Archives for the month of: January, 2013
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Mayor Bloomberg Compares NYC Teachers Union to NRA

By dianeravitch
January 5, 2013 //
34

Mayor Bloomberg is frustrated that the New York City United Federation of Teachers does not agree with his plan to evaluate them by test scores. He has been berating the union, as have the city’s tabloids, for weeks.

But now he hit a new low.

He compared the teachers’ union to the National Rifle Association.

Coming only weeks after the Newtown massacre, this is especially gross.

This is reminiscent of the time many years ago when U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige referred to the NEA as “a terrorist organization.”

Paige had the good sense to apologize. So should Bloomberg.

Categories Bloomberg, Michael, Teacher Evaluations, Unions

For-Profit Charter Takes Over Muskegon Heights

By dianeravitch
January 5, 2013 //
13

In Michigan, the state government decided it was tired of all the fiscal woes of certain districts, so it handed them to emergency managers, who gave them to for-profit operators.

Michigan Public Radio has been watching events in Muskegon Heights. The word that is most commonly heard is: Chaos.

The charter operator fired all the teachers and hired new ones who cost less.

Within the first month, 20 of the 80 teachers quit.

Chaos.

Well, give them time.

Categories Charter Schools, For-Profit, Michigan, Privatization

Uniting Supporters of Public Schools in Tennessee

By dianeravitch
January 5, 2013 //
7

Here is a great new parent and community group supporting strong public schools in Tennessee.

Please check it out.

Are there active parent groups in Memphis? Chatanooga? Knoxville? Other cities and towns?

Please write to let us know.

Categories Parent Groups, Tennessee

Carl Cohn: The “Parent Trigger” Is Obscene Verbiage

By dianeravitch
January 5, 2013 //
23

Carl Cohn is one of our nation’s most distinguished educators. He had led many school districts, received innumerable awards, and now serves as a member of the California State Board of Education. Like many people, Dr. Cohn finds the imagery of the “parent trigger” unseemly. Why suggest that parents take up arms and shoot someone, even metaphorically? Violence, whether real or metaphorical, is not the path to education or knowledge or wisdom.

Dr. Cohn writes:

“Given the horrific events at Newtown, isn’t it time for the
media and the proponents of this so-called reform to abandon the
image of parents pointing a gun at a school? As a member of the
California State Board of Education, I objected to this terminology
when the matter was before us for establishing regulations based on
the law. Wouldn’t it be fitting as a memorial to the heroic
educators at Sandy Hook who gave their lives protecting their
students to abandon this distasteful image?”

Categories Charter Schools, Connecticut, Parent trigger

The Problem with Choice

By dianeravitch
January 5, 2013 //
93

A reader from Oregon explains the destructive consequences of choice. School choice has been a goal of the right for decades and is now embraced by the Obama administration:

“For US education to thrive, charters must go.

“Some Win, Some Lose with Open Enrollment”. The headline in the Eugene, Oregon Register-Guard may seem like an occasion for joy to the winning school districts but, really, it is just terribly sad for all of us. Open enrollment across district lines is the latest and most extreme version of a school choice movement that is on a trajectory to split public education in two – one set of schools for the haves and the other for those left behind.

School choice is probably the most popular of the signature elements of the current school reform movement – and is there any reason why alternative and charter schools shouldn’t be popular? They house some of the best teachers and some of the most innovative programs; they have more opportunities for enrichment because they are exempt from many of the requirements faced by regular schools; and the parents are more involved and more able to donate time and money – the last not because they care more about their kids. Rather it is because the parents need to be able to provide transportation and often are required to agree to levels of involvement not possible for families without a car and a stay-at-home parent.

The result: one set of schools with wealthier, less diverse students and fewer kids with special needs; the other serving children more diverse in ethnicity, income and educational needs (with fewer resources and more requirements). Public education was supposed to be the great equalizer, an inclusive, welcoming place that gives all kids a chance to climb the ladder of success. But current trends create a de facto tracking system based on socioeconomic status.

