In this post, Ed Berger explains the collaboration among stakeholders that is needed to defend our community public schools from marauders and vandals. He identifies the vandals.
The vandals all have the same goal: Destroy public schools. They call it “reform,” and anyone who stands up to them is called “a defender of the status quo.” They forget that they are the status quo.
The Chicago Teachers Union issued a report on segregation in the Chicago public schools:
New Report Unravels the Sordid History of Racial Segregation in Chicago Public Schools
On anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, “Still Separate, Still Unequal” examines continued acceptance of de facto segregation and injustices in district schools
CHICAGO—On was is the 59th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) today released a report on the history of disruptive actions against communities of color by Chicago Public Schools (CPS), exemplified by school closings that intensify the harmful effects of segregated schools and neighborhoods. The study, titled Still Separate, Still Unequal, acknowledges the deep segregation that exists in Chicago, but states that segregation is exacerbated by flawed education reform policies and assaults on communities that have long borne the brunt of its harmful effects.
The 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision was one of the most successful victories of the modern Civil Rights Movement. The ruling declared segregation in U.S. public schools unconstitutional, saying it violated the “equal protection under the law” clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
Now, nearly six decades later, parents of Chicago’s African-American and special education needs students are also seeking court protection against Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s plan to shutter 53 elementary schools. On Wednesday they filed two federal lawsuits seeking a halt closures because these actions are discriminatory and will cause undue harm to their children.
“The mayor and his CPS administration are barreling through the largest round of school closings ever—actions that will once again disproportionately harm students and communities of color,” said CTU President Karen Lewis. “What they’re proposing will set us back to the time before Brown v. Board of Education. This report shows that we are still living in an era of education apartheid and we must do all we can to resist the destruction of our schools and the harming of our vulnerable population.”
Over the past decade, one out of every four intensely segregated African-American schools—schools with a more than 90 percent African-American student population—has been closed, phased out or turned around. Yet segregation has increased and African-American students are now more segregated by race and class than in 1989. At the same time there are far more schools with virtually no Black teachers and no Black students. Schools with fewer than 10 percent African-American students and teachers now make up 28 percent of CPS schools, up from 10 percent in 2001. In CPS, integration has been abandoned as policy and segregation accepted as the norm, rather than as the deliberate and systematic construction that it is. The report addresses, specifically:
“CPS seems committed only to deepening the harms of segregation, rather than moving towards an integrated school system,” said Still Separate, Still Unequal author, Pavlyn Jankov. “Segregation has increased, and the associated policies of disinvestment and destabilization are more acute than ever.”
Still Separate, Still Unequal calls for an end to the segregated harm of failed school closings and turnarounds, and a halt to the rapid expansion of private charter operators and other aberrations of “choice” that increase segregation.
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This blogger follows the money. That is his hobby and his passion. In this post, he tracks Walton funding for “advocacy.”
I put advocacy in scare quotes because foundations are tax-exempt and supposedly non-political. Yet the tax laws apparently allow them to put some of their money to work advocating for what appear to be political goals, in the case of the Waltons, the privatization of public education.
When it comes to funding “advocacy,” the Gates Foundation is right up there with multi-millions.
Say this for the Waltons: they are consistent. They don’t attempt to hide their agenda. They like charters and vouchers. They don’t like anything involving regulation or government.
Legislation is advancing in North Carolina that will harm the state’s underfunded public schools and strike a blow against its beleaguered teachers.
North Carolina is a right-to-work state, so there is no collective bargaining, and teachers have no voice in policy decisions about education.
Among the worst of the new bills is a proposal to fund a voucher/tax credit program, removing $90 million from public schools so that 1% of the state’s 1.5 million students may attend private and/or religious schools.
Another bill would strip away due process rights from teachers, so that teachers would have no right to a hearing if fired, no matter how many years of experience they have.
The new legislation would restrict eligibility for preschool, reducing the number of children who may enroll, and remove class size limits for some elementary grades.
Make no mistake (President Obama’s favorite expression, mine too): this legislation will save money in the short run but will cost the state far more in the long term. The Legislature is planning not only to harm public education, but to harm the children who benefit by being in preschool and in classes of reasonable size.
