Yes, we do know the secret of getting high test scores!
Exclude the kids who might get low scores.
Kick out the kids who do get low scores.
Only strivers need apply. Only strivers will be admitted.
It is the formula for a miracle school!
All children get high scores!
All children (who weren’t kicked out) graduate and go to college!
This s the golden dream of Race to the Top.
Cull the best, forget the rest!
Chentcher writes:
“Edweek has closed the comments on Bridging Differences!
On this very topic, Petrilli wrote a column today defending policies that “dump” the vast majority of inferior, undeserving needy students. He calls on today’s reformers to establish a mercilessly demanding environment like the one that once allowed a few exceptional, highly motivated and “deserving” negro students a straight and narrow path upward:
“Though relegated to second-class status and stifled at every turn, Dunbar produced a coterie of graduates that the most elite schools in the country would envy. Doctors, lawyers, Ivy League professors, generals, and titans of business all graced and were graced by Dunbar’s faculty and community.”
After waxing nostalgic for the Golden Age of segregation, Petrilli actually wrote these words:
“And this, of course, was in the Jim Crow era.
Dunbar later became a regular, de-tracked, “comprehensive” high school–and started its long slide. Would anyone argue that Washington, D.C., is better off as a result?”
http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/Bridging-Differences/2013/10/the_especially_deserving_poor.html
I just want to say, with all my heart, yes. Please consider all that rose up, among the generations of “undeserving” poor children who gained access to our public schools. I want to say, a promise has been made that can’t be called back.
Anthony Cody has written a column in response, “Social Darwinism in the Gilded Age”
http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-dialogue/2013/10/social_darwinism_resurrected_f.html
Comments have been closed on Cody’s blog, also! Diane, please link his column, and write about this where we can discuss it.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
There’s no reason regular public schools can’t be “orderly, safe, high-expectation havens.” There just needs to be different paced classes offered to reflect varying levels of ability, and class sizes need to be small. (Especially remedial classes with many kids with special needs.)
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Yes. Like my high school was in 1991. I was pretty sure we already had this figured out, with perhaps some attention needed on issues of racial bias etc.
But now that the issue has been complicated by charters, vouchers, VAM, tests, CCSS, closed schools we can’t really consider a public school and how it should run to best serve many types of learners. Instead of improving what we had we blew it up and now we have to clean up and rebuild at the same time. We can’t have these conversations about how to best serve academically ardent pupils from all socioeconomic levels and races until we agree what 1. public schools are and 2. that it is not in the best interest of our nation to make a market out of the public service and public forum that should be public school. Until we say, “Yay Milton Friedman for making points worthy of consideration from an intellectual standpoint but no thank you from a pragmatic and realistic standpoint” and close the door on his ideas regarding education we can’t have the conversations that will lead to the improvements we need. Until we just take his notions off the table, we are going to continue to yell with no solutions. His ideas are toxic to our society in terms of public school. We need to own that and add it to the conversation like a mantra–Just as we will not allow “our schools are failing” to drive the conversation. We will not get anywhere so long as Friedman’s ideas and the sky is falling mentality are kept alive. Only by moving past those pessimistic, poisonous ideas can we make a plan for simultaneously cleaning up and giving the public’s schools back to the public.
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A former colleague of St. Hope charter schools founder Kevin Johnson, Margaret Fortune, is now doing just this — founding a separate but equal charter for African American kids… What is being fought in the Carolinas by the national NAACP, is lauded in Sacramento by the NAACP (at least the local chapter, which is as corrupt as sin itself)…
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Thank you Diane. I was so appalled by the Petrilli column it took all I could do to respond without calling it racism. The line about how Dunbar insisted on good hygiene almost put me over the top.
This is the real story behind tracking….within schools and tracking writ large with school selection. It grew out of the desire to maintain segregation, even after schools were forced to desegregate.
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Petrilli did not say anything about hygiene; he was quoting from the student handbook from back in the day.
I don’t know about him being a racist, but I think it’s a bit unfair to ding him for what the student handbook said and what, apparently, lots of parents and students had no problem with at the time.
Good hygiene prevents disease and many of the poor have no concept of it. Here in Texas, our students from Mexico often throw their used toilet paper and sanitary products onto the bathroom floor because in parts of Mexico they cannot flush those things and they don’t know what the little black trashcan with the swinging lid is for.
