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Crain’s New York is running an opinion poll, asking which of Bloomberg’s policies the next mayor should get rid of. Bloomberg has promoted high-stakes testing, charter schools, school closings, co-locations of charters, and evaluation of teachers by test scores. Class sizes are at their highest in fourteen years.
After I posted about the NYC DOE decision to place a new charter school into space that Central Park East wanted for expansion, many comments were received. Some accused the school of being exclusive or selective or no different from a charter. This parent at the school responded in hopes of clarifying what the school is and does.
There is an alarming amount of misinformation in the posts above.
There is no admissions test at CPE, and the school’s population is heterogeneous in every respect; the admissions process is designed to create a balance of students, not to select the most “gifted.” The most important criterion for admission is that the parents desire a progressive education for their children.
The curriculum that my son is experiencing at CPE is radically different from the traditional model that his brother got at a regular public school (also in East Harlem). There is more play, art, music, and movement incorporated into the school day, and my third-grader has yet to bring home a practice test for homework (his brother at this point in his 3rd grade year at his traditional school was doing nothing but filling in bubbles).
Not all parents would choose this non-traditional approach, but those who do feel passionately that it is right for their child and their own educational values. No one at CPE feels that there is an either/or between the progressive middle school that we have been applying to start for five years and the East Harlem Scholars’ Academy, which is desired by other parents.
THERE IS ROOM FOR BOTH, and BOTH are desired by parents in the community. Isn’t this what the much touted “school choice” is all about? But the DOE is acting with gross favoritism when it allows a brand new charter school to expand while the CPE’s application is rejected for lack of space.
Robert Skeels is a pro-public school candidate in Los Angeles. He has raised $15,000. He will not get anything from Eli Broad or Michael Bloomberg.
He comments:
The LA Times asked me for a quote on Bloomberg’s $1 Million CSR donation. Here’s my response: “As a community candidate who has raised over $15,000 through myriad small contributions from local parents, community members, and classroom teachers, I find it dismaying that a single out-of-state billionaire has a greater voice in our school board election than all the working families of District 2. Where were these millions of dollars when the incumbent callously cut early childhood education, adult education, and K-12 arts last year?”
Just an hour ago, I posted the story about how officials at the Tennessee Virtual Academy had instructed teachers to delete failing grades, allegedly to show “progress.”
The virtual school, run by the for-profit K12 corporation, is among the lowest-performing schools in the state.
This afternoon a state legislative committee blocked any discussion of the school altering grades and prevented efforts to limit enrollment in the school. Although the legislators refused to hear any reference to the school’s practice of deleting failing grades, they did hear a teacher who claimed that home instruction on a computer was a very positive experience for children with autism.
The legislators gave the virtual school an additional two years with no accountability, despite its poor academic performance.
The school gets about $5,000 per pupil and enrolls more than 3,000 students. It is known for its astute lobbying and well-targeted campaign contributions.
Another step backward for American education.
Administrators at the for-profit K12 online charter called Tennessee Virtual Academy instructed teachers to delete failing grades from the fall semester.
School officials defended the practice:
Tennessee Virtual Academy Principal Josh Williams insisted that the school had taken the steps to “more accurately recognize students’ current progress.”
“By going back into our school’s electronic grading system and recording students’ most recent progress score (instead of taking the average throughout the semester) we could more accurately recognize students’ current progress in their individualized learning program,” he told the station in an email.
This must be the lamest excuse ever invented, since it achieves the opposite of what is intended. If you want to show “progress,” you keep the failing grades. That way, you can see gains from September forward.
The school is one of the lowest performing in the state. Despite its poor performance, the school is making money for K12 and hopes to grow enrollment.
We will soon find out whether the legislators care more about the quality of education offered to Tennessee students or pleasing the lobbyists for K12.
Despite the fact that a Louisiana judge struck down the funding for the state’s voucher program, State Superintendent John White expressed confidence that the state would find a way to pay for it and that the numbers who leave public schools for religious schools with public funding will increase.
Although nearly half a million students were eligible this current year, only about 5,000 currently are using a voucher to attend a nonpublic school.
White did not address whether the state will continue to fund schools that do not teach accurate or modern science, mathematics or history.
