Archives for the month of: November, 2015
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Isaac Asimov on the Future of School: “The Fun They Had”

By dianeravitch
November 21, 2015 //
30

Isaac Asimov wrote a short story in the 1950s called “The Fun They Had.” It was about a brother and sister in the year 2157 discussing a rare find: a book. They had never seen a book before. All their learning was at home, on a computer. They didn’t know what a human teacher was. Their mechanical teacher “taught” them and graded their responses.

Margie went into the schoolroom. It was right next to her bedroom, and the mechanical teacher was on and waiting for her. It was always on at the same time every day except Saturday and Sunday, because her mother said little girls learned better if they learned at regular hours.

The screen was lit up, and it said: “Today’s arithmetic lesson is on the addition of proper fractions. Please insert yesterday’s homework in the proper slot.”

Margie did so with a sigh. She was thinking about the old schools they had when her grandfather’s grandfather was a little boy. All the kids from the whole neighborhood came, laughing and shouting in the schoolyard, sitting together in the schoolroom, going home together at the end of the day. They learned the same things, so they could help one another on the homework and talk about it.

And the teachers were people…

The mechanical teacher was flashing on the screen: “When we add the fractions 1/2 and 1/4…”

Margie was thinking about how the kids must have loved it in the old days. She was thinking about the fun they had.

Categories Education Reform

Meet NPE Action Fund’s Successful Candidates

By dianeravitch
November 20, 2015 //
8

The Network for Public Education Action Fund endorsed some fabulous candidates. All are supporters of public education.

 

Four of them won, from sea to shining sea. Open the link to see who they are.

 

We urge friends of public education to run for office as school board members, legislators, and any other post where you can make a difference. We can’t raise money for you, but our endorsement is a signal that you are a true supporter of public education, not a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

 

To learn how to obtain our endorsement, contact Robin Hiller, executive director of the NPE Action Fund at:

 

rhiller@voicesforeducation.org

 

Get active. Help take back public education in your community, city, or state!

Categories Network for Public Education

Washington State Court Turns Down Charters Again

By dianeravitch
November 20, 2015 //
14

The Washington State Supreme Court turned down an appeal from its September ruling that charter schools are not public schools and cannot receive public funding. The vote was 5-4.

Only one charter existed before August 2015, when another 8 opened. Advocates for charters said these new schools were already getting “tremendous results,” even though they opened only three months ago.

As is now customary, charters bussed their students to the state Capitol, in hopes of swaying the decision, but they produced only hundreds of students, not the thousands that appear to pressure legislators where charters are well established. No one asked about the legality or propriety of closing the school for a political rally, a practice that public schools are it permitted to do.

Some background: Washington State has conducted four referenda on whether to permit charters. The first three failed. In 2012, Bill Gates and a handful of other billionaires put $10-15 million behind a new charter law, a sum that overwhelmed the law’s opponents. It passed by a margin of less than 1%.

Charter critics hoped the county’s decision would return the legislature’s attention to another Court decision: adequate funding.

“The court’s announcement Thursday should help refocus the Legislature’s attention on boosting funding for K-12 public schools, said Rich Wood, a spokesman for the statewide teacher’s union that challenged the charter law.

In the case known as McCleary, the Supreme Court has held the Legislature in contempt for its failure to come up with a plan to fully fund basic education by 2018.

“Now it’s time for the Legislature to focus on its paramount duty … and fully fund K-12 schools for all of our state’s kids,” said Wood, of the Washington Education Association. “That’s what we expect lawmakers to do when they return in January.”

Categories Charter Schools, Washington State

Chicago: Facing Doomsday Choices

By dianeravitch
November 20, 2015 //
11

The Chicago public schools have absorbed cuts and layoffs and now faces a new crisis point. With a $500 budget deficit, the city is looking to the state to avoid the loss of thousands of teachers’ jobs.

John Cullerton, a Chicago Democrat and president of the State Senate, has proposed a compromise that the mayor supports, the governor supports, virtually everyone supports….but the Chicago Teachers Union.

