the other PARTS than test scores?

A lot of the last part of the article is good touchy, feely stuff - good ideas for teachers to use. And we all can benefit. Talk of the video taping set me to chuckling. I was involved in a program to improve teaching by video taping lessons and cataloguing the kinds of questions I was asking - in 1969.

I learned so much of what is talked about in this article (which offers a blueprint of the high and mighty descending to give actual working teachers "The Word") by seeing experienced WORKING teachers (are there any left) in the context of working in their class - in action. I adapted their stuff to my personality and made a lot of it work. Almost every teacher I ever knew had mastered classroom management - at least 85% of them - or they left, often to become people who end up training other teachers.

What if every so-called great teacher who left to become some guru actually stayed in the classroom and taught for an entire career? Maybe close the achievement gap (that's a joke folks.)

"What makes a good teacher" asks Elizabeth? She asked all the wrong people.

She could have talked teacher quality with teachers in the trenches...

People like
Pissed Off
Chaz's School Daze
Under Assault
NYC Educator
Accountable Talk
Have a Gneiss Day
The Jose Vilson: The Blog

And the newer generation of teachers: It's Not All Flowers and Sausages

Mrs Mimi said the other day:

WHY ARE WE GIVING POWER TO EVERYONE IN THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD, EVERYONE WHO HAS EVER COME IN CONTACT WITH A SCHOOL OR THOUGHT ABOUT SCHOOL OR SAID THE WORD "SCHOOL" EXCEPT FOR TEACHERS???!?!?!

Riddle me that one.

Perhaps it's because we want them to remain Candidate Numero Uno on the old chopping block when it comes time to passing around some blame. Or keep them in our line of sight so that they are at a arms reach for some extensive finger pointing?

Instead Green spoke to:

Doug Lemov: "after a successful career as a teacher, a principal and a charter school founder."
Successful? Based on what? I love this: Lemov "set out to become a teacher of teachers [because] he was shamefully aware of his own limitations." So he left teaching. Nice.

And Deborah Loewenberg Ball, "an assistant professor who also taught math part time at an East Lansing elementary school and whose classroom was a model for teachers in training."

[Note this comment from Columbia prof Aaron Pallas:
Aaron Pallas said...

Norm,

You're a bit harsh on Deborah Ball, my former colleague at Michigan State. She was a full-time elementary classroom teacher from 1975 to 1988 before and during graduate school -- and continued teaching third and fourth grade mathematics for four years as an assistant professor. Not a dilettante by any stretch of the imagination.

- when people you respect speak, I listen so I take it back. 13 years is a serious amount of time in a classroom. I wonder though how views change in the midst of the ed deform movement. I'll try to say more about what I think it would take to upgrade teaching and also on the accountability question - I always felt my major accountability was to parents and students not bureaucrats.]

What about trying full time teaching, year after year, decade after decade? You gain a certain perspective and context when you talk to teachers. Then talk to us about training teachers.

In my 6 week summer of training to become a teacher in 1967, all my instructors were teachers, assistant principals and principals (in those years supervisors actually had to teach for a long time before rising up) and I learned more from them and my later colleagues than anyone.

What Green has done under the guise of what looks like a more genial approach than Joel Klein's "lets go on a witch hunt" using Lemov's "we can't replace them fast enough, so let's retrain those heathens" is to validate the ed deform model of blame the teachers.

Green's biggest sin: She used the words "reformers" and Michelle Rhee in the same sentence.


Related: South Bronx School blog does some research into Doug Lemov and why Whitney Tilson likes him and as he so often does, takes it over the top.
Whitney Tilson Is In Love With Doug Lemov

*Thanks to SBS for the bio:

.......Founder of School Performance, an Albany-based non-profit that provides diagnostic assessments, performance data analysis, and academic consulting to high performing charter schools. He is a founder and the former principal of the Academy of the Pacific Rim Charter School in Boston, regarded as one of the highest performing urban charter schools in the country. After leaving Academy of the Pacific Rim, Mr. Lemov served as the Vice President for Accountability at the State University of New York Charter Schools Institute, the leading authorizer of charters in New York, where he designed and implemented a rigorous school accountability system. He has since served as a consultant to such organizations as KIPP, New Leaders for New Schools, and Building Excellent Schools. Mr. Lemov is a Trustee of the New York Charter Schools Association and of KIPP Tech Valley Charter School. He has a B.A. from Hamilton College, an M.A. from Indiana University, and an M.B.A. from the Harvard Business School.