Former Congressman and State Superintendent Bob Etheridge said: “To the folks now running our state government in Raleigh, education reform is just another code word for cut, slash and burn.”
Governor Pat McCrory, who supports the radical anti-teacher, anti-public education agenda, has just named Eric Guckian as his Senior Education Advisor. Guckian was regional director of New Leaders in North Carolina (which recruits “transformational” leaders) and before that, was executive director of Teach for America in the state. He has been a consultant for the Gates Foundation and worked with KIPP. The following comes from the Governor’s press release:
“I am honored and humbled to serve as a member of Governor McCrory’s team,” said Guckian. “This is a critical time for education in our state, and I’m looking forward to working with committed teachers, leaders and community members to ensure that all of North Carolina’s students, regardless of circumstance, achieve an excellent education that will put them on the pathway to a better life; a life of honor, prosperity and service.”
Guckian joins John White in Louisiana and Kevin Huffman in Tennessee as TFA alumni in state-level positions serving reactionary administrations.
I posted a few days ago about a panel discussion in New York City where Paul Vallas made this startling statement: “We’re losing the communications game because we don’t have a good message to communicate.”
He spoke bluntly of the “testing industrial complex.”
Here Valerie Strauss briefly reviews Vallas’ role in Chicago, Philadelphia, and New Orleans, where testing and privatization were key elements of his reforms. It is difficult to see any of those districts today as a template for reform of the nation’s schools. Chicago is in dire straits, As is Philadelphia, and the only thing sustaining the myth of New Orleans is a massive disinformation campaign by the funders of privatization.
I know Paul Vallas and there was a time about a decade ago when I thought he was the most promising leader of school reform in the nation. I was impressed by his energy and his quick intellect.
Because he is so smart, I hold out hope that he might be the first of the “reform” A-team to see the light, as I did around 2005.
By his remarks at the forum cited in the links, he recognizes that teacher evaluation by formula is a mess. From his Philadelphia experience he may have learned that privatization is no solution. He inaugurated the nation’s most extensive experiment in privatization a decade ago, and it failed.
Now Vallas has another chance to get it right, this time in Bridgeport, Connecticut, a small district compared to his previous assignments.
Will he lead the way away from the failed status quo? Will he be first to renounce the failed status quo?
Crazy Crawfish here writes a brilliant post about The Great Accountability Scam.
He is writing about Louisiana and the Recovery School District, but what he describes applies with equal force to every “reform” scheme in every state and even to Race to the Top.
What he explains is the destructive and failed theory of action that is the very heart of the corporate reform movement.
It goes like this: use test scores to fire teachers, fire principals, close schools, and shatter communities. Create a swath of destruction that falls hardest on poor children, their families and communities. Cover your tracks by declaring success where none exists.
His prime example in this case is Louisiana’s Recovery School District. It has been recognized in the media as a national model, but it is a failed experiment that has benefited its promoters, not students.
RSD is a prime exemplar of the Great Accountability Scam.
Here are his concluding thoughts (but open and read it all):
“What if all these resources we spent taking over school districts, firing teachers, and displacing children were used instead to improve the schools in which they already reside – dozens of these schools now lay shuttered and vacant statewide while the children are bussed to campuses clear across their communities. This is done to disguise how poorly we’ve served these children while we hope taking their temperature over and over and telling them to “get better” will finally work. What if instead of just testing children and holding them “accountable” we held ourselves accountable as a society and worked to improve their plight? All this testing and test prep is not helping our students catch up, and it may actually be bringing everyone else down as well. In Louisiana to disguise this fact John White has changed the “grading scale” and intends to change it yet again next year and every year we continue to employ him. John White will guarantee the scores go up, for what they’re worth, but our students will eventually tire of teachers just taking their temperatures when they show up for school, and who could blame them?
“Kill the RSD, and hand the schools back over to their communities where they belong. The RSD experiment we’ve forced on our children has failed, and miserably so. Instead of spending all that excess funding on bringing in out of state charters and temporary teachers, train the teachers we have, provide funding for universal pre-kindergarten, afterschool programs, restore music and the arts and provide tutors and recruit mentors from the community for children. There are thousands of people just waiting to help, if the state will back off and return to a support role instead of the tyrant it has become under Paul Pastorek and John White. Teachers are trying, but they can’t tackle this task alone.
