Showing posts with label progressive ed reform. Show all posts
Showing posts with label progressive ed reform. Show all posts

Friday, January 9, 2009

F i x i n g t h e S c h o o l s , i n F i v e E a s y S t e p s !


Ah, the wisdom of an experienced teacher. Here is the face of reform that would work from Accountable Talk. I love Step 5. As I commented on AT's post, on the few occasions where all our admins were out, the teachers and secretaries (NEVER UNDERESTIMATE THE ABILITY OF GOOD SCHOOL SECRETARIES TO RUN A SCHOOL) sort of just took over and the place ran better than ever. Ed Notes has always stood for the principle of election of principals.

And make sure to check out AT's great suggestion to throw shoes at pictures of Bloomberg. Maybe start all faculty conferences that way. I bet the supevisors join in - if we haven't fired them yet.

S t e p O n e - - S t o p t h e G i m m i c k s

S t e p T w o - - E n f o r c e D i s c i p l i n e

S t e p T h r e e - - R e d u c e C l a s s S i z e

S t e p F o u r - - A t t r a c t i n g a n d K e e p i n g t h e B e s t T e a c h e r s

S t e p F i v e - - F i r e A l l A d m i n i s t r a t o r s

Friday, December 12, 2008

The New Know Nothings


I just heard Jonathan Alter rant against teacher unions on Don Imus while praising Bill Gates as a reformer. Alter joins David Brooks, another education Know Nothing in pushing the Joel Klein/Michelle Rhee/Arne Duncan model of "it's all the teachers and their unions fault" model of school reform. Brooks recently wrote his second column pushing his vacant ideas on education.

What's interesting about these Know Nothings is how they refuse to look at places where the anti-union market based "reforms" have had little impact. Arne Duncan brags about how he fired the teachers at low performing schools. How has the Chicago model worked out? (See my recent column about how PS 225 in Rockaway had most of the teachers dumped out in March 2005 and is now being closed.) As a matter of fact, the refusal to look at the record of Chicago 13 years after mayoral control began and where George Schmidt reports the union has been rendered just about helpless, is a major plank in the Know Nothing platform.

Another plank is the refusal to look at all the right to work states where unions barely exist and how education is working out in those places.

Alter never mentions Gates' recent turn around on his support of small schools, a movement that has decimated and de-stabilized so many schools in New York City. Ooops! Let's try another experiment with no data backing it up. The irony, of course, of all these data kings never using data to judge the validity of their "reforms," would be delicious if it wasn't so destructive.

The rants ignore the significant voices of vocal parents in New York who have actually made a firmer stand against BloomKlein than the UFT.

I put a lot of blame for how this is being played out squarely on the teacher unions, who could of/should of been fighting for the kind of education reforms that would work. But they abandoned that fight a generation ago. We expect people like Gates, Alter, Brooks, Klein, etc. to act the way they do. But when the rank and file have to fight a two-front war, their situation is very bad indeed.

As we full well know, the UFT has barely made a stand at all. I won't go into the gory details. You see, the UFT/AFT wants to play "me too – see, we are also reformers." No, not the kind of reformers who call for low class sizes and offering urban kids the same kind of education wealthy kids get. But merit pay, ending union work rules, support for the testing mantra (though making squeaks about how much they are opposed.)

The tragedy is that our union leaders are not Know Nothings. They actually know something about how schools work but have decided to play the political game with the union attackers. "We'll give you some of what you want now and sell it to the members while leaving you loop-holes to get the rest. We will then put on a big act for the members about how awful this is but shrug our shoulders with a 'what can we do' attitude." The key issue: hold on to power.

They want to be a partner with the business community and have a seat at the table. Except for the extreme right wing union attackers, the reformers are perfectly happy to have a UFT/AFT on board as their intermediaries in selling their platform from the inside. The union leaders will get dues no matter what happens to the teachers. And most importantly, they will remain in power.