Let's see. When I was 42 years old, I had taught 17 years of self-contained grades 4-6 classes and one year as a special ed cluster, mostly in one school while getting MA's in Reading instruction and computer science.

A Teacher Comments on Harold Ford Jr. as Ed Deformer

I received this email of outrage from a NYC teacher who is clearly making the connections between the ed deformers and the catastrophe public education is undergoing. Here it is, unexpurgated


Harold Ford Jr. former Tennessee Congressman and now head of the Democratic Leadership Council, co-wrote a piece of jive with Louis Gerstner and Eli Broad about the Race to the Top stuff at the WSJ on November 24. The piece contained the usual stuff - must add competition and accountability to education, data systems and tracking of student and teacher performance is essential to real reform. But Ford, who became a Congressman when his daddy retired from the seat, couldn't pass the most important standardized test he ever took in his own life - the Tennessee bar. To make matters worse, he referred to himself as a lawyer on the campaign trail when he ran for Senate in 2006. Now this shit burns me up - a hypocritical little wanker who has led a life of privilege and thinks he's pulled himself up by his bootstraps, now takes on education reform and pushes testing as the most important measurement of success, but couldn't pass his own fucking bar exam.

I called the DLC and left messages on two different lines. I was polite, asked nicely how Mr. Ford gained his expertise in education reform and wondered if his law professors should be fired because he failed his bar exams.

The bullshit coming from the neo-liberals on education these days - from Obama, from Duncan, from Ford and Bloomberg and Arianna Huffington and even comedians like Bill Marr and Jon Stewart, has me outraged. I have been dropping grenades at Gotham Schools every once in a while, but it just feels like the reformers are winning the message war and the real one too. I did like Diane Ravitch's last piece and Alan Singer has had some good push back at the Huffington post (surprised Arianna lets it go up - she's squarely in the "the AFT is evil" contingent), but otherwise it's all the Obama/Duncan/Bloomberg way in the media these days.


Here is Ravitch's piece referring to the little wanker Harold Ford Jr.:

One of the institutions that made this country a great haven for immigrants was its public education system.

Our public schools were never perfect. There was never a golden age when everyone graduated high school and learned to a high standard of excellence. Improving education and expanding equality of opportunity have been the slow, steady work of generations.

Yet now, we live in an age when it is the custom to bash the public schools, not to thank them for helping to build our nation. It has become commonplace for the president, the secretary of education, and the leaders of the business community to lament the terrible state of our schools and to demand radical, one might even say revolutionary, changes. We live in an age of data, and the data (they say) are awful. They look at NAEP test scores, international test scores, graduation rates, and anything else that is measurable, and they demand solutions, now.

Note that they never speak of the state of learning, nor even the state of education, because those words connote many intangibles that cannot be measured and converted into data. The politicians and business leaders do not speak about whether young people read in their spare time, whether their reading consists of good literature and non-fiction, whether they know how to write an engaging essay or a well-constructed research paper, whether they can engage in an informed discussion of history, whether they are knowledgeable about our governmental system, whether they perform volunteer service in their community, whether they leave high school prepared to serve on a jury and vote thoughtfully.

No, instead what we now hear from our business leaders is that the schools must be redesigned to function like business. They conveniently overlook the fact that business practices and the ruthless pursuit of a competitive edge nearly destroyed our national economy a year ago.

Last week, an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal by Harold E. Ford Jr. (chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council), Louis V. Gerstner Jr. (former chairman of IBM), and Eli Broad (founder of the Broad Foundations) enunciated the new wisdom about school reform. (Leave aside the fact that these three have never reformed a school; nonetheless, they know how it should be done.) Schools with low scores must be closed, and states must open the flood gates to unlimited numbers of privately managed charter schools. Schools must compete for students. Teachers must compete with one another for higher test scores. Everyone must be evaluated by those scores. Everything else is an "insignificant" idea.

