Prince George’s County, Maryland, will become the first county in the nation where the county executive controls the schools.
The executive will appoint the schools’ superintendent and several board members.
No doubt the Maryland legislature was impressed by the success of mayoral control in Chicago and Cleveland. Or was it Néw York City, where Mayor Bloomberg doubled the budget without narrowing the achievement gap and was able to raise the graduation rate to 62%, about the same as Philadelphia and Chicago.
“According to the National Association of Counties (NACo), Prince George’s County—which lies on the eastern border of Washington, D.C, and is home to nearly 900,000 people and 125,000 students who attend the county’s schools—is the first county in the United States where the executive has that level of control over a formerly autonomous school district. It is similar to some cities, such as Philadelphia, where the mayor appoints school board members.”
The linked article cites Philadelphia as an example of mayoral control–by which they mean a suspension of democracy-but Philadelphia has been controlled by the state for more than a decade and is on the brink of fiscal and educational bankruptcy.
Why do many reformers think that democracy is their enemy? Why do they put their trust in autocracy?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This is not a push towards autocracy for everyone. It’s a push towards autocracy for people of color. Prince George’s County is 65% African American.
It is no coincidence that the schools in most of the places where democracy has been suspended are populated primarily by children of color — Detroit, Philadelphia, Newark, Camden, Jersey City, Paterson.
This is very much about race and the ed deformers’ willingness to treat people of color very differently, and much worse, than whites.
I dunno. I agree with you that racism plays a large role, but I think in the long run, it is a push for autocracy for everyone. Just like “no excuses” and drill to kill teaching methods started in poor black schools and has since worked its way up to white and working/middle class schools, I think we’ll see more and more encroachment of single executive “managers” taking over functions from democratically elected leaders in white and working/middle class districts eventually. It’s easier to start in poor and minority districts because no one with any power ever objects. But it sets a precedent that gradually trickles up the economic scale and across racial boundaries, by which time the train is moving so fast people don’t see it coming and can’t stop it.
“But it sets a precedent that gradually trickles up the economic scale and across racial boundaries, by which time the train is moving so fast people don’t see it coming and can’t stop it.”
No doubt Dienne, can you say NCLB and its mutant step child RaTT!
For years none of the affluent districts said anything about those abominations of educational malpractice policies/laws, based on lies and slanders against teachers, until it started to effect them. They “went along to get along” as they thought they were “winning”. And now? Is it too late? Jokes on them, now! Unfortunately that joke is causing untold harm to many students.
The Foundation-based Deformers have false idol worship syndrome. Democratic elections suggest that the unreformable masses may change leadership against the Elitists wishes.
In PG County, Dell + Broad had tech grant agreements specifically saying they had rights to terminate funding if change of Superintendent occurred; it was tied both to Deasey and then Hite terms. The grants were to construct teacher/school evaluation and data capture systems through consultants like McKinsey (including Hite’s now #2 in Phila named Paul Kihn; Kihn is co-author of Pearson executive Sir Michael Barber’s book “Deliverology” while both were are McKinsey) and hardware suppliers.
Not clear if that system functions or is utilized now. Potentially no return on investment for PG County citizens ans students.
But the grant it served its purposes for Dell Fdn, Broad Fdn and Deasey and Hite. Two more deformers using smaller districts as stepping stones to reap destruction at the crown jewel districts.
If (a big if) the County Executive changes direction of PG County away from its recent path, then this may be a necessary set back for democracy with longer term benefits.
An interesting article. I would have hoped the school board could have found the resources to participate in the task force addressing the six high school students killed. Perhaps an administrative structure that includes school, law enforcement, and social services will be better able to coordinate their efforts.
Democracy is just an EMPTY word to the DEFORMERS. Autocracy is more like it and really BAD, too.
I am a badass teacher and a teacher in PG Co. Missing from all of this is the role of the ‘union’, PGCEA. As an association member, I know they were against this move by Baker to take control. However, their actions were weak. I don’t recall any real concerted effort, except in the beginning perhaps, of this association doing much to protest this. I know this was the only thing on their plate at the time; with so many other issues they can only focus on one injustice at a time.