He says it will avoid a strike and layoffs.

Why does the union oppose it? The bill eliminates the current funding system without proposing a new one to teplace it.

““Three-eighteen is not about stopping a strike. Three-eighteen is about destroying our school system,” said Stacy Davis Gates, the legislative coordinator for the Chicago Teachers Union.

“Davis Gates is referring there to something Cullerton himself wants the bill to accomplish. Along with peppering Senate Bill 318 with things like a property tax freeze to get Gov. Bruce Rauner in, and teacher pension payments for Emanuel, Cullerton added a remake of the state’s school funding formula–one of his own major goals. He says under the way state government currently gives money to schools, poor districts like Chicago don’t get the money they should and wealthier districts are getting more than they should.

“So Cullerton’s bill puts an expiration date on the current way Illinois funds schools. In effect, he says he wants to end a bad system to make way for a better one. But Davis Gates with the Teachers Union says the union has a big problem with that. You can’t end school funding first coming up with a way to replace it, she argues.

“This bill, again, is irresponsible,” she said. “You cannot say that we are providing a solution to a problem when you eliminate the entire revenue stream to the school district.”

“The teachers union also wants big things that aren’t in Cullerton’s bill, like a new income tax system and an elected Chicago school board. In the meantime, the clock is ticking on Chicago Public Schools. District leaders say they have only a few months before cuts will be necessary – right in the middle of the school year.”

Categories Chicago, Funding

Farewell, NCLB, We Won’t Miss You

By dianeravitch
November 20, 2015 //
41

The House-Senate conference committee overwhelmingly (39-1) endorsed an overhaul of the No Child Left Behind, which was the latest (and worst) revision of the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). The new ESEA, which still must be approved by both houses of Congress, is called the Every Student Succeeds Act.

 

The ESSA limits the federal role, a direct rebuke to Arne Duncan’s belief that he was the national superintendent of schools. The law retains a large chunk of George W. Bush’s legacy, including annual testing, a practice not found in any high-performing nation. The law no longer requires teacher evaluation by test scores.

 

The Republicans wanted to restore state and local control, while the Democrats ironically defended Bush’s accountability emphasis. The outcome is a compromise.

 

Most everyone seems to have forgotten that the original purpose of ESEA was equity for the neediest students, meaning federal dollars to high-poverty schools. Don’t you long for the day when laws were given descriptive titles, rather than aspirational ones? “Every Student Succeeds” is the flip side of “No Child Left Behind.” What was wrong with “the Elementary and Secondary Education Act”?

 

I don’t want to sound cynical, but I’m prepared to wager any sum that 7 years, 10 years, or 15 years from now, no one will say that every student is now succeeding. So long as nearly a quarter of our nation’s children live in poverty, “success” will remain elusive. So long as experienced teachers are underpaid and disrespected, so long as the anti-teacher lobby files lawsuits to strip teachers of their rights, “success”will escape our grasp. So long as jobs continue to be outsourced and eliminated by technology, we must continue to worry about whether and how young people will be motivated to “succeed.”

 

But for the moment, let’s celebrate the demise of a terrible law that saw punishment as the federal strategy for school reform. Let’s celebrate that no future Secretary of Education will have the power to impose his or her flawed ideas on every public school and teacher in the nation. Let’s thank Senator Lamar Alexander and Senator Patty Murray for finally ending a failed and punitive law.

 

 

Categories Education Reform, Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), Equity, NCLB (No Child Left Behind)

EduShyster: Liberty and Justice for a Few

By dianeravitch
November 20, 2015 //
9

EduShyster asks whether charter schools are “progressive.” Would you call the Walton Family Foundation, which hates unions, their biggest financial backer, progressive? Isn’t ALEC, with its model charter legislation, progressive? Would you call charter boosters Governor Scott Walker, Governor Bobby Jindal, Governor Rick Scott, Governor Rick Snyder,and Governor John Kasich, “progressive”?

