Archives for the month of: December, 2013
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Anthony Cody: Has ASCD Embraced Free-Market Reforms?

By dianeravitch
December 12, 2013 //
17

In this provocative post, Anthony Cody takes ASCD to task for its tilt toward market-based reforms and its advocacy for Common Core.

Cody notes that ASCD has received more than $3 million from the Gates Foundation to promote Common Core. That disappoints him, as he thinks that ASCD should be an organization that debates so sweeping a change as Common Core.

In its publications and conferences, says Cody, ASCD seems to be bending to one side of a ferocious debate.

I think what Anthony Cody wants is not for ASCD to be neutral or a debating club. Since there is so much money and political power on one side, pushing privatization, friends of public education cannot afford to be neutral or a debating club.

Categories Common Core, Privatization

This is What Real Tech Literacy Looks Like

By dianeravitch
December 12, 2013 //
28

Last Sunday, the Néw York Times had a lengthy editorial lamenting the sorry state of math education in the U.S. the editorial said that our kids find math boring, so they don’t major in math or become engineers. The Times barely mentioned the pernicious effects of standardized testing, which surely mars math tedious.

But the Times writers should visit Pasadena, California, which has developed a model program for the use of technology. It is certainly NOT boring. It demonstrates foresight, planning, vision, and purpose. And it seems to be very exciting!

“In sixth through eighth grade classrooms in Pasadena Unified School District, elective Robotics classes hum with activity as teams of excited kids use laptops to build robots during the school day. Students show off the robots’ abilities in a fun end-of-year “final exam” Expo open to the entire community, and those meeting a basic academic requirement will create and code video game and other apps in the just-launched App Academy at Pasadena High School.

There are no admissions tests, no magnet school attendance restrictions, and no GATE requirements to take the elective Robotics class; interested students simply choose the elective.

For the past three years, Pasadena Unified has offered real technological literacy and computer programming classes for public school children in two out of four high schools (with plans for all) in the district — and yet its big, slow-moving neighbor to the west, Los Angeles Unified, isn’t paying attention. Neither is the rest of California, to its detriment.

Under the direction of a visionary team housed in the Pasadena Education Foundation’s STEM initiative, children in Pasadena Unified’s majority-minority, 68% free-and-reduced lunch schools with many English language learners figure out how to code in hands-on, engaging ways. These students apply math, design, engineering, marketing, and even arts learning to their creations.

The goal is to offer programming and App Academy high school classes across the entire district, and with support from faculty at CalTech, rocket scientists at NASA/JPL, and Pasadena’s burgeoning tech incubator community, they appear on track to achieve this. There’s no reason Silicon Beach on Los Angeles’ westside or Silicon Valley up north can’t help with in-kind assistance — and crucial funding via revenue to the state — to scale this highly effective model to every single school district in California, not just the ones lucky to have a high-tech hub in their backyard.”

How great is that !

The link: http://k12newsnetwork.com/blog/2013/12/09/real-technological-literacy-for-public-school-kids-instead-of-ipads-for-tests-or-code-org/

Categories California, Los Angeles, On-Line Education, Technology, Computers

Tom Loveless on Shanghai: The Scores Are Rigged, and OECD Doesn’t Care

By dianeravitch
December 12, 2013 //
21

Tom Loveless of the Brookings Institution calls on the OECD and PISA to stop permitting China to present data that does not represent the full population of students.

For one thing, only Shanghai is tested–and Shanghai is not representative of China.

Loveless writes that Shanghai’s #1 ranking on all subjects is misleading because it excludes the children of migrant workers.

He writes:

Shanghai has a school system that excludes most migrant students, the children of families that have moved to the city from rural areas of China.  And now for three years running, the OECD and PISA continue to promote a distorted picture of Shanghai’s school system by remaining silent on the plight of Chinese migrant children and what is one of the greatest human rights calamities of our time.

The numbers are staggering.  There are an estimated 230 million migrants in China.[1]  Approximately 5-6 million people have moved from rural areas to Shanghai since 2000.  Imagine a population the size of Los Angeles and Houston combined relocating to a city that was already larger than New York City—and in only thirteen years!  Shanghai’s population today is estimated at about 24 million people, with 13 million native residents and 11 million migrants.  For the most part, the migrants are poor laborers who fill the factories driving China’s export-driven economic boom.

