Archives for the year of: 2015
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About the New Texas Commissioner of Education: Very Bad News 

By dianeravitch
December 15, 2015 //
12

A reader shares more details about the new Commissioner of Education in Texas. He is deeply embedded in the movement that wants to privatize public schools, make testing the goal of education, and take away teachers’ pensions. 

“It gets worse:

“From San Antonio Express News:

“The news was met with unease and apprehension by leaders of education groups, who said Morath’s appointment continued a troubling trend to weaken the state’s focus on public education while increasing attention on testing and privatization. Advocates of school vouchers, charter schools and more rigorous accountability praised the choice, calling Morath a reformer who would push Texas toward more creative ideas for school improvement….
“Morath was the main supporter of a failed attempt to create the state’s first “home-rule” district, an initiative bankrolled by Houston-based billionaire and former hedge fund manager John Arnold of the Laura and John Arnold Foundation. It would have