Charter cheerleaders say they are “saving poor kids from failing schools.” In blue states, they portray themselves as progressive. They don’t bother to explain their strange right-wing bedfellows. They expect us to believe that it is progressive to transfer funding from public schools to privately managed schools.

It is not progressive. It is a classic case of wolf in sheep’s clothing.

EduShyster interviews a venerable civil rights leader in Boston, Mel King, who opposes charters. He says: “If the solution is only meant for a few kids, and all the rest of the kids are left out, where is the liberty and justice for all?”

The reformers’ shining example of charter success is the Edward Brooke school, which posts high test scores.

EduShyster writes:

“Writer Farah Stockman tells the story of the Edward Brooke charter in Mattapan where an all-minority student body posts some of the highest test scores in the city. Stockman skims over the fact that Brooke’s teachers are overwhelmingly white in a city where demands for a more representative teaching force date back decades. She doesn’t mention that minority boys with special needs, who are punished disproportionately in the Boston Public Schools, seem to fare even worse here. Instead, she dwells briefly on the question of whether it matters that a mere 5% of the students at Brooke are still learning English compared to nearly 30% in the Boston Public schools. Stockman concludes that it doesn’t because after all, there are other schools that serve small numbers of English Language Learners. As for what will happen to the rest of those students, she doesn’t bother to say.”

Categories Boston, Charter Schools, Equity

Peter Greene Reviews the Latest Unmemorable Gates Study

By dianeravitch
November 20, 2015 //
9

Peter Greene is selfless. He reads all sorts of blah-blah trivia so we don’t have to.

In this instance, he reviews a study of “personalized learning,” conducted mostly in charter schools. I hope by now you understand that the best kind of personalized learning involves a machine, not a person.

Peter is dismissive but he has a one-liner that will crack you up. My advice: don’t read this while drinking coffee.

Categories Education Reform

Leonie Haimson: Is Closing Schools Good for Students?

By dianeravitch
November 20, 2015 //
10

 

Leonie Haimson is a fearless advocate for students, parents, and public schools. She runs a small but mighty organization called Class Size Matters (I am one of its six board members), she led the fight for student privacy that killed inBloom (the Gates’ data mining agency), and she is a board member of the Network for Public Education. None of these are paid positions. Passion beats profits.

 

In this post on the New York City parent blog, she takes a close look at a new report that lauds the Bloomberg policy of closing public schools as a “reform” strategy. The report was prepared by the Research Alliance at New York University, which was launched with the full cooperation of the by the New York City Department of Education during the Bloomberg years (Joel Klein was a member of its board when it started).

 

Haimson takes strong exception to the report’s central finding–that closing schools is good for students–and she cites a study conducted by the New School for Social Research that reached a different conclusion. (All links are in the post.)

 

Furthermore, she follows the money–who paid for the study: Gates and Ford, then Carnegie. Gates, of course, put many millions into the small schools strategy, and Carnegie employs the leader of the small schools strategy.

 

Haimson writes:

 

“The Research Alliance was founded with $3 million in Gates Foundation funds and is maintained with Carnegie Corporation funding, which help pay for this report. These two foundations promoted and helped subsidize the closing of large schools and their replacement with small schools; although the Gates Foundation has now renounced the efficacy of this policy. Michele Cahill, for many years the Vice President of the Carnegie Corporation, led this effort when she worked at DOE.

 

“The Research Alliance has also been staffed with an abundance of former DOE employees from the Bloomberg era. In the acknowledgements, the author of this new study, Jim Kemple, effusively thanks one such individual, Saskia Levy Thompson:

 

[He wrote:] ‘The author is especially grateful for the innumerable discussions with Saskia Levy Thompson about the broader context of high school reform in New York City over the past decade. Saskia’s extraordinary insights were drawn from her more than 15 years of work with the City’s schools as a practitioner at the Urban Assembly, a Research Fellow at MDRC, a Deputy Chancellor at the Department of Education and Deputy Director for the Research Alliance.’