“I suppose it comes down to whether you want a solution or simply someone to blame. Bobby Jindal just wants a talking point for his futile presidential aspirations; John White wants to help out-of-state vendors, so they can hook him up for a lifetime of perks and positions once he leaves Louisiana. If you are a citizen of this state, if you care about the students, the children, the teachers, your fellow citizens, our way of life and our future, then you need to kick these guys out and take back our schools. Kill the RSD and rescue our teachers and students before it’s too late.
“It’s about time we held our failing leaders responsible. RSD has been in place for almost 7 years and has mostly all new students, and every year it is vying for worst district in the state with two to three times the resources. In my book that deserves an F- and the creators of it should be held accountable.
You think it can’t happen here?
You think your state is immune?
Read about the war on public education in Texas and think again.
Some part of this radical agenda is being promoted in almost every state.
Yours too.
This comment was written by Bonnie Lesley of “Texas Kids Can’t Wait”:
“I worry a lot whether public schools will continue to exist in some states. Our organization, Texas Kids Cant Wait, has felt overwhelmed at times this legislative session about the sheer number of privatization bills, all either sponsored by Sen. Dan Patrick or by someone close to him. We have been battling a big charter (what is in reality the gateway drug to privatization) expansion bill, a parent-trigger bill, opportunity scholarships, taxpayer savings grants, achievement district, “FamiliesFirstSchools”, home-rule districts, vouchers for kids with disabilities, online course expansion, numerous bills to close public schools and turn them over to private charter companies, and on and on. A friend said it is as if they threw a whole bowl full of spaghetti at the wall, believing something would stick.
Every one of the ALEC bills we have seen introduced in other states has been introduced in Texas this year.
The privatizers have also held hostage the very popular bills such as HB 5 to reduce testing significantly unless their privatization bills advanced, and advance they have. So lots of folks are playing poker with kids’s lives and futures.
What keeps many of us fighting 20 hours a day and digging into our own pockets to fund the work is our understanding that these bills are not the end game. We’ve read the web sites, beginning with Milton Freidman’s epistle on the Cato Institute’s website, that lay out the insidious plan we are seeing played out. We have also read Naomi Klein’s brilliant book, Shock Doctrine.
First, impose ridiculous standards and assessments on every school.
Second, create cut points on the assessments to guarantee high rates of failure. (I was in the room when it was done in the State of Delaware, protesting all the way, but losing).
Third, implement draconian accountability systems designed to close as many schools as possible. Then W took the plan national with NCLB.
Fourth, use the accountability system to undermine the credibility and trust that almost everyone gave to public schools. increase the difficulty of reaching goals annually.
Fifth, de-professionalize educators with alternative certification, merit pay, evaluations tied to test scores, scripted curriculum, attacks on professional organizations, phony research that tries to make the case that credentials and experience don’t matter, etc.
Sixth, start privatization with public funded charters with a promise that they will be laboratories of innovation. Many of us fell for that falsehood. Apply pressure each legislative session to implement more and more of them. Then Arne Duncan did so on steroids.
Seventh, use Madison Avenue messaging to name bills to further trick people into acceptance, if not support, of every conceivable voucher scheme. The big push now as states implement Freidman austerity budgets to create a crisis is to portray vouchers as a cheaper way to “save” schools. The bills that would force local boards to sell off publicly owned facilities for $1 each is also part of the overall scheme not only to destroy our schools, but also to make it fiscally impossible for us to recover them if we ever again elect a sane government. Too, districts had to make cuts in their budgets in precisely the areas that research says matter most: quality teachers, preschool, small classes, interventions for struggling students, and rigorous expectations and curriculum. See our report: http://www.equitycenter.org. Click on book, Money STILL Matters in bottom right corner.
Eighth, totally destroy public education with so-called universal vouchers. They have literally already published the handbook. You can find it numerous places on the web.
Ninth, start eliminating the vouchers and charters, little by little.
And, tenth, totally eliminate the costs of education from local, state, and national budgets, thereby providing another huge transfer of wealth through huge tax cuts to the already-billionaire class.
And then only the wealthy will have schools for their kids.
