In this post, Ed Berger explains the collaboration among stakeholders that is needed to defend our community public schools from marauders and vandals. He identifies the vandals.
The vandals all have the same goal: Destroy public schools. They call it “reform,” and anyone who stands up to them is called “a defender of the status quo.” They forget that they are the status quo.
Karen Lewis won re-election as president of CTU with about 80% of the votes.
Lewis led the city’s first teachers’ strike in 25 years last fall.
She has been leading the battle against Mayor Emanuel’s mass school closings, the largest in American history.
Students and teachers complained about the commercial brands that were represented in the recent Pearson tests for the a Common Core testing in New York State.
According to the authoritative satirical blogger Students Last, this was no error. This is now state policy and a clever way to raise new funding.
Why not sell naming rights to our schools while we are at it?
The Chicago Teachers Union issued a report on segregation in the Chicago public schools:
New Report Unravels the Sordid History of Racial Segregation in Chicago Public Schools
On anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, “Still Separate, Still Unequal” examines continued acceptance of de facto segregation and injustices in district schools
CHICAGO—On was is the 59th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) today released a report on the history of disruptive actions against communities of color by Chicago Public Schools (CPS), exemplified by school closings that intensify the harmful effects of segregated schools and neighborhoods. The study, titled Still Separate, Still Unequal, acknowledges the deep segregation that exists in Chicago, but states that segregation is exacerbated by flawed education reform policies and assaults on communities that have long borne the brunt of its harmful effects.
The 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision was one of the most successful victories of the modern Civil Rights Movement. The ruling declared segregation in U.S. public schools unconstitutional, saying it violated the “equal protection under the law” clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
Now, nearly six decades later, parents of Chicago’s African-American and special education needs students are also seeking court protection against Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s plan to shutter 53 elementary schools. On Wednesday they filed two federal lawsuits seeking a halt closures because these actions are discriminatory and will cause undue harm to their children.
“The mayor and his CPS administration are barreling through the largest round of school closings ever—actions that will once again disproportionately harm students and communities of color,” said CTU President Karen Lewis. “What they’re proposing will set us back to the time before Brown v. Board of Education. This report shows that we are still living in an era of education apartheid and we must do all we can to resist the destruction of our schools and the harming of our vulnerable population.”
Over the past decade, one out of every four intensely segregated African-American schools—schools with a more than 90 percent African-American student population—has been closed, phased out or turned around. Yet segregation has increased and African-American students are now more segregated by race and class than in 1989. At the same time there are far more schools with virtually no Black teachers and no Black students. Schools with fewer than 10 percent African-American students and teachers now make up 28 percent of CPS schools, up from 10 percent in 2001. In CPS, integration has been abandoned as policy and segregation accepted as the norm, rather than as the deliberate and systematic construction that it is. The report addresses, specifically:
“CPS seems committed only to deepening the harms of segregation, rather than moving towards an integrated school system,” said Still Separate, Still Unequal author, Pavlyn Jankov. “Segregation has increased, and the associated policies of disinvestment and destabilization are more acute than ever.”
Still Separate, Still Unequal calls for an end to the segregated harm of failed school closings and turnarounds, and a halt to the rapid expansion of private charter operators and other aberrations of “choice” that increase segregation.
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John Merrow has written a blistering critique of the Establishment’s cover-up of the cheating scandal in D.C.
The article he wrote exposing the cover up was rejected by a national magazine, unnamed.
When Merrow directly asked Duncan about the scandal, Duncan bobbed and weaved.
But Merrow reserves his greatest ire for the editorial writers at the Washington Post, who were cheerleaders for Michelle Rhee and who dismissed anyone who dared to criticize her.
Why? This is the newspaper that revealed Watergate.
What is the mysterious power of Michelle Rhee over the Washington Post editorial board?
Are they afraid of her?
Why?
Richard Rothstein recently gave a commencement address to the graduates of the Chicago Loyola School of Education.
What do you say to new teachers, embarking on their careers in these perilous times? What do you say to those who have chosen a profession that is under siege?
Rothstein is a deeply knowledgeable and fearless scholar. Read what he said.