Nor did he mention whether teachers in voucher schools will need to be certified, as they are not now.
John White is one of the national leaders that Teach for America produced.
He is determined to leave a legacy in Louisiana of vouchers, charters, and an impoverished public school system.
Some legacy.
Maybe his next job might be at ALEC or the Walton Foundation.
Despite protests from parents and teachers, the Indiana Legislature agreed to continue rolling out the Common Core standards, which have already been rolled out for kindergarten and first grade, and will soon be released for second grades (these are the grades in which early childhood experts say the Common Core standards are developmentally inappropriate).
The state board of education, which is staunchly Republican, is firmly and unanimously committed to the Common Core.
Newly elected State Superintendent Glenda Ritz said she would review the CC standards to see whether there was a way to combine them with Indiana’s previous standards, which were widely recognized as among the best in the nation.
Here is a good overview of the political situation in Los Angeles by Howard Blume of the LA Times. Two billionaires have assembled a campaign chest of $2.5 million to make sure that Superintendent John Deasey has a board that supports his agenda.
Los Angeles has more charter schools than any city in America, and more are on the way.
Mayor Bloomberg’s contribution of $1 million to the pro-Deasey forces is called “a game-changer.”
Steve Zimmer, the prime target of the corporatists, says that he hopes to have a chance to sit down and talk with Mayor Bloomberg.
He thinks the mayor might change his mind.
New Yorkers would advise him not to hold his breath while waiting for that meeting.
Lest we forget, there is a larger question that deserves attention: Is it appropriate for someone who has been fortunate enough to amass $20 billion to use that money to overwhelm the democratic process?
This is one of the most interesting education stories on the web this week.
David Kirp wrote a very good article in the New York Times about how the Union City public schools have improved over the years without charter schools or TFA. The Times gave it the headline “The Secret to Fixing Bad Schools.”
Gary Rubinstein decided to subject it to careful analysis, as he has done on other occasions when Arne Duncan, President Obama and others claim to have discovered “miracle schools.”
Gary determined that Union City is not a miracle district, that the claims don’t match the rhetoric.
This provoked a fascinating series of responses to the article.
Some people were upset that Gary would puncture a picture that was good for “our side.”
Some said that Kirp never claimed Union City was a “miracle.”
Some said that the “reformers” would use his debunking to argue that schools can’t succeed without using their tough medicine (e.g., firing everyone and closing the school and bringing in TFA).
Read it and see what you think.
But bear in mind that the article is based on David Kirp’s new book Improbable Scholars, which goes into much more detail about Union City and its schools.
In this article, which appeared on Huffington Post, Alan Singer of Hofstra University in New York, nails the empty promises and misleading claims in President Obama’s State of the Union address. He calls it “Obama’s Mis-Education Agenda.”
Alan Singer writes:
I am a lifetime teacher, first in public schools and then in a university-based teacher education program. I think I do an honest job and that students benefit from being in my classes. I was hoping to hear something positive about the future of public education in President Obama’s State of the Union speech, I confess I was so disturbed by what Obama was saying about education that I had to turn him off. In the morning I read the text of his speech online, hoping I was wrong about what I thought I had hear. But I wasn’t. There was nothing there but shallow celebration of wrong-headed policies and empty promises.
For me, the test question on any education proposal always is, “Is this the kind of education I want for my children and grandchildren?” Obama, whose children attend an elite and expensive private school in Washington DC, badly failed the test.
Basically Obama is looking to improve education in the United States on the cheap. He bragged that his signature education program, Race to the Top, was “a competition that convinced almost every state to develop smarter curricula and higher standards, for about 1 percent of what we spend on education each year.” I am not sure why Obama felt entitled to brag. Race to the Top has been in place for four years now and its major impact seems to be the constant testing of students, high profits for testing companies such as Pearson, and questionable reevaluations of teachers. It is unclear to me what positive changes Race to the Top has actually achieved.
In the State of the Union Address, Obama made three proposals, one for pre-school, one for high school, and one for college.
Obama on Pre-Schools: “Study after study shows that the sooner a child begins learning, the better he or she does down the road. But today, fewer than 3 in 10 four year-olds are enrolled in a high-quality preschool program . . . I propose working with states to make high-quality preschool available to every child in America . . . In states that make it a priority to educate our youngest children, like Georgia or Oklahoma, studies show students grow up more likely to read and do math at grade level, graduate high school, hold a job, and form more stable families of their own.”
