Parent activists in New Jersey have written the President.

Please read.

Some while ago, I posted an article by David Berliner about poverty and inequality.

I promised to post the link when I got it.

Here it is.

http://www.tcrecord.org/Content.asp?ContentID=16889

Dear President Obama,

I strongly supported you in 2008 and I continue to support you in 2012; however, your record and your policies on education give me pause. Unlike Governor Romney, who by all accounts views public education and teachers with contempt, you have expressed some interest in preserving and improving our nation’s democratic educational system.

Unfortunately, the rhetoric and lip service that you pay public education and teachers has not been matched by the policies of your administration. As a result, I am left wondering if there is any hope for a truly democratic educational system that affords all students, no matter what neighborhood they live in or what their family circumstances, an opportunity for an equitable education.

I teach in Philadelphia, a city that has struggled with violence, concentrated generational poverty, unemployment, and inequality for decades. Further, I teach students who are over-aged (16-21 years old) and under-credited (having fewer than 12 of the 23.5 credits necessary for graduation). My students are teen parents, foster kids, victims of violence, and full-time workers. They have struggled with abuse, seen expulsion from “no excuses” charter schools, and been incarcerated. My students have been labeled dropouts, failures, and delinquents. In spite of these myriad mistakes and roadblocks, my students come to school everyday with more energy, determination, and drive than any I’ve experienced in my entire educational career.

I share this description of my specific population to demonstrate the importance of alternative programs. Unfortunately, programs like this are a dying breed. They are an easy target for budget cuts. Every spring, my colleagues, students, and I wait with bated breath for the District’s decision about the fate of our school. Two years ago, we saw our doors shuttered, only to be reopened months later after being used as political leverage. However with the mobility and fragility of our population, this experience served as the final blow for nearly one third of our students.

Our precarious position is a direct result of growing privatization in the educational system. Coincidently, this same privatization is the exact reason that the waiting list for my program continues to grow each passing semester.

Privatization within public education is systematically undermining our nation’s democratic educational ideal by siphoning resources from public schools and communities. Additionally, this system of privatization has created a two-tiered reality of education in large urban districts, affording a select few students a high caliber education, while the majority of students are forced to cope with under-funded and dilapidated schools.

More troubling even than the inequitable system created by privatization is the proliferation of for-profit schools. In Philadelphia alone, we’ve seen a staggering number of cases of fraud coming from charter and cyber schools that promise parents and children better opportunities, only to take the money and run. When education becomes a for-profit business, the focus shifts from learning to the balance sheet. Students and parents become customers. Teachers cease to be educators and become merely workers. Education is a public good and must be regarded as such.

In 2008, I was energized by your message of hope and change. Though I recognize the mountain of challenges that awaited you when you took office, I am dismayed by the absence of efforts to address the profound inequality that exists in our education system. It is astounding that in Philadelphia, two schools less than one mile apart see more than a $13,000 disparity in per student funding. The way that schools are funded at the local, state, and national levels is antiquated and perpetuates this two-tiered system of education.

I implore you to push your Secretary of Education and your administration to abandon symbolic actions like “Race to the Top”, test-based accountability, and merit-based pay. Our nation’s educational system requires a dramatic rethinking beginning with funding, teacher training, and teacher retention. All students, particularly those in poverty, deserve highly practiced, compassionate, and committed educators. It is only through an investment in equitable public schools that our nation can achieve a truly democratic system that will serve as a model for the world.

Please, President Obama, recognize that your policies are demoralizing not only teachers, but also the students they serve. They are well aware of the divestment in public schools and turn to their teachers for answers. Almost daily, my students look at me and say, “The city doesn’t care about us. The nation doesn’t care about us. No one cares about us.”

Prove them wrong, President Obama.

Prove to students in Philadelphia and in cities across the country that you have not given up on them. Prove this by ensuring equality in our nation’s public education system.

Thank you very much for your consideration.

October 17, 2012

Dear President Obama:
Have your educational policies ushered in an Age of Enlightenment? Sadly, no.
Have your educational policies ushered in an Age of Reason? Sadly, no.
Have your educational policies ushered in an Age of Discovery? Sadly, no.
Your educational policies have ushered in an Age of Measurement, and that is sad.

Your policies have sided with those in the educational testing industry, from those profit and non-profit stakeholders who believe that the measure of a student’s education can be reduced to the results of a single metric test. This thinking is simply not the thinking that will propel our nation’s education system forward. Your current policies are a retrograde fit to a system that demands 21st Century skill development instead, with assessments that measure skills needed in our new economy: collaboration, communication, and creative problem solving.

Consider that the reliability of tests used to measure student achievement have been widely disputed because of influences beyond the classroom; poverty, race, the influence of previous teachers, the attitudes of peers, and parental support are influential factors that are not accounted for on single metric tests. Furthermore, the unrelenting focus on testing demands an unprecedented amount of the teacher and students’ classroom time being given over to the collection and review of data.

Our public schools need educational policies that return power to the educational professionals in the classroom. Our public schools need to recruit highly educated professionals to the teaching profession who are paid accordingly. Our public schools need to be re-imagined and reengineered to move from the agrarian school model to year round schools that are flexible in meeting the specific needs of the communities they serve. Our public schools need to serve all members of a community, not the few who remain because of a flawed voucher system.