This is an issue of whether or not a single individual can control a school board. It doesn’t matter who is chosen to administer it as the goals of RttT, CCS, testing, etc. would be dutifully managed. This was also a pissing match between Baker and others; a clash of egos. Always, those least empowered are the most impacted by such personality fights.
That explains why the three finalists for superintendent withdrew.
Myles..I agree with your points but would add a bit more strongly that PG teachers SO NEED TO REALIZE how weak the union is there. THe trouble is that more PG teachers than not feel hopeless as PG elections seem to be a sham. Haines jumps as high as the BOE wants him to and yet teachers are ired by this but miraculously he is elected and re-elected. The way the last elections were held were highly suspect for so many reasons. Ughh!
Since I taught in Prince George’s for 16 years, perhaps I can give a little more perspective. There is a long history of problems with the schools.
The NAACP had to go to Court to get the system to desegregate. The system was under a court order/supervision with respect to that for many years. It included setting up magnet programs so that students would be drawn from neighborhoods that were segregated into racially mixed schools. But as the school system became increasingly children of color, eventually nothing was going to make a difference and the supervision was dropped.
You can see the problem from the current demographics:
67.4% African-American
22.6% Hispanic
4.6% Caucasian
2.9% Asian
2.4% various other races
Next, there is a real problem of funding. First, the County Board was controlled by development interests for quite problem (when it was not being controlled by a corrupt political organization), and thus a lot of townhouses were built – the problem is that brought a lot of children into the schools, but the townhouses did not come close to paying sufficient taxes. Further, the tax base in the county has never been very good.
Then there is a voter initiative known as TRIM which prevents the County from raising taxes for any purpose without a referendum approved by the voters.
the schools have been underfunded for years.
Governance has varied over the years, from board members being appointed by County Council members (by district) at one point IIRC, and then elected by councimanic district, as well as a previous takeover in part by the state.
They have also been mismanaged. There were major problems with an elected board, which clashed with the Superintendent they had hired from the outside (Iris T. Metts) where there were real issues on both sides: Metts was paying bonuses to people who did not deserve them, the school board was moving to dismiss her in a fashion that might not have been legal. The elected school board was abolished for a while with a school board appointed partially by the Governor and partially by the County Executive (so lack of democratic governance of the school system is not something brand new). That school board wound up hiring one Andre Hornsby, who among other things we convicted (although that conviction was overturned) of guiding contracts to a software company for which his live-in girl friend was a sales person. Trust me, you do not want to know all the gory details.
As a side note, I had students of two of those appointed board members in the same class.
Eventually the school board was again elected by the voters. IT was IIRC the elected board that hired John Deasy, who at that point had managed a quite small school district in CA – PG is one of the largest districts in the Country.
When he left, that board promoted his deputy, William Hite, who has now left to go to Philadelphia, where he is participating in dismantling what is left of that school system.
When Hite left, the board hired Alvin Crawley, previously a senior level administrator in DC, as the interim superintendent. When County Executive Rushern Baker succeeded in getting effective control over the school system, Crawley withdrew from consideration for the permanent appointment. The new head of the system is Kevin Maxwell, who grew up in the county, began his career in PG schools as teacher, administrator and principal before moving to Montgomery County where he was a principal and then an area superintendent, then moving to Anne Arundel County where he has been their superintendent. He has continued to live in the County and his kids went to school there.
About mismanagement. Several issues immediately come to mind. One, the board was committing to a very expensive new building to replace the administration building at the time when it was cutting essential services and had frozen teacher salaries and eliminated a fair number of emoluments, including for National Board. Eventually they were forced to back off on that.
They hired teachers from outside the US, primarily from the Philippines. But the law was not followed, because those teachers were required to pay a fee to an agency. The appropriate administrators were warned about this, but ignored it. The federal government came after the school system on this issue – the school system spent a lot of money trying to fight it legally, even though they had no chance of winning. I believe they may also have been financially penalized.
I hold no brief for Rushern Baker. He has a history as a County Council member of being insensitive to separation of church and state.
