Peter Greene asks: if you had your choice, which head of the hydra-headed reform monster would you lop off first?
Hint: one of those heads is essential for all the others. I agree with his choice.
Archives for the year of: 2014
Keystone State Education Coalition
Pennsylvania Education Policy Roundup for June 3, 2014:
In God We Trust? How about a bill that would require charter and cyber schools to post their PA School Performance Profile scores prominently in any advertising paid for with public tax dollars?
Blogger Rant:
At a recent school board meeting I voted against authorizing a payment to Agora Cyber Charter School. Why? During the NCLB regime, Agora never once made AYP; this year their PA School Performance Profile Score was 48.3 (scale of 100). In my district, our Middle School score was 94; our High School score was 96.4. Agora is run by K12, Inc., a for-profit company founded by convicted bond felon Michael Milken. K12 paid it’s CEO $13 million from 2009 through 2013 and spent our tax dollars on over 19,000 local TV commercials. I do not believe Agora should receive one cent of my neighbors’ tax dollars.
Instead of posting “In God We Trust”, how about a bill that would require charter and cyber schools to post their PA School Performance Profile scores prominently in any advertising paid for with public tax dollars?
A statement from the Chicago Teachers Union:
STATEMENT
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE CONTACT: Stephanie Gadlin
June 9, 2014 312/329-6250
CTU on SB1922 signing: “Emanuel’s Law is another slap in the face to the citizens who put the governor and mayor in office.”
CHICAGO—The Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) is greatly disappointed at the signing today by Gov. Pat Quinn of Senate Bill 1922, a proposal by the mayor of Chicago that will cut the retirement savings of thousands of city workers and school employees, and a slap in the face to the citizens who put the governor in office. The Union maintains that this short-sighted proposal does not, in any way, solve Chicago’s pension problem, and is just another attack on communities and citizens who continue to be victims of draconian policies out of Springfield and the fifth floor of City Hall.
The worker retiring today under this “Emanuel’s Law,” earning an average of $23,000 a year will lose nearly $10,000 in earning power within twenty years. In 2034, this retiree’s pension 20 years from now will only be worth $15,982 per year in today’s dollars – a pension in 2034 that is worth $7,018 less than the retiree’s pension today. She will lose more than 18 percent of her total pension over 20 years.
This is nothing more than continued disinvestment in our city, neglect of public employees and the straddling of taxpayers who must bear the brunt of this so-called pension crisis instead of those who crippled our economic system in the first place. CTU members do not receive social security benefits and therefore must absorb the expense of all future health care costs.
“We have to call this what it is—which is theft—because these people are stealing from dedicated city workers like the paraprofessionals in our schools,” said CTU President Karen Lewis. “Instead of any accountability for those who actually caused this problem, Emanuel’s Law brutally attacks the people who are most vulnerable, our seniors and municipal employees who remain on the frontlines in our city.”
The CTU has called for various revenue proposals to not only eliminate the pension debt but also provide critical resources for neighborhood schools, including a LaSalle Street Tax of $1 per financial transactions such as stocks, bonds, currency, futures and credit default swaps. In addition, the Union supports a 1 percent commuter tax which could draw $350 million every year; and, changes to the city’s controversial TIF program.
Under “Emanuel’s Law, school clerks, teachers’ aides and support services staff will join nurses, cafeteria workers and librarians in losing a third of their retirement life savings. “It is time public employees stop shouldering the burden of a shortfall created by politicians, corporations and the elites in Illinois who refuse to pay their fair share of taxes,” Lewis said. “This was an opportunity for Pat Quinn to stand up for everyday citizens instead of standing in the gap for the mayor and his well-funded pension reform allies.”
The CTU represents 4,000 active members and thousands of retired members in the Municipal Employees’ Annuity and Benefit Fund of Chicago (MEABF), and was not part of any negotiation with the City of Chicago in the creation of SB1922. The Union will continue to vigorously fight this attempt at pension heist as part of the We Are One Chicago coalition and will support litigation to challenge the new law.
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The Chicago Teachers Union represents 30,000 teachers and educational support personnel working in the Chicago Public Schools and, by extension, the students and families they serve. CTU, an affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers and the Illinois Federation of Teachers, is the third largest teachers local in the country and the largest local union in Illinois. For more information visit CTU’s website at http://www.ctunet.com
Andrew Cuomo told an editorial board meeting that he had the right to shut down a commission investigating corruption because he created it.
“Gov. Cuomo denies interfering with his anti-corruption commission — but says even if he did, he’s allowed to.
Appearing Wednesday before the Crain’s New York Business editorial board, Cuomo said the commission he formed was his to do with what he wanted.
Manhattan US Attorney Preet Bharara had called reports Cuomo inteferred with the panel disturbing and did not rule out probing the matter. But Cuomo says there is nothing to probe.
