This letter came from a high school teacher in Houston who requested anonymity. The usual reasons: intimidation, fear of losing his job. It is way too soon to declare victory, but it is nonetheless encouraging to know that the insurgents who fight the status quo are feeling fearless and working to overturn policies that hurt kids and destroy communities.
He writes:
Dear Ms. Ravitch,
I wanted to share with you that good news might emerge out of Houston next Tuesday night. Network for Public Education endorsed candidate, Anne Sung, just might topple Harvin Moore, a 12 years member of the Houston ISD school board who vociferously endorses using standardized testing to shame students, evaluate teachers and loses no sleep over closing small community schools.
I am one of Anne’s teacher foot soldiers walking the blocks knocking on doors with parents and community members. At the beginning it was one of those “just plow ahead” efforts, but last Saturday people in a swing neighborhood told me that they had already early voted for Anne Sung. They like the idea of having someone with seven years of classroom experience at a high school in a struggling community sitting on the board making decisions affecting their children. They have lost faith in Harvin Moore, Superintendent Grier, to deliver quality education to all HISD students. They sense HISD is the Enron of public education.
Slick PR and pronouncements from the top will not deter the rising tide of hard data from toppling the walls of the corporate ed reformers’ sand castles. Anne Sung is part of that surging incoming tide. Harvard trained physicists know how to tear numbers apart, which makes Anne dangerous to the Moore / Grier corporate reform “status quo” who accept manufactured numbers like EVAAS as is. To quote Anne “EVAAS is junk science.”
I admire Anne’s intelligence, insightfulness and grit. Three years ago she was “Teacher of the Year” at Lee High School, a diverse inner city school of many immigrants with 70 spoken languages. At the time, Lee High School boasted the third highest AP passing rate in the city. Anne’s students were being admitted to colleges like Stanford and MIT. Then Superintendant Grier with Harvin Moore’s approval declared Lee HS a “failing school” and imposed Harvard Professor Roland Fryer’s untested “Apollo” prescription of firing the staff, extending the school day, and testing excessively, all in the name of closing the achievement gap. Mr. Moore repeatedly stated that HISD under Dr. Grier, a Broad disciple, would be the “best school district in the country”, but the promised miracle hasn’t happened. Anne’s old school is now suffering from atrophy. All of the faculty are gone, enrollment is down, and the stellar AP program is in shambles.
Last May at a Community Voices for Public Education, TOP and HFT meeting about the future of public education Anne told us about her plans to run for the school board. She had no pot of money, just the determination to do right. Like all others, the students at Lee High School deserve better.
I am hopeful about next Tuesday. But Anne faces an intricate web of formidable self interest.
Guess who hosted a fund raiser for Anne’s opponent at his house? John Arnold. He kicked in $10K to Harvin and another HISD school board candidate. Funny how Enron’s former energy hedge trader is influencing HISD’s policy to focus on privatization, student testing and teacher evaluation while eying the $170 billion Texas public employee retirement fund for privatization.
Billionaires like tests and balance sheets. Numbers give them the levers of control. Their pitch today is just like the one they gave the public during the corporate raiding days of the 1980s when the US economy was emerging from a sharp recession (budget cut backs, red ink): Grant us control and we will make the tough, gutsy “Rhee” decisions to save the company (public education) – close factories (schools), lay off workers (teachers) and outsource (charters). Ignoring the historical track record, we just need to understand that when assets exchange hands, the Gordon Gekkos make money. According to the Houston Chronicle’s endorsement, Harvin Moore “argues that high teacher turnover has been good for the district.” A high teacher turn over is good business for some. Anne Sung is no Gordon Gekko’s pawn for profit.
Anne is also confronting the Moore – Grier – Eli Broad – Fryer alliance. Superintendent Grier is telling the Houston voters the recent Broad Award confirms he and Harvin are on the right course. But the Broad Award is based on Dr. Grier’s pet project Apollo which was designed by Harvard Professor Fryer who received financial support from the Broad Foundation, according to your web site. In a “late October surprise” effort to help Mr. Moore, last week Dr. Grier and Professor Fryer held a press conference claiming Apollo is working, but Professor Fryer has yet to submit his final findings which will be subjected to “biased third party” review. At the same time Harvin Moore is voting to expand the unvetted Apollo program to more schools paid for by dipping into the general HISD fund for millions of dollars at the expense of other non-Apollo schools. Understand, a successful Apollo is Dr. Grier’s ticket to national fame – finding the cure for the urban achievement gap with the Fryer vaccine. A pig in a poke? Anne is wised up and people are wising up to what is in the bag thanks to Anne.