The exclusionary school enrollment practices are rooted in China’s hukou (pronounced “who-cow”) system.  Although hukou dates back centuries, the current system was created by Mao Zedong’s regime in 1958 to control internal mobility in China.  Every family in China was issued a rural hukou by its home village or urban hukou by its home city, a document best understood as part domestic passport and part municipal license. 

The hukou controls access to municipal services.  Migrants in China with rural hukous are barred from a host city’s services, in particular, social welfare programs, healthcare providers, and much of the school system.  Hukous are transferred from generation to generation.  The children of migrants, even if born in Shanghai, receive their parents’ rural hukou, which their children, too, will someday inherit no matter where they are born.  As Kam Wing Chan, a Chinese migration and hukou expert at the University of Washington, puts it, “Under this system, some 700-800 million people are in effect treated as second class citizens, deprived of the opportunity to settle legally in cities and of access to most of the basic welfare and state-provided services enjoyed by regular urban residents.”

In addition, he says:

The barriers to migrants attending Shanghai’s high schools remain almost insurmountable.   High schools in Shanghai charge fees. Sometimes the fees are legal, but often in China, they are no more than bribes, as the Washington Post has reported.  Students must take the national exam for college (gaokao) in the province that issued their hukou.  An annual mass exodus of adolescents from city to countryside takes place, back to impoverished rural schools.  At least there, migrant kids might have a shot at college admission.  This phenomenon is unheard of anywhere else in the world; it’s as if a sorcerer snaps his fingers, and millions of urban teens suddenly disappear.

The toll on children and parents is staggering.  Families are torn apart.  Some migrant parents leave their children with relatives in villages when they initially move to cities in search of work.  The All China Women’s Federation estimates 61 million children are “left behinds,” as they are known in the country.  These children’s lives are marked by loneliness and despair.  A recent book, Diaries of China’s Left Behind Children, poignantly describes their plight.  The book caused a huge sensation in China.

What’s disgraceful is that OECD and PISA are complicit in allowing Shanghai to exclude a large part of its high school age students from the sample:

In 2010, Andreas Schleicher of the OECD revealed that the 2009 PISA was conducted in 12 provinces in China.  The data from mainland provinces other than Shanghai have never been released, and OECD’s list of participants in the 2009 PISA continues to omit them.  A Chinese website leaked purported scores from other provinces, but the scores have never been confirmed by PISA officials in Paris.

This shroud of secrecy is peculiar in international assessment.  Now the world has new data from the 2012 PISA.  The OECD has not disclosed if other Chinese provinces secretly took part in the 2012 assessment.  Nor have PISA officials disclosed who selected the provinces that participated.  Did the Chinese government pick the provinces?  Does the Chinese government decide which scores will be released?  In 2012, the BBC reported that theChinese government did not “allow” the OECD to publish PISA 2009 data on provinces other than Shanghai.  There is a lack of transparency surrounding PISA’s relationship with China.

Shanghai is portrayed as a paragon of equity in PISA publications.  A 2010 OECD publication,Strong Performers and Successful Reformers in Education, highlights model systems that the world should emulate.  Shanghai is singled out for praise.  One section on Shanghai is entitled, “Ahead of the pack in universal education.”  The city is described as an “education hub,” and the only discussion that even remotely touches upon migrants is the following:

“Graduates from Shanghai’s institutions are allowed to stay and work in Shanghai, regardless of their places of origin. For that reason, many ’education migrants now move to Shanghai mainly to educate their children.”[2]

That description is surreal.  PISA’s blindness to what is really going on in Shanghai was also evident in the official release of PISA’s latest scores.  The 2012 data appear in volumes organized by themes.  Volume II is entitled, PISA 2012 Results: Excellence through Equity, Giving Every Student the Chance to Succeed.  Shanghai is named as one jurisdiction where schools “achieve high mathematics performance without introducing greater inequities in education outcomes (p. 28)” and one with “above average socio-economic diversity (p. 30).”  In the 336 pages of this publication on equity, the word “migrant” appears only once, in a discussion of Mexico. The word “hukou” does not appear at all.

Is it possible that PISA officials are simply unaware of the hukou system and the media coverage cited above?  That’s doubtful, but even if it were the case, PISA’s own data shout out that something is wrong with Shanghai’s enrollment numbers.  PISA reports that 90,796 of Shanghai’s 15 year-olds are enrolled in school in grade 7 or above, out of a total population of 108,056 15 year-olds, producing an enrollment rate of about 84%. That’s comparable to other PISA participants.[3] Shanghai appears as inclusive as any other PISA participant.

