Andy Smarick believes that public schools can’t be fixed or turned around. He thinks that the only way to solve their problems is to close them down and replace them with privately managed charters. Andy served on the board of a KIPP school, so he is confident that KIPP can do what no public school can do.
In a previous post, I called on Andy to join me in “the KIPP Challenge.” This is the challenge for KIPP to take over an entire low-performing district and show what it can do. Prove that it doesn’t skim the best students, show what happens when it takes all the kids, prove the critics wrong. Given Andy’s experience as a member of a KIPP board, I thought he should join me.
Now he says that the School Improvement Grants (SIG) are a vast waste of money. I agree with him again.
Billions have been spent with meager results. The Department of Education has boasted of double digit gains, but Anthony Cody showed the statistical game that the DOE was playing. Anthony warned last March that the DOE was “spinning the numbers,” and that the SIG program was not working.
Agreed!
I feel strongly that a decade from now, we will look back and realize that the billions spent on Race to the Top were a waste of money that diverted schools from their true mission of developing and educating citizens, not the best test-takers who can win a race for higher test scores.
Andy, lover of all things new, wants to see the SIG program replaced by a commitment only to new schools.
But Chicago and New York City have been doing that for years without much success. The New York Daily News reported recently that nearly 60% of the new schools opened by Mayor Bloomberg had lower passing rates than the “failing” schools they had replaced. Why do more of the same when it didn’t work? If most of the new schools do worse than the old schools, we will move backwards, not forwards.
So, my suggestion is that federal money go to build and strengthen communities as well as schools; that it be coordinated with social services and health services to make sure that children are fit and healthy; that it be spent to make sure that schools in every community have a full rich curriculum with experienced teachers; that it be used to make sure that every school serving poor communities has strong parental involvement and social workers. And that we honor our nation’s commitment to equality of educational opportunity.
I know Andy won’t agree with my prescriptions. But I don’t agree with privatizing education.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
In addition, unions need to become stronger so that families have stable incomes. Stable incomes lead to stable families which leads to stable children ready to go to school.
Have you ever observed what happens when adolescents who have been engaging in at-risk behavior or have been experiencing trauma or have been out on the streets because they have run away are able to eat three meals a day plus two snacks, sleep in a clean, safe environment, and attend school on the basis of individualized, student-centered learning, not be using alcohol and/or drugs to self-medicate? It’s an amazing transformation, we call it the butterfly effect. Over the course of hours, you begin to see these young people emerge from the cloak of fear and depravation. Often students begin to care about their education again. Sometimes they are willing to walk away from using drugs and alcohol. What they do recognize is that they need help? Why can’t school systems help? Some systems are, but so much more could be done.
Over the years in talking to public schools about the young people returning to them, the conversation trails off because the resources and systems are just not there to support and sustain the effort of providing resources to children and families in really specific ways.
Educators should not be surprised when all of the great teaching strategies don’t improve outcomes for students when the home environments that they come from are chaotic and under-resourced and even dangerous.
Diane, your summary at the end of what we need to do as a nation to strengthen education is absolutely on the mark. Let’s put our backs into helping this become a reality. Former Newark superintendent Clifford Janey’s essay “Reset or Redo Ed Reform”
speaks to the clear evidence before us that Early Childhood education and addressing the intersection of education and social policy (poverty) are fundamental to any
long lasting meaningful progress.
I want you to be our Education Secretary!
Yes, we have had this information for over fifty years. Now it’s time to act on it.
And I agree that appointing a successful EDUCATOR to the position of Secretary of Education would be an excellent start.
I agree. I am about to get my letter written to President Obama, now that he has secured the White House for the next 4 years and suggest that Arne Duncan be replaced with Diane. I think he has some clear ideas about reducing poverty but he has not connected them closely to the context of how the schools are affected by improving the home life of children or how children need effective schools that nurture them to escape from poverty. Our schools need to be a place where children want to be and are nurtured by WHILE their home lives are being made better.
Diane,
I am grateful for your vigilance in making our country aware of the dangers we face from charter schools and their backers. Our schools have always been a support for upward mobility and inclusion of diverse populations. The segregation and lack of education resulting from charter schools is appalling. We need you!
Your remedy is this: “So, my suggestion is that federal money go to build and strengthen communities as well as schools; that it be coordinated with social services and health services to make sure that children are fit and healthy; that it be spent to make sure that schools in every community have a full rich curriculum with experienced teachers; that it be used to make sure that every school serving poor communities has strong parental involvement and social workers. And that we honor our nation’s commitment to equality of educational opportunity.”