Many do not bathe regularly or brush their teeth or wipe their mouths. This is health issue for those kids. Lice infestations and pinkeye are rampant and considered something to endure rather than something to end.
As long as we’re not telling a child, “You’re dirty!” I believe we would be negligent not to teach kids healthy vs. unhealthy. Schools that require good hygiene are doing kids a favor.
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Anglophone thy name is cupcake!
Hispanophobe thy surname is cupcake!
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I felt dirty after reading Petrelli’s column. Kind of like I’d crawled out of a dumpster which is where his article belongs.
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Duane–so because I will not jump on a bandwagon and throw out the extremely strong accusation that someone is a racist based on his quoting of a decades-old handbook which certainly wasn’t giving kids advice/guidelines intended to harm them, I am an Anglophone and a Hispanophobe?
Wow.
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Don’t mind Duane, Cupcake. He’s one of our liberal fundamentalists here. Eventually you will get to love him because he actually cares about kids and teaching, in spite of his racist anti-racist rhetoric. He really is a good guy, just a bit exhaustingly hyperbolic during polemics. I believe his students are extremely lucky to have him. I’m sure he treats his students way better than he treats those posters on this blog whom he identifies as in any way anti-student, even if one expects common sense civility and hygiene from kids in school. A mensch, even we might say a Missouri Mensch. I don’t presume to understand his guru Wilson’s animadversions against standardized testing, but on the basic position I happen to agree, much preferring the essay as a measure—no I don’t even want to say measure—but as an expression of soul(which includes intellect in my view), and for that, the proper reaction is delight rather than quantification. I don’t like grading essays, but I do enjoy getting to know the students who wrote them.
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If by “tracking” you mean offering different levels of classes in a given academic subject to adequately help students of different levels of ability, then I strongly disagree that racism is “the real story behind it.”
We need differently paced classes in public schools because we serve such a wide spectrum of abilities. A student who can’t grasp algebra 1 cannot understand trigonometry. A student on a fourth grade reading level cannot read Hamlet.
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Although he didn’t say so directly, I have a suspicion that that handbook came from the 20’s as he appears to be dwelling on that time as some golden age for Dunbar. I doubt those standards are significantly different than those addressing other impoverished communities, and although they are obviously racist, many of the strictures would have applied in most schools. I doubt he purposely chose that excerpt to paint himself as a racist, but I felt sick to my stomach as well. Our unconscious prejudices will do us in every time. As time has passed, my symptoms of foot in mouth disease have decreased, but I have to remain vigilant against flare-ups. Mr Petrilli needs to apologize. I will be interested to see how Deborah Meier responds.
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I think Petrilli was referencing social-Darwinism/eugenics of the past as the source of what we inherited and still deal with today, the what and how far we have come from it. If nothing more, how to best respond in light of that legacy.
Its also noticeable that the roots of the legacy is hushed K-12, yet educators know about it, the public not so much. In doing my own research, have come across its influence and see the implications, presumptuous results of it still lingering in todays socio-political- economic climate. Firsthand, because as a public schooler in the 80’s, and later in college, still experienced the judgementalism that came from being ethnic and female to boot, where certain factions just decide in absolute terms there is no investment made in you they will possibly want to make regardless of what civil rights statues were instituted.
Even typing about this reminds me too much of a college English professor I had, who kept insisting I could not write, despite my having an English Regents Sequence and high SAT scores.
That professor was a throw back to the days of “you dont belong here,” something made them subconsciously convey strongly that they did not want me there, literally went out of their way to do their best to try to make me miserable. Did it work? I’m here, in spite of them, with a total of three languages under my belt in which am fluent, plus others which I continue to study as time allows.
In the end students need to know that limiting beliefs are naught but a yoke on those who would otherwise seek their own truth, best shirked off at libraries open to all. Its too precious to be decided upon by the few, Malala Yousafzai comes to mind.
There will always be some great teachers, and some not, but the freedom to self teach is the most liberating of all.
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This is inhumane, unconscionable and it has been illegal since Brown v Bd of Ed in 1954, so no publicly funded schools should be permitted to do this.
We should not fool ourselves into thinking only right wing conservatives believe this. It’s exactly what all the no-excuses schools, like KIPP and Success Academy, are doing, under the euphemisms of ‘developing character,’ ‘promoting grit’ and ‘instilling middle class values’ in their segregated schools. Not only has it continued and expanded, but the administration of our first black president supports and promotes it.
