Archives for the month of: July, 2012
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Lawyers Garnish Teacher’s Wages to Pay Off Student Debt

By dianeravitch
July 2, 2012 //
11

John Hechinger of Bloomberg News is the best education journalist at work these days.

His latest story is chilling: It tells of a determined effort by the federal government and lawyers to collect a student loan debt owed by  a teacher in Los Angeles.

The teacher had a debt left from the 1970s. The aggressive lawyers emptied her bank account and grabbed a quarter of her earnings. A court intervened.

What’s the moral of the story?

Some might see it as evidence that people should pay their debts. There’s no free lunch. etc.

I’d say it shows that our nation is hypocritical about the importance of  higher education, that we say we want to have the highest college going rate in the world but we shrug our shoulders at the rising cost of higher education.

My view is that the federal government and state governments should reduce the cost to the student of getting a college degree. The nations where college-going is increasing have done that. Meanwhile we pursue student loan debt with a SWAT team vengeance.

This is no way to out-educate the rest of the world.

Diane

Categories Education Reform, Los Angeles

Pearson Helps the Poor

By dianeravitch
July 2, 2012 //
7

Pearson, the all-encompassing media giant that dominates education publishing, plans to open $3-a-month private schools for children of the poor in Africa and Asia. According to Sir Michael Barber, who advises Pearson, there really is no point depending on government when private entrepreneurs can supply education at low cost far more efficiently.

I suppose the goal is to get the business up and running, then get government to foot the bill as it outsources education to Pearson.

Maybe it makes sense to have a private company providing basic education in a country that can’t or won’t, though there must certainly be some questions raised about the cultural, political, and ideological content of the education that is provided. What kind of teachers will be hired for these $3-a-month schools? Will they be teachers or computer monitors?

Is this actually the same plan that has been developed for the U.S. under a different guise?

Categories Education Reform, Pearson

One Reason Why Louisiana Turned into a Bad Joke

By dianeravitch
July 2, 2012 //
20

This parent in Louisiana noticed that the state insists that only trained professionals can trim his shrubs.

And only licensed florists can sell flowers to him.

But under Bobby Jindal, the children of Louisiana can be taught by anyone who wants to teach, even if they have less training than a shrub technician or a licensed florist.

And that’s why Louisiana is now an international joke.

Categories Jindal, Bobby, Louisiana

School’s Out at a Turnaround School

By dianeravitch
July 2, 2012 //
4

This era may be remembered as the time when our nation’s leaders decided to break the spirits of our teachers and to close enough schools to instill fear in the hearts of all educators

I don’t know which “thought leader” came up with the idea that the best way to “fix” a school with low test scores is to fire the principal and at least half the staff. I don’t know the evidence to support this policy of wiping the slate clean without individual evaluations.

But now with the federal imprimatur of Race to the Top, it’s happening in many school districts. And of course, the U.S. Department of Education will stretch to prove that lowering the boom works, because it’s their idea. But how do you persuade the public and especially communities of color where the axe will fall most often that this punitive strategy is a good idea?

Imaginary scene: Some bright PR guy or gal figured out how important language is in selling a really destructive idea. “How can we explain to people that we are firing most of the teachers and renaming the neighborhood school? The one that everyone knew and loved for fifty years? How do we make this unpleasant reality palatable?” Ponder, ponder.

“Ah, I’ve got it! When we shut down their school and fire everyone, let’s call it a “turnaround!” That sounds like a dance around the Maypole. It sounds so festive. It’s positive and happy.

“Crazy idea. No one will believe that. No one is that stupid.”

“Think so? Let’s try it and see how it goes.”

With that context, here is how it went for this teacher in New York City.  This comment and the events it describes occurred before the arbitrator postponed the school turnarounds last Friday. Some teachers had already found other jobs. Those who choose to remain have a one-year lease on life, unless a court throws out the arbitrator’s decision. The bottom line: chaos, uncertainty, disruption. This is no way to run a school or a school system.
Categories Accountability, Education Reform, NYC, Race to the Top

These Guys Want to Run Our Schools

By dianeravitch
July 2, 2012 //
13

Joe Nocera, a regular columnist for the New York Times, wrote a column about what can only be described as the legal looting of Burger King.