What’s going on?

The only reasonable conclusion is this: officials in Shanghai are only counting children with Shanghai hukous as its population of 15 year-olds, about 108,000.  And the OECD is accepting those numbers.  It is as if the other children, numbering 120,000 or more, do not exist.  This is not a sampling problem.  PISA can sample all it wants from the official population.  Migrant children have been filtered out.  Professor Chan of Washington agrees with this hypothesis, saying in an email to me: “By the time PISA is given at age 15, almost all migrant children have been purged from the public schools.  The data are clear.”

Categories Education Reform, International, Testing

Wall Street’s Plans for the Future of K-12 Education

By dianeravitch
December 12, 2013 //
13

When Frank Bruni wrote a column saying that American students are too “coddled,” he added a gratuitous swipe at “leftwing paranoiacs” who “imagine some conspiracy to ultimately privatize education and create a new frontier of profits for money-mad plutocrats.”

Well, here is another point of view, called “Wall Street is Designing the Future of Public Education.” It appears on Salon.com.

I think Bruni has not heard about the investors’ conferences where hedge funders and entrepreneurs gather to learn about the opportunities to make a profit in public education. Stephanie Simon, then at Reuters (now at politico.com), wrote an article about this called “Private Firms Eyeing Profits from U.S. Public Schools.”

Why are so many hedge fund managers so interested in funding charter chains?

Why is the tech industry so devoted to Common Core and charters like Rocketship?

Why are billionaires and other wealthy individuals sending money to local school board races in districts where they do not live?

Anna Simonton, who wrote this post for Alternet, has done a herculean task trying to disentangle the web of connections among advocacy groups and entrepreneurs:

She writes:

The Education Reform Industrial Complex is a dizzying house of mirrors, with money ricocheting back and forth between many more players. To outline all of the connections would be a Herculean task.

Suffice it to say, their investments are paying off. National charter school enrollment has increased from 340,000 students in 1999 to 1.8 million in 2011. As of 2009, President Obama’s Race to the Top fund rewards states for tying teacher compensation to test scores. Teach for America boasts over 19,000 corps members and alumni teachers in 36 states and the District of Columbia, and has nearly doubled the number of alumni in school system leadership in the past two years. As a result, business is booming for education companies like K12 Inc., the country’s largest operator of full-time virtual schools, whose CEO received a compensation package of $6 million in 2011.

Most of this change has taken place as the result of campaigning and lobbying at the state and federal levels. But as the Atlanta school board election shows, no race is too small for the millionaires behind the education “reform” movement.

Last year these same millionaires bought school boards in New Orleans, Indianapolis, Memphis, and a little town in New Jersey called Perth Amboy. (The money in that purchase came from a man who made his fortune selling Bank of America shares to the government for twice what he paid, while stroking a pair of brass testicles he keeps on his desk for good luck.) This year Denver and Los Angeles were also sites of the onslaught, with reformer candidates collecting hundreds of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions.

As regular readers of this blog know, there is a silver lining: An informed public.

Simonton writes:

In Seattle, Wash. and Bridgeport, Conn., the same script concluded with very different results. Last year, Bridgeport voters rejected a measure that would have ended school board elections for good by authorizing the mayor to choose board members. The referendum was backed by Michelle Rhee and Michael Bloomberg, but real grassroots organizing efforts shot it down.

This year, in Seattle, blogger and activist Sue Peters ran for school board on a platform critical of corporate education reform. She was outspent 4 to 1 by her billionaire-backed opponent, but squeaked by with 52% of the vote.

These cases offer hope that when voters are made aware of the money trail, they turn out and vote in their community’s interest.

 

 

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Privatization

Anthony Cody: Common Core and Creation Myths

By dianeravitch
December 11, 2013 //
117

Anthony Cody has discovered that there are many organizations that have published a list of “myths and facts” about Common Core standards.

There seems to be a concerted effort to convince educators and the public that the standards were written by educators, or by the states, or by a huge collaboration of educators and administrators and governors, all working together.

As Cody shows, there was not a single educator included in the writing of the standards. Educators were brought in to review the first draft, not to participate in writing it.