“The true measure of any society can be found in how it treats its most vulnerable members” – Ghandi
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I, too, was appalled reading Petrilli’s article. He is racist. We definitely need to be helping our more vulnerable students. A big part of our problem are children who have medical issues, as well. I had many children in my class, who were undiagnosed ADHD, autism, etc. They were different races. I don’t think we should continue shoving these students on until they drop out, get expelled, or just give up. Does Mr. Petrilli think filling our “private” prisons with our low achieving students is the way to go, as well? This isn’t an issue of just low achieving. If many of these children were properly diagnosed, they would be more successful in school and life. If we had all the things Dr. Ravitch has suggested in her book, like early childhood intervention, preschool, parenting classes, etc., I’m sure many more students would do well in school and life.
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Yep, comments are open on Petrilli, but I still Cody is still shut down. At the risk of repeating myself, here’s what I posted:
Let’s get this straight. Petrilli writes:
“And this, of course, was in the Jim Crow era.
Dunbar later became a regular, de-tracked, “comprehensive” high school–and started its long slide. Would anyone argue that Washington, D.C., is better off as a result?”
And I answer, with all my heart: yes, the world is far better off with Jim Crow gone. That comprehensive high school and the children in it should be exalted, and the children in it should be treasured and taught and held close by their whole nation. We are one people.
The “reformers” have exposed their own venomous nostalgia for institutionalized inequity. They can’t or won’t count the value of the generations that have risen up through the public education system he’s bent on destroying.
The days are over when we’ll allow bigots to beat down our children, and then prescribe the proper remediation to keep the undeserving in their place.
We, the people, are going to defeat that plan, and bring excellent public education to all our children.
It’s not enough for you servants of wealth and arrogance to let the chosen few “especially deserving” children strive for your favor, as long as they can be taught to mind their manners. Nobody is accountable to you.
Fordham has been disgraced by this sanctimonious bigotry. Petrilli should resign.
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Ed Week has closed off all comments to the Petrilli article. Can anyone access them? Thanks.
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Supposedly it’s because they’re revamping their blog system. Last night, Petrelli’s comments were already down, and then Cody’s went down while I was composing my comment. Maybe they closed Petrilli’s before any comments were logged. We’ll have to wait and see.
I then posted comments on several other blogs with no problem.
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This is really no different from Rahm Emanuel’s claim that 25% of Chicago’s kids could be written off because they were never going to make it.
When I took a graduate adolescent development course, an important question was posed to the class, which was comprised of educators: “At what point do you give up on kids?” People considered various biological and environmental variables and proposed different ages. Having been a difficult child and a rebellious adolescent, who was grateful that there were adults in my life who had not given up on me, I was the only one who said, ‘Never.’
I have never written off any child and I think that people who do so must have ice in their arteries and sh*t for brains.
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Has anyone besides me noticed that Michael J Petrilli’s family name suggests an ancestry that not too many generations ago would have been considered by his ideological counterparts of yesteryear as being a marker of someone coming from [supposedly] inferior and unimprovable human stock?
Link: http://www.ancestry.com/name-origin?surname=petrilli
And then, just as now, there were vociferous assertions made by “smart” people about the inescapable necessity of devoting the maximum available resources, efforts and money to the “strivers” and “high-achievers” and waste as little as possible on the “uneducables” and “non-strivers” and “toughest to serve kids” .
Just how big a group was considered deserving by the right sort of thinkers? Hint: there were [allegedly] very specific requirements set by laws—natural and divine—so only those fortunate few who was of just the right SES, religious, and gender specifications [just to mention a few] were “worthy.” Not to worry, though, because the occasional outlier could be permitted in without diluting the wondrous purity of the master crass, er, class [darn Microsoft Ideological SpellCheck!].
Folks like Michael J Petrilli wouldn’t be where they are today if it weren’t for yesteryear’s equivalents of Deborah Meier and Diane Ravitch and Adell Cothorne and Irma Cobian and too many others to name.
Segregation academies by any other name stink just the same.
😦
But this is where folks like KrazyHistoryLady [aka the owner of this blog] and Stephen Jay Gould [THE MISMEASURE OF MAN] come in.
And this blog and others like it.
Truth is the best disinfectant.