He describes how one group of financiers bought the company, paid themselves a few hundred million, then sold it to some other Wall Street bunkum artists for a billion, who extracted another billion from the company before selling it to yet another group of investors who had figured out how to milk the company one more time. Every time it changed hands, some smart guys on Wall Street laid off workers, did some fancy footwork with financial instruments, got rich and dumped the company.

I read the books about Enron (The Smartest Guys in the Room and Conspiracy of Fools); I know about Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling. I read The Predators’ Ball about Michael Milken and his junk bonds. I read Barbarians at the Gate and Liar’s Poker. I read half a dozen other books about the way that ingenious financiers buy a company, break it into parts, and sell it off for more than they paid, or strip the company of its assets and abandon the shell. I learned about how household names and products disappeared as equity investors descended on their parent companies like vultures and picked them apart to make money (read the book about Jack Welch and GE, At Any Cost). I learned about hostile takeovers and corporate raiders. These are the guys who took down what I used to think of as the American way of life and elevated greed as our highest value. Although so much of this is repellent, I felt a certain resignation. That’s their world, I thought, not mine.

But now they are coming into education. They are hedge fund managers and equity investors. These are the guys who play with millions of dollars every day, and they have decided that rearranging the nation’s education system is a fun hobby. They don’t have much sympathy with working stiffs who earn only five figures, and low five figures at that. They don’t understand why there is such a thing as public education; so few of them went to public school and wouldn’t dream of sending their own child to one. Why shouldn’t all schools have a private board of directors like the one they send their children to? Why shouldn’t all schools be deregulated? That’s the way it works in business. Why shouldn’t schools with low scores be closed and replaced by new ones? That’s the way it works in their world. Why should schools be compelled to take children they don’t want, children with severe disabilities and children who don’t speak English? Isn’t winning what it’s all about? Winning means getting the highest test scores, and if you take in the kids who can’t do that, you can’t win.

What if we ran schools like the stock market? There would be a portfolio; you would keep the winners and sell the losers. That’s the way the world works, right?

Their world and the world of education are different spheres. They operate by different rules. Unfortunately, the barbarians are no longer at the gate. They are inside.

Diane

Categories Corporate Reformers, Education Reform

Why This Preschool Teacher Voted to Strike

By dianeravitch
July 2, 2012 //
4

A lot of cash will be spent in Chicago to beat the teachers down for authorizing a strike. Expect a barrage of ads aimed at demeaning the teachers and distorting their grievances. The big equity investors and corporations like to complain about the power of the unions, but the unions don’t look very powerful these days. The CTU looks like downtrodden and much-abused teachers. Democratic mayors like Rahm Emanel have shown that they don’t care about CTU, and don’t need them. They talk “respect” out of one side of their mouth, but they are ready to throw the teachers under the bus.

Emanuel’s Wall Sreet friends will make sure the public hears his side of the story on radio and television.

Time to hear the other side.

A preschool teacher in the Chicago public schools explained recently why she voted to authorize a strike. Understand that teachers are disposed to follow rules, because they teach children to follow them. They are inclined to respect authority because they expect to be respected for their authority. But in Chicago, after years of being abused by the city’s leadership, they decided they had had enough.

This teacher gave her reasons.

One, every year her job is in jeopardy because of budget cuts. Every year she gets her resume ready and every year she lives in constant insecurity, not knowing if she will be around next year. At the same time, she must maintain the level of enthusiasm necessary to be a “super-teacher” both to keep her job and to hired if she needs another job. It’s hard to maintain maximum “effectiveness” under such demoralizing conditions.

Two, she is disgusted that the time she used to spend on field trips and other activities that little children love has now been turned into time to administer standardized tests to them to determine “kindergarten readiness.” It used to be that every child of the right age was ready to go to kindergarten, but “those days are over.” Accountability, she writes, always seems to be for “those with the least say-so.”