Of course we’ve always had school choice. Through the 1960s the choice was public or private. Over the last few decades, however, public school districts created alternative and charter schools and encouraged them to draw their students from the surrounding neighborhood schools. In a Darwinian battle the schools would compete for students with the best schools thriving and good riddance to the losers. It is really hard to believe that school “reformers” didn’t foresee the result: the non-charters left with the most needy kids, fewer resources and, inevitably, failure.

The fact that public alternatives and charters have many good teachers and leaders and involved parents is, itself, the strongest argument against public charters and alternatives. Those are the very resources needed by neighborhood schools to make them what they need to be. And it isn’t even a zero-sum game – it’s negative-sum. Services are duplicated and shifting enrollments make long-range planning impossible.

The parents of students who choose schools outside their neighborhoods are not the problem – good parents will always look for the best available school for their children. The teachers and administrators in those schools are not the problem – many of them are among the best. The problem is the system that sends parents school shopping in the first place.

It is a system that takes advantage of the parental instinct to provide our children with the best possible education. You don’t have to be a public school hater to participate; school shopping has become a mark of good parenting for parents of all persuasions. “I can’t send my daughter to the neighborhood school,” said one mom recently. “Those parents aren’t involved.” And, sadly, what used to be a myth is creating a reality as parents like her opt out of their neighborhood schools.

If, as I suggest, we are to end most school choice, it is important to be sure that we are sending our kids to excellent neighborhood schools. To be honest, part of the reason parents have been so willing to drive their kids across town (or now to a different town) is that some neighborhood schools had become rigid, take-it-or-leave-it, hostile-to-change institutions. Parents with concerns or questions were considered pests. Though they can’t be all things to all people, our neighborhood schools need to be what many already are; nimble, responsive, welcoming neighborhood centers providing an outstanding education to all kids.

The successful innovations that charter and alternative schools have devised wouldn’t be wasted. They – including language immersion – can and should be applied in the neighborhood schools. And charters and alternatives that step up to meet the needs of high school students when regular high schools are unable to do so should be allowed to keep working with, rather than competing against, the mainstream schools.

It is a cliché that if you are attacked from both sides of an issue, you are probably correct. But school “reform” seems to call for a corollary: if there is agreement on an issue from both sides of the aisle, it must be wrong. It is truly mind-boggling that free-market educational policies – so obviously counterproductive, ineffective and unsustainable – are supported by both Democrats and Republicans. The deck may be stacked against us but if we are truly committed to equity, diversity and efficiency in our public schools we’ll need keep working to convince officials, parents and educators that it is essential that we stop this suicidal intra- and inter-district competition, phase out school shopping and bring back new and improved versions of the centers of our neighborhoods – our schools.

Jim Watson, Eugene, Oregon

Categories ALEC, Broad Foundation, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Education Reform, Federal Waiver, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Obama, Privatization, Race to the Top, US Education, Vouchers

Learning from Kansas City

By dianeravitch
January 5, 2013 //
22

A reader writes to describe what happened in Kansas City as a warning to other cities (John Covington left the superintendency of Kansas City on short notice to head the Michigan Education Achievement Authority, which was created to oversee low-performing districts across the state):

Learn from Kansas City’s mistakes. You spoke – in another blog, that the superintendent of a southern system fired teachers and replaced them with 150 from Teach For America. The same happened in Kansas City – we fired 150 teachers without cause and replaced them with (drumroll) 150 Teach for America teachers at a cost of $3,000 per head. So it was with dismay that I discovered that a Teach for America sits on the board of Broad Institute. Is that not conflict of interest?

John Covington, when in Kansas City, created new graduation requirements so low that no competitive college would take a student with those minimal courses. He didn’t know basic college requirements stats, or the range of college placement scores to achieve acceptance.

He ruined a successful college prep program but closing the more modern of the two buildings (the one with wireless internet, a pool, two gyms and a larger cafeteria) and slamming 1200 sixth through twelfth graders in an antiquated with lacking those amenities.