“There are only two mistakes one can make along the road to truth; not going all the way, and not starting.” [Buddha]
The comments above show we have already started.
From the bottom of my heart, thank y’all for your remarks.
🙂
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Please excuse: for some reason the sources of the labels in the second full paragraph did not survive copy-and-paste and post.
Michael J Petrilli is the source for “strivers” and “high achievers” in the first part and “non-strivers” and “toughest to serve kids” in the second part. Mayor Rahm Emanuel for “uneducables.”
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Given the context of the educational war that’s going on I have a problem with his comments overall; but I have to admit that Petrilli is right about suspensions.
Petrilli: “There’s a movement today to make it harder to suspend or expel disruptive children or to chide charter schools that enforce strict norms of behavior. That’s a big mistake. To be sure, we should use discipline programs that are effective, and sky-high expulsion rates are often the sign of a poorly run school. But we should be at least as concerned–if not more concerned–about the students who are trying to learn and follow the rules as we are about their disruptive peers. If suspending (or relocating) one student means giving 25 others a better chance to learn, let’s do it.”
I assume (hope) that the “one student” he’s referring to is a student with out of control respect and behavior problems and not a student who merely has difficulty learning. If so I agree with him.
We’ve passed laws that have made it too difficult for public schools to enforce meaningful discipline. A school can’t function properly with loose cannon students who disrupt and violate rules over and over and over and over and over again, and take up all the administrators’ time and energy.
(And just to be clear, I’m not defending the absurd militaristic discipline of many urban charters. I’m referring to the ability to enforce regular handbook rules that allow a school to function properly as a place of learning.)
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Harold Washington, as Mayor of Chicago, often talked about what he owed to his teachers at segregated Du Sable High School. His “professors” were Ivy League material but bigotry made sure they were excluded from university/college faculties across the USA. So, Mr. Washington and his friends were the beneficiaries of a champagne education on a beer budget, courtesy of Jim Crow.
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I guess I read Petrilli’s article a bit differently.
Alot of what he says flies in the face of what TFA, Rhee, Broad and other deformers continue to claim.
The deformers claim that schools are failing and it’s the teachers’ fault that kids are failing and staying poor so we need more testing to keep the teachers accountable.
Petrilli is putting the accountability back on the students and parents–he’s highlighting what TFA and Rhee want to ignore: the importance of student effort.
Isn’t that what teachers have been saying, too? Give me a fed, rested and supervised student and I can teach them anything? But do not hold me solely accountable for the performance of kids with overwhelming and unmet needs?
Petrilli is taking the first step away from the deformers: he’s recognizing that there is a very, very difficult group of students impacting everything and everyone in urban districts.
His solution is to pull out the best and leave the rest behind elsewhere. That’s what private schools and charters offer to frustrated parents who would otherwise stay in public schools. We can’t dispute the reality that no parent wants their child around dangerous or disruptive kids. I certainly don’t.
My solution would be to pull out the below-level kids and barrage them with intensive resources for a school year. Counseling, tutoring, medical, dental, etc. HELP THEM and then support them back at their neighborhood school.
Separately, pull out the disruptive and dangerous kids for a school year and HELP THEM, too.
Petrilli is on the right track in that he’s looking at the student side of the equation. Petrilli is finally not attacking teachers.
Our choices are serious intervention for the high-need kids or charter take-overs. I see Petrilli simply as the messenger.
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Hi agree, but I think he’s forgetting the “HELP THEM too” part. His comments could be easily construed to mean that vulnerable kids should be kicked to the curb.
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I agree that he isn’t calling for helping the vulnerable, high-need kids, but at least he’s at least acknowledging their presence and their impact.
Charter parents need to be told that while they might escape the kids who throw furniture (yes, I’ve had one of those), they aren’t escaping the testing machine.
Charters need to be outed as the test-prep centers they are.
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I don’t see Petrilli proposing separate intervention schools for students with high needs. I think he’s saying it’s perfectly acceptable for only half of the poor kids to make it into the middle class and to skim the “strivers” and provide separate schools for them, because they are “especially deserving,” and use public schools as dumping grounds for everyone else.
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What’s sad is that with just one year of intense interventions, almost all kids could be turned into “strivers.”
There’s no money for the deformers in that approach, though.
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cupcake said:
“What’s sad is that with just one year of intense interventions, almost all kids could be turned into ‘strivers.'”