The purveyors of “myths and facts” seldom mention the involvement of major corporations and the testing industry. Representatives of both were at the drafting table from the get-go.

 

Categories Common Core

NY Daily News: KIPP in NYC Has “Padded Room” for Disobedient Students

By dianeravitch
December 11, 2013 //
39

Rachel Monahan and Ben Chapman of the New York Daily News (whose editorial board strongly supports charter schools) report that the KIPP Star School in Washington Heights (upper Manhattan) has a tiny padded room where students are sent to “calm down.”

According to the story:

A tiny padded room at KIPP Star Washington Heights Elementary School was a real-life nightmare for two young boys who were repeatedly detained in the tot cells, the Daily News has learned.

The students, who were enrolled in kindergarten and first grade at the highly regarded charter school, were both removed by their parents in the past two weeks after they suffered anxiety attacks as a result of their confinement.

“He was crying hysterically,” said Teneka Hall, 28, a full-time Washington Heights mom whose son, Xavier, was rushed to the hospital after he panicked and wet himself while he was holed up in the padded room. “It’s no way to treat a child.”

The school’s so-called “calm-down” room is small, about the size of a walk-in closet, said Hall, who visited it with her son at the start of the school year. It’s empty, but for a soft mat lining the floor and a single light on the ceiling.

Is this legal in public schools?

 

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/education/padded-calm-down-room-causing-anxiety-kids-article-1.1543983#ixzz2nCZohLWR

Categories Charter Schools

Is TFA Your Favorite Charity?

By dianeravitch
December 11, 2013 //
40

Teach for America is a powerful organization. It has collected hundreds of millions of dollars in the past few years. One of its most recent IRS forms showed $300 million in assets. Its board of directors includes some of the nation’s biggest corporate and media leaders.

Yet TFA is considered a charity, and many corporate funders ask you to make gifts to it, as if were the Red Cross or a homeless shelter.

Barbara Torre Veltri, a professor of education at Arizona State, has trained many TFA recruits. She wrote a book about it, called “Learning on Other People’s Kids: Becoming a Teach for America Teacher.” She wrote the following commentary for this blog:

“It’s that time of year––the annual upsurge of buying and giving. Corporations are poised for both giving and receiving as they elect to support particular charities and encourage the public, their clients, and employees to join them. Teach For America has mastered the art of philanthropic fundraising and is deemed as one of the “charities” of choice of numerous consumer-based corporations.

​Recently a colleague at a southeastern university shared that Subaru is donating money from their car sales to the “charity” Teach for America, http://www.subaru.com/share-the-love.html, and today, J.Crew sent an email blast to its customers.

“By promoting TFA as a charitable organization to its consumers, corporations obscure significant facts from an unsuspecting public, such as TFA teachers’ two-year teaching turnaround, five week training, and 80% who leaving the teaching profession after year three.​

​Amanda, a 24 year-old teacher questioned the direct solicitation for TFA during her trip to the mall in Glendale, Arizona.

“I was taken by surprise when the J.C. Penney’s sales woman at the Arrowhead ​Mall asked if I want to contribute to the charity of the month: Teach For ​America. Here I am, working full time, taking classes at night for two years to be ​a teacher, and what is JC Penney doing? Soliciting funds for TFA? They are ​using my profession, and me, a future teacher, to get money from people who ​think that they are supporting teachers, but don’t know that TFA prepares its ​teachers in five weeks, ” (personal conversation, September 23, 2012).

While Teach For America does not represent all teachers, that fact is not shared with the public when corporations or supporters seek donations. When solicitation for TFA comes in the form of pressure from corporate sponsors, full disclosure seems better left hidden. An eighty-year old client of Wachovia Securities/Wells Fargo Advisors received a solicitation from then-President and CEO, Daniel J. Ludeman.

“For each survey received, we will make a donation to your choice of one of the ​following charities: American Red Cross, Teach For America or the National ​Council On Aging. Please mail back your survey by July 13.”

“Why would donations be solicited by Wells Fargo for Teach For America? Since when is teaching some kind of charity? This letter bothers me because it is demeaning to real teachers. Who is collecting funds for them? By sending this letter out to its clients, Wells Fargo sends a message to seniors [citizens] who value education, that teaching with Teach For America is something that we should donate to because they are educating poor children” (cited in Veltri, 2010, p. 177).