Reason 3: She was infuriated with Superintendent Brizard sent a letter to parents informing them that the strike was wrong. The letter was translated into “Spanish, Mandarin, Polish and Arabic.” The teacher was dumbfounded because she had never been able to get the resources to translate materials or information to the parents without doing it herself. So the system does have those resources, but only to attack the teachers and their union.

Reason 4: The city council just voted $5.2 million to the Hyatt chain to build a new hotel (CPS board member Penny Pritzker is an heiress of the Hyatt chain).

And finally, “I voted ‘yes’ because I have self-respect, and I was always taught (and teach) that when you stand up for yourself against bullies and liars, other will stand up with you. Well, the teachers are standing up. Will you join us?”

 

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Categories Education Reform

Bloomberg’s Defeat..For Now

By dianeravitch
July 2, 2012 //
10

Mayor Bloomberg is intent on closing as many public schools as he can before he leaves office at the end of 2013 (his third term). He has already closed about 150 schools, maybe more, of the 1,100 or 1,200 that he started with. He has added hundreds of new schools. I’ve lost count. Maybe he has too.

The mayor loves privately managed charter schools, competition, and choice. He has done his best to promote those ideas over the past ten years. There was a time when the mayor and his public relations team sold the idea of a “New York City miracle,” but those claims blew up in 2010 when the state acknowledged that it had manipulated the passing score for years. When scores across the state were recalibrated, the “miracle” about which Bloomberg and Joel Klein had boasted for years evaporated. Now, the big boast is about climbing graduation rates, but since 80% of the city’s graduates require remediation in the city’s community colleges, those claims too must be taken with a large helping of salt.

By now it is clear that the mayor’s central “reform” strategy is to close schools, fire the entire staff, and open new schools, either small schools in the same building with new names or charter schools. Many schools that were the heart of their local community have been killed during the time in which the mayor has ruled the schools with an iron hand. Most of the closed schools had low test scores, and he assumed it was because they were bad schools, but they enrolled disproportionately large numbers of poor students, students with special needs, and English language learners. As large high schools closed, the new schools tried to avoid enrolling the same students, to burnish their own scores.

Last week, at a press conference called to announce that 1,100 professors across New York state had signed a petition opposing high-stakes testing, Pedro Noguera of New York University (who recently resigned as chair of the State University of New York’s charter school authorizing board) denounced the mayor’s school closing strategy as a “shell game” that harmed the city’s most vulnerable students. In a blistering critique, he said that our public officials literally have no idea what they are doing and  cling to failed policies rather than listen to their constituents.

Last Friday, an independent arbitrator ruled against the mayor’s plan to do a “turnaround” at 24 public schools. Originally, the mayor planned to close 33 schools outright, but some powerful politicians stayed the executioner’s hand and got him to reduce it to 24. The mayor doesn’t listen when thousands of parents and students show up at public hearings, but he does listen when the head of the State Assembly’s education committee complains.

The mayor’s usual strategy is to just close the school outright, but he wanted to get millions of federal dollars available for the “turnaround” so he proposed to fire at least half the staff instead of everyone. The United Federation of Teachers sued to block the closings, on grounds that it violated their contract. The arbitrator agreed with the union.

The city will appeal. The mayor is defending the children, of course. Stay tuned.

Categories Accountability, Bloomberg, Michael, Charter Schools, Education Reform, NYC

Will Florida Ruin Its Higher Education Institutions?

By dianeravitch
July 2, 2012 //
12

A reader informs us about Florida Governor Rick Scott’s plans to transfer the destructive ideas of K-12 to the higher education sector. Last fall, Governor Scott memorably said that Florida doesn’t need more people with anthropology degrees, that presumably being an unusually useless area of study; his daughter has an anthropology degree:

The university system is already under attack in Florida. Our governor wants professors to be judged by student evaluations. They want professors to give up tenure in exchange for the opportunity to earn bonuses for research and such. They want to rate education schools based on the VAM scores of their graduates and admissions profile.
Categories Education Reform

Theft of Public Education in Memphis (Update)

By dianeravitch
July 2, 2012 //
96

Jim Horn of Schools Matter pored through the 200-page document describing the plan for the immediate future of the Memphis public schools, and this is what he learned.