Tuesday night might be seismic in Houston for our cause. Sung in, Moore out. Anne Sung is the 5th vote.
If you are inclined to do so, please give a public “shout out” to Anne. She has the courage and grit to challenge the Machine with cold, hard facts. Anne is a home grown HISD educator with an incisive mind. She makes me proud of my profession. We will reclaim public education.
Sincerely,
XXXXXXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXX
A HISD high school social studies teacher and union (HFT) member
PS. Good news. Anne Sung out-raised Harvin Moore 2 : 1 ($24K vs. $12K) in the last reporting cycle. Very small compared to other races.
PPS. It is best to keep my name private. Some of my statements are my opinions. As an active HFT member, I need to work with the person sitting in the District 7 seat regardless. And note I speak on my behalf only.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Noted ed reformer Chris Christie works cooperatively with a teacher:
“I asked him: “Why do you portray our schools as failure factories?” His reply: “Because they are!” He said: “I am tired of you people. What do you want?”
So that’s the word on public schools from this national ed reform leader: failure factories
Lovely photo, too. He’s pointing and screaming at her because she had the temerity to ask a question. Real role models for children, these guys.
– See more at: http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/#sthash.i8cIDpKr.dpuf
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Terry Grier= opportunistic hack
We knew him in Akron, Oh, and followed his buyouts in NC and CA. Just learned about Houston via this blog a few months ago. He is bad news and he has been wheeling and dealing on the gravy train for well over 20 years.
A group of parents met with him in a home of a local businessman. We knew he was bad news quite quickly. He thinks he has all the answers, but actually has nothing to say.
Good luck Houston teachers, schools, students, and communities. I hooe he is forced to retire without a pension. Be’s already lined his pockets.
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http://www.anne4hisd.com/
Looks like Anne Sung is a TFA alum, and she taught for 7 years. I know there’s a lot of criticism of TFA, but there are a lot of thoughtful alum from what I’ve seen, and TFA alum have diverse opinions.
I wonder if TFA will showcase Anne Sung if she wins and does things like:
“Anne Sung will support training and mentoring for educators and reverse perverse incentive systems that encourage great principals and teachers to leave schools where they are most needed.” or “Especially in an urban diverse district like HISD, reducing class size is essential, allowing teachers to build relationships with students and support their individual gifts and needs.”
It seems that Anne stands for things that most educators and parents stand for (and teachers unions from what I can tell.) Will TFA stand behind her and showcase her as an alum who is contributing to the “One Day” mission?
To any TFA staff reading this, I’m asking a genuine question. Gary Rubinstein has written about this also. Why not promote alum like Anne Sung instead of Michelle Rhee, who basically has the opposite policies Anne Sung is promoting? Maybe you have already but I’ve missed it? If so, could you reply to this post with the info? Or would supporting Ms. Sung alienate Broad and The Walton Foundation and others in that circle? If TFA does not want to promote someone like Ms. Sung, can TFA clarify why? This is not a gotcha question. I really want to know why someone like Rhee is a TFA hero (she was a main panelist at the TFA summit in DC a few years back) and why what Ms. Sung is trying to do might not be heroic? (Again, clarify if it is.)
The biggest danger of TFA in my opinion is the danger of alum with little experience who get into powerful education positions and push for policies from a naïve view, which causes more harm than good. I wonder if Ms. Sung’s policy positions are grounded from her years of actual day to day teaching experience. Maybe with experience, she has seen what schools can and can’t do given the circumstances, and is now trying to make a difference as a board member with what she has learned and promoting policies that she believes work, like class size reduction.
Or, market based education reformers, do you believe that she’s trying to protect the status quo, and create more union jobs? (If HISD has unions?) Do you get my point education reformers? I know a lot of you have good intent (and a lot of you don’t), so this is directed to those reformers with good intent: Maybe what experienced teachers advocate for, and maybe what teachers unions advocate for, stems from experience – a deep understanding of students, of the classroom, of the school, of the community, rather than a “protecting the status quo” intent. Education reformers, time to start realizing that experience matters. I wonder if this is what Camika Royal, a TFA alum, in her address to TFA Philly, meant when she says “Examine Yourself” to TFA.