Proof please, cite research (other than the TFA crap from which this thought comes).
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Duane is right. I’m not aware of research supporting a year long miracle cure for the ills of poverty impacting students –in any setting. It sounds faith-based.
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Cupcake, he’s not saying this “in the face of what TFA, Rhee, Broad and other deformers continue to claim.”
This is the contrapuntal tune they’re all humming, and you just sang along. Listen to you:
“Petrilli is putting the accountability back on the students and parents–”
Who are these gatekeepers to whom the “not especially deserving” poor children and their parents supposed to be accountable, again? Who is he (or you) to say which children deserve equity?
And no, that isn’t “what teachers have been saying, too.” Trolls come around and proclaim what our “choices” are, falsely sorting the children we teach. When they do that, they’re attacking teachers.
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chemtchr: IMHO, you hit the nail on the head by objecting to “falsely sorting the children we teach.” It helps clear up some terminological confusion and obfuscation.
Public schools take on all comers. No excuses allowed. Even in the face of diminishing support and ever more vicious public attacks.
The leading education rheephormers mouth the words “no excuses” while in practice they find every dodge possible to keep out, counsel out and push out Rahm’s “uneducables” in their never-ending quest for $tudent $ucce$$. Their Centres of EduExcellence often enjoy siginificant advantages over public schools, including starving them of critical resources. Yet they give up on students and parents and communities over and over and over again. In other words, they’re
QUITTERS.
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Who are the gatekeepers who decide if things are working or not? We are. The taxpayers funding the enterprise are the ones with the right to demand and expect accountability.
Who is he or who am I to decide which kids get equity? All kids deserve it and it isn’t happening.
In many places, urban public schools are broken and the middle class parents know it. Dallas ISD has thousands of middle class kids who attend privates or charters; only 5% of DISD’s 157,000 kids are middle class. The rest of the parents won’t go near the public schools and it isn’t because of testing. It’s because of the mayhem they see playing out on the news every night from one campus or another.
How do you think the deformers got the green light to come in and tear things apart? Because public dissatisfaction in urban areas was/is very real and was not being addressed.
The deformers came in and attacked teachers as being the root of the problem. Then they brought in testing.
Petrilli is the first I’ve heard not solely blaming the teachers. He’s saying some of the kids have real problems. He’s right and that’s what teachers have been saying. He’s saying charters offer “strivers” a break from those kids. Parents will embrace that message whether we like it or not.
If public schools don’t get proactive this time and set up interventions for those kids (which the deformers will not want to fund), charters will win this battle for the future of American kids.
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Cupcake,
“It’s because of the mayhem they see playing out on the news every night from one campus or another.”
Proof please!
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Self-segregation by whites in the South is part of a long history of prejudice against people of color and a legacy of resistance to racial integration. If “mayhem” in schools is reported in the news each night, it’s likely to serve as reinforcement of existing biases. However, news reports might not be any more true than all the other lies that have been reported about public education everywhere.
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“Pull out the below-level kids”-can’t we just make all the necessary services available in all schools?
Sometimes kids need to be in a different school because of overwhelming, severe needs- I understand that. But many impediments to learning can be addressed by having more staff.
I remember being a short-term sub in a two teacher classroom. One boy was resistant to doing classwork. Quiet, but refused to participate. Over the course of a couple of days, it came out that his uncle, who he and his single dad lived with, had a heart attack at home and was taken away by ambulance. Can you imagine the stress of that? Anyway we talked about it briefly, and as if by magic, his persona lightened up and he actively participated in class.
Having enough staff is very important.
Having more caring adults is so important
Having more caring adults
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I lived in Texas during the years of forced segregation and I loathe any person or politician who ignores any student. As we started to desegregate it was obvious many blacks were hindered academically. This is a sad but true situation but the bright side was that the world was changing.
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Comments are open on the Petrilli article again! Looks like they were reformatting the pages on EdWeek; at least on my laptop they look different from yesterday.
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In case anybody missed it, Petrilli’s “we should set academic standards for receiving Pell Grants” reflects the plan for Obama’s carrot and stick, win/lose education policies to be extended into higher education. Colleges will be required to compete against each other for students and funding, and grants for students will be merit based.
Besides saving money, this will result in gatekeping, which will lock out a significant number of students from college, despite our president’s call for everyone to go to college.” (This does not bode well for kids who want to attend trade/vocational post-secondary schools either, unless another kind of financial support is planned for them.)