​Teach For America promotes their charitiable status by encouraging tax deductible donations by donors who are told that they will ‘support corps members’:

“As a sponsor, you will also join a unique group of results-oriented philanthropists who have the opportunity to contribute to the impact of ​our corps members and alumni. Garrett Boone, Chairman Emeritus and Co-founder of The Container Store, is a champion of Teach For America,”
(http://www.teachforamerica.org/where-we-work/dallas-fortworth/supporters.)

​During this season of giving and gifting, perhaps consumers would be curious to know that their own money is directed to the 501c3 charity, Teach For America. Perhaps educated consumers might choose to redirect their purchasing, based upon the knowledge of which corporations financially support Teach For America. The list below includes corporations who solict funds from customers, donate millions of dollars to TFA, and/or whose CEO’s serve on TFA’s national or regional boards of directors.

​AT & T​​​
All- State ​​
Apple
​Build-A Bear
​​Coach​​​
Coca-Cola​​
​J Crew​​​
The Container Store​
Dell ​​​
​Dr. Scholl​​
Fed Ex​​​
The Gap​​
General Mills
​​Hewlett-Packard
​IBM​​​
​Kraft Foods
JC Penney
​​KB Homes ​​
​Lowes
​​​Medtronic
​​Microsoft ​​
Safeway​​
Sony​​​
Sprint​​​
​State Farm
​​Sylvan Learning
​De Vry University​
​U of Phoenix​​
Visa ​​​
Walmart ​
​Weather Channel Companies​ ​​
Xerox

[Banks & Financial Services]
​Bank of America ​
BBVA
Compass
​BMO
Harris Bank (CHI)
​JP Morgan Chase
​Goldman Sachs
​M & T Bank (BAL) ​
​Mechanics Cooperative Bank (MA) ​​
Wells Fargo/Wachovia
​Barclays​​
Charles Schwab​
Credit Suisse Americas
​P & C Bank (BAL)​
Fidelity Investments​
Sun Trust Bank

[Auto Makers]
​Honda (AL)
​​Subaru

[Health Insurance Providers]
​​Blue Cross & Blue Shield (AZ)
​Aetna (CT) ​​GE Healthcare (CHI)​​​
Kaiser Permanente (Pacific NW, CO, OH, GA)​
Travelers

​[Sports Teams]
​​Arizona Diamondbacks
​Atlanta Braves ​
Baltimore Ravens
​​Red Sox​​​
SF 49ers
​​San Francisco Giants

​[Oil – Houston]
​​Chevron
​​​Conoco
Phillips
​Exxon
Mobil​
Shell

​Teach For America’s Business Plan outlines it’s 2015 goal: Each region will be fully sustainable (TFA, 2010-2015). This prioritizes continuous fund-raising:

​“On Friday, March 1st, Teach For America – Phoenix hosted its annual ​​​“Building a Community of Champions,” highlighting the role of Teach For ​​​America as one piece in the movement to reform education in Arizona. ​​​Key gifts were received from Blue Cross Blue Shield of Arizona, Apollo ​​​Group/University of Phoenix, Kitchell Corporation, and Nita and Phil ​​​Francis to make the dinner possible. The celebration grossed nearly ​​​$500,000 for the region.”

​(http://www.teachforamerica.org/where-we-work/phoenix/supporters.)

The questions persist: Why is Teach For America considered a charity? Why is ‘teaching’ poor children of color considered a tax deduction, as long as TFA corps members are the teachers? And why are government leaders shy about examining pervasive concerns about TFA and realizing that there is something more here than a feel good ‘charity’ directed at educational reform for poor children of color.

​“A gift of $5,000 or more helps us recruit, select, train, and support a ​​teacher who will help his or her students succeed at the highest levels and work ​to help ensure that all students, no matter where they are born, get an ​outstanding education. As a sponsor, you will also join a unique group of results-​oriented philanthropists who have the opportunity to contribute to the impact ​of our corps members and alumni.” (www.teachforamerica.org/supportus).

​Families of teachers, supporters of teachers, teachers themselves, and those of us who can remember their most inspirational teacher or coach, might consider how to engage the collective power of the purse(s) to support the profession of teachers. Teaching is not a charity, a tax deduction or community service. Our children are not promotional commodities, to be held up at fundraisers as the emotional hook to garner donations. I do not purchase goods or services from the companies above.