In the other college prep campus, he bussed over a thousand at risk, low performing students into the building. In the first semester, the school at 1400 suspensions in the first semester (with only 1200 students in the building), 51 fires/fire alarms, and three principals. Covington’s last principal had only elementary school experience. In the principal’s defense, Covington was quoted in the paper saying “I don’t have urban experience and I think I’m doing pretty good.”

He cut the budget for a successful debate program that served hundreds of students claiming he didn’t have the funds, but then commissioned a massive $28,000 trophy out of his own discretionary budget which didn’t require board approval. KC didn’t want him, and weren’t told that Broad was likely funding part of his salary. He killed what little progress we’d made, interviewed on the basis of improvements that were actually accomplished by his predecessor (such as rising test scores for tests taken before he was hired), and then left abruptly – weeks before the State was ready to announce that under his leadership we had passed fewer benchmarks towards accreditation than when he was hired.

So read it an weep. We were conned. So are the residents of Michigan. The goal is not to improve a district – their goal is to break already struggling ones so they can enrich Private Schools, Charter Schools and Teach for America.

Our struggling district was on the mends, Covington came in and left us with a mess to clean up. Kansas City’s average ACT score is 14 to 16 out of a total of 36 possible points.

And one last thing – do you not find it suspicious that there were other candidates who dropped out only days before he arrived for his interview? And do you not find it suspicious that he lied to break his contract with KC knowing he had another job lined up?

Your governor knows more than he is telling. Which is why he wouldn’t initially explain which private foundation was helping to fund Covington’s salary. Don’t say you weren’t warned. Been there, done that. Notice no decent school district will have him. They can see through his obfuscation better than failing districts can.

Categories Education Reform

California Parent Trigger Leaders Sue for Money

By dianeravitch
January 5, 2013 //
11

Readers may recall that an organization called Parent Revolution led the battle for a “parent trigger” law in California in 2010. Parent Revolution is funded by Gates, Broad and Walton foundations.

Earlier this year, Parent Revolution worked with parents in Adelanto, California, to take over low-performing Desert Trails elementary school. Some parents wanted to rescind their signatures from the petition to take over the school, but the judge would not permit them to do so. The parents who did not sign the petition were not allowed to vote on choosing a charter operator.

When it was time to select a charter school, only 53 parents in a school of more than 600 children cast a ballot.

In one of the strangest twists in the parent trigger case in Adelanto, the five leaders of the parent trigger action sued the district for $100,000, even though all their legal costs were handled pro bono. According to this article, the parents plan to split their winnings.

Categories Broad Foundation, California, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Parent trigger, Walton Foundation

EduShyster Explains the “No Excuses” Model

By dianeravitch
January 5, 2013 //
12

EduShyster is upset. She doesn’t understand why our nation’s leaders have embraced the idea that “success=compliance.”

She is concerned that white philanthropists and  white teachers are imposing strict discipline on black and brown children.

This phenomenon is known as “no excuses.”

As she mentions, the origin of “No Excuses” may be traced to a book of that name by Samuel Casey Carter, written in 2000 about 21 “high-performing, high-poverty schools” and released by the far-right Heritage Foundation. The idea behind the book was that we didn’t need to spend any more money to fix schools, we just had to make sure that the schools were tough in their discipline and indulged in no pedagogical nonsense.

Some day, an enterprising researcher or journalist will check to see where those “no excuses” schools are today. One of them, P.S. 161 in Brooklyn, was on the Mayor’s list of schools-he-wants-to-close. Another, the famous Bennett-Kew Elementary in the miracle district of Inglewood, California, was collapsing, along with the district, and on the verge of a state takeover (when last I read about its travails). Why? Because so many charter schools had opened in the Inglewood “miracle district” that the district had to lay off teachers, custodians and other staff, had increased class sizes to 40 or more, and was about to fall into bankruptcy.

Then came the Thernstroms’ book of the same title.

