A reader passed along this speculation about a possible replacement for Duncan.
Archives for the month of: November, 2012
San Diego had a bond issue on the ballot. It passed handily.
It appeared to be a great victory for public schools.
But unknown to many, there was a sweet deal tucked into the bond issue.
The district will get $2.8 billion in loans, but $350 million is set aside for charters.
Decisions about how to allocate the money will be made by a committee, this article says, dominated by representatives of the charter industry.
Here is another name to add to the billionaire boys’ club: Irwin Jacobs of Qualcomm. This La Jolla billionaire believes that most students in the San Diego schools should eventually be in a charter school. Jacobs gave $80,000 to the campaign for the bond issue in San Diego. He was also one of the biggest contributors to the Obama campaign.
Another true believer in privatization of public education.
Jere Hochman runs an exemplary school district in Bedford, New York.
Before the election, he wrote an eloquent letter (which I posted though I may not have used his name) on why everyone should support President Obama.
He convinced me.
He also promised me that after the election, he would speak out about the need to change the punitive testing and accountability policies of this administration.
The biggest problem in education today is the politicians, who are interfering in matters they do not understand, he says.
He offers excellent advice to the President, and this is only part 1.
Thank you, Jere.
Louis Filippelli, a teacher in the Cleveland public schools, writes that all of the most popular nostrums about school reform are wrong.
The governor, the mayor, the teachers’ union, the business community, and elected representatives are on the wrong track, he says.
More money, he writes, won’t solve the fundamental problem in the school, which is the lack of parent and student responsibility.
Filippelli maintains that the leaders are averting their eyes from the real crisis:
“The assumption that large numbers of student failures must be the fault of an incompetent, lazy, burned-out, greedy teacher is a ludicrous proposition. The paradox here is that in the real world of modern inner-city education, the teacher with the higher failure rate may indeed be the superior teacher. Challenging students with high academic standards and rigorous testing will inevitably mean low or failing grades on a grand scale for pupils either unwilling or unable to do the work.
“Standardized test scores tell little or nothing about teacher quality especially when dealing with an unprepared, unmotivated, and severely insubordinate student body.
“Teachers who complain about discipline issues are admonished by the administration as weak in classroom management skills and thus bombarded with never ending “professional development” sessions that tout group work and new “strategies.” In reality no one really knows what to do with the staggering amount of children whose sole purpose seems to be to derail the entire educational process.”
Ronnie Greco, who is leader of the Jersey City Education Association, joins our honor roll of heroes of public education.
Ronnie refused to sign Jersey City’s application for a Race to the Top grant for $40 million.
Ronnie quickly figured out that not a penny of the $40 million would solve any problem that Jersey City public schools have.
It would not be used to improve teaching and learning conditions.
It would not be available to reduce class size.
It would be used to impose merit pay, which has never worked anywhere.
It would be used to find and fire “ineffective” teachers, based on unproven test-based measures.
It would be used to implement top-down mandates devised in Washington, D.C., by the U.S. Department of Education.
The issues in Jersey City are no different from the issues that led to a strike in Chicago.
It is tough for a union leader to say no to a big federal grant because the media will blame him (or her) for turning down “free” money.
But Ronnie figured out the trap.
The money comes with strings that get fashioned into a noose for teachers.
The money will not reform the schools of Jersey City.
The money will not help the children of Jersey City.
The schools of Jersey City have been under state control for 23 years.
For 23 years, the state of New Jersey has failed the children of New Jersey.
The teachers of Jersey City work under difficult conditions.
They are heroes.
And their leader, Ronnie Greco, joins our honor roll for his courage, insight, wisdom, and conviction–all qualities in short supply today in our public life.
Parent groups in Indiana have posted a petition on change.org calling on the elected officials of the state to respect the voters’ choice of Glenda Ritz. In early statements, the governor, the governor-elect and some legislative leaders indicated tat they would stand by Tony Bennett’s agenda, which the people of Indiana rejected. Parents called on the state’s leaders to abide by the democratic process.
This is the Indiana petition. Please sign it and circulate it on blogs and Facebook pages:
“Indiana voters elected Glenda Ritz as our new Superintendent of Public Instruction by a large margin. She received roughly 1,300,000 votes–about 100,000 more votes than the governor-elect, Mike Pence. Now, however, Governor Daniels refuses to acknowledge that our election of Glenda Ritz sent a clear message on the direction of school reform, saying instead: “The consensus and momentum for reform and change in Indiana is rock solid.” Governor-elect Mike Pence is also choosing to interpret the election results as a “strong affirmation on the progress of education reform in this state,” (Journal Gazette 11/8/12). On the contrary: when Indiana voters elected Glenda Ritz as superintendent, we rejected the top-down, corporate reform model imposed by the state. We embraced Ritz’s platform and her research-backed proposals to support and improve our public schools.”