He has appointed as chair of the board Segun Eubanks, who as it happens is Director of Teacher Quality at the National Education Association. He is the father of two children in the system, and has worked closely with Rushern Baker in the past. As a side note, a number of teachers who have been active in educational policy in the past have butted heads with Eubanks, specifically with some of the missteps we believe Dennis van Roekel has made in the past few years, which Eubanks has defended.
I have no ongoing connection with PG schools other than friendships with former coworkers and having some of my former students with one more year before they graduate. Oh, and a number of my former students who teach in the system.
But I suspect of the regular contributors to this blog I am probably the most knowledgeable about PG schools. which is why I offered this extensive comment.
Mr. Eubanks is a former brother in law of Mr. Baker.
It will be interesting to see if Mr. Baker appoints a Hispanic to take the place of the recently resigned school board member, Carletta Fellows. She resigned due to her abuse of the BOE issued credit card.
(On the trivia note, one of the last elected BOE members from the early 2000s, Marilyn Bland, spend over $5000 of BOE money to take her family to Disney World. As an auditor presented their financial report to the BOE, Ms. Bland pulled out a Mickey Mouse figurine and set it in front of herself. She then spend $11,000 on a mid-June mailing to the citizens of District 9. The mailing contained preparation tips for the MSPAP testing completed the month before and a list of graduation dates already past. She was running for the county council seat and was pushing her name using school money. She won.)
Forced busing started in 1973. The whites running the system, like Sue Mills, didn’t care about black children. A virtually all black school, Fairmont Heights High School had standing water in the basement and an infestation of rats.
Dr. Hite told citizens he wanted to grow gray in PGCPS. As has been noted elsewhere, he told parents he did not have the time to visit every school, yet he twice visited one teacher at Duval High School (who has since left for a charter school in DC).
Another example of the disorganized central office was in 2002. The county had to pay a $2 million penalty to Oracle for the payroll system. The county had missed the deadline for entering data on the employees.
On the last day of school for teachers in June 2004, employees were inserviced on David Coleman (yes, him) and McGraw-Hill’s expensive GROW Network. That was the first and last day teacher ever used it.
Thanks TeacherKen. Just wondering what your thoughts on the newest of the superintendents might be (now called – ughh – CEO)?
everything I know about Kevin Maxwell is positive. Don’t worry about the title. But there are still real problems with funding. And State rejected what we (I was part of it) designed as our teacher evaluation method.
TeacherKen: glad to know that Maxwell might actually be an asset. I do hope SO HOPE that he will concern himself with the needs of students and not the needs of corporate profiteers (despite what his title of CEO suggests). But in regards to the evaluation comment… I do wonder if PG will go through with this now that there has been an official national “back-peddling” on this teacher evaluation process! I cannot imagine how they could implement this for so many reasons including the fact that they haven’t even rolled out a common core based test yet.
issue is what Maryland Dept of Education decides to do. They rejected PG and Montgomery and one more b/c it was not 50% of teacher evaluation dependent upon student test scores. EVen if Feds back off does not mean state will
It is disturbing that this Maryland legislated top-down autocratic control of the PG public schools is occurring in a very blue state.
It would not have passed the Maryland General Assembly if it were not for the most part supported by the Delegates and State Senators from the County. So it is not quite like the rest of the state is imposing it upon the County without any support from elected officials in the County.
One of the Senator, Jo Ann Benson, told teachers and parents who went to Annapolis to argue against granting Baker this authority, that they did not what was really going on.
The legislature cut back on Mr. Baker’s proposal to be given total authority. They did not want to start a precedent.
“Sometimes people hold a core belief that is very strong. When they are presented with evidence that works against that belief, the new evidence cannot be accepted. It would create a feeling that is extremely uncomfortable, called cognitive dissonance. And because it is so important to protect the core belief, they will rationalize, ignore and even deny anything that doesn’t fit in with the core belief.”
– Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
Cognitive dissonance, what the vast majority of people have when shown that the grading of students is logically and ethically wrong and an educational malpractice atrocity of which educational standards and standardized testing have come to dominate.