On the face of it, this makes sense, BUT all of these things used to be the province of parents, and still are in middle class in-tact families. Thus we have to inquire what detroyed the families of the poor. It clearly wasn’t racial discrimination. The poor family was intact even before the civil rights revolution. What then was it that destroyed the poor, often black family structure? It was government funding of single mothers and their children. Your prescription still sees the state, in the form of the schools, as replacing the family as the source of food, safety, shelter, and emotional support. At this point, it may indeed be the best that we can manage in working back toward family creation and stability.
We should not, however, ingore the simple fact that irresponsible men and women have fathered a sub-class of bastards, literally, of children without fathers to partner with the women who must then bring up the children by themselves. It’s tough even with two parents in the household. It’s VERY difficult for single mothers. This much more fundamental social problem should at least be acknowledged before we discuss remedies for the schools, the performance of which is in fact a direct mathematical function of the characteristics of the “levels” of society they serve.
This is not blaming the victims. It’s just recognizing reality. Your argument for vastly increased funding for social services to these neglected children MIGHT work—I certainly don’t know for sure what else to do—but if your proposals were implemented, the secondary effect would be increased work for unionize teachers, which I take it is your main supporting constituency. ‘What’s good for the AFT is good for the country.’ Right???? I believe you are sincere in that sentiment, but I’m not 100% sure it is any more true than “Engine” Charley Wilson’s famous statement so frequently derided, “What’s good for GM is good for the country.”
“We should not, however, ingore the simple fact that irresponsible men and women have fathered a sub-class of bastards, literally, of children without fathers to partner with the women who must then bring up the children by themselves.”
Who is ignoring the plight of these children on this blog, Falstaff? Certainly not Diane or most of the commenters in this community.
I’m assuming you are not an educator, based on your ignorant comments made on this blog in the past, so I’ll point this out as a difference between you and those of us who educate. You have the luxury of sitting back and pontificating on who is to blame for the “bastards”. We don’t. We just have to do our best to teach them.
I suppose it does sound like pompous, ignorant, pontificating. I am trying to bring a different perspective to your discussion, not just be part of the mosh pit cheering your rock star, Diane, in her Leftist same old, same old Marxist song. What would being taken seriously mean? That you admire me for joining in the hand wringing chorus of keening at the successful privatization of the public school system? That I join in the 30’s anti capitalist rant when it was fashionable to be a Marxist? The public school system is a dying holdover from progressive times, dying because it came up against its inability to deal with the actual proletariat. It failed because it couldn’t deliver on the promise of equality or equity. Ironically privatization, i.e. Americanization, is happening simultaneously as socialism, Marxism, Leftism, has taken over the country as a whole. I don’t see HOW Obama and Duncan can be permitting it to happen. Maybe if he gets all the new taxes he wants, he will have enough money to effectively federalize education as well as health care. We live in interesting times. Diane thinks that a major effort by the natural Leftist constituency of teacher will get him to remembrance unaccountable education. She may be right. I don’t think so, but what can a pompous, ignorant, pontificator know, except to point out from time to time that the Marxist wine of life looks and tastes and tests like wine still and not the holy transformation of student OR society that is advertised by the high priestess of unionized public education, our dear, believer in chief, Diane, in what might be called the modern Pauline epistles to you all. I preferred her when she was working for the Sanhedrin. I first encountered her in THE NATIONAL REVIEW, not to be confused with THE NATION/NEW YORK TIMES/ATLANTIC trinity of Leftist journals. Yes, she once was a conservative, that is to say American in her thinking, not European.. I’ve always wondered what her Road to Damascus moment was, when she drank the kool aid of the new-old poison brew of socialism, Leftism, whatever one calls it these days, the religion of heaven on earth in our generation. Except for the anti capitalist, profit is greed, hate mongering, she really does write with exceptional clarity and verve. That’s why I follow this blog. Karen Lewis in Chicago offers hope, but her coalition had to defeat the old union leadership before they could do anything. Diane is ambivalent about her and the CFT, but I am not. I like the way a little truth has been injected into the debate by her. We live in interesting times.
Falstaff:
I announced long ago that this blog was the virtual equivalent of a living room.
I have no expectation that guests will agree, but I do have an expectation that they will be civil.
Your name-calling is not civil.
If you persist in name-calling, I will remove all of your comments.
Doing so will not be censorship.
It will be my enforcement of standards of civility.
If you can’t live by the standards of civility of this blog, go elsewhere.
Diane
How is calling you a union Leftist name calling? Isn’t that just accurate identification? You do a great deal of name calling yourself, if one counts your anti-capitalist, anti-privatization rants against Rhee, Gates, the Koch’s etc. Why is it OK for you to name call, except that you see it as accurate identification? It IS your living room, of course, but that doesn’t mean that you won’t use that privilege hypocritically. I don’t call you corrupt, but seriously misguided about the potential for securing more tax money for the public schools. Lefties hide behind “civility” when they don’t want their party members to hear non-party approaches. I expect that your groupies will applaud you if you silence me here. Typical.
