Make plans to attend Occupy the DOE 2.0 in Washington, D.C., on April 4-7.
Here is the official schedule.
What a stellar lineup of speakers.
I am speaking on Thursday afternoon.
Many wonderful thinkers, activists, teachers, writers.
A great opportunity to network with friends and allies who want to change the course of American education.
Time to resist.
Bruce Baker looks closely at the latest Mathematica Policy Research study of KIPP and draws some useful lessons.
Mathematica says KIPP is more successful than the nearby public schools.
Why?
Baker shows that KIPP spends substantially more (in some districts, $5,000 more per student), has smaller class sizes, higher salaries, “coupled with a dose of old-fashioned sit-down-and-shut up classroom/behavior management and a truckload of standardized testing. Nothin’ too sexy there. Nothin’ that reformy. Nothin’ particularly creative.”
Matt Di Carlo estimates that it would cost the New York City Department of Education an additional $688 million to get the same results in middle schools, and only $72 million in Houston.
Di Carlo has been saying for a long time that it is not “charterness” that is so special, but what charters do that produce higher scores: spend more money, reduce class size, pay more to teachers, etc.
That is, if parents want their children to be in a no-excuses school with strict disciplinary rules and “a truckload of standardized testing.”
From: Jonathan Kozol To: Steve Zimmer
School Board Member, L.A.U.S.D.
Subject: The Re-Election of an Enlightened Educator
Dear Mr. Zimmer,
March 3, 2013
I’ve been one of your strong admirers in the education world for a good while now. I’m writing to tell you and my many friends in Los Angeles that I think your voice is terribly important in defense of public education at a time when it is under fierce and irrational attack from those who would replace it, as much as they can, with charter schools and other private or semi-private institutions.
This issue is all the more important in light of the fact that many, if not most, charter schools are incapable or serving children with special needs — or, in order to boost their test-scores artificially, refuse to serve these children.
I’m also glad you’ve courageously resisted the political demand to judge the value of our teachers according to their students’ grades on standardized exams — a practice, as many members of the U.S. Senate have belatedly observed, simply drives beleaguered teachers to drill their students for the tests instead of giving them a rich and broad curriculum that incorporates those aspects of our culture that can never be reduced to numbers.
For these and other reasons, I thank you for your loyalty to children. I whole-heartedly support you.
Sincere Regards,
Jonathan Kozol
Natalie Hopkinson is one of our nation’s most interesting and provocative writers. In this article, she asks the question that is the title of this post. She could have gone further to look at the strict disciplinary rules of the “no excuses” schools. Or the nearly all-white young teaching staffs in all-black schools. What is the subtext? I am sure we will more about these issues from her.
A question from a reader:
“Des Moines Iowa needs some advice.
“Des Moines superintendent candidates narrowed to 3″
” Carey Wright, chief academic officer of the District of Columbia Public Schools.”
When readers learned that Oprah’s OWN network was filming in New Orleans, they feared that she would repeat the inflated and fraudulent claims about charter schools that are so often repeated on television. So did I.
But according to this Louisian teacher, all of us were wrong. We owe Oprah an apology. The charter schools face the same problems as public schools.
Here is what the Louisiana teacher reported:
“By the way, if you haven’t seen Oprah channel – OWN – new series “Blackboard Wars” an unreality series filmed at a New Orleans charter, you must. After much fear and trepidation at the idea of its filming it is turning out to be an exposé of the disaster that many of these charters have brought to N.O. Several of the teachers featured are TFA, although they don’t make that clear to an unknowing public audience. The filming of these students’ lives is a travesty, even filming the actual delivery room scene of one young student. The first episode featured a “teacher(?)” yelling at her students in barely recognizable dialect, with her boobs hanging out all over the place. I am SURE the filmmakers caught on and did not attempt to cover over the truth of what is taking place there. Steve Barr and his principal are acting their parts for their own personal aggrandizement! It will ultimately result in a black eye and I hope a lawsuit for the RSD to allow this.”
Advocates of charter schools can’t understand why anyone questions the purity of their motives or the excellence of their results. When there are scandals, they brush them off as mere anecdotes. When a charter operator steals millions, that’s an anecdote too. Nothing interferes with their belief that deregulation and lack of oversight is the right formula for school success.
In Chicago, we learned recently that the second-ranking official at the UNO charter chain resigned after awarding millions of dollars in contracts to family members or politically connected individuals.
Here is another. Chicago plans to close 129 elementary schools because of “underutilization,” even as they open 60 new charter schools, some in the same neighborhoods where enrollment is allegedly low. Here is an interesting web woven around a new charter:
“Jeannie Kim is employed by the Board of Education, where she works as an instructional effectiveness specialist for the Pershing Network. Her job, like her 17 other counterparts citywide, is to work with principals to evaluate teachers from an administrative perspective, and make sure CPS’s official Teaching Framework is being enforced. In fact, according to several people from the Chicago Teachers Union we spoke to on background, people like Kim have the power to get tenured teachers terminated, or at least put on a remedial track, if not reassigned to a different school altogether.”
“Besides being a member of the Board of Education’s administration staff, Jeannie Kim is also a founding member of the design team for the proposed Be the Change Charter School. In fact, Kim’s name appears in fundraising emails obtained by Chicagoist, and on the charter school’s not for profit incorporation papers as the organization’s agent. And on the not for profit’s most recent annual report, as filed with the State of Illinois, Kim is listed as the organization’s secretary. These documents list a condo in the West Loop owned my Kim and a man named John Bang.”
To understand these relationships, it is important to ponder these words: Chicago, power, politics, money.
Tennessee is the next target for voucher advocates.
The far-right American Federation For Children has poured $800,000 into an ad campaign for vouchers. This is the same organization that honored Governor Scott Walker and Michelle Rhee in 2011, the year that Walker went after the teacher unions in Wisconsin.
The voucher campaign has the support of the governor and the state commissioner of education, Kevin Huffman, who is one of the “leaders” produced by Teach for America. And also Rhee’s ex-husband.
John Kuhn is recognized among many educators as our most eloquent spokesman, a champion of students, educators, and public school.
Here he is interviewed on “The Chalkface,” speaking as he always does, from the heart.
The Republicans in Alabama are not usually thought of as the guardians of minority children, the poor, and oppressed. Last week, they slipped through a bill that allows tax credits for private and religious schools. The cover story is that it is “for the children.” The reality is that it is intended to destroy public education and support privatization.
Here is the story of how it happened.
Michelle Rhee’s StudentsFirst hailed the secretive legislation.