Never mind that in many states the test scores are phony, doctored, and meaningless. We might start, for example, with New York and Illinois. The Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago released a report ("Still Left Behind") earlier this year that documented the lowered cut scores on Illinois's state tests, which gave the illusion of progress in Chicago. Chicago students are still far behind, and progress during Arne Duncan's tenure was meager. The report reaches these key findings:

"Most of Chicago's students drop out or fail. The vast majority of Chicago's elementary and high schools do not prepare their students for success in college and beyond.

"There is a general perception that Chicago's public schools have been gradually improving over time. However, recent dramatic gains in the reported number of CPS elementary students who meet standards on state assessments appear to be due to changes in the tests made by the Illinois State Board of Education, rather than real improvements in student learning.

"At the elementary level, state assessment standards have been so weakened that most of the 8th graders who "meet" these standards have little chance to succeed in high school or to be ready for college. While there has been modest improvement in real student learning in Chicago's elementary schools, these gains dissipate in high school.

"The performance of Chicago's high schools is abysmal—with about half the students dropping out of the non-selective-enrollment schools, and more than 70 percent of 11th grade students failing to meet state standards. The trend has remained essentially flat over the past several years. The relatively high-performing students are concentrated in a few magnet/selective enrollment high schools. In the regular neighborhood high schools, which serve the vast preponderance of students, almost no students are prepared to succeed in college."

Similarly, the scoring of the state tests in New York was dumbed down dramatically from 2006-2009, and it became possible for students to reach Level 2 by random guessing. Proficiency rates on state tests soared dramatically at the same time that the state's scores on NAEP remained flat. As a result of the state's dumbed-down tests, New York City's accountability system crashed, and 97 percent of all elementary and junior high schools were rated A or B because of their alleged gains on the state tests. Having just launched its own "merit pay" plan, New York City was required to pay out more than $30 million in bonuses to teachers, triggered by the remarkable (and phony) gains on state tests. My friend Andrew Wolf, who wrote an education column for the now-defunct New York Sun, described the collision of the state tests and the city accountability system thus: "It is like two thieves trying to rob the same bank at the same time."

New York City and Chicago are two districts that adopted competitive business practices, aggressively closing down schools and spurring competition. What are the results? Grade inflation on state scores, but neither district saw significant improvement on NAEP since 2003. (NYC did get a gain for its 4th grade students in math in 2007, but not in 4th grade reading, 8th grade reading, or 8th grade math, and in 2009, the state's math scores were flat, which indicates that the city's were, as well.)

Living as we do in an age when test scores are so easily manipulated and so often fraudulent, we should proceed with caution before using them to determine the fate of students, teachers, principals, and schools. I give Mssrs. Ford, Gerstner, and Broad the benefit of the doubt: They think that school data are as meaningful as a profit-and-loss statement or a price-to-earnings ratio. Presumably, they don't realize that what is measured and can be measured may not be the most important things that happen in schools.

Where I do not give them the benefit of the doubt is that they assume that the Race to the Top is "enforcing academic standards." That is simply not true. In fact, it is sad or laughable, I am not sure which. The main themes of RTTT are privatization via charters and evaluation via phony test scores. How this translates into "rigorous standards" defies my understanding.

Nor do I admire their belief that schools will get dramatically better if they compete, just like businesses do. Maybe people in business win by competing, maybe competition produces better mousetraps, but that is not the way that schools function. Schools work best when teachers collaborate with one another to identify students who need extra attention or a different program or to mentor weak teachers; schools work best when they collaborate around common goals. Schools are not trying to build a better mousetrap. They are trying to educate our citizenry. Schools are not businesses, and we will continue to flounder so long as we put politicians and business leaders in the driver's seat on education policy.