“It’s not a legal question. The Moreland Commission was my commission,” Cuomo explained. “It’s my commission. My subpoena power, my Moreland Commission. I can appoint it, I can disband it. I appoint you, I can un-appoint you tomorrow.”
Put another way, l’etat c’est moi.
The Working Families Party briefly flirted with the possibility of running an independent slate. Its candidate for governor was going to be Zephyr Teachout, a Fordham Law professor who specializes in investigating public corruption.
However, at the party’s annual convention, WFP endorsed Cuomo after he promised to govern like a Democrat instead of a conservative Republican.
Teachout has not given up. She may challenge Cuomo in the Democratic primary.
Here is her statement on education.
Paul Thomas explains here why the growing movement to drop the Common Core is strangely disappointing. Oklahoma has dropped Common Core for sure, and other states are making tentative moves in that direction. Whether they will drop CCSS or rebrand it is not clear.
As Paul explains, the dissident states are not dropping CCSS and replacing it with a fresh strategy to address the needs of children. No, they are dropping the national standards-testing-accountability approach and replacing it with a home-grown standards-testing-accountability approach. The differences will be marginal at best.
Whether created in DC or in the state, the testing approach operates on the flawed and frankly hopeless belief that more testing will lead to higher achievement. After more than a decade of NCLB, we have no reason to believe that testing and accountability will change the fundamental problems of American education, which are rooted in poverty. Whether the tests are national or state, the bottom range of the distribution will be heavily weighted with children who are poor, who have disabilities, who don’t read English, or have other issues that testing and accountability will not change.
As I have noted on other occasions, Tom Loveless of Brookings explained in 2012 that standards by themselves don’t matter all that much. Loveless wrote then: “On the basis of past experience with standards, the most reasonable prediction is that the common core will have little to no effect on student achievement.” The biggest variation in test scores is within states, not between them. States with high standards have achievement gaps; states with high standards may have low academic performance. Tests measure gaps, they don’t close them.
Exchanging national standards for state standards won’t change the underlying conditions, which we used to call “root causes.” So long as we ignore the root causes of low performance (however it is measured), we will not improve education. We need a new paradigm for educational improvement, not just a switch from doing the wrong thing at the national level to doing the wrong thing at the state level.
Jeff Bryant demonstrates that “school reform” (aka privatization) has hit a rough patch. Despite the giant publicity machine of the well-funded “reformers,” their claims are falling apart.
Louisiana’s all-charter Recovery School District is in fact one of the lowest performing districts in the state. It is not a model for any other district.
Bryant writes:
“There’s no evidence anywhere that the NOLA model of school reform has “improved education.” First, any comparisons of academic achievement of current NOLA students to achievement levels before Katrina should be discredited because the student population has been so transformed.
“Second, despite reform efforts, the NOLA Recovery School District has many of the lowest performing schools in Louisiana, which is one of the lowest performing states on the National Assessment of Education Progress (aka, the Nation’s Report Card).
As Louisiana classroom teacher and blogger Mercedes Schneider reported from her site, RSD schools perform poorly on the state’s A–F grading system. “RSD has no A schools and very few B schools. In fact, almost the entire RSD – which was already approx 90 percent charters – qualifies as a district of ‘failing’ schools according to Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal’s definition of ‘failing’ … Ironic how the predominately-charter RSD has the greatest concentration of such ‘failing’ schools in the entire state of Louisiana.”
In Néw Orleans, the “reformers” have achieved their goal–to eliminate public education–but their model doesn’t get good results. Even if the test scores were higher, it is a bad trade to abandon democracy for higher scores.
Newark, Néw Jersey, is the district that has openly aspired to copy the Néw Orleans model. Mark Zuckerberg dropped $100 million into Newark, with the expectation that it would become a national model. The best description of the draining of the Zuckerberg bequest is Dale Russakoff’s story in The Néw Yorker.
Somehow, a large proportion of Zuckerberg’s donation could its way into the pockets of consultants. The “national model” is nowhere to be seen.
The recent election of Ras Baraka as mayor signaled a loud NO to plans to turn Newark into another Néw Orleans. The people of Newark are not prepared to give up democracy or to allow Cory Booker, Chris Christie and Cami Anderson to rule their schools without checks or balances.
Pasi Sahlberg, a visiting professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, spoke recently to Citizens for Public Schools in Massachusetts.
His topic: what can Massachusetts learn from “Finnish Lessons”?
It is worth watching. Pasi is always a wonderful speaker, and he is a leader in the international fight to resist test-mania and privatization and to protect education and children.
The story about Bill Gates’ swift and silent takeover of American education is startling. His role and the role of the U.S. Department of Education in drafting and imposing the Common Core standards on almost every state should be investigated by Congress.