If a reform movement within the UFT ever got started and attracted masses of rank and filers, watch how quickly the gang running the schools line up with Unity Caucus to keep militants away from union power.

Related
Greg Palast had a great post at Huffington which I posted at Norms Notes. Is the real Gates interest to make sure poor kids are educated in a narrow, test-driven school he would never send his own kids to so he can assure enough data entry clerks?

Is Obama Getting Bad Advice on His Appointments?

Joel Klein is being considered for secretary of education, which would make as much sense for our schools as Michael Brown did for disaster relief.

Has Barack Obama forgotten, Michael "Way to go, Brownie" Brown? Brown was that guy from the Arabian Horse Association appointed by President George W. Bush to run the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Brownie, not knowing the south shore of Lake Pontchartrain from the south end of a horse, let New Orleans drown. Bush's response was to give his buddy Brownie a thumbs up.

We thought Obama would go a very different way. You'd think the studious senator from Illinois would avoid repeating the Bush regime's horror show of unqualified appointments, of picking politicos over professionals. But here we go again. Trial balloons lofted in the Washington Post suggest President-elect Obama is about to select Joel Klein as secretary of education. If not Klein, then draft choice No. 2 is Arne Duncan, Obama's backyard basketball buddy in Chicago.

It's not just Klein's and Duncan's empty credentials that scare me: It's the ill philosophy behind the Bush-brand education theories they promote. "Teach-to-the-test" (which goes under such prepackaged teaching brands as "Success for All") forces teachers to limit classroom time to pounding in rote, low-end skills, easily measured on standardized tests. The transparent purpose is to create the future class of worker-drones. Add in some computer training and -- voila! -- millions trained on the cheap to function, not think. Analytical thinking skills, creative skills, questioning skills will be left to the privileged at the Laboratory School and Phillips Andover Academy.


Alphie Kohn has a piece in The Nation which I also posted at Norms Notes.

Beware School 'Reformers'

For Republicans education "reform" typically includes support for vouchers and other forms of privatization. But groups with names like Democrats for Education Reform--along with many mainstream publications--are disconcertingly allied with conservatives in just about every other respect.

Sadly, all but one of the people reportedly being considered for Education secretary are reformers only in this Orwellian sense of the word.

Duncan and Klein, along with virulently antiprogressive DC schools chancellor Michelle Rhee, are celebrated by politicians and pundits. Darling-Hammond, meanwhile, tends to be the choice of people who understand how children learn. Consider her wry comment that introduces this article: it's impossible to imagine a comparable insight coming from any of the spreadsheet-oriented, pump-up-the-scores "reformers" (or, for that matter, from any previous Education secretary). Darling-Hammond knows how all the talk of "rigor" and "raising the bar" has produced sterile, scripted curriculums that have been imposed disproportionately on children of color. Her viewpoint is that of an educator, not a corporate manager.

Imagine--an educator running the Education Department.


For more research-based pieces, check Leonie Haimson's consistent defense of reforms that will work at the NYC Public Parents blog. Leonie's stake is that she has a child in the NYC schools. In this piece Leonie punches holes in the entire Bill Gates rationale.

No evidence of improved outcomes at NYC's small schools

And of course the work done by Eduwonkette to debunk the Know Nothings. And then there's the ongoing discussion between Deborah Meier and Diane Ravitch at Bridging Differences.

You see, the new Know Nothings want to know nothing about all this evidence of opposition that goes way beyond teachers.

Previous Ed Notes articles on another David Brooks column in July.

David Brooks and the Status Quo at the NY Times

Responding to David Brooks

Michael Fiorillo Challenges David Brooks

Monday, September 8, 2008

Common Sense, Rational Education Reform

REVISED & UPDATED

What lies between the Joel Klein/Al Sharpton Education Equality Project (market based, narrow outcome oriented, punish schools and teachers) and the Bigger Bolder approach (schools can't do it alone without significant investment in support services)?