Mark Twain once stated that, “We believe that out of the public school grows the greatness of a nation.” I believe that is true. I believe that with good educational policies and your support of the ideas I mentioned above we can successfully grow the greatness of the nation. I believe that you can shift from this futile educational emphasis on testing and turn to usher reason, discovery, and enlightenment back into public education.

Very truly yours,

Colette Marie Bennett
Teachcmb56@aol.com

Biography: Colette Marie Bennett is the English Department Chair at Wamogo High School (Region 6) in Northwest Connecticut. She has also served as the Social Studies Department Chair. She has over 21 years of experience in the classroom grades 6-12.
She blogs @www.usedbooksinclass.com

Sound advice, and it didn’t cost anything.

Dear President Obama:

I am writing to you as a fellow magna cum laude Harvard Law grad (’73) and fellow Democrat.

Please reconsider two of your Administration’s Race-to-the-Top education policies – 1) high-stakes testing, and 2) charter schools.  Under superficial analysis, these policies appear sensible; under in-depth analysis, they are destructive.

In developing school reform policies, the first step is to identify the problems.  In the US, most suburban schools are doing OK.  The problems exist in the low-SES schools, particularly in the inner-cities.  Veteran teachers and principals in the low-SES schools – writing in first-person books, on education blogs, and newspaper websites – routinely cite two main problems – students reading far below grade level and classroom misconduct – and two additional problems – chronic absenteeism and chronic tardiness.  In the low-SES schools, these problems are endemic; in the suburban schools, these problems exist, but they are occasional rather than endemic.

Rational school reform should, therefore, focus on these problems that are endemic in the poorly-performing low-SES schools but exist only occasionally in the well-performing suburban schools.  Such rational school reform would directly address the problems that plague the low-SES schools.  We should be testing and implementing reforms in the low-SES schools regarding reading skills, student behavior, and attendance.  Unfortunately, Race-to-the-Top largely ignores these problems.

High-stakes testing (and the resulting teacher discharge) address a different problem – that is, the problem posed by bad teachers.  However, bad teachers are not responsible for the poor performance of the low-SES schools.  The suburban schools are doing OK and there is no reason to believe that teacher quality in the suburban schools is uniformly stronger than in the low-SES schools (particularly given the flood of hyper-talented Teach for America grads into the low-SES schools during the past 15 years).  If bad teachers was a major problem, we’d see the low-performing schools distributed roughly evenly between the suburbs and the low-SES areas.

Moreover, assuming arguendo that identifying/discharging bad teachers would significantly improve low-SES schools, high-stakes testing is an awful way to identify/discharge bad teachers.  First, high-stakes testing is unreliable – it yields too many false positives and too many false negatives.  There are many non-teacher-controlled variables that impact a teacher’s student test scores under even the most sophisticated value-added model – i.e., the number of “difficult” students who disrupt the class and require extra attention, the class size and the teacher’s total pupil load, the number of different preparation the teacher has, whether the teacher has taught the course/grade before, whether the teacher is teaching within his/her core expertise, the amount of classroom support (aides), and the amount of central office support (regarding discipline, etc.).  Second, high-stakes testing has major adverse side effects.  It encourages teaching to the test, encourages narrowing the curriculum, encourages cheating, discourages teacher-teacher cooperation, and, most importantly, discourages teachers from teaching “difficult”/high-risk students.

And, there are more productive ways to identify/discharge bad teachers.  For example, Montgomery County, MD (a large mostly suburban school system near Washington, DC) has successfully used a peer-review approach (called “PAR”) for over 10 years.  PAR has resulted in the discharge or resignation-in-lieu-of-review of over 500 teachers; the teachers union supports PAR; the teachers view the system as fair; few of the discharges have been challenged; and there is no high-stakes testing with its adverse side effects.

Charter schools, like high-stakes testing/teacher discharge, fail to address the problems that plague the low-SES schools.  Instead of solving the problems, charters simply remove some of the children – the children of the parents who are functional enough to investigate charters, complete the application process, and provide the daily transportation usually required for charter students – from low-SES neighborhood schools.  By enrolling only the children of the more functional parents, the charters largely avoid – rather than solve – the low-SES school problems of students reading far below grade level, classroom misconduct, absenteeism, and tardiness.  And, by siphoning off the children of the more functional parents, the charters increase the concentration in the neighborhood schools of children of the less functional parents – thereby exacerbating the problems that plague the low-SES schools.

The charter approach – protecting the children of functional parents by sacrificing the children of the dysfunctional parents – will ultimately impose huge social costs on society as the children of the dysfunctional parents become drop-outs, teenage mothers, barely-literate unskilled workers, welfare recipients, and criminals.  A far better approach would be to abandon the charters and instead implement school reforms directly targeting the problems that plague the low-SES schools.

Please stop the high-stakes-testing/teacher-discharge and charter reforms that are damaging, rather than improving, our low-SES schools.  Please encourage the low-SES schools to implement reforms directly addressing the problems that plague the low-SES schools.

Sincerely,