 

Levy Thompson was Executive Director of the Urban Assembly, which supplied many of the small schools that replaced the large schools, leading to better outcomes according to this report — though one of these schools, the Urban Assembly for Civic Engagement, is now on the Renewal list.

 

After she left Urban Assembly, Levy Thompson joined MDRC as a “Research Fellow,” despite the fact that her LinkedIn profile indicates no relevant academic background or research skills. At MRDC, she “helped lead a study on the effectiveness of NYC’s small high schools,” confirming the efficacy of some of the very schools that she helped start. Here is the first of the controversial MRDC studies she co-authored in 2010, funded by the Gates Foundation, that unsurprisingly found improved outcomes at the small schools. Here is my critique of the follow-up MRDC report.

 

“In 2010, Levy Thompson left MRDC to head the DOE Portfolio Planning office, tasked with creating more small schools and finding space for them within existing buildings, which required that the large schools contract or better yet, close.

 

“And where is she now? Starting Oct. 5, Saskia Levy Thompson now runs the Carnegie Corporation’s Program for “New Designs for Schools and Systems,” under LaVerne Evans Srinivasan, another former DOE Deputy Chancellor from the Bloomberg era Here is the press release from Carnegie’s President, Vartan Gregorian:

 

“‘We are delighted that Saskia, who has played an important role in reforming America’s largest school system, is now joining the outstanding leader of Carnegie Corporation’s Education Program, LaVerne Evans Srinivasan, in overseeing our many investments in U.S. urban education.'”

 

Concludes Haimson:

 

“How cozy! In this way, a revolving door ensures that the very same DOE officials who helped close these schools continue to control the narrative, enabling them to fund — and even staff — the organizations that produce the reports that retroactively justify and help them perpetuate their policies.”

 

 

Categories Accountability, Bloomberg, Michael, Closing schools, Education Industry, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Research

Mike Klonsky Bids Farewell to Rahm’s “Liar-in-Chief”

By dianeravitch
November 19, 2015 //
10

Rahm Emanuel is the leading union-buster of the Democratic party. How a man who served as President Obama’s chief-of-staff became so antagonistic to labor unions is a story that I don’t know. I will wait for a Chicagoan to explain it.

 

Behind the scenes, he has had a lot of help. In this post, Mike Klonsky introduces you to one of Rahm’s most important helpers, who is leaving to make money in the private sector. Not a pretty picture.

Categories Education Reform

What Will Michelle Rhee Do Next?

By dianeravitch
November 19, 2015 //
77

A story in the Sacramento Bee speculates on Michelle Rhee’s future. The reporter, Christoper Cadelago, reviews her meteoric career as chancellor of the D.C. schools, her face on the cover of TIME (and Newsweek), her founding of StudentsFirst, then her decision to step down and devote herself to her husband’s career. Her new husband, Kevin Johnson, had been a superstar in basketball and when they married, was the popular mayor of Sacramento. There was talk that he might be the next governor of California.

 

Alas, the old rumors about sexual improprieties–the superstar and a teen–resurfaced along with a video of the girl being questioned about what the superstar did to her, as well as a new statement by the accuser, now an adult. The timing was not good for Mayor Johnson. ESPN was about to release a heroic film showing how he saved the local basketball team and kept it in Sacramento. ESPN cancelled the showing until it could figure out how to handle the latest uproar.

 

Lately, the story says,  Mrs. Johnson has not been seen much.

 

“Michelle Rhee, the combative former D.C. public schools chancellor who founded the national advocacy group StudentsFirst, has retreated recently from public view.

 

“Rhee, who is married to Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson, was nowhere to be found at the downtown premiere of “Down in the Valley,” the shelved TV movie documenting Johnson’s successful campaign to keep the Kings from moving to Seattle. Rhee hasn’t been seen courtside with Johnson at Kings games.

 

“And she wasn’t by his side when Johnson, stung by the re-emergence of allegations that he molested a teenager, confirmed last month that he wouldn’t seek a third term at City Hall when his expires next year.”

 

The question is: What will Michelle Rhee Johnson do next?

Categories Education Reform
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