Categories Teach for America TFA

Pasi Sahlberg Explains Finnish Philosophy of Education to Rhode Island Policymakers

By dianeravitch
December 11, 2013 //
28

Rhode Island won a Race to the Top grant, so of course the state is obsessed with competition, accountability, and high-stakes evaluations of students, teachers, principals, and schools.

Fortunately, the great Finnish educator Pasi Sahlberg was invited by the University of Rhode Island to describe an alternate universe where entering teachers meet the highest standards, students do not take standardized tests, competition is minimized, and almost every student graduates from either an academic or career program.

Sahlberg said:

“Finland, unlike the United States, believes that schools can provide every child with a quality education without sacrificing excellence. But that means taking care of the whole child: offering early-childhood programs, comprehensive health and special-education services and a curriculum that values art, music and sports as much as math and English.

“In a fundamental sense, Sahlberg said, the United States is asking the wrong questions. Instead of asking, “What will help students succeed in today’s economy,” the U.S. should be asking, “What will encourage students to be active participants in a democracy?” and “What will make them be lifelong learners?”

“Sahlberg is also highly critical of the American emphasis on what he sees as a competitive, market-driven philosophy of public education, one that asks states to compete for federal dollars by agreeing to federally guided reforms.
Sahlberg also says that the growing popularity of school choice, in the form of charter and for-profit schools, undermines the traditional public schools by pulling valuable resources from students who need them most.”

The contrast between what Rhode Island and Finland could not be more stark.

Categories Accountability, International, Teachers and Teaching, Testing

The Education Agenda of the Walton Family

By dianeravitch
December 11, 2013 //
66

This post is a comprehensive review of the education priorities of the Walton Family Foundation.

The Walton family has made many billions of dollars from the Walmart stores.

Walmart comes into a region and undersells every local retail store. In time, the mom-and-pop stores–beloved community institutions handed down in some cases from generation to generation– close their doors, and mom and pop become low-wage greeters at Walmart. The giant Walmart causes an implosion of Main Streets across the region where they are located, as working people shop for bargains and bypass their own community.

If the Walmart head office decides that the store is not making a big enough profit, the Walmart closes and goes elsewhere. It leaves behind dead small towns, towns without a local economy, because the local economy was sucked dry by the big Walmart. Whether the Walmart stays or goes, Main Street dies.

In education, the Walmart agenda is not dissimilar. The foundation supports charters and vouchers, though it prefers vouchers. It seeks to create schools that are non-union and that are able to skim off students from the local public schools. In time, the local public schools will die, just as the Main Street stores died.

They give generously to create an education marketplace of choices; the one “choice” they do not favor is the neighborhood public school. They underwrite major education media to be sure that their agenda gets favorable attention. They fund compatible researchers. They are strategic in their funding.

The upshot:

The Waltons and the Walton Family Foundation have gargantuan financial resources and can exert undue influence on politicians and public policy issues of their choosing. No matter where people come down on the issues of education reform or school choice, we can all agree it is unfair that the Walton family gets to dictate the future of public education because of the amount of money at its disposal, and to do so in a way that is unaccountable to the public.

Remember, too, that the Waltons—white, rural, and mind-bogglingly wealthy—pursue their education reform goals in low-income, urban communities where the student populations consist largely of children of color. When a profoundly privileged family seeks to engage in philanthropy in historically marginalized communities that they are not part of, the lack of accountability is even more troubling.

The Waltons and their foundation have reaped billions and billions of dollars from a ruthless business model that relies on Walmart jobs being insecure and unstable jobs, with low wages, skimpy benefits, and little respect in the workplace. Their company has helped create a world where parents have to work two or more jobs, with unstable hours to make ends meet. They’ve helped create a world where parents struggle with choices like paying rent, putting food on the table or taking a sick child to the doctor. And now the Waltons want to tell us how to fix our schools? The Walmart model has made its impact on much of the world. But, for many, the Walmartization of our schools is one step too far.

This is called creative destruction. There is nothing creative about it.

But there is quite a lot of destruction.

This is an agenda that promises profits for the few, but misery for the many as public institutions are eviscerated, raided, and left as shells.

No longer are there democratic institutions to bring the community together.

In their marketplace of choices, the voucher schools and charters compete to get the “best” students.