And then came David Whitman’s Sweating the Small Stuff, which lavished praise on “no excuses” schools that practice “the new paternalism.” It was published by the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute. Whitman is (or was) Arne Duncan’s speech writer.

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Reform, Privatization

A Call for Political Leadership

By dianeravitch
January 5, 2013 //
24

Where are our leaders? Where are the political leaders with the courage and independence to support the commons against the power of Big Money?

This reader read Gary Rubinstein’s brilliant Letters to “Reformers” and wrote this comment:

“Thanks for making this series more widely known– it is so well done and important for people to see. And as noted in the notes on the Tillson piece, their collective silence is deafening. Rarely is that crowd quiet about anything . . .

“What we need is a politician to spend more than five minutes studying and understanding the real issues of real education reform. Too many fall into the Obama/Duncan trap of nostrums that sound good but don’t work. Most people are busy, don’t have kids in public schools, don’t talk to principals or teachers and don’t even realize they are lining up with the ALEC privateers. Isn’t anyone in DC listening at all? Seems not, and meanwhile the damage being done in the states and in the local schools is tangible and real.

“Where is our champion inside the beltway? A senator, a rep, someone running for President next time . . ? Someone to make this, true and meaningful and effective education reform, a major part of their political identity. They’d start with an enviable base.”

Categories Corporate Reformers, Democrats, Education Industry, For-Profit, Privatization

Hari Sevugan Defends StudentsFirst Agenda

By dianeravitch
January 5, 2013 //
47

I earlier reported the story on Huffington Post that said a number of top staffers had resigned, including Democrats. Hari Sevugan was a key figure in the article. He here explains his continued loyalty to Michelle Rhee’s mission.

I hope he will write again to explain why he thinks that Rhee’s support for for-profit charters, for vouchers, and for the agenda of rightwing governors helps our society’s most vulnerable children.

Diane – I’ve never posted a comment on your blog, but as one of the subjects mentioned in the article you have extrapolated from to make your point in this entry, I felt that I needed to on this occasion. I’m also writing this on my iphone, so please forgive me any wayward autocorrects.

You have often suggested, as you have here, that folks at StudentsFirst and more broadly the education reform community are working to privatize education and diminish teaching and teachers.

You afforded a story regarding my time at StudentsFirst enough validity to use it to criticize the organization. So, I hope you will afford my opinion based on that time the same credibility when I tell you this:

To suggest that folks working at StudentsFirst or in education reform are doing anything but working for the benefit of kids is plain wrong.

Everyone I worked with at StudentsFirst and in the education reform community was and is exclusively interested in improving the lives of children. They are not out to diminish teachers, but rather they recognize the importance of teachers in ensuring children have the best education possible. They are not out to destroy public education, but rather their fealty belongs to the public school students served by that system.

The thing is – I believe the same is true of teachers unions and many advocates, including you, who are opposed to education reform.

While I no longer work at StudentsFirst on a day-to-day basis, I will continue to work with them in other ways, as well as with other reformers, toward their goal of ensuring every child has access to high quality education.

In this post you ask, “What part of [Rhee’s] agenda is bipartisan?” There are many Democrats, including this one, who work toward reform because public schools are not currently serving every child – too often children of color and from poverty – as they should. These children are being denied a fundamental civil right. It is a core Democratic value to ensure that their civil rights are enforced. It is a core Democratic value to ensure poverty or socio-economic status is not a barrier to opportunity. It is a core Democratic value to ensure teachers are respected for the work they do.

There will be disagreements on how to enact those values at a policy level, on both sides and at times within the same side (see Newark teachers deal) but I hope we can abstain from characterizing motivations or values of those we disagree with. (Or in this case mischaracterizing them). I hope we can raise the level of the dialogue in this debate to reflect the importance of the subject matter both sides are trying to serve – our kids.

Hope this finds you otherwise well and doing better things on a Friday night that reading this.

– Hari

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, For-Profit, Privatization, Rhee, Michelle, StudentsFirst, Vouchers
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