Diane

School Closings, ATRs, Charters, Rubber Rooms Are All Snakes in the Same Basket

Jeez, try to get away for a few days the all kinds of stuff start hitting the fan. More school closings - and the creation of more ATRs. Rubber rooms in the news and all kinds of other stuff on charter schools, using test scores to judge teachers, tenure and the Obama/Duncan Race to the Top to force the privatization model down the throats of state legislatures. These are all connected and one of the things we try to do here is link the various issues that may seem local to the big picture. Like it's not all about getting rid of Joel Klein as the UFT/Unity Caucus/New Action tandem would have you believe.

School closings and the creation of ATRs and rubber rooms are all part of the plan to privatize and de-unionize vast swaths of public schools, mostly in urban areas. And having a union leadership (the UFT/AFT is the only organization that has the resources to fight all of this) that either doesn't see the big picture (doubtful) or does see it, yet deliberately misleads the members and the public to think it is all about local stuff like BloomKlein puts people who want to resist things like school closings in a box. But more on school closings in a follow-up post.

For this post, let's start at the top and take a look at the overall plan in the use of charter schools as the wedge to break public control. I put this link at the top of the sidebar to a John Merrow (an ed deformer) podcast with Diane Ravitch, who savages Race to the top (listen carefully to some of Merrow's cloying questions).

Also check the link to the CAPE (PS 15, Redhook) piece (What Your Money Can and Cannot Buy) on the Medina article on charters sharing space in public schools.

Also keep an eye on the controversy over the charter school study of CMO's (Charter Management Orgs) being repressed by the Ed Sector (one of the leaders of the ed deform pack) and the excellent reporting coming out Alexander Russo's blog. This post there by Marc Dean Millot exposes some of the fault lines. Millot starts out with this:

Debra Viadero's article in today's online edition of Education Week ( Study Casts Doubt on Strength of Charter Managers) is worth reading if you are trying to determine the extent to which EdSector manipulated Tom Toch's Sweating draft, and whether it makes any difference. The gap was wide enough for Toch to disown EdSector's authorless Growing report, but Edsector argues that "the sort of editing process it went through would not be something out of the ordinary."

All I can say is that every research analyst should hope it is extraordinary, because if what has happened to EdSectors co-founder and co-director is the ordinary course of business in education policy research, the ordinary staff member is little more than an intellectual serf.

The first bit of new information in Viadero's report is Toch's accusation that EdSectorCMO Czar, Kim Smith, pressured management to excise financial and other insider information that cast doubt on the future of some CMOs as going concerns. board member, New Schools Venture Fund founder, and

Read more
http://scholasticadministrator.typepad.com/thisweekineducation/2009/12/millot-ed-weeks-story-on-tochs-sweating-v-edsectors-growing.html#more

You can download Toch's original draft here. (Thanks to Leonie for putting the Ed Sector stuff together. If you are not on her listserve you are missing out on one of the best ways of getting educated on what's happening in NYC and beyond.)


Is the Battle Over Charters Just About Public Space?

This comment was posted on the Leonie Haimson moderated NYC Ed News listserve,

I have no problem per se with Charter Schools but great resentment when they go into used public school spaces, taking over libraries and science rooms, making public schools less effective. If they find/pay for their own space, then let them open… but not when they encroach on public space....

I find this argument all the time. That people think charters are ok as long as they find their own space. We need to look at the larger picture of the charter school movement even if in their own spaces as part of a plan to undermine the public school system and put most of the schools in the hands of privateers, where large chains of charter schools (through buyouts and consolidations - the next phase) will control the education system and drive out public schools. Think Walmart and how small businesses were driven out, leaving a monopoly in many communities. Mom and pop charters may seem cute. But so were the local hardware stores driven out by Home Depot and Lowes. That is the future of urban school systems. Capitalism capitalizes and leads to bigger and bigger. The competition will be between national chains of charters like KIPP, Victory, etc. If there is to be a monopoly, the public should control it.

My Nov. 9, 2009 post had links to The Plan to replace public school systems and other articles of interest.