A reader from Houston suggests that we watch the PBS documentary on Houston’s Apollo program and watch the faces of the students:
He writes:
To see how many kids react to an overemphasis on testing, watch Dropout Nation. PBS Frontline’s Dropout Nation series featured HISD and its Apollo Program in its September broadcast. While there are some good things about Apollo-individulized tutors, more support staff, etc., it’s data driven focus contains the seed of its own destruction. Talking about tests all the time, doing test prep all the time, making kids take tests that they are not relevant to them and that they are not prepared for is wrong.
Watching these kids tell their stories is painful. Watching what some staff are willing to do help kids is heroic. Seeing testing be a focus is exasperating. I was not surprised by the emotional and physical reactions of these kids as staff kept trying to get them and keep them in school. The kids keep saying that the learning is irrelevant. They keep saying that school is boring. They keep saying that no one understands them and their plight. Telling them, “No Excuses!” is disrespectful. Children are not responsible for the circumstances that they are born in and a pat phrase is offensive.
At one point a kid shows up after being gone for days and the staff try to get him to take an SAT test that is about to start.
The Apollo program is in its 3rd year and only the featured high school, Sharpstown, has shown slight improvement. Much of those gains may be to student attrition. Teacher attrition has been high as well. Perhaps that is why Frontline did not show one classroom teacher in the whole episode.
Superintendent Dr. Grier has asked for 17 million more from the Board. If only there were a way to make sure that money went to anything but testing. Social workers, psychologists, teachers, etc. but not a dime for testing.
On May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court declared that segregation of the races in public school was unconstitutional. At the time, segregation was the law in 17 states and many districts.
For years, the states where segregation was outlawed resisted the court decision. Their favorite ploy was school choice. They knew that school choice would preserve racial segregation because whites would choose to stay with whites, and blacks would be fearful of applying to white schools, where they would face a hostile climate, harassment, and even violence.
The Supreme Court and lower federal courts overturned the many strategies enacted to evade the necessity of desegregation.
But that was then,and this is now.
Now, billionaires proudly sponsor segregated schools. Now, cities and states authorize all-black, all-Hispanic, all-white charter schools without embarrassment.
The UCLA Civil Rights Project says that racial resegregation is on the rise, for blacks and Hispanics.
The federal government–most especially, the U.S. Department of Education–doesn’t care about racial segregation any more. Nor does it have an active interest in discrimination against students with disabilities. When the ACLU recently won a ruling against voucher schools in Milwaukee that excluded students with disabilities, it went not to the Office of Civil Rights in the Department of Education, but to the U.S. Department of Justice. When the U.D. Government Accountability Office issued a report criticizing charter schools for their mall proportions of students with disabilities, James Shelton of the U.S. Department of Education said something like, “we’ll have to look into that.” That was the last heard from this Department.
Those who care about the resegregation of public education and discrimination against students because of their disabilities will have to wait for another administration that also cares about fairness, equity, and the principles enunciated on May 17, 1954. This one does not.
Having studied the history of education for some decades, I have a built-in resistance to claims about the school of the future, particularly when it involves the end of schooling. Over many years, I have seen predictions about that Great Day when all children are self-motivated, all learning comes naturally, and instruction by adults becomes superfluous. The archetype of this idea was A. S. Neill’s “Summerhill,” which was a huge bestseller in the 1960s. But it was preceded by many other visions of schools without books, without tests, without classes, without teachers, without stress, without walls, without without without.
Here is the latest: a school in the Cloud, with Grannies to answer questions as self-motivated children use the Web to learn at their own speed, as they wish. The man behind this proposal won a $1 million TED prize for this idea.
What do you think?
Parents and teachers in Concord, Massachusetts, are outraged over the firing of the teachers’ union leader, an 18-year teacher of third grade, allegedly for ineffectiveness.
“The catalyst for the protest was the decision by Thoreau Elementary School Principal Kelly Clough not to renew the contract of veteran third grade teacher and Concord Teachers Association President Merrie Najimy.
“Barbara Lehn has been a teacher with Concord’s school system for 25 years. She said she has known Najimy since she was hired 18 years ago. She said the idea that Najimy could have been found deficient in every single area of her evaluation as suspect and “laughable.”
“The evaluation system that exists has been misused and abused,” Lehn said. “It’s not because of her teaching, but because she is president of the Concord Teachers Association. … Merrie has been an exemplary teacher.”
Did it ever occur to any of the proponents of the new teacher evaluations that they could be used arbitrarily and capriciously?
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