During the strike, I printed a letter from Kevin Lee, a teacher in Chicago, to explain why he was striking. The letter was read by thousands and reprinted widely. The editors of the Guardian, a publication in London, read Kevin’s post and asked for his email address. He wrote this wonderful article for them about the strike and about conditions in the Chicago schools.
Archives for the month of: September, 2012
Karen Lewis stood up to the national media. She stood up to the mayor. She could do it because she knew she had the support of 98% of the teachers in the Chicago Teachers Union. The CTU had a strategy to build parent and community support. And that support meant more than the screeching from the editorial boards of the newspapers and the commentators on FOX and CNN.
I told Karen how much the readers of this blog admire what CTU did and what she did. Here is her response, which she said I could share with you:
I do not understand why people think what we did was special. I do not understand why people think I’m a leader. I am a teacher who hates what’s happening to our children. We cannot go along with harm. Plain and simple. Sometimes I feel like we’re in that bad psych experiment where people give folks electric shocks because they were told to do so. I am embarrassed by all the attention and I would like to go somewhere and be quiet. I didn’t realize my life would be this nuts.
Harold Meyerson wrote a great story about the strike in the Washington Post. Please read it.
The mainstream media, the pundits and the editorial writers were so hostile to the strike that it is refreshing to read someone who really understands what happened in Chicago. Meyerson sees the strike not just as a job action, but as a strike against the national faux-reform movement, which demands incessant testing and pushes privatization.
He gets it.
And as you would expect, someone writes in response and says the teachers are not the union, the union is not the teachers. Oh, please. Who were the 98% of teachers who voted to authorize the strike? Who was it that donned red T-shirts and overflowed the streets of Chicago? Let me say it slowly: The union is the teachers. The teachers are the union.
Regardless of what the media said and wrote, teachers tell of the support from police, firefighters, transit workers, parents, and ordinary citizens who honked their horns and gave a thumbs-up.
Meyerson understood who supported the strike, who opposed it, and what the issues were (and continue to be).
The mainstream media did not. They echoed one another, and their sponsors.
No surprise here. The biggest of the for-profit virtual school corporations, K12, has as many as 275 students to one teacher, according to this report in Florida.
This is what is described by promoters of the “Ten Elements” of digital learning as personalized, customized learning for the 21st century. Others might call it a profitable scam.
Remember P.T. Barnum said that there is a sucker born every minute. Someone else said that no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the human race.
K12 proves the cynics right.
A reader from Maine writes:
I think you’re right to feel paranoid–Sometimes they really are out to get you!
One thing that is starting to get some notice, but is still too far below the radar, is that while the state’s pile on more and more restrictive and demanding requirements for public schools, simultaneously they are pushing for reducing or eliminating those requirements for charters and virtual charters. As the Portland Press Herald noted in its expose of the LePage administration’s virtual charter games in Maine:
Digital education companies also have something less than an arm’s-length relationship with [Jeb] Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education, the organization [Maine’s Education] Commissioner Bowen has leaned on in developing administration policy.
The foundation’s Digital Learning Now! initiative receives funding from Pearson, K12, textbook publishing giants Houghton Mifflin-Harcourt and McGraw-Hill, and tech companies such as Apple, Intel and Microsoft, and digital curriculum developers Apex Learning and IQ Innovations iQity. The initiative – whose 10-point strategy has been formally embraced by the LePage administration – focuses on removing legal barriers to public financing of virtual classes.
The “10 elements” include dozens of specific policy directives, including for states to:
• eliminate restrictions on online student-to-teacher ratios, enrollments, class sizes, budgets, providers, or the number of credits a student can earn;
• not regulate “seat time” in classes, or require that online providers, their teachers, or their governing board members be located in the state;
• avoid assessment of “inputs such as teacher certification, programmatic budgets and textbook reviews” and focus instead on “student learning data” from digital testing;
• fund digital learning “through the public per-pupil funding formula;”
• provide all students with access to “any and all” approved online providers;
• require students to take online courses in order to graduate;
• pay for the online classes of all students, including homeschoolers and those in private schools;
• ensure by law that full-time virtual schools are available for all students;
• deprive school districts of “the ability to deny access to approved virtual schools and individual online courses” even as they pay for their students to use them out of their per-pupil budget allocation.
“One of the striking things about these reforms is the extent to which they remove control of the schools from democratic governance and turn them over to corporate decision-making and appointed bodies,” says Alex Molnar, research professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder’s National Education Policy Center. “Education policy is now being made to some degree by people who have a financial stake in what they are making policy about.”
Digital education companies also have something less than an arm’s-length relationship with Bush’s Foundation for Excellence in Education, the organization Commissioner Bowen has leaned on in developing administration policy.
The foundation’s Digital Learning Now! initiative receives funding from Pearson, K12, textbook publishing giants Houghton Mifflin-Harcourt and McGraw-Hill, and tech companies such as Apple, Intel and Microsoft, and digital curriculum developers Apex Learning and IQ Innovations iQity. The initiative – whose 10-point strategy has been formally embraced by the LePage administration – focuses on removing legal barriers to public financing of virtual classes.
