Beware, this might be a hoax.
I hope it is true.
If it is true, please share at once with your legislators. Send it to Arne Duncan. Share it with corporate leaders.
A principal of an elementary school in Massachusetts fired the security guards and expanded the school’s arts programs. Everyone and everything got better.
Call Ripley. Tell “Believe It or Not.”
David Greene mentored many Teach for America teachers. He knows how poorly prepared most of them were for the job of teaching in New York City’s toughest schools. He tried to help them cope.
Here he offers good advice to TFA.
Arthur Goldstein teaches high school in Queens, New York. Many of his students are English language learners. He blogs at NYC Educator. His blog is one of the best in the nation.
He wrote the following for readers of this blog:
How Smart Will Common Core Make Our Kids?
Judging from the editorials in the papers, you’d think Common Core was the best thing since sliced bread. Actually, sliced bread is highly overrated, as anyone with fresh artisan bread and a good knife can attest.
The Daily News predicts over 60% of our kids could fail Common Core tests, and appears to see this as a good thing. Yet, as a public school teacher, if 60% of my students were to suddenly fail, I highly doubt my principal’s first instinct would be to compliment me on my high standards.
I’m also willing to bet anything my students would not appreciate it very much. They’d be particularly upset, vocally upset, if I’d given them tests for which I had not prepared them at all. I could certainly explain to 34 teenagers that it was urgent I raise standards, that it was an emergency, and that there was, therefore, no time to prepare or test my methods. Nonetheless, I would not wish to have to face them on a daily basis afterward.
Their parents would not be happy either. And yet, when NYS Education Commisioner John King advocates much the same thing, the Daily News says he’s “fighting the good fight.” It’s not much of a fight when he’s facing down a press corps that cheers each and every untested reformy notion that comes down the pike. It would be tougher to explain huge failure rates to a group of public school parents (like me).
One of the most remarkable statements I’ve seen was from the Daily News editorial, which asserted our kids were “nowhere near as smart as they need to be.” Can they seriously believe Common Core tests measure intelligence?
I don’t give tests to see how smart kids are. I give them primarily to see how well students have mastered material I’ve introduced. I’ve tested kids who barely speak English, kids who live with broken or improvised families, kids who work nights helping their parents deliver papers, kids who travel hours just to get to school, and kids in situations I cannot even publicly describe. Here’s something I know for sure—very smart students fail tests.
I keep hearing about how Common Core measures reading comprehension. One good way to to improve that is via tricking kids into loving what they read. If you can get them to do that (and I’m not at all persuaded any new tests will), they’ll be better equipped to plod through The History of Cement, or whatever delights Common Core has in store for them. Other tests will certainly continue to reflect student preparation, or how well they can select A, B, C, or D. None of this tells us how smart kids are.
I’m just a lowly teacher, but I don’t see it as our job to make kids smarter. It’s our job to inform and prepare them, and for far more than test-taking. It’s our job to awaken or inspire their passions. It’s our job to make them love this great gift that is their lives.
And frankly, John King, who sends his kid to a Montessori school where none of these tests are applicable, has an awful lot of gall to tell us they’re what our kids need. Why on earth doesn’t he want our kids to have what his kid has?
Suppose you were mayor of Chicago and had complete control of the public schools.
Suppose one of your high schools had an outstanding record by any measure.
Suppose it had an excellent IB program.
Would it occur to you to make the entire school an IB school?
Would it occur to you to get rid of some of the veteran teachers, just to shake things up?
Probably not.
But it did occur to Mayor Rahm Emanuel, and today there was a mass student walkout to protest the mayor’s autocratic effort to break what was working.
Thanks to Ben Joravsky for a great article, and to Fred Klonsky for blogging Ben’s article, and to Chaya R for bringing it to my attention.
Ben J. proves that great journalism is alive and well.
This thoughtful and provocative essay by Shawn Gude situates present-day corporate reform in its historical context. Gude shows the connections between early 20th century social efficiency and the present-day demand for testing, standardizing, and data-based decision-making.
Here is an excerpt:
“There’s a special resemblance between the struggles against scientific management, or Taylorism, and today’s teacher resistance to corporate reform schemes. Just as factory workers fought top-down dictates, deskilling, and the installation of anemic work processes, so too are teachers trying to prevent the undemocratic implementation of high-stakes testing and merit pay, assaults on professionalism, and the dumbing down and narrowing of curricula.
“There are more obvious parallels: Proponents of scientific management counted some prominent progressives in their ranks, just like the contemporary left-neoliberals hawking education reform. The nostrums of both Taylorism and the education accountability movement paper over foundational conflicts and root causes. Many of those who espouse education reform cast their solutions as unimpeachably “scientific” and “data-driven,” yet as with scientific management partisans, the empirical grounding of their prescriptions is highly dubious. And proponents of scientific management and corporate school reform share an antipathy toward unions, often casting them as self-interested inhibitors of progress.”