Two teachers have started a campaign to take their message to the White House: stop the Race to the Top!
The message of their campaign:
Give all students the same education your girls are getting! Abandon Race to the Top and stop privatizing public schools.
Join them!
Earlier, I published a post about Students for Education Reform, linking to a post by EduShyster.
SFER is a junior version of Democrats for Education Reform, the group formed by Wall Street hedge fund managers to promote privatization and high-stakes testing.
EduShyster here says that the credit for investigative reporting goes to Stephanie Rivera, a student at Rutgers, who plans to be a teacher and often engages in dialogue with her peers at SFER and TFA. Her website is called Teacher Under Construction.
EduShyster writes:
Actually all of the credit for “digging” goes to Stephanie Rivera, a student at Rutgers. She posts regular updates about SFER on her blog, Teacher Under Construction, and has done an amazing job of reaching out to SFER members and getting them to talk openly about things that don’t seem quite right about a student group.
SFER has been under the radar so far but that’s only because they haven’t done much.
That will soon change though. Students from SFER’s chapter at Whitworth University in Washington state, a private, virtually all white school, lobbied ardently for the state’s new charter law, including going door to door. I suspect that here in Massachusetts, where the charter lobby will file a bill in the coming months to eliminate the cap on charters in our poorest cities, it will be students from Smith and Harvard who provide the ground troops…
I can’t help but admire the evil genius that came up with this concept. Students across the country, who are utterly sincere in their passion and zeal, are being lined up behind the privatizers’ policy agenda. Ask questions and you’re accused of “attacking students.” Yet the students who make up the bulk of SFER’s membership don’t seem to know anything about their national organization’s funders, its positions or of the implications of those positions.
Conservative commentators–and Tony Bennett himself–blame Bennett’s loss on his support for the Common Core standards. They say that Bennett lost the votes of some Republicans who oppose the standards as federal over-reach. It’s hard to over-state how Bennett’s loss shocked and bewildered conservatives. He was their super-star.
Before that hardens into conventional wisdom, please consider the different view of this Hoosier:
Bennett and his policies were incredibly detrimental to the education of Hoosier children. Hatchet men were placed as trustees of universities – not to support strengthened teacher education program, but to demean and demolish programs that are internationally perceived and practiced as excellent. An all out war was waged to de-professionalize teaching, which would result in putting less-qualified teachers in classrooms, raise class size, and force teachers to teach to tests rather than teach for critical and creative thinking. Why? Follow the money folks. . . who stands to gain financially if PUBLIC schools are declared failures and forced to close? Who is financially invested in charter schools? Who stands to gain if children are taught to accept the authority of someone else’s interpretation of facts rather than learn to question, explore, and discover? Who would rather have a population of followers than thinkers?
That’s why Bennett lost – and why Ritz won. Truth does matter, and news media who served the interests of big bucks and insidious political agendas rather than the interests of an honestly informed populace did themselves in . . . Parents and teachers looked for more reliable sources of information, because parents want the best for their children. They want their children to thrive!.
Unfortunately, it looks as if those who promoted Bennett have not given up the idea that with enough money, lies, and time they can wear the public down and hoodwink Hoosiers into accepting lesser standards for teacher preparation, un-inspired didactic instructional approaches, and curricula that value test statistics above the curiosity, imagination, and deep intellect of our children. I’m hopeful that parents’ love of their children and desire of all Hoosiers to see our children truly thrive will continue to resist Bennett’s political backers in the statehouse and allow Ritz to lead us along a path to true academic growth and freedom for our children.
Matthew Di Carlo of the Albert Shanker Institute always applies a rigorous analysis to any study or report he reviews.
Here he looks at the methodological issues raised by the TNTP review of the DC reforms. Among his concerns: the teachers who responded to the TNTP survey were a non-random sample, and those who responded might be different from those who did not; in addition, the “evaluation” is based on only a single year of data. Di Carlo concludes that the study isn’t very interesting because of its flaws.
When Gary Rubinstein reviewed the same report, he made the sensible point that TFA and TNTP have been recruiting teachers for the DC schools since 2007, so one must wonder why so many of their own recruits are found to be ineffective.
Or is it the veteran teachers who are ineffective?
Linda Darling-Hammond once memorably said that you can’t ” fire your way to Finland,” and nothing in this study indicates otherwise.
In fact, it seems from both Matt and Gary’s analysis that the fastest way to be labeled “ineffective” is to teach in a high-poverty school, and the best assurance of a bonus is to teach in a low-poverty school.
To me, the fundamental problem with this “study” is that TNTP, as Matt notes, is an advocacy organization with a strong point of view, not a research organization known for dispassionate perspective.
I don’t see how anyone can take seriously the research claims of an organization with a clear self-interest as well as conflict of interest.
Let them advocate all they want, and they will. But please, media, recognize that they have a point of view and are not putting evidence-first.
Diane Ravitch's blog 