Here, in a series of posts over the last few days at the Schools Matter blog, we see the plan to undermine public education (and of course to destroy teacher unions) laid out by a former Bushie in early 2008. Now ask yourself: exactly what is the AFT/UFT doing in response? Think: who needs public education, let's get our share. Thanks to Michael Fiorillo for finding this gem (and don't forget, GEM in NYC right now is the only organized opposition to THE PLAN.)

Kenneth Libby laid out the plan to eliminate the public option in education in this post:

From the Vault

This is part of an essay written in early 2008 by AEI/Fordham's Andy Smarick, a former Bush II Domestic Policy Council member tasked with K-12 and higher education issues:

Here, in short, is one roadmap for chartering's way forward: First, commit to drastically increasing the charter market share in a few select communities until it is the dominant system and the district is reduced to a secondary provider. The target should be 75 percent. Second, choose the target communities wisely. Each should begin with a solid charter base (at least 5 percent market share), a policy environment that will enable growth (fair funding, nondistrictauthorizers, and no legislated caps), and a favorable political environment (friendly elected officials and editorial boards, a positive experience with charters to date, and unorganized opposition). For example, in New York a concerted effort could be made to site in Albany or Buffalo a large percentage of the 100 new charters allowed under the raised cap. Other potentially fertile districts include Denver,Detroit,Kansas City, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, New Orleans, Oakland, and Washington, D.C.

Third, secure proven operators to open new schools. To the greatest extent possible, growth should be driven by replicating successful local charters and recruiting high-performing operators from other areas. Fourth, engage key allies like Teach For America, New Leaders for New Schools, and national and local foundations to ensure the effort has the human and financial capital needed. Last, commit to rigorously assessing charter performance in each community and working with authorizers to close the charters that fail to significantly improve student achievement.

In total, these strategies should lead to rapid, high-quality charter growth and the development of a public school marketplace marked by parental choice, the regular startup of new schools, the improvement of middling schools, the replication of high-performing schools, and the shuttering of low-performing schools.

As chartering increases its market share in a city, the district will come under growing financial pressure. The district, despite educating fewer and fewer students, will still require a large administrative staff to process payroll and benefits, administer federal programs, and oversee special education. With a lopsided adult-to-student ratio, the district's per-pupil costs will skyrocket.

At some point along the district's path from monopoly provider to financially unsustainable marginal player, the city's investors and stakeholders--taxpayers, foundations, business leaders, elected officials, and editorial boards--are likely to demand fundamental change. That is, eventually the financial crisis will become a political crisis. If the district has progressive leadership, one of two best-case scenarios may result. The district could voluntarily begin the shift to an authorizer, developing a new relationship with its schools and reworking its administrative structure to meet the new conditions. Or, believing the organization is unable to make this change, the district could gradually transfer its schools to an established authorizer.

You can practically check off each of Smarick's suggestions for a pro-charter policy environment, particularly in places like Los Angeles. The general silence of Right-wing education "reformers" (hell-bent, in reality, on destroying and privatizing public education) is not a coincidence - they're largely happy with Obama/Duncan's education agenda.
Welcome to "third way" centrism.


More Schools Matter articles on charters:

After Years of "Innovation," NJ Charters Perform No Better Than Poorest Public Schools

The Real Effects of Corporate Charter Schools on Public Schools

CEO Pay in Charter School Chains

Gloucester Parents Stage Protest Against Crooked Charter School Approval



NOTE: Make sure to check the sidebar regularly for new snippets. I add to it every day, with the latest near the top.

Love That Bob (Compton)

Not. Well, filmmaker and self proclaimed ed expert, nee ed deformer Bob Compton, is not loved by Paola de Kock over at the NYC Public School Parent blog.

What Is Our Children Learning from Ersatz Education Experts?

Paola writes:

"Compton’s bright new ideas are the usual mix of “assessment and accountability” measures, pay-for-performance, and limitless expansion of charter schools and of teaching by TFA recruits and private-sector professionals; details are, of course, available by clicking the “Shop my store” tab."

