Secretary Arne Duncan publicly urged Pennsylvania officials to take action to save the public schools of Philadelphia.
Archives for the year of: 2013
In a changing of the regime, the leadership of the Los Angeles school board changed hands.
Six-term president Monica Garcia is out.
Dr. Richard Vladovic was elected as president, with Steve Zimmer as vice-president.
Garcia was a close ally of Mayor Villaraigosa.
In response to news that the Walton Family Foundation awarded $4.3 million to Teach for America to send its ill-trained recruits to the Delta, a reader sent this comment:
What upset me most about this award was that the Mississippi Delta is served by our own Mississippi Teacher Corps, which provides more summer training than TFA and a lot more support during the school year. It also requires that its members take coursework at the University of Mississippi leading to a master’s degree in teaching, while attending classes on weekends. Our school has received recruits from both programs, and I can tell that the MTC corps members are much more grounded in the realities of the environments in which they will be placed than the TFA members. I cannot understand why our legislature was so easily swayed away from our own program, unless megabucks have changed hands.
Governor Tom Corbett passed a budget that shows his disdain for public education, I.e., the future of the state.
Philadelphia got the back of his hand. The burden of paying down the debt created by the state’s own School Reform Commission (which reforms nothing) will be placed on the working class, while big corporations skip away with no responsibility.
One plan, says columnist Will Bunch, is to turn the schools into chicken coops, where nothing happens but bare bones academics because everything else was stripped away by layoffs.
Blogger Yinzercation says the budget doesn’t reach the funding levels of 2008-09.
This governor and legislature and business community don’t care about the children or the future of the state. They would not do to their own children what they are doing to other people’s children.
The New York City Department of Education is treating students who boycott state tests as failures and requiring them to go to summer school if they hope to be promoted. Even if their teacher recommends them for promotion, they will be punished. There are consequences for those who defy the DOE.
In a surging groundswell of support, about three dozen people rallied for ousted Bridgeport superintendent Paul Vallas.
The meeting was held in a church led by the president of the Board that appointed Vallas. The mayor of the city, Vallas’ strongest supporter, spoke on his behalf.
Mayor Finch is hoping that Vallas will do for Bridgeport what he did for Chicago, Philadelphia, and Néw Orleans.
When Michelle Rhee announced on “Oprah” the creation of her group called “StudentsFirst,” she said she would raise $1 billion in one year.
Then she backtracked and said she would raise that amount in five years.
Joy Resmovits of Huffington Post got copies of the group’s tax forms (which are made public), and Rhee is far short of her goal.
“In the fiscal year starting August 1, 2011 and ending July 31, 2012, StudentsFirst raised $28.5 million, more than tripling its $7.6 million fundraising the previous year. During that period, the group’s political 501(c)(4) arm raised $15.6 million and spent $13.4 million. Rhee herself drew a salary of about $300,000.”
At the rate Rhee is raising money, it will take her more than 25 years to raise $1 billion.
Joel Klein lambasted the Democratic candidates in the race to succeed Mayor Bloomberg for their criticism of his policies.
Klein defended the policy of giving free public space to charters, even though many of the charters have billionaires on their boards. He also defended his record of closing schools with low test scores even though many of the replacement schools exclude low-scoring students.
He didn’t mention the fact that he resigned shortly after the collapse of city test score boasts in 2010, or that he was replaced by hapless publisher Carhie Black, or that the achievement gap remained unchanged during his eight years as chancellor, or that only 22% of voters want more of the same failed policies.
In another great post, Anthony Cody explains why he is fed up with all the mud being thrown at teachers by politicians, foundation heads, corporations, and pundits.
He asks, why no accountability for the banks and rating systems that lied and hid data and caused millions of people to lose their homes?
Why no accountability for the big corporations that greedily soak up tax cuts while refusing to pay their share of the taxes needed to support public education (all the while, blaming teachers in underfunded public schools)?
Why no accountability for the testing corporations that foist failed online programs on students while raking in millions?
Yes, it is time for accountability.
Paul Thomas used the occasion of Cody’s post to reprint a piece he wrote in 2011, which shares the same lesson. He reviews the failures of Rhee, Duncan, Gates, Canada, and Co. and concludes:
“Accountability appears to be something those driving the reform are using to mask the lack of expertise or accomplishment among the reformers themselves. And the media is playing right along, unwilling and possibly unable to hold the reformers themselves accountable — unwilling and possibly unable as well to discern that the education reform debate is being misrepresented as badly as education is itself.”
A bonus in Paul’s piece: He includes the great poem “Ozymandias,” reminding us and the reformers that their feckless and fruitless efforts will soon blow away and be forgotten.
This is an alarming account of the frenzied efforts by Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s Department of Education to cement his “legacy” of opening privately managed charter schools while abandoning the public schools for which he is responsible.
The high school named for the famed Socialist Norman Thomas will be closed and set aside as space for privately managed charters. This is a way of spitting on the memory of a crusader for the public sector, that is, if anyone at the New York City Department of Education ever heard of Norman Thomas.
The new charter high schools will not accept any transfer students; after all, they are not public schools, so why should they comply with the same rules as real public schools?
The article by Gail Robinson of City Limits says that the charter school community of hedge fund managers and equity investors is worried about what will happen after Bloomberg leaves office. There is always the risk that someone might be elected who doesn’t want to privatize public education.
“Until then, Bloomberg is doing what he can. When the new school year starts, the city will open 24 new charter schools, for a total of 183, with spending on the publicly funded, privately run schools set to top $1 billion. And the city Department of Education (DOE) continues to allocate space in public school buildings to many charter schools, which use the rooms rent free.
But the department is also looking beyond Bloomberg’s term, carving out rooms in district buildings for schools that will not open until fall 2014. One, PAVE II, got space in a Bushwick middle school building even though the state has not yet approved its existence. And DOE also has set aside space for a charter that was supposed to open in August 2011; the plan now is for it to finally begun admitting students in September 2014.”
PAVE Academy was started by a billionaire who prefers free space in public buildings, rather than buying or leasing space. Who can blame him? Why not take free public space if the mayor wants you to have it?
Bloomberg himself plans to open four new charter schools, in partnership with billionaire George Soros.
We can only hope and pray for a mayor who takes seriously his responsibility to improve the public education system, which enrolls more than one million children. The needs of those children have been treated as a measurement issue for a dozen years; the public schools have gotten no support, only threats of closure, as the mayor blithely pursues a free-market system, with favor and preference for schools that he does not control, the privately managed schools that enroll 6 percent of the city’s children. Who will care for the other 94%?
The first thing a new mayor should do is clean out the top layers of administrative personnel, those who have abetted the privatization of public education in the City of New York. Shame on them.