And in today’s upside down world of politics, just like Clinton’s Welfare Reform, it is a dream come true for Republicans which could have only been accomplished by a neo-liberal president who is a “New Democrat.”
Are we so uncaring about our nation’s children that we cannot even fathom providing free P-20 education for all?
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Isn’t it amazing, when President Obama and the Democrats want to spend money on everything else without verification of legitimate eligibility, that for going to college they want some sort of merit based selection system? Imagine that. The government will PAY (i.e. you the taxpayer will pay), but only if the kid is smart enough already to benefit from an education. What a bizarre concept. Of course, the rich, who can pay their own freight, don’t have to worry about getting their idiot sons and daughters into some college. Some college will take them if they are private pay, and sometimes even graduate them, even if they graduate ignorant. Imagine, if you are poor, you have to be able to actually do the work; if you are rich, you don’t. What has happened to this country? It used to be the other way around.
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Mike Petrilli’s comments are appalling because they state in plain language what is frequently not articulated openly. The theme, “everyone deserve a chance to enter the middle class– if they are willing to work hard,” is pervasive in conservative thinking. What is more troubling, is that they also appear, albeit not as blatantly, in a Democratic President’s remarks and policies. (http://www.arthurcamins.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Obama%E2%80%99s-education-gap-Rhetoric-vs-policies-The-Answer-Sheet.pdf).
The sorting– some win, some do not– notion is what drives competition based policies of the US Department of Education, including competition among parents for limited charter school slots, competition among schools for students, competition among teachers for “merit” pay, and competition among districts for limited funds. Winner and loser policies can never bring about real equity.
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Mr. Camins is certainly correct that “Winner and loser policies can never bring about real equity.” But my follow up questions are 1)What do you think will bring about “real equity”? 2) What makes you think there can EVER be “real equity” given the wide range of variation in natural human intellectual ability. How can you change a fact of nature?
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“Equity” in terms of schooling does not mean–or at least it should not mean–making everyone reach the same levels of achievement. It means helping each student learn and grow to the best of his or her ability, whatever that ability is at that moment in time.
That’s why we are all up in arms about evaluating schools according to test scores. Not all students are the same, both in terms of intrinsic abilities and the environmental factors that affect their growth outside of school. The accountability movement is based on a fantasy of an egalitarian universe that is at odds with reality.
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Could those of you labeling Petrilli a racist please explain where you’re getting that from? That’s a strong accusation and I don’t see it in the text of his column.
What am I missing?
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Oh, gee, I don’t know, maybe waxing nostalgic for Jim Crow. SCOTUS determined that separate is not equal. My white mom’s method of protesting Jim Crow in the South was by using all facilities designated for “coloreds only,” wherever we went, so I know all too well that black people were given the absolute worst, not just different, facilities, and they were treated very poorly. Jim Crow is not a model of humanity, let a lone equity.
And how about targeting only half of all poor children for the middle class, IF they work hard enough. Same rules for white privilege?
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He’s not “waxing nostalgic for Jim Crow.” He’s citing what he considers to be an example of a school that helped black students during Jim Crow.
We can disagree with his assertions about the effectiveness of the school, and I’m not comfortable defending someone from a conservative think tank, but I don’t think it’s constructive for us to misrepresent what he’s saying.
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You’re kidding yourself if you think Petrilli is not holding up an example of strict segregated schooling for blacks during Jim Crow as the ideal, in order to justify the existence and expansion of no-excuses military style charter school boot camps for children of color.
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I know he’s defending charter schools, but he’s holding up the strictness of the school’s methods as an ideal, not the culture’s racial segregation.
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Dunbar was, and the boot camp charters are, highly segregated schools for poor minority children in urban areas. I saw nothing about promoting integration. Plus, I highly doubt many middle class, educated or white families are likely to send their kids to rigid military style test prep factories. These schools are for poor children of color.
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Whilst addressed to all viewers of this blog, I am thinking in particular of a frequent commenter who is on a not so Quixotic quest:
What better way to label, sort and rank the deserving “strivers” and the undeserving “non-strivers” amongst us than high-stakes standardized tests? They are not only scientifical and infallible, they come to us with the Most Cagebusting Achievement-Gap Crushing Blessings of the High Holy Church of Testolatry.