"According to his biography on robertacompton.com, he is or has been an “IBM Systems Engineer, Professional Venture Capitalist, Angel Investor, President/COO of NYSE company, Entrepreneur and Filmmaker”; and “active in over 30 businesses including software, telecommunication services, healthcare services and medical devices.”


Bob apparently has problems with sticking with one thing. You see, Bob, some of us spent an entire career actually teaching kids. I even spent 27 years in one school. I know, I know. In your world that makes me a slacker. I guy without ambition (except to teach) to rise up in the competitive world you want education to be.

Ed Notes was visited by Bob Compton, or "Dumb Bob" as he signed his first comment after we posted this:

Renowned Arizona Charter School Asks Disruptive Students to Leave

We responded to Bob with this post:

Dear Dumb Bob Compton

And DB returned with a 2 part comment that read like a press release for the market based ed deformer crowd. Stop by and respond.


Nostalgia Note: Love That Bob with Bob Cummings was all the rave in the mid-50's when we were kids, particularly pre-adolescent boys. Cummings played a bachelor photographer and dated the hottest girls, who often wore skimpy outfits. More on the show here.

Race to the Bottom

Diane Ravitch (Obama's Heavy-handed Education Plan) at Politico nails the Obama/Duncan plan to use stimulus money to extort states into pushing the ed deform program down our throats. You know the drill: mayoral control, teacher bashing, merit pay, charters galore.

Diane's summary of ed deform is more elegant than mine:

...lots more charter schools; lots more privatization; evaluate teachers based on the test scores of their students; open more alternate routes into teaching to break the grip of professionalism.

It's worked so well in Duncan's Chicago, which has ruined a generation over the last 14 years of mayoral control. Diane's point here is one that should be blasted all over the nation to counter the deformers.

If Duncan knows so much about how to reform American education, why didn't he reform Chicago 's schools? A report came out a couple of weeks ago from the Civic Committee of Chicago ("Still Left Behind") saying that Chicago's much-touted score gains in the past several years were phony, that they were generated after the state lowered the passing mark on the state tests, that the purported gains did not show up on the federal tests, and that Chicago 's high schools are still failing. On the respected federal tests (NAEP), Chicago is one of the lowest performing cities in the nation.

Mike Petrilli of the Fordham Foundation (not a foe of ed deform, by the way) calls it "Washington Knows Best at its worst." Diane asks,

"What if Washington doesn't know best?" What if the "reform" ideas are wrong? Just a few weeks ago, a respected Stanford University study reported that 80% or more of charter schools are no better than or worse than their neighborhood public school. Why replace struggling public schools with worse charter schools? There is a ton of evidence that evaluating teachers based on student test scores is a lousy idea (see the work of Jesse Rothstein at Princeton , for example).

Why is Washington pushing "reform" ideas that have so little evidence behind them, as well as ideas that will positively harm public education in America ?

Related
Robert Pondiscio at Core Knowledge:
http://www.coreknowledge.org/blog/2009/07/24/nineteen-points-and-one-very-bad-idea/

See a compilation of raw posts from the NYC Ed News listserve, including Diane's full piece, posted at our storage facility Norms Notes: Several Posts re: Obama/Duncan's Race to the Top

THE BUSINESS OF EDUCATION: TEACHERS MISSING AT THE TOP

At City Limits

The New York City public school system has always been led by teachers. Until the chancellorship of Joel I. Klein.

A few subheadings:

• Product over process- check
• Teaching and learning downgraded- check
• 'Contempt for the profession'- check
• But businesses have gone bust- double check

An excellent article despite the numerous quotes from the ultimate hypocrite and intellectually dishonest UFT VP Leo Casey, who just might check out his boss' comments praising Bloomberg and mayoral control and giving them credit for the rise in test scores.

That former DOE cabinet member who is afraid of personal and professional retribution? I'll bet my union COPE contributions it is Carmen Farina, also one of the most hypocritical people on earth for remaining silent. A supposedly true educator (her silence weakens that argument), she was told by the Kleinites she didn't have the skill set for the job of Deputy Chancellor (they are on their 6th one).