And here is another excerpt:
“When education is reduced to test prep, rich curricula and the craft of teaching are imperiled. The vapid classroom of neoliberal school reform mirrors the vapid workplace of Taylorism. Teach for America, which implicitly advances the idea that the sparsely trained can out-teach veteran educators, engenders deskilling and deprofessionalization. Non-practitioners dictating to practitioners how they should do their work mirrors management’s disciplining of workers; both militate against work as a creative activity. The appropriation of business language — the head of the Chicago Public Schools is the “CEO” — reinforces the idea that schools should be run like corporations. Merit pay individualizes and severs educators’ ties to one another, forcing them to compete instead of cooperate. So too with the anti-union animus that neoliberal reformers and scientific management proponents display.”
Read the essay. You will understand the roots of the corporate reforms of our day.
The K12 cyber charter in Virginia may close.
The school enrolled 350 students.
The county “hosting” the school decided it was too much of a bother, and only five students from the host county were enrolled.
There have been persistent questions about the quality of virtual charter schools, but their profitability has never been in doubt.
K12 will go looking for another partner or the governor will find another way for them to make a profit by providing inferior education to students in Virginia.
The public has been sold a bill of goods about what is needed to improve our schools.
We see misinformation on television. We hear it from our leaders in both parties.
It is hard to explain the real issues in our schools when the media bombards the public with the corporate reform narrative.
Once in a while, some insightful journalist breaks through the media blanket.
Here is some good news: I just came across an article posted a while ago by someone who totally gets what is going on.
The author refers to Race to the Top as a “marketing” ploy for failed ideas.
He calls it a “race to the bottom,” tied firmly to Bush’s bad ideas.
It was posted on the popular blog site of Jonathan Turley.
Keep singing.
So will I.
What do you do if you head the Connecticut chapter of Teach for America and you long for bigger worlds to conquer?
Simple.
The state commissioner is a charter school guy, so he is no problem.
You decide to open your new charter in Bridgeport, where the superintendent won his reputation by privatizing public schools in New Orleans.
All the right connections and the public’s money. No brainer.
Jersey Jazzman has a sharp article about Commissioner Cerf’s decision to turn a local charter school over to a national chain. The chain is expanding thanks to a $9 million federal grant and extra help from Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
The chain has fewer students who are special education or English language learners, as compared to the local district. It spends more than district schools.
Is this a sustainable model?
Jersey Jazzman concludes:
“To recap: Democracy Prep’s practices includes more spending per pupil, a rigid “no-excuses” culture, high rates of attrition, and segregation by poverty, special need, and English proficiency.
“This is your future, Camden – imposed on you by state-officials and outside CMOs. Don’t even think about fighting back.”
Responding to a complaint filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, the U.S. Department of Justice warned voucher schools in Milwaukee to stop excluding, counseling out, or otherwise discriminating against students with disabilities.
“The state cannot, by delegating the education function to private voucher schools, place students beyond the reach of the federal laws that require Wisconsin to eliminate disability discrimination in its administration of public programs,” DOJ officials wrote in the letter to Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction Superintendent Tony Evers.
Voucher programs across the nation–now operating in 20 states–will be affected, and states are now obliged to monitor voucher programs to be sure they are in compliance with federal laws protecting the rights of students with disabilities.
The ACLU contended that the voucher program excluded students with disabilities, and if they were admitted, they were systematically expelled and/or pushed out. This practice led to a very large percentage of students with disabilities in the public school district even as its funding was declining due to loss of enrollment to vouchers and charters. Consequently, the so-called “failing” district cannot possibly recover because the private schools don’t accept students with disabilities and the public school has to accept all comers. And despite their exclusion of students with disabilities, the voucher schools in Wisconsin DO NOT outperform the public schools.
A statement issued by the ACLU warned of the danger of choice programs:
“Publicly-funded voucher programs have the effect of setting up a separate escape hatch for only a few, leaving the majority of the poor students in schools that are even less likely to succeed than they were before the voucher program or tax credit began. Furthermore, the private schools that spring up to educate a child for $6,500 are producing results that are no better than the public school district – in Milwaukee, for example, three years of comparison test scores show they are performing worse than the public system. We also know that the Milwaukee parents who take advantage of these programs tend to have higher education levels and children without disabilities, leaving the public school district with a higher percentage of children with disabilities and parents with less education. There are few checks in place to ensure that all of the schools accepting vouchers are more than glorified day care providing convenient hours for parents.”
Even more ominous is the specter of segregation academies in the south:
“…some private schools in states like Georgia and Alabama, where tax credits have recently been put into place, were founded as segregation academies to thwart federal integration efforts. While the program in Milwaukee and its school district serve almost entirely students of color, as “school choice” spreads around the country, the stage is set for these programs to become even more exclusionary and segregated. We know this because Milwaukee’s voucher program already excludes students with disabilities and segregates them into the public school district while at the same time stripping the district of much needed funds to educate them. If we permit this to continue, we are condoning separate schools for a number of groups of students, including racial minorities, students with disabilities, religious minorities and LGBT students. What we have known for the fifty years since Brown v. Board of Education is that separate is not equal. School voucher programs and tax credits do not provide a choice for everyone. They create publicly funded separate schools.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 