Reader Christine Langhoff sent the following information about some “turnaround” schools in Massachusetts. Having won “Race to the Top” funding, the state has taken Arne Duncan’s advice to fire everybody and start over, which seems to be his deep thinking on how to improve schools, not through collaboration and steady work, but through fear tactics.
She writes:
The state of Massachusetts has recently taken over two Boston elementary schools. Each has been “turned around” (I think of it as churned) several times. This has included mass staff dismissals and new staff have been hand picked by new administration, yet the schools have remained as Level 4 schools. That the schools have populations of about 88% poverty, 40% English language learners and 20% SPED kids will surprise no readers of Diane’s blog. (Remember too, some number of these kids have hit a triple, i.e. they are members of all three groups: poor special needs kids who are learning English – is there a VAM algorithm for that?)
Under the state takeover, our state commissioner, Mitchell Chester (national chairman of PARCC) has unilaterally given both schools over to charter management organizations (Bluepoint and UP Academy) to run. The first move that has been made at the Dever School has been to kill the dual-language program. That no one with a linguistic background has been included in the decision is obvious; Chester seems to believe that instruction in languages holds back language development. (See: http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/04/06/dever-school-parents-teachers-assail-state-plan-scrap-dual-language-program/qfQea68Wy0qeV9Chs7jCiJ/story.html )
The second move has been to force teachers to work an extra 700 hours over the school year for a stipend which comes to $2.75 an hour. So who is going to staff the schools? Professional status teachers have been churned out. Other professional status BTU members are unlikely to volunteer for 700 extra hours at virtually no compensation. I’m at a loss to understand how education for some of our most needy kids is going to be improved.
Here’s a link to the state plan for the Dever. If you go to page 6, there’s a chart (which I could not paste here) with proficiency scores for ELA. They are unsurprising, given the school’s population. Actually, that 16% of 8 year old kids in such challenging circumstances score so well in a test in a language that is not their first is a testament to their teachers’ efforts and professional training.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The most telling part of the presentation at the Board of Ed in April regarding this was when a member of the board asked the Commissioner what the difference was going to be in these turnarounds from the ones the schools had already undergone. Having gone through the presentation, the member could find none.
He didn’t have much of an answer.
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Congratulations, Diane. After all of your railing against the “far-right,” the Southern Poverty Law Center now implies you and your readers are just right-wing extremists for opposing Common Core:
http://dailycaller.com/2014/05/10/leftist-terrorism-inspiring-southern-poverty-law-center-labels-common-core-critics-far-right-extremists/
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Cherchez la Moolah …
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I read the article, found no mention of Diane, and did a quick ctrl-f search for “diane” in the SPLC report. I got two results, and none seemed to be negative. On page 19, she’s listed as valid concern w.r.t Common Core, and on page 33, SPLC essentially agrees with her and references her book Reign of Error. I haven’t read the report fully, because I have to get back to work, but something tells me that she’s mentioned, along with a few others, to give a sense of neutrality to SPLC’s feelings toward Common Core, but will only focus on far-right complaints and agendas.
Here’s the SPLC report: http://www.splcenter.org/sites/default/files/downloads/publication/public_schools_in_the_crosshairs.pdf
HOWEVER, what the Daily Caller did, using Diane and Louis C.K.’s pictures as article art, (as well as George Will’s and whoever that lady is with the glasses), is disingenuous and click-baity. It’s yet another reason why I avoid sites like Daily Caller.
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I never claimed the SPLC calls out Diane by name — thus, the qualifier “implicitly.” The point is that the SPLC, like so many others have tried to do, wants to dismiss opposition to CCSS as just some crazypants right-wing hysteria, lumping all opponents in that camp and ignoring the ideological diversity of the opposition. The SPLC ups the ante, however, since it is best known for smearing people for “hatred.” So, oppose Common Core and get lumped in with the Klan.
The lady in the glasses, BTW, is the head of the Chicago teachers’ union.
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“The lady in the glasses, BTW, is the head of the Chicago teachers’ union.”
Huh? I saw plenty of ladies in glasses in that report, but not one of them was Karen Lewis.
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Oh crud. I wish we could delete posts. I see what you’re talking about now. Nevermind. Wrong link.
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“Not Working”?
Of course it’s working.
It’s doing exactly what it’s intended to do.
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“The state has taken Arne Duncan’s advice to fire everybody and start over…not through collaboration and steady work, but through fear tactics.”
This is Mao’s Cultural Revolution come to America but instead this is Obama’s Cultural Revolution. Make no mistake, Duncan might be the one giving the advice, but his mouth works for the Obama White House and that means he’s doing the President’s bidding.
Mao worked the same exact way. What’s happening with this fake school reform in the United States starting with G. W. Bush’s NCLB is right out of Mao’s play book, and Mao’s NCLB was his Little Red Book.
Years before China’s devastating Cultural Revolution devastated China from 1965 to 1976 (when Mao died), the first step was to reform the public schools and then the second step was to denounce all public school teachers, intellectuals and college professors.
Mao never did any of this directly. While he stayed mostly out of sight living in the Forbidden City as a modern emperor, his lieutenants, like Arne Duncan, were responsible to carry out his unwritten orders. You see, Mao never wrote his exact order down so none of what happened in China could be linked directly to him through written evidence.
The result. By 1976, more than 2 million teachers, intellectuals and college professors had committed suicide, the schools hadn’t taught for a decade and literacy had fallen to 20%.
In addition, Teach for America (TFA) sounds frighteningly similar to Mao’s Barefoot Doctors program. Because medical doctors in China were college educated (Many in the US and Europe), they were also denounced and Mao’s lieutenants—the same as Michelle Rhee and her TFA—trained illiterate peasants to become medical doctors and surgeons by having them watch films for a few weeks and then they were sent out to practice medicine for the first time on real humans and cut people open to removed whatever they thought was causing an illness.