Fear and Loathing in the NYC School System
The article ends with this Editor's Note:

In preparing this article, City Limits spoke with former and current DOE staffers and cabinet members, former and current school principals, academics, and critics on the left and right of the political spectrum, nearly all of whom requested anonymity out of concern for possible detrimental consequences for speaking candidly on the record on a sensitive issue. “The incredible concentration of political and financial power leaves no room f or dissent or difference,” said one person.

Many expressed worry that their schools might suffer or their programs might be jeopardized, given the depth and reach of Bloomberg-funded civic and philanthropic projects citywide. The mayor’s broad and deep connections across political, financial, social and philanthropic networks limit comments to those kept off the record – and, critics say, strongly influence largely favorable coverage in the mainstream media.

The DOE, despite prior verbal agreement to review and consider questions related to this article, declined comment, and would not address the near-universal desire for anonymity.

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.

Charter School Parents Used As Shock Troops

The Daily News' Juan Gonzalez asks:

Are parents of charter school children across the city being organized into shock troops for Mayor Bloomberg's continued control of the public school system? The state law that authorized mayoral control expires on June 30, and the debate over whether the Legislature should extend it has turned increasingly bitter in many city neighborhoods.

If you check out the last two Ed Notes posts (here and here) dealing with the rally by Brownsville parents opposing charter schools and the bund-like rally held by Eva Moskowitz with Bloomberg at the keynote speaker, you get a picture of what is going on as the pseudo ed reformers, or distorters, use their money and power to push public education off the cliff. The resistance movement grows, but is far outnumbered by the resources of the corporate world which has teamed up with most of the politicians. With the surrender of the teacher unions, the battle will be long and hard and indeed we may have to wait out a generation to see how the test driven/market based/charter school movement with a revolving peace corps-like teacher corps will lead to scandal and even collapse of entire school systems.

What will happen is a growing resistance from parents shut out and teachers overworked. Such coalitions are forming in Chicago and LA and we are in the early stages in NYC.

The ICE/NYCORE conference (endorsed by groups within and outside the union) to STOP CLOSING SCHOOLS on March 28 at John Jay College from 12-3PM is one of the building blocks of the resistance and if you are a resister, you should be there. We have to rebuild the union as a force to defend public education, build alliances with parent, community and student groups.

Gonzalez goes on:

Supporters of Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, including principals from many newly formed public charter schools, have launched a well-financed and sophisticated effort to lobby for more charters and for mayoral control.

In recent weeks, those principals have mobilized parents from their schools for "School Choice" community rallies to demand extra space for new charters in existing public schools, and to pack a series of state Assembly hearings on school governance, the last of which will be held in Brooklyn today.

"You see the organizers and the parents brought in on buses, and the sandwiches distributed, and you can tell it's a highly organized effort," said one official who has attended several of the hearings.

Some disgruntled charter school parents have claimed their principals require them to attend such rallies.

A Harlem principal who shares space with one of the new public charter schools is furious at the "obvious double standard."

"If I tried to use my budget and resources to mobilize parents that way, my job would be in jeopardy," said the principal, who requested anonymity. "But the charters have all this extra money to do whatever they want, all with the blessing of Klein."

If you are involved in education in any way, be scared, very scared, as communities are intentionally turned against each other, as are teachers.

The biggest uproar has been sparked by DOE's aggressive policy of putting new charters in existing public schools without seeking parent approval.

"It's the same in every neighborhood," said Monica Major, president of the Community Education Council in District 11 in the Bronx. "The DOE just tells you they're putting a new charter in your building and you have to force them to even have a conversation about it."

Such directives have turned parents in some neighborhoods into warring factions. Those who favor charters claim others are denying their children the chance for a better education.

Remember: March 28, John Jay College (59th st and 10th Ave) as teachers from some closing schools and some community and even student groups will develop strategies for building the resistance.

Related:
Why Obama is wrong about our schools
Randy Childs, a public school teacher and member of United Teachers Los Angeles, debunks Barack Obama's arguments for charter schools, standardized testing and merit pay for teachers.
http://socialistworker.org/print/2009/03/19/wrong-about-our-schools