Don’t believe me. I refer you to a higher authority. Mr. Michael J Petrilli, “one of the nation’s most trusted education analysts.”
Link: http://www.edexcellence.net/about-us/fordham-staff/michael-j-petrilli
Link: http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/response-atlanta-cheating-scandal-article-1.1307845
Mr. Petrilli and others seem to long for the good old days of “school choice” aka “segregation academies” but the comedienne Jackie “Moms” Mabley put it best:
They’re always talking about the good old days, the good old days. I was there. Where was they?”
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“. . . a frequent commenter who is on a not so Quixotic quest:”
If The Quixotic Quest ever becomes “a not so Quixotic Quest” then the Duane Qoixote de la Mancha Swacker will be able to put down his knight errant pen (keyboard? and mouth?) and die peacefully. Unfortunately, I think that the QQB* will need as many “pens” to continue fighting the “giants”, “gods”, sorcerers and sorceresses (if you can’t figure out who they are keep reading this blog) of the edudeformers, the deformers themselves and the GAGA** gang of supposed educators who have thrown their lot in with the forces of evil.
We’ve only just begun! Load up the pens and wagons!!!
If all were to contact and convert one, just one GAGA to our side, and then another and another, “imagine, imagine fifty GAGAs a day,”*** it would go a long way to helping retire (instead of re-tiring) the QQB which is only getting older and more worn each day. But that wear and tear is nothing compared to the abuse that is committed against the innocent and vulnerable children of this land who are subjected to these nefarious educational malpractices.
*QQB = Quixotic Quest Bandwagon
**Go Along to Get Along
***See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8DtpdXZi0M
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A good read for these dark times. You will see many parallels between what Edwin Black writes of in this book and the current education deform movement:
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I thought disruption was good for education? Logically, the more disruptive students, the better it should be.
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No problem with getting disruptive students out of the general population, I think there is some value in that. Shifting them back to public school is a cop out. Tossing them out on the street is a potential 2 million dollar per student liability on public funds in the courts and criminal justice system, so that is a very bad idea from a fiscal sense perspective.
So Petrilli needs to advocate for funding for alternative schools that provide excellent support for the scholars he culls out. Spending triple the per pupil spending on at risk students is still a bargain. Without including all students in the picture, he doesn’t have a case.
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He should be advocating for the original, legitimate purpose for charter schools, as alternative centers of learning for kids who don’t function well in a traditional academic setting.
He also should be advocating for enhanced vocational programs.
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I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating. Michael Petrilli is a charlatan, a huckster. And he has absolutely no shame. In that sense, he is ho different than Michelle Rhee or Wendy Kopp, or even Amanda Ripley, who claims to be an “investigative journalist” while spewing the essentials of corporate-style “reform.”
Petrilli too makes outrageous claims, in addition to the nonsense he writes. For example, he says he’s ““one of the nation’s most trusted education analysts.” That’s an obvious lie. Sort of like saying that John Stossel and Sean Hannity are “trusted” sources.
Petrilli prescribes more “rigorous academic standards and tests” for the public schools. He says that we “should rate schools on an easy-to-understand scale, ideally from A to F, as Florida started doing under Governor Jeb Bush.” Yeah. That’s right. Let us rely on Jeb Bush. But of course Petrilli would cite Bush. They believe in the same conservative dogma. However, as a parent active in opposing the Bush agenda in Florida noted, “People are starting to realize that Jeb and his reforms are not good for children and not good for schools. They are meant to privatize public education.”
This should be no surprise. Petrill is a strong advocate of school vouchers. He writes that ““Republican governors like Chris Christie, Mitch Daniels, John Kasich, and Scott Walker are demonstrating real reform.” Huh? What say? Mitch Daniels in Indiana, he of the A-F school grading scandal? Scott Walker of Wisconsin, who hates public servants, including teachers, with a passion? John Kasich of Ohio? Even his Republican colleagues don’t like his education ideas. And Christ Christie of New Jersey? Please. Christie opposes equitable school funding in favor of “closing low performing schools, adding more charter schools and introducing merit pay for teachers.”
It should be no surprise that Petrilli favors (at least) a two-tiered education system. One for the “elite.” And one for the commoners.
Petrilli has plenty of company. Some of them –– like Rupert Murdoch and Joel Klein, Michelle Rhee,Wendy Kopp, and the Arnold, Broad, and Walton Foundations –– are overt about their “reform” intentions. Others like Amanda Ripley use more nuanced language.