For all you regular readers who are saying to yourselves “How did that Quixotic Swacker manage to work in Wilson’s ‘Educational Standards and the Problem of Error’ found at:
http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700 into a discussion about Prince Georges county executive’s takeover of the public school district?” Well, as a perfect example of “cognitive dissonance”. Thanks, NoBrick for the opening, oops I mean opportunity!!
Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine. (updated 6/24/13 per Wilson email)
1. A quality cannot be quantified. Quantity is a sub-category of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category by only a part (sub-category) of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as one dimensional quantities (numbers or grades) is to perpetuate a fundamental logical error” (per Wilson). The teaching and learning process falls in the logical realm of aesthetics/qualities of human interactions. In attempting to quantify educational standards and standardized testing we are lacking much information about said interactions.
2. A major epistemological mistake is that we attach, with great importance, the “score” of the student, not only onto the student but also, by extension, the teacher, school and district. Any description of a testing event is only a description of an interaction, that of the student and the testing device at a given time and place. The only correct logical thing that we can attempt to do is to describe that interaction (how accurately or not is a whole other story). That description cannot, by logical thought, be “assigned/attached” to the student as it cannot be a description of the student but the interaction. And this error is probably one of the most egregious “errors” that occur with standardized testing (and even the “grading” of students by a teacher).
3. Wilson identifies four “frames of reference” each with distinct assumptions (epistemological basis) about the assessment process from which the “assessor” views the interactions of the teaching and learning process: the Judge (think college professor who “knows” the students capabilities and grades them accordingly), the General Frame-think standardized testing that claims to have a “scientific” basis, the Specific Frame-think of learning by objective like computer based learning, getting a correct answer before moving on to the next screen, and the Responsive Frame-think of an apprenticeship in a trade or a medical residency program where the learner interacts with the “teacher” with constant feedback. Each category has its own sources of error and more error in the process is caused when the assessor confuses and conflates the categories.
4. Wilson elucidates the notion of “error”: “Error is predicated on a notion of perfection; to allocate error is to imply what is without error; to know error it is necessary to determine what is true. And what is true is determined by what we define as true, theoretically by the assumptions of our epistemology, practically by the events and non-events, the discourses and silences, the world of surfaces and their interactions and interpretations; in short, the practices that permeate the field. . . Error is the uncertainty dimension of the statement; error is the band within which chaos reigns, in which anything can happen. Error comprises all of those eventful circumstances which make the assessment statement less than perfectly precise, the measure less than perfectly accurate, the rank order less than perfectly stable, the standard and its measurement less than absolute, and the communication of its truth less than impeccable.”
In other word all the errors involved in the process render any conclusions invalid.
5. The test makers/psychometricians, through all sorts of mathematical machinations attempt to “prove” that these tests (based on standards) are valid-errorless or supposedly at least with minimal error [they aren’t]. Wilson turns the concept of validity on its head and focuses on just how invalid the machinations and the test and results are. He is an advocate for the test taker not the test maker. In doing so he identifies thirteen sources of “error”, any one of which renders the test making/giving/disseminating of results invalid. As a basic logical premise is that once something is shown to be invalid it is just that, invalid, and no amount of “fudging” by the psychometricians/test makers can alleviate that invalidity.
6. Having shown the invalidity, and therefore the unreliability, of the whole process Wilson concludes, rightly so, that any result/information gleaned from the process is “vain and illusory”. In other words start with an invalidity, end with an invalidity (except by sheer chance every once in a while, like a blind and anosmic squirrel who finds the occasional acorn, a result may be “true”) or to put in more mundane terms shit in-crap out.
7. And so what does this all mean? I’ll let Wilson have the second to last word: “So what does a test measure in our world? It measures what the person with the power to pay for the test says it measures. And the person who sets the test will name the test what the person who pays for the test wants the test to be named.”