The idea that the richest man in America can purchase and–working closely with the U.S. Department of Education–impose new and untested academic standards on the nation’s public schools is a national scandal. A Congressional investigation is warranted.
The close involvement of Arne Duncan raises questions about whether the law was broken.
Thanks to the story in the Washington Post and to diligent bloggers, we now know that one very rich man bought the enthusiastic support of interest groups on the left and right to campaign for the Common Core.
Who knew that American education was for sale?
Who knew that federalism could so easily be dismissed as a relic of history? Who knew that Gates and Duncan, working as partners, could dismantle and destroy state and local control of education?
The revelation that education policy was shaped by one unelected man, underwriting dozens of groups. and allied with the Secretary of Education, whose staff was laced with Gates’ allies, is ample reason for Congressional hearings.
I have written on various occasions (see here and here) that I could not support the Common Core standards because they were developed and imposed without regard to democratic process. The writers of the standards included no early childhood educators, no educators of children with disabilities, no experienced classroom teachers; indeed, the largest contingent of the drafting committee were representatives of the testing industry. No attempt was made to have pilot testing of the standards in real classrooms with real teachers and students.. The standards do not permit any means to challenge, correct, or revise them.
In a democratic society, process matters. The high-handed manner in which these standards were written and imposed in record time makes them unacceptable. These standards not only undermine state and local control of education, but the manner in which they were written and adopted was authoritarian. No one knows how they will work, yet dozens of groups have been paid millions of dollars by the Gates Foundation to claim that they are absolutely vital for our economic future, based on no evidence whatever.
Why does state and local control matter? Until now, in education, the American idea has been that no single authority has all the answers. Local boards are best equipped to handle local problems. States set state policy, in keeping with the concept that states are “laboratories of democracy,” where new ideas can evolve and prove themselves. In our federal system, the federal government has the power to protect the civil rights of students, to conduct research, and to redistribute resources to the neediest children and schools.
Do we need to compare the academic performance of students in different states? We already have the means to do so with the federally funded National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). It has been supplying state comparisons since 1992.
Will national standards improve test scores? There is no reason to believe so. Brookings scholar Tom Loveless predicted two years ago that the Common Core standards would make little or no difference. The biggest test-score gaps, he wrote, are within the same state, not between states. Some states with excellent standards have low scores, and some with excellent standards have large gaps among different groups of students.
The reality is that the most reliable predictors of test scores are family income and family education. Nearly one-quarter of America’s children live in poverty. The Common Core standards divert our attention from the root causes of low academic achievement.
Worse, at a time when many schools have fiscal problems and are laying off teachers, nurses, and counselors, and eliminating arts programs, the nation’s schools will be forced to spend billions of dollars on Common Core materials, testing, hardware, and software.
Microsoft, Pearson, and other entrepreneurs will reap the rewards of this new marketplace. Our nation’s children will not.
Who decided to monetize the public schools? Who determined that the federal government should promote privatization and neglect public education? Who decided that the federal government should watch in silence as school segregation resumed and grew? Who decided that schools should invest in Common Core instead of smaller classes and school nurses?
These are questions that should be asked at Congressional hearings.
We have all noticed what’s happening in the retail business: the big-box chains like Walmart drive the mom-and-pop stores out of business by cutting prices. At a certain point, you notice that all the little local shops are gone, vacant. The shops in the malls are doing well, but they are not locally owned. They are chain stores.
This approach is now invading the world of charter schools. Textbook case: Camden, Néw Jersey. There, two small charters are being closed by the state as it clears the way for the corporate charter chains: KIPP, Mastery, and Uncommon Schools.
New Jersey blogger Mother Crusader writes here about the latest developments. “Small, independent charters are being given the boot, somewhat unceremoniously and precipitously, to make way for what are essentially big box, prefab, chain Charter Management Organizations (CMOs).”
She adds: “There is a well connected, well funded effort underway, and it seems that not even a change in Commissioner can stop the train that Cerf and his cronies have set in motion.”
Sue Altman, writing for EduShyster, says:
“Be warned, starters of small charters! You may have enjoyed a red-carpet spotlight in the past, but don’t expect much loyalty from reformy fashionistas these days. It’s a school-eat-school world out there, and on the path to global competitiveness and *bigger rigor,* there is no room for last season’s trends. Such is the hard lesson learned recently by City Invincible Charter of Camden, New Jersey, which is being forcibly closed by the state in order to make way for the bigger, more disruptive charter chains.”
A board member of City Invincible Charter said:
“[O]ur public education system is being hijacked not only in Camden, but all over our country. This decision simply exemplifies the circumvention of due process in order to benefit those who are more concerned with expanding their brand or their name or their influence or their pockets.”
He is right.
Diane Ravitch's blog 