Aw, you may say. They can’t do that! My response is that yes, they most certainly will unless you and I stop it!”
I did not go to the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association in San Francisco, so was not aware of what is described in this post. Jennifer Jennings says that Arne Duncan was booed when he spoke, and she apologized to Secretary Duncan for the behavior of her fellow researchers.
Why was Secretary Duncan booed, and should AERA (or anyone else) apologize for the booing?
Booing is the behavior of the powerless. Educators are angry–and Jennings knows this–because of the top-down, authoritarian way in which Duncan has imposed policies that are bad for children, ruinous for teachers, and harmful to the quality of education. Jennings also knows that Duncan holds all the power. Educators may write blogs, opinion pieces, books, and research studies, and they will be completely ignored by Duncan. To say the least, he is uninterested in dialogue and unwilling to change his hardened belief that his policies are successful, no matter what anyone says.
In New York City, our mayor proudly announced that the public should hold him accountable for improving the public schools. After he spent $100 million or so to win a new term, someone in the press asked Mayor Bloomberg how the public could hold him accountable. He answered: “They can boo me at parades.”
How can we hold Secretary Duncan accountable?
He is silent as teachers and principals are fired based on test scores. He is silent as beloved schools are closed because of test scores. He is silent as cities turn their public schools over to entrepreneurs. He is silent as for-profit businesses take over public school districts and as for-profit charters proliferate. He is silent as more and more states adopt vouchers to send public money to religious schools. He is actively abetting the misuse of testing. He is actively supporting the forces of privatization.
We know now he will not change course. The only question is whether public education will survive Arne Duncan.
I condemn his misguided and harmful policies, not the researchers who used the only means of protest available to them. What he is doing to our children, our teachers, and our schools is far more offensive than booing. Will Arne Duncan ever apologize to the children, parents, and educators of America for what he has done and continues to do?
What do you do if you head the Connecticut chapter of Teach for America and you long for bigger worlds to conquer?
Simple.
The state commissioner is a charter school guy, so he is no problem.
You decide to open your new charter in Bridgeport, where the superintendent won his reputation by privatizing public schools in New Orleans.
All the right connections and the public’s money. No brainer.
With vouchers stalled in the Texas legislature, the privatizers turned to another strategy to create new opportunities for entrepreneurs.
They want a state district for schools with low test scores, where the state can hand the schools over to private organizations.
There is not a shred of evidence that this improves education for the children in those schools.
The models are Michigan, where the state authority turned over to segregated, impoverished black districts to for-profit charter corporations, and Tennessee, where the schools are being turned into charters.
Neither effort has studies or results; they just got started. Both represent the privatization of public education and the decimation of community schools.
I learned about this from the following comment on the blog:
From your home state:
I don’t know if you are aware of this, but it could spell disaster.
The worst schools in Texas could be placed in a special statewide school district to help turn those campuses around under legislation approved by the Senate on Wednesday. The measure by Sen. Royce West, D-Dallas, would establish the Texas Achievement School District to operate schools that have been rated low-performing for two consecutive years. The campuses would be removed from the jurisdiction of their regular school districts and placed in the new ASD by the state education commissioner, who would also appoint the superintendent for the statewide district.
West emphasized that low-performing schools would not have to be placed in the Achievement School District, calling it one of multiple options that could be used to handle the campuses. Asked how many campuses could be in the ASD if it were now in existence, West said as many as 15 from across the state could be under the management of the district. The ASD superintendent would be empowered with a range of options to improve achievement at the schools, including replacing staff or contracting with an alternative management group. The campus would return to its regular school district once student performance was back on track.
“Studies in other states have shown promise with this approach,” West explained. “This is the right thing to do for children that are trapped in low-performing schools.” Senate Education Committee Chairman Dan Patrick said the state must find new ways to address schools that are “perennial failures,” and he asserted that the legislation would support that goal. One senator questioned whether moving failing schools to the new Achievement School District would artificially inflate the performance ratings of their regular school districts, who would no longer have the low-achievement campuses. But West responded that the small number of schools involved would not have much impact on district ratings. Passed on a 26-5 vote, the Senate measure now goes to the House. And also, The Johns Hopkins University (of which I am an alum), is now offering an online MFA for TFA Corps members.