The Memphis schools will be merged with the schools of Shelby County, allegedly for efficiency. But in fact, the plan is to implement a massive transfer of students to charter schools.

By 2016, a mere four years from now, enrollment in charter schools will increase from 4% to 19%. This will happen not because parents or students have asked to be assigned to charters but because the planners want it to happen (one guess as to who devised the plan).

This will result in a handover of $212 million of public funds to privately managed charter schools.

That is, $212 million will be removed from the budget of the public schools and transferred to charter schools whose governance is private and not subject to local, democratic control.

The plan acknowledges that costs will be greater “due to loss of scale” and the introduction of multiple managers, but cost savings will realized by such measures as teacher layoffs and the replacement of experienced (expensive) teachers with inexperienced and less expensive teachers. If the teacher layoffs and other strategies are insufficient to save money, there is a contingency plan to add to savings by laying off 115 librarians.

The plan was devised by a “transition planning committee.” The secretary of the committee happens to be the executive director of Stand for Children (are you surprised?).

Tennessee is a state with a Republican governor and a Republican legislature. The state commissioner of education is Kevin Huffman, who previously worked for Teach for America (and yes, readers, he is Michelle Rhee’s ex-husband). The “Achievement School District,” which is taking charge of the state’s lowest performing schools, is run by Chris Barbic, a TFA alum who created the Yes Prep charter network in Houston.

It is simply mind-blowing to watch this small cadre of people who are associated with TFA, Gates, Broad, Stand for Children, and the Walton Foundation colonize and privatize America’s public schools. Who elected them?

Diane

P.S. In a comment to this post (scroll down to find it), a resident of Memphis who is also a director of Stand for Children wrote to disagree with Jim Horn’s description and with my reactions to it. This comment added the commission’s summary, linked below. I read it and did not see a justification for the large expansion of privately managed charter schools. If charter schools don’t get different results from public schools, as the preponderance of studies show, what’s the point of shifting over $200 million out of the public schools. Nor was it apparent from the commission summary why the public schools could not offer universal pre-K or the other initiatives here proposed. Then I noticed that the background work for the commission was prepared by the Boston Consulting Group, the same management consultants that recommended the privatization of 40% of Philadelphia’s public schools. I found that more worrisome than Jim Horn’s account. (Mitt Romney’s old firm, Bain, was a spin-off from the Boston Consulting Group.)
Categories Education Reform

Does Experience Matter?

By dianeravitch
July 1, 2012 //
69

One of the axioms of corporate reform in education is that experience doesn’t matter. Also, they say, degrees don’t matter. Certification doesn’t matter. Nothing matters except “performance” or “results,” and these are defined as the “measurables,” the test scores. If a teacher can get students to produce higher test scores, he or she is a good teacher. If they can do it year after year, they are “great” teachers.

Reformers say that you can’t know in advance who the great teachers are. You have to collect the test scores for three or four years, and then you know who they are, and you give them a bonus. You also know who the “bad” teachers are, and you fire them.

But is it true that experience doesn’t matter? The reformers’ claim that teachers reach their peak performance by their third or fourth year, and they never get any better.

This could be taken in different ways. It might mean that teachers hit their stride in the third or fourth year, and districts should hold on to those who have reached that level. It also might mean that districts should avoid TFA, because most of them will leave after two years, and never hit their stride.

But reformers think it means experience doesn’t count, because teachers don’t continue to improve after that magical third or fourth year.

Of course, this is based on economists’ analysis of test scores, not interaction with teachers or deep study and observation of teacher performance.

This teacher disagrees:

After 26 years, I am still tryng to perfect my craft and get better every day. Building my own classroom library of close to 1,700 YAL books takes years. Reading most of them, or at least the first in a series, and keeping up with the interests of 12 and 13 year olds is constant, time-consuming and ever changing. There is so much that can’t be measured by a Gates selected “researcher” who has no clue how to relate to, motivate and respect children.
Categories Education Reform
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