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The Humble Origins Of Historical Horrors is one lesson human beings have the worst time learning for good.
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Thanks to poverty, many kids grow up before age six and start school with no love of learning or reading. Instead, they fight learning and hate to read. And when these children refuse to cooperate with the process of education, they aren’t going to learn much beyond how to survive on the streets of a poverty ridden community dominated by violent street gangs—to be clear, the FBI reports that there are more than 38,000 of these street gangs in the US (an illegal growth industry) with more than a million members and they deal in drugs, human sex trafficking of children and adults (an even faster, illegal growth industry), gambling, illegal weapons, etc.
In fact, almost half of violent crime in the US has been linked by the FBI to these gangs.
Many of the 45+ million Americans who live in these pockets of poverty might not belong to these gangs, but if they live in the same communities these gangs operate in, they fear them and are their victims every day. If half of the violent crimes in America are taking place where those 45 million Americans live (out of a total population of 316 million) I think you might imagine how dangerous it is to live there.
Only a total idiot—for instance, G. W. Bush, Obama, Arne Duncan, Bill Gates, etc—would assume that every kid is hungry and able to learn and that only an incompetent teacher would cause learning not to take place.
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There are plenty of students at my kids’ suburban schools who hate school and don’t like to read, too. The difference is that they at least sit still, follow instructions, and allow the teacher to do her job. Lack of basic discipline is the biggest problem at poor schools that holds those kids back.
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You’re right. I taught for most of thirty years in those poverty schools and every day was a battle with one or more students who would rob time from the other students who cooperated to learn what teachers taught.
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There are plenty of kids at my kids’ suburban school who don’t listen and disrupt class. And plenty of parents who ride to their rescue if any hint of discipline is suggested. Not sure your anecdotal post has any relevance. I do think it is true that schools that can screen and expel have a solution to discipline problems. Just 1-2% of the population ruins it for the remaining. But my anecdote is that we lost a great teacher due to a small group of vindictive parents who staged a witch-hunt because their kid was not given a top position in an extra-curricular. Maybe more due process is needed.
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MathVale — Well, that kind of thing certainly happens, no question about it. And yes, some kids at suburban schools are disruptive, too. But the problem is on a whole other level in poor schools. People are robbed and murdered in small towns, but that doesn’t mean the crime problem in Popperville is in any way comparable to what goes on in Detroit.
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I’m actually surprised at how rah rah the PARCC twitter feed and site is. I thought there would be at least a nominal effort to present this as an “experiment”, gathering evidence, working towards a better product. There’s none of that. It’s 100% pom pom waving for the test.
It reads like a wholly commercial marketing push.
Really, really discouraging, considering this IS an experiment.
I’m no scientist, but I don’t think it bodes well for honest evaluation and feedback if
your website only mentions positive anecdotes and promotes 100% positive news in the breathless manner with no mention of any drawbacks 🙂
https://twitter.com/PARCCPlace
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There certainly are teachers who will work for less and volunteer for 700 hours over the year. They are women. It has been widely documented that women consistently agree to work for less and will not negotiate salaries. This may seem stupid at the outset, but savvy women understand that such an act will be penalized as “un-ladylike”.
Women hired as teachers have often studied fuzzy subjects and want to volunteer for good causes. So they have limited employment potential. This kind of women also have fuzzier career goals, so staying in place while earning something is fine with them.
Overall, the action plan is based on a solid appreciation of the teaching market forces.
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You say appreciation, I say exploitation. To-MAY-to, to-MAH-to….
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I love the assumption ed reformers make that charter schools have something to “teach” public schools but it never works the other way.
Both Duncan and Obama repeat this line, and the obvious bias is inherent in the claim. Why would they assume public schools have nothing to teach charter schools? That’s crazy, unless you start out biased against public schools.
I think public schools have a lot to teach charter schools on transparency and accountability for public funds, for example. That seems blatantly obvious at this point. Yet, ed reformers like Obama and Duncan just don’t even imagine this possibility.
I mean, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out they’ve made up their minds and given up on public schools. They can’t even IMAGINE a public school “innovating” or teaching anyone, anything. The possibility is not even raised.
It’s also amazingly arrogant. The privatized system they’re creating is so vastly superior to the system they inherited they can just pitch the old system into the trash, and no value will be lost! It will be all upside! Frankly, it’s delusional.
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What if (heaven forbid!) I believe firing everyone and turning a school on it’s head is a lousy idea? I think (although I’m not an expert) that children generally don’t like constant change and churn. They’re a fairly risk averse bunch, actually, which makes sense because they’re vulnerable in a way that Eli Broad is not.
Do public schools have to learn from this an adopt it? What if it’s a lousy idea?
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The Boston Teachers Union is an AFT affiliate, and their union has been lax in the defense of their city, its children and its schools.
The NEA affiliates in Holyoke and New Bedford have been fighting the churn, but until now our state association, the MTA, has failed to engage. That changed Saturday.
A resolution to examine the grounds for a court challenge to the churnarounds passed overwhelmingly, and Barbara Madeloni was elected president of the MTA.
Boston, come onboard.
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Testing 123?
The Massachusetts Teachers Association voted Saturday to instruct its legal staff to investigate a challenge the churn around of Holyoke and New Bedford in court. They said they could look into that. They’re our legal staff, now.
We elected Barbara Madeloni president of the MTA, an NEA affiliated union. Boston is AFT affiliated. Come on board, brothers and sisters, and lets stop this outrage.
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