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Columbia Teachers College professor Huerta is “unsure whether Fryer’s five ingredients for charter school-style effectiveness were what actually made the charter schools successful to begin with. ..It’s important to separate the marketing hype — that these organizations have used to self-promote their franchises about what they claim makes them effective — from the actual practices that may actually make a difference in raising students’ learning curves,” Huerta said.
Fryer believes his ingredients accounted for 40 percent of variance between charter and public schools in his earlier New York-based charter study.
If you add that much money per pupil and hire that many tutors then perhaps you get math scores up? It usually takes longer to get reading scores up. I am not certain how they report “effect size”….. indicating their results in math or reading. also, it is never clear how many pupils are dismissed or withdraw before they report their results on achievement . These are selected populations and self-selected populations that end up in the testing data.
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Thanks for the information on Houston; my sister raised 4 children there and mostly they found a benefit in magnet schools ; my niece did not fare as well as her 3 brothers. these are some of my favorite people talking about vouchers/choice/charter
QUOTE: Alex Molnar, director of the Education Policy Studies Laboratory at Arizona State University, argues that the idea of choice in education is fundamentally flawed. Schools, he says, are “social institutions, not boxes of wheat flakes. Treating them as just another market commodity will never work”
“While choice is not bad for the individual kids or parents, our experience in New York is that it has done little or nothing to improve neighborhood schools,” says Clara Hemphill, director of http://www.insideschools.org and author of several guides to the city’s best public schools. If anything, she says, “it has drained some of the vitality and excitement from neighborhood schools….the market metaphor doesn’t work — the New York experience of 30 years is clear on that.”
Henry Levin–Teachers College at Columbia University. “It’s how we do choice. ” H. Levin is my favorite researcher when it comes to the uses of technology in education; he did a study on CAI in the 80s and we have tried to be faithful to his methods.
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What is “CAI”?
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Helen Ladd’s study (Duke University) is older but it is the major problem I see with the charter schools. “Parental Choice in the Netherlands: Growing Concerns about Segregation.” 2009 she did studies comparing students’ achievement while in public schools with the same students in their charter school (later) and she also did studies in other countries to look at consequential validity of the policies.
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Cities such as Detroit, Chicago, Boston, Philly etc…..
North Carolina has this to report : “Although racial balance in North Carolina’s public schools has remained steady since 2005-06, students are increasingly separated by income.
That’s one of several findings in a new report by Duke University professors Charles Clotfelter, Helen Ladd and Jacob Vigdor, “Racial and Economic Diversity in North Carolina’s Schools: An Update.” “ significant disparities remain between schools, both racial and economic, [and] these disparities are among the most pressing civil rights issues of our time.” – See more at: http://pulse.ncpolicywatch.org/tag/helen-ladd/#sthash.BJAtfv68.dpuf
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From now to kingdom come the debate about charters continues; the underlying issue of economic disparities will need to be the focus…. Boston is electing a new mayor and whoever is the choice the city is going to see a push for charter schools to increase. The real estate agents love the fight ; they can sell more houses in affluent districts based on schools ….. school boards have very little to control in this fight — cities are made to compete against the more affluent suburbs and we need to get on the Governor’s agenda . State Departments of Education compete against the LEAs for the same pots of money.
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“At the time, Lee High School boasted the third highest AP passing rate in the city. ”
Note that this is the only good thing the letter-writer can bring himself to say about Lee, and it’s completely meaningless, given that the school can keep out of AP all the kids who wouldn’t pass in the first place. A few years ago, a national study identified Lee High School as a “dropout factory” for having 40% of kids fail to finish.
So let’s not fall for utterly self-serving insinuations that Lee was doing just fine — the story is just a wee bit more nuanced than “great school gets randomly targeted by bad people for no reason.”
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The true test will be if teachers vote. Unfortunately, teachers in Texas have not been voting! They can make a difference in the polls.
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It’s great to hear about Anne Sung’s run for a position on the HISD board. She’s just the kind of leader needed there.
One note about this post, though. When HFT calls itself a union, it isn’t doing its members any favors. Collective bargaining by public school teachers in Texas is illegal. HFT is an association of teachers. Texas teachers are in a very weak position and will never gain the right to bargain collectively in Texas if the public is led to believe that unions and collective bargaining already exist there.
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