In other words it measures “’something’ and we can specify some of the ‘errors’ in that ‘something’ but still don’t know [precisely] what the ‘something’ is.” The whole process harms many students as the social rewards for some are not available to others who “don’t make the grade (sic)” Should American public education have the function of sorting and separating students so that some may receive greater benefits than others, especially considering that the sorting and separating devices, educational standards and standardized testing, are so flawed not only in concept but in execution?
My answer is NO!!!!!
One final note with Wilson channeling Foucault and his concept of subjectivization:
“So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority; true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience that contradict the story; true because in acting out your story, which now includes the mark and its meaning, the social truth that created it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that your voice becomes a voice of authority in the power-knowledge discourses that reproduce the structure that helped to produce you; true because if your mark is low your voice becomes muted and confirms your lower position in the social hierarchy; true finally because that success or failure confirms that mark that implicitly predicted the now self evident consequences. And so the circle is complete.”
In other words students “internalize” what those “marks” (grades/test scores) mean, and since the vast majority of the students have not developed the mental skills to counteract what the “authorities” say, they accept as “natural and normal” that “story/description” of them. Although paradoxical in a sense, the “I’m an “A” student” is almost as harmful as “I’m an ‘F’ student” in hindering students becoming independent, critical and free thinkers. And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.
“And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.” EXACTLY!! BINGO!!
GIVE THE MAN A CIGAR! (don’t inhale)
Try as you may to educate (independent, critical and free thinkers)
Government will fight you all the way. Gov. doesn’t want a return
to the 60’s independant, critical and free thinkers, behind the social
uprising, promoting change (civil/voter rights, anti-war…)
SCHOOLING (order) is the objective, not EDUCATION !
KISS, keep it simple stupid, entertains common sense.
Common sense: Educators know how to educate, NOT
the Captains of Capital.
Understanding is reduced as levels of abstraction are added.
Enter Strategic Complexity:
The complexity
both excludes most of the public from
policy debates and also lends status
to the masters of a “Complex” discipline.
Enter Mythology:
“The Structuralist school of anthropology argued that myth is the means by which we organise our world. Some anthropologists stressed the social aspects of this; others emphasize the fact that mythic or symbolic structures were important in shaping our perceptions.
Social structure as mythic or symbolic is easy to imagine. As Hamlet says in a moment of lucid madness: “The body is with the king, but the king is not with the body.” The king is a social or symbolic function, not a physical thing. A particular king – say, James II – is no different biologically from his fellow men, yet he puts on a crown, sits on a throne and assumes a symbolic position of authority. It is from this place, backed by a mythic structure (divine right, for example), that the social structure itself borrows its substance.”
Control has been the objective all along. What better way to
isolate potential threats to power, than to corral them, specialize
them to blindness, give them a vote, and tell them they are free.
The bell tolls for thee…
NoBrick,
Have you read “The Ruin of Kasch” by Calasso?
Duane
Duane, I haven’t read the book.
It’s quite interesting. I was reading it as part of my doctoral work when my funding was pulled by the school. I’ve now gone back and am rereading it.
With your comments I think you might enjoy!
The mayor of Philadelphia does not have control of the school board. The school board was eliminated in December of 2001 and replaced with a 5-member School Reform Commission. Three members are appointed by the governor and two by the mayor.
Barbara McDowell Dowdall English/Academic Department Head (Retired) A. Philip Randolph Technical High School Philadelphia
Sent from my iPhone
It’s Chicago “where the mayor appoints school board members” –every single one of them. For the past 18 years of mayoral control, they have all been the mayor’s cronies who rubber stamp whatever he wants.
I wonder how quickly this will spread and to what degree. Hopefully not like Common Core; it seemed to spread like wildfire without the facts being checked first. I suppose some of these mayors go along with Bill Gate’s corporation mindset but don’t check the facts and examine results of this practice, so they don’t see that this “quick fix” isn’t the answer either, and in many cases, does more harm than good to the people–school children.–that the mayor wants –or claims to want–to help. In the meantime, these mayors have made themselves look good in the eyes of people such as Bill Gates and Jeb Bush. Maybe that was their motivation in the first place. I wonder what these mayors will get out of their newly aquired business of running their city’s schools.