I am a big supporter of universal pre-kindergarten and I like the promise, but Georgia and Oklahoma are not models for educational excellence. Both states have offered universal pre-k for more than a decade and in both states students continue to score poorly on national achievement tests. Part of the problem is that both Georgia and Oklahoma are anti-union low wage Right-to-Work states. In Oklahoma City, the average salary for a preschool teacher is $25,000 and assistant teachers make about $18,000, enough to keep the school personnel living in poverty. Average Preschool Teacher salaries for job postings in Oklahoma City, are 17% lower than average Preschool Teacher salaries for job postings nationwide. The situation is not much better in Georgia. In Savannah, Average Preschool Teacher salaries for job postings are 12% lower than average Preschool Teacher salaries for job postings nationwide.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-to-work_law
http://www.indeed.com/salary/q-Preschool-Teacher-l-Oklahoma-City,-OK.html
http://www.indeed.com/salary?q1=Preschool+Teacher&l1=savannah+georgia
Obama on Secondary Schools: “Let’s also make sure that a high school diploma puts our kids on a path to a good job. Right now, countries like Germany focus on graduating their high school students with the equivalent of a technical degree from one of our community colleges, so that they’re ready for a job. At schools like P-Tech in Brooklyn, a collaboration between New York Public Schools, the City University of New York, and IBM, students will graduate with a high school diploma and an associate degree in computers or engineering . . . I’m announcing a new challenge to redesign America’s high schools so they better equip graduates for the demands of a high-tech economy. We’ll reward schools that develop new partnerships with colleges and employers, and create classes that focus on science, technology, engineering, and math – the skills today’s employers are looking for to fill jobs right now and in the future.”
Unfortunately, P-Tech in Brooklyn, the Pathways in Technology Early College High School, is not yet, and may never be, a model for anything. It claims to be “the first school in the nation that connects high school, college, and the world of work through deep, meaningful partnerships, we are pioneering a new vision for college and career readiness and success.” Students will study for six years and receive both high school diplomas and college associate degrees. But the school is only in its second year of operation, has only 230 students, and no graduates or working alumni.
http://www.ptechnyc.org/site/default.aspx?PageID=1
According to a New York Times report which included an interviews with an IBM official, “The objective is to prepare students for entry-level technology jobs paying around $40,000 a year, like software specialists who answer questions from I.B.M.’s business customers or ‘deskside support’ workers who answer calls from PC users, with opportunities for advancement.”
The thing is, as anyone who has called computer support knows, those jobs are already being done at a much cheaper rate by outsourced technies in third world countries. It does not really seem like an avenue to the American middle class. The IBM official also made clear, “ that while no positions at I.B.M. could be guaranteed six years in the future, the company would give P-Tech students preference for openings.”
Obama on the cost of a College Education: “[S]kyrocketing costs price way too many young people out of a higher education, or saddle them with unsustainable debt . . . But taxpayers cannot continue to subsidize the soaring cost of higher education . . . My Administration will release a new “College Scorecard” that parents and students can use to compare schools based on a simple criteria: where you can get the most bang for your educational buck.”
As a parent and grandparent I agree with President Obama that the cost of college is too high for many families, but that is what a real education costs. If the United States is going to have the high-tech 21st century workforce the President wants, the only solution is massive federal support for education. There is a way to save some money however I did not hear any discussion of it in the President’s speech. Private for-profit businesses masquerading as colleges have been sucking in federal dollars and leaving poor and poorly qualified students with debts they can never repay. These programs should to be shut down, but in the State of the Union Address President Obama ignored the problem.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alan-singer/higher-education-for-the-_b_1642764.html
The New York documented the way the for-profit edu-companies, including the massive Pearson publishing concern, go unregulated by federal education officials. These companies operate online charter schools and colleges that offer substandard education to desperate families at public expense.
President Obama, celebrating mediocrity and shallow promises are not enough. You would never accept these “solutions” for Malia and Sasha. American students and families need a genuine federal investment in education.
Diane Ravitch's blog 