The public schools take those rejected, excluded, or dumped by the charter and vouchers schools.

The end result: a dual system of schools, all publicly funded. One for the haves, another for the have-nots.

Categories Education Reform

A Parent Reports on John King’s Stacked Forum in Brooklyn

By dianeravitch
December 11, 2013 //
36

New York Commissioner John King held his first meeting in New York City on the rushed implementation of the Common Core and the tests whose cut score was set so high that only 31% of students across the state passed. Among English learners, only 3% passed. Among students with disabilities, only 5% passed. The pass rates among African American and Hispanic students was 15-18%. In NYC, the passing rates were even lower.

Here is a report sent to me by a parent who attended the forum last night at Medger Evers College on Brooklyn.

“I am a Brooklyn public school parent who went to the forum last night at Medgar Evers College with John King. I wanted him to hear the near-universal concerns of my fellow parents that high-stakes testing has gotten out of control. By the time I showed up at 6PM, the speaker’s list was full. My mistake – but the forums had been announced at the last minute, with no information about how to sign up for speaking. Many of us believed (mistakenly) there would be an open mike. Clearly StudentsFirstNY had different information. Apparently they brought in about fifty parents and charter school teachers at 4:30 – one woman from “our” side, a sympathetic teacher, had happened to get there that early, so she was the only speaker who stood up to criticize the NYSED.

The forum began at around 6:45. After the first speaker had criticized was done, a “Parent Organizer” from StudentsFirstNY whooped up her part of the crowd with a racially inflammatory speech charging that “parents in Park Slope don’t want the kids in BedStudy” to get the same education as their kids. She at least had the honesty to acknowledge that she was a paid employee of StudentsFirstNY. I know of at least one other speaker (an ex-teacher) who did not acknowledge that she is an employee of StudentsFirstNY. However, what’s interesting about the first speaker is that (I was told by one of my fellow parents) she is actually a parent at PS321, one of the best schools in Park Slope, where test prep is de-emphasized as much as possible. It seems that she wants test-prep for everyone else, but not for her kid.

Early on a state assemblyman (I think it was Karim Camara) spoke about John King – he said, and I quote, “John King has an Ivy League education. He could be anywhere in the world. But he chose to be here with us. Isn’t that amazing?” I found that a bizarre comment, since John King should consider himself pretty lucky to be NY State Education Commissioner, with precious few qualifications, and listening to the public seems like it should be a basic part of his job, not a favor he bestows on his fortunate subjects.

But then the array of speakers started – one after another, repeating the same talking points, accompanied by cheers. They spoke in turgid cliches which no one could argue with – “Don’t you believe in the children?” over and over again – fending off some mythical Common Core opponent who is against all standards and expectations, and wants minority children to do poorly in school. The majority of people in the audience sat stunned and helpless at the barrage of nonsense being unleashed from the stage – a burst of rhetoric totally unrelated to real debates about common core implementation and high-stakes testing. It’s hard to argue with someone when a) you don’t even get a chance to speak and b) you are called a racist without them hearing any of your arguments.

I actually felt sorry for whatever percentage of charter school parents there who were unpaid. They are right to be angry at the educational inequalities in our society. Their children are not getting the same education as parents on the Upper East Side or even Park Slope. But it is not primarily because of differences in curriculum, and Common Core is not going to make a big difference in those inequalities. What would make a difference is changing the way resources are allocated – why are our poorest schools cut down to the budgetary bone? But none of those parents seemed cognizant of that.

What I find ironic is that they kept saying they wanted the same education for their kids as their richer counterparts. But parents in Park Slope would never put up with the monotonous test prep John King wants to institute in schools state-wide. Of course John King and Meryl Tisch would never expose their own children to that – both send (or sent) their kids to progressive private schools, where their children are taught to think creatively.

After an hour of so of being told we were racists for daring to question King, many of us retreated to the lobby, where we discussed how the event had been hijacked. I don’t even think John King believed he was hearing from true representatives of parents.

I had the temptation to rush the mike and give a Swiftian speech a la A Modest Proposal: Why (I would ask in mock-outrage) had John King refused to allow tests for Kindergarteners? (Note: he recently abandoned the K-2 bubble testing under immense political pressure) Did he not believe in standards? Did he not want low-income children to succeed? Without tests, how can parents know how they’re doing? Does he not believe in the children?”

Categories Common Core, New York
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