There are also those who won’t acquiesce openly to Petrilli’s nonsense, but who go along with it implicitly. Administrators and schools, for example, push the ACT and the SAT, and Advanced Placement (AP) courses. But they are mostly hype. They don’t do anything helpful. Colleges use them for their own nefarious practices: to “lure good students” with promises of financial aid, and to target and eliminate other students on the basis of family income, all to make themselves “look good” in rankings published by US News & World Report. And AP? A comprehensive examination of AP courses and tests by the National Research Council (NRC), for example, found them to be a mile wide and an inch deep, and inconsistent with research-based principles of learning.
The NRC study was explicit: “Until the College Board makes a concerted effort to educate the media, policymakers, and the public about correct and incorrect interpretations and uses of its examination results…abuses and the consequences associated with them, will almost certainly continue and will probably increase.”
Has the College Board made any such effort? No. In fact, under David Coleman it has doubled down on its faulty products, which it now claims are “aligned” with the more “rigorous” Common Core standards.
Might we improve public education? Absolutely. But not with the “reforms” advocated by the likes of Michael Petrilli and his brethren. And not without engaging in some very serious reflection on and about the purpose(s) of public schooling in a democratic republic.
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AP classes are only “a mile wide and an inch deep” if the teacher makes them that way. I’m sorry democracy, but I’m going to continue strongly disagreeing with your broad overgeneralizations about AP, based on my own classroom experience as an AP teacher and my interaction with other AP teachers and students.
I didn’t realize Petrilli was such an active and well-known “reformer”…I hadn’t heard of the guy. That would partially explain the intensity of the responses to him here.
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Dear Jim: These are not my “broad overgeneralizations” about AP courses. What I write – and cite – is the research. And there’s a lot of it.
For example, the main finding of a 2004 Geiser and Santelices study was that “the best predictor of both first- and second-year college grades” is unweighted high school grade point average, and a high school grade point average “weighted with a full bonus point for AP…is invariably the worst predictor of college performance.”
Klopfenstein and Thomas (2005) found that AP students “…generally no more likely than non-AP students to return to school for a second year or to have higher first semester grades.” Moreover, they write that “close inspection of the [College Board] studies cited reveals that the existing evidence regarding the benefits of AP experience is questionable,” and “AP courses are not a necessary component of a rigorous curriculum.”
A 2006 MIT faculty report noted ““there is ‘a growing body of research’ that students who earn top AP scores and place out of institute introductory courses end up having ‘difficulty’ when taking the next course.” Two years prior, Harvard “conducted a study that found students who are allowed to skip introductory courses because they have passed a supposedly equivalent AP course do worse in subsequent courses than students who took the introductory courses at Harvard” (Seebach, 2004). Dartmouth found, for example, that high scores on AP psychology tests do NOT translate into college readiness for the next-level course. Indeed, students admit that ““You’re not trying to get educated; you’re trying to look good;” and, “”The focus is on the test and not necessarily on the fundamental knowledge of the material.”
In The ToolBox Revisited (2006), Clifford Adelman finds that “Advanced Placement has almost no bearing on entering postsecondary education,” and when examining and statistically quantifying the factors that relate to bachelor’s degree completion, Advanced Placement does NOT “reach the threshold level of significance.”
As Geiser (2007) notes, “systematic differences in student motivation, academic preparation, family background and high-school quality account for much of the observed difference in college outcomes between AP and non-AP students.” College Board-funded studies do not control well for these student characteristics (even the College Board concedes that “interest and motivation” are keys to “success in any course”). Klopfenstein and Thomas (2010) find that when these demographic characteristics are controlled for, the claims made for AP disappear.
And then, as I noted, there’s that comprehensive National Research Council study.
You generalize from your personal experience, and some “interaction” with others.
Now who is it that’s guilty of “overgeneralizations?”
I pointed out in my comment above that the College Board has doubled down on its faulty products. It has. Unless and until educators wean themselves from the SAT and AP courses – and you obviously will not –– the Common Core and corporate-style “reform” will move full steam ahead.
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I think the problem has come with high schools being rated by the number of AP courses they offer. The shift in focus from providing advanced courses to receiving ratings had led to schools gaming the system to look good. Students who are not ready to tackle a truly advanced placement course are encouraged to take them.
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