The “10 elements” include dozens of specific policy directives, including for states to:
• eliminate restrictions on online student-to-teacher ratios, enrollments, class sizes, budgets, providers, or the number of credits a student can earn;
• not regulate “seat time” in classes, or require that online providers, their teachers, or their governing board members be located in the state;
• avoid assessment of “inputs such as teacher certification, programmatic budgets and textbook reviews” and focus instead on “student learning data” from digital testing;
• fund digital learning “through the public per-pupil funding formula;”
• provide all students with access to “any and all” approved online providers;
• require students to take online courses in order to graduate;
• pay for the online classes of all students, including homeschoolers and those in private schools;
• ensure by law that full-time virtual schools are available for all students;
• deprive school districts of “the ability to deny access to approved virtual schools and individual online courses” even as they pay for their students to use them out of their per-pupil budget allocation.
“One of the striking things about these reforms is the extent to which they remove control of the schools from democratic governance and turn them over to corporate decision-making and appointed bodies,” says Alex Molnar, research professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder’s National Education Policy Center. “Education policy is now being made to some degree by people who have a financial stake in what they are making policy about.”
(See: http://www.pressherald.com/news/virtual-schools-in-maine_2012-09-02.html?searchterm=K12)
And in Louisiana, Bobby Jinal’s administration has come in for similar scrutiny: http://cenlamar.com/2012/09/12/bobby-jindal-and-john-whites-voucher-scam-violates-the-louisiana-state-constitution-and-they-know-it/
The answer is clear–All of the charters want to paid on a fully-burdend per-pupil basis, i.e., at the same rate as the public schools. But they want to reduce their overhead to maximize their profits. So, the game is not about improving education by providing better schools, it’s about a bait and switch to transfer tax money to corporate profits.
Bruce Adams, a veteran teacher and artist in Buffalo, explains how to fix the schools in nine not-so-easy steps.
His recipe does not involve firing teachers or closing schools. It does not rely on standardized testing. It takes time.
Wall Street hedge fund managers, Eli Broad, and the Gates Foundation won’t like his plan, because he warns against expecting quick results. In fact, he says, “don’t expect overnight success.” That no doubt disqualifies him in the eyes of our impatient reformers, who can’t wait.
Adams writes:
We don’t give schools enough time to implement one educational philosophy before replacing it with a trendy new one. Radical improvement doesn’t occur overnight. If we overhaul the system tomorrow and remain consistent, we could expect comprehensive results by the time this year’s newborns reach their senior year. Seventeen years may sound like a long time, but if we had spent ten years transforming our system after “A Nation at Risk” identified the problem in 1983, last year’s graduating seniors would have provided the first cradle to grad results. Think long term, not quick fix.
Of course, it does matter if you implement sound ideas to begin with. If you impose bad ideas that demoralize teachers and turn children into test-taking robots, then seventeen years will be a hard and ugly eternity.
Here is an article written by a Texas businessman and former legislator complaining that young people in Texas are woefully underprepared for college or the workplace.
The answer: more testing and accountability.
He fails to note that Texas has been pushing that testing and accountability thing for at least 20 years. Remember Ross Perot? Remember the Texas miracle? The whole country is stuck with NCLB because of all the “Texas Brags” that turned out to be all hat and no cattle.
Some people say that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting to get different results.
I’d say that the definition of ideology is doing the same thing over and over again without regard to evidence or experience.
When your method fails, and fails, and fails, and fails, don’t blame the kids. Blame the method.
Jonathan Pelto reports on Jeb Bush’s recent visit to Connecticut. While there, he saluted the “reforms” pushed through the legislature by Governor Dannell Malloy, especially his efforts to curb teachers’ tenure and seniority. And he boasted about Florida’s achievement (he didn’t mention the class size reduction initiative, which voters approved and he tried to roll back). And choice, choice, choice!
Funny that no one mentioned that Connecticut is one of the top two or three states in the nation on NAEP, even though it has strong teachers’ unions, seniority and tenure. It is far ahead of Florida. Since when does a state whose students are ABOVE the national average (8th grade math, NAEP) take lessons from one that is well below the national average?
We have felt the full court press of the faux reform movement for more than a decade. Chicago has been burdened with it for nearly 20 years, New York City for 11 years, Washington, D.C., for five years.
The one city that reformers love to cite as their victory is New Orleans. Hurricane Katrina, in their narrative, was a blessing in disguise (and Arne Duncan said it was the best thing ever to happen to education in New Orleans).
New Orleans now has more of its students in charters (about 80%) than any other city, so it is the paradigm of the reform movement, the model for all other cities, which–if reform continues to advance–will one day have no public schools, except as dumping grounds for the kids rejected by the charters, and no teachers’ unions.
Given the status of New Orleans, it becomes very important to protect its image. And so the reformers talk about its rate of improvement, but never mention that the district is one of the lowest-performing in a low-performing state. Before the Jindal takeover of the state board of education and the state education department, New Orleans was ranked as 69th of 70 districts in the state by test scores. And 79% of its highly-praised charters received either a D or an F from the state.
But! There is good news. Superintendent John White put out a press release to announce that students in New Orleans improved their ACT scores by four-tenths of 1 point! That is right: four-tenths of one point on the ACT! Why, that is almost half of one whole point!
Fortunately, math teacher Gary Rubinstein subjected this amazing progress to careful examination. He describes John White’s celebratory press releases as an example of “How to Lie with Statistics.” The ACT score for students is New Orleans, Gary points out, is actually very low, only 16.8. Be sure to read Gary’s post.
This is an excellent piece reblogged by Valerie Strauss.
The author Corey Robin asks the reasonable question, why do so many well-educated, seemingly liberal people look askance at teachers and unions.
Diane Ravitch's blog 