Falstaff,
You are on notice. No name-calling. This is my blog, not yours.
This is your last chance.
Call me names and you are banned for life.
Diane
Falstaff,
I find your comments utterly lacking in respect, or the humility that comes from actually working with children, schools, or needy families. If you are sincere in your interest in discussing ways to strengthen our public schools (the purpose of this website) start by spending some actual time getting to know the children and families and teachers of your local school. They need you and you clearly need them.
Thank you Steve, for your clarification. I had not realized that this website’s purpose was to discuss ways to “strengthen our public schools.” I thought it was an open education discussion website. I would prefer to translate “strengthen our public schools” as “Keep the public schools under control by the AFT, Diane sponsor and patron.” I guess I really am the skunk at your garden party. But to shift the metaphor egregiously, you are all barking up an empty tree under Diane’s leadership. What she is advocating simply won’t ever happen because the parents don’t want it and won’t pay for it, and when we enter the next dip in the depression won’t be ABLE to pay for it. Public education is already dead in this country, but you don’t know that you are a zombie. My aim is to break the stranglehold of the unions on the public schools, and if that means killing them in order to kill their union lamprey parasites, that is the way that must be taken because reform from within is never going to happen either. I’ll have to reconsider whether it is worth my time to keep on reading this union blather, but I have found it immensely useful in keeping on top of the privatization of education developments. Diane does keep up. And YOU have done me a real service in showing me what the rest of you are doing here, deluded in dreamland as you are.
As compared to your delusions of grandeur? You have absolutely no idea what parents want and you do not speak for me, my husband, my colleagues or my family. Once again…you are a legend in your own mind. I agree with one of your statements….it is time for you to troll another blog. Google: pompous narrow-minded know-it-all bloviators and you will feel welcomed and very much at home or better yet, start your own blowhard blog….Rush and Donald might join you.
“… deluded in dreamland as you are.”
Steve encouraged you to educate yourself about the true nature of public education. Get to know students, teachers, parents, and administrators. Learn the challenges they face. You’d be amazed at the successes that aren’t measured by test scores.
Until you do these things … It is you who are “deluded”.
” I’ll have to reconsider whether it is worth my time to keep on reading this union blather . . .”
Falstaff, you haven’t been following this blog for long, have you? If you had, you would know that teachers union leadership gets roundly criticized on a pretty regular basis. Your stereotypes and prejudices are writing checks that your limited understanding can’t cash, man.
Want to be taken seriously in discussions here? Spend a week in a public school classroom shadowing a teacher and thereby acquire the foggiest clue what’s going on in the institution you are criticizing with such authority. I guarantee you will moderate your commentary. Live anywhere close to northern Wisconsin? I know a guy who would be happy to show you the ropes.
Thank you for your offer. Too far from where I am. I hope you voted not to recall Scott Walker. No one doubts some public schools do good work, and under difficult circumstances. I think no school should be larger than 220 students. Otherwise the principal can’t know every one of them by name on sight. Without that, there cannot be enough “personal” quality to the education. Every staff member should know every student by name and on sight. Anything less is not real virtue-modeling education, in my opinion. Yes, we want to teach abstract knowledge, but we want to provide the human dimension most fundamentally. The best is when we can combine intellectual distinction in teachers with the personal touch. How many public school teacher could survive in such an environment? Non unionized, of course. Why TFA is getting so much purchase on the system. They are modern Jesuits. Soldiers for the best in brain stuff.
I would not trust anyone connected with KIPP any more than I do Teach for America. When they started the KIPP school in Atlanta they went through the apartment complexes on Buford Highway recruiting 5th graders, most of whom were Latino. Then they instituted their rigid schedule and punitive discipline policies and hired young not really teachers who had degrees in business. Needless to say, about half the students went back to regular school. There biggest complaint was that school took up so much of the children’s time they had no family life and the requirements for family involvement interfere with their work schedules. I never heard of anything good coming out of KIPP.
Oh, long ago we had a social worker in our school. For a while we had a great parent leader who did home visits. I wish we had either of them now. I have 9 students (out of 23) who failed the vision screening and 3 students who are missing way too much school. Also some really sad stories accompany some of my most problematic students.
To fullofhimself,
If you are looking for Rhee lovers this is not the place. May I suggest you sign up at Students Last and then the Rheeject will finally have one grassroots supporter. Best of luck and good riddance.