Does "Common Sense Educational Reforms" led by New York based Class Size Matters' Leonie Haimson and Julie Woestehoff's Chicago-based "Parents United for Responsible Education" (PURE) offer a 3rd way? (See the Common Sense blog.)

(Read Leonie Haimson's post at NYC Public School Parents, which fine tunes the CS position.)

Elizabeth Green of the NY Sun reports:

The parents criticize both groups. They dismiss Mr. Klein's as offering only a beefed-up version of President Bush's unpopular No Child Left Behind law. Mr. Klein's prescriptions are "NCLB on steroids," the parents' letter says.

They also reject charter schools, which are embraced by Mr. Klein and his supporters as a means of giving opportunities to poor children. The Common Sense group says charter schools actually further exacerbate income disparities by admitting only children who can do well at their schools and leaving the rest to flounder.

Admission at charter schools is regulated by strict lotteries in New York, but the parents argue that only the savvy students apply to them, and they say that the schools encourage more troubled students to leave.

The parents' statement also criticizes the Broader, Bolder Agenda's argument that schools alone cannot end the achievement gap.

"We cannot and we should not give up on schools being able to make a really transformational differencee in kids' lives," Ms. Haimson said.

Read Green's full story here. See the letter CSER has written to Obama and McCain here (after Green's piece.)


Will CSER become the third person between EEP and BB?
(Okay, it's a stretch - Orson Welles forgive me.)


Is this part of a movement for rational educational reform that will unite parents with progressive teachers who have seen their union drift into limbo between competing reform movements? (NYC Educator promoted it as did Ed Notes - I think I signed it.)

The UFT will jump on board - why not? It won't cost them anything but in terms of actually doing something about reform, don't expect much. After all, in addition to the BB, they also signed on to many of the aspects of the EEP - longer days, evaluations of schools based on narrow agendas, various merit pay schemes, charter schools and whatever crap is thrown against the wall and shows signs of sticking. Most of these concepts are criticized by CSER.

Bigger, Bolder does not claim schools cannot be improved at all and also seems to sign on to some of the accountability themes of EEP, though calling for an expansion beyond narrow test scores of how schools are held accountable. Bigger, Bolder's main themes are:
  • Continue to pursue school improvement efforts (with a big component being reducing class size.
  • Increase investment in developmentally appropriate and high-quality early childhood, pre-school, and kindergarten education.
So it is not clear exactly how different Common Sense is from Bigger, Bolder?

Philissa and Kelly at Gotham Schools called the school wars between EEP and BB a "false choice." Kelly raised the common sense concept:

As a policymaker evaluating schools, it makes no sense to ignore context. Set a high bar for everyone, of course - but recognize that it will take a lot more resources for some schools to achieve that than for others. If you don’t provide those resources - I’m talking small classes, rigorous, proven curriculum, recruitment, development, and retention of the best teachers, and it’s all going to take money - then you’re just setting up schools to fail.

And as a society, it makes no sense to put the whole burden on schools. I will know that our nation really wants to leave no child behind when I see a complete package of funded legislation that takes on health care (physical and mental), housing, environmental justice, early childhood education, and a host of other issues that affect the development and opportunities of our kids. “Our schools are failing,” is nothing but an excuse when the rest is left unaddressed.

To me, it looks like common sense: no excuses schools in a no excuses society.


I believe that most teachers who see the full consequences of how education in urban areas is given short shrift compared to places they send their own children to school do not take an approach to their jobs that things are hopeless. Teachers see real progress in many kids every day and put out their best. The real accountability they feel is to their students.

What they do see is the shame of what could be. What could be if only they didn't have 5 classes with over 30 kids in each, etc. (You know the drill.) There are kids who just don't make progress and they don't know what to do about it in the context of the resources they have at hand. Frustration, yes. But give up? No. The job becomes just too much heavy lifting when you do that. But when you add this market based competitive accountability thing to the equation then a job that was manageable to live with can become oppressive as the years go by.

