Clayton Christiansen loves disruption.
He loves the idea that almost everything familiar to us will die and be replaced by competition.
Many corporate reformers swear by him. They think disruption is creative.
I wish they would get out of our lives and make money selling something other than disruption.
A reader comments:
To the corporate moguls this is a game of chess, their winnings being billions of dollars.
They have been playing this game for many years now.
The big problem is that they never informed anyone what or whom they were playing against. They just kept making their moves while their opponents never realized they were in their game and therefore never had a chance to make a move.
We are now at the point of check.
If we take RTTT then checkmate, they win.
If we take the NCLB waivers, checkmate they win.
The only thing we can do is call this for what it is, outrageous.
We have to protest their game as destructive to our society and detrimental to students’ education. Now, as before, we have no moves.
We must knock over the board in protest!
Deborah Meier has been blogging recently with Michael Petrilli of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.
Deb is known as a progressive, Mike as a conservative. Deb was one of the founders of the small schools movement and a leader of opposition to standardized testing through her involvement in Fairtest. Mike strongly supports standardized testing, charter schools, and competition a drivers of change.
In his previous post, Mike asked Deb whether she was part of the problem (because of her opposition to standardized testing and her general skepticism towards what is called “reform” today, I.e., No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top).
This is a good exchange. I wonder if they can bridge their differences.
Deborah answered here. I won’t begin to summarize what she said. Let me just say that she is at her best and what she wrote about children, about the shrinking middle class, and about what schools can and cannot do. Please take the time to read what she wrote.
I have heard repeatedly in the past few years that teachers don’t want student teachers in their classrooms. The teachers are so focused on raising test scores that they can’t take the time to mentor the younger generation, and they are afraid to lose ground if they let a student teacher try a practice class. Consequently, the opportunities for the would-be teachers to get student teaching experience are closing up. This is not a problem for Teach for America, whose recruits get five weeks of training, but it is a huge problem for those planning a career as an educator and eager to get classroom experience before they enter into the profession.
This comment from a reader confirms the stories:
I am currently enrolled in a MAT program in Chicago, and I have been following your blog closely for quite a few months. One side of the story that I think is missing is how all these corporate reforms and testing have a negative impact on preservice educators. With teachers held to such high accountability, it seems that less are willing to have us preservice teachers come observe or work with them. With isat testing going on, my classmates and I have had very little success setting up observation times at schools. This is something that we have all been struggling with (even when testing is not happening). These observation hours are required for our degree. Also, I have heard anecdotes from a student teacher a year ahead of me about how the teacher is so concerned with testing that she would not let the student teacher teach.
I doubt that “reformers” and proponents of accountability think about how these high stakes measures make it difficult for preservice educators to learn the craft of being a teacher. The time spent observing, helping, interviewing students and teachers, and teaching are invaluable experiences for us and teach us so much about being teachers, but current reforms make these experiences hard to come by. I think a shared sentiment among my classmates and I is frustration. We want to be successful, prepared educators, but it feels like we have to jump through hoops and beg for time in schools. If we really cared about preparing quality educators, it should not be so difficult to get into schools, to see. feel, and experience the real deal.
Our first reform fairy tale was Chicken Little. This one is the story of the Flea, the Grasshopper, and the Leap-Frog, who were invited by the King to pass a test to win the Princess.
It is with humor, satire, and fairy tales that we unmask the foolishness that dares call itself “reform.”
WBEZ, the NPR station in Chicago has been doing outstanding investigative reporting on the Chicago Public Schools. The reporters, Becky Vevea and Linda Lutton, dig for facts and do their own analysis instead of reporting the press releases from CPS.
In this story, they do a fact-check on the city’s plan to close dozens of public schools.
The facts and the claims don’t coincide.
Wouldn’t it be great if every city had investigative journalists like them?
In this post, Ed Berger explains the collaboration among stakeholders that is needed to defend our community public schools from marauders and vandals. He identifies the vandals.
The vandals all have the same goal: Destroy public schools. They call it “reform,” and anyone who stands up to them is called “a defender of the status quo.” They forget that they are the status quo.
Karen Lewis won re-election as president of CTU with about 80% of the votes.
Lewis led the city’s first teachers’ strike in 25 years last fall.
She has been leading the battle against Mayor Emanuel’s mass school closings, the largest in American history.
Students and teachers complained about the commercial brands that were represented in the recent Pearson tests for the a Common Core testing in New York State.
According to the authoritative satirical blogger Students Last, this was no error. This is now state policy and a clever way to raise new funding.
Why not sell naming rights to our schools while we are at it?
The Chicago Teachers Union issued a report on segregation in the Chicago public schools:
New Report Unravels the Sordid History of Racial Segregation in Chicago Public Schools
On anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, “Still Separate, Still Unequal” examines continued acceptance of de facto segregation and injustices in district schools
CHICAGO—On was is the 59th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) today released a report on the history of disruptive actions against communities of color by Chicago Public Schools (CPS), exemplified by school closings that intensify the harmful effects of segregated schools and neighborhoods. The study, titled Still Separate, Still Unequal, acknowledges the deep segregation that exists in Chicago, but states that segregation is exacerbated by flawed education reform policies and assaults on communities that have long borne the brunt of its harmful effects.
The 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision was one of the most successful victories of the modern Civil Rights Movement. The ruling declared segregation in U.S. public schools unconstitutional, saying it violated the “equal protection under the law” clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
Now, nearly six decades later, parents of Chicago’s African-American and special education needs students are also seeking court protection against Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s plan to shutter 53 elementary schools. On Wednesday they filed two federal lawsuits seeking a halt closures because these actions are discriminatory and will cause undue harm to their children.
“The mayor and his CPS administration are barreling through the largest round of school closings ever—actions that will once again disproportionately harm students and communities of color,” said CTU President Karen Lewis. “What they’re proposing will set us back to the time before Brown v. Board of Education. This report shows that we are still living in an era of education apartheid and we must do all we can to resist the destruction of our schools and the harming of our vulnerable population.”
Over the past decade, one out of every four intensely segregated African-American schools—schools with a more than 90 percent African-American student population—has been closed, phased out or turned around. Yet segregation has increased and African-American students are now more segregated by race and class than in 1989. At the same time there are far more schools with virtually no Black teachers and no Black students. Schools with fewer than 10 percent African-American students and teachers now make up 28 percent of CPS schools, up from 10 percent in 2001. In CPS, integration has been abandoned as policy and segregation accepted as the norm, rather than as the deliberate and systematic construction that it is. The report addresses, specifically:
“CPS seems committed only to deepening the harms of segregation, rather than moving towards an integrated school system,” said Still Separate, Still Unequal author, Pavlyn Jankov. “Segregation has increased, and the associated policies of disinvestment and destabilization are more acute than ever.”
Still Separate, Still Unequal calls for an end to the segregated harm of failed school closings and turnarounds, and a halt to the rapid expansion of private charter operators and other aberrations of “choice” that increase segregation.
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