What many, if not most, teachers who don't leave end up doing is finding ways to get out of doing a full schedule (comp time, dean, etc) or a gig that is less intensive teaching wise - there are a hell of a lot of non-classroom or part-time stuff that could be used to reduce class size. (We'll get into this aspect another time.) Finding teachers who do the blood and guts full schedule teaching for a very long time will be an increasingly rare thing.

My problem with one way accountability - hold teachers, schools, kids responsible while the people who hold the keys to the money escape - is that the fight for proper allocation of resources to close the equality gap between wealthy and poor schools gets lost in distraction over issues like teacher quality and accountability. Spend a fortune on monitoring, weeding out (isn't it cheaper to just find other useful things for people to do if there's a feeling they are not the best teachers), etc. instead of funneling all money into the classroom.

More from Kelly
How could two-way accountability actually work? If a school fails, but other services aren’t in place, schools are underfunded, and so forth, should the school still be held accountable? How could parents and educators in that school hold the government accountable for doing its part?

Let’s move beyond the “false choice” and explore what two-way accountability could look like in practice. Anyone?

I've been wrestling with Kelly's challenge and cannot see how 2-way accountability can work without a mass movement. Such a mass movement can never get moving with a progressive teachers union that bridges the gap between various elements and organizes and mobilizes its membership. That is why I have put a lot of my energies over the past 40 years into trying to spark a movement for progressive change in the UFT (with little success, I might add.) The UFT has bought into one way accountability and only pays lip service to holding political forces accountable - just look at their endorsement list (Pataki and worse.)

Class size is the bell weather issue that defines the separation of quality schools and the work Leonie has done for the past decade has been a focal point in the call for 2 way accountability. She has become one of the most vocal parent leaders in the city and beyond while attracting a lot of support from progressive teachers (as opposed to the UFT which also supports her - but you know the view from the anti-union right wing- they are only interested in class size so they can add members and dues.)

Parents organizations are difficult to sustain as they are mostly in the struggle for the years their kids spend in schools. Can create a movement without allying very strongly with teachers, who unless they are the new "peace corps" temporary teachers, are in it for decades and even if looked at from narrow self-interest, still have enormous incentives to see schools work well? That is why class size is such a unifying issue for all.

Gary Stager in his article in Good Magazine "School Wars" says, "Politicians, billionaires, and mavericks all want to fix public schools. They won’t. Parents will." Okay, I don't agree that parents will - alone. But these points focuses on the lack of accountability when it comes to the funders of the EEP approach are worth closing with:

Traditionally, corporate philanthropy in education consisted of a speaker on career day or sponsorship of a softball team. I’m all for generosity, but I’m also for accountability. And I wonder, to whom are the Gateses and the Broads of the world accountable? They were not elected or even appointed, but their money is changing the ways public schools operate. They may do this for altruistic reasons, but what is a citizen’s recourse if their ideology harms children? And, worse, what happens if a billionaire finally throws up his or her hands and publicly exclaims, “Even I can’t fix the public schools”? Our schools may not be able to survive the sudden cash withdrawal—or the backlash.

One way to navigate this new era of “giving” is by asking a simple question: Would these folks send their own children or grandchildren to their “reinvented” schools? Is a steady diet of memorization, work sheets, and testing the sort of education the children they love receive? Of course not. If affluent children enjoy beautiful campuses, arts programs, interesting literature, modern technology, field trips, carefree recess, and teachers who know them, I suggest that we create such schools for all children. What’s good for the sons and daughters of the billionaires should be good enough the rest of the children, too.



Friday, May 23, 2008

Progressive Ed Reform of the Day...

...provide health services to students at each large high school. A doctor, dentist, some full-time nurses. That would be as important in closing the achievement gap as any other lame brained idea the Regressive Ed reformers are pushing.

Another in a series of true reforms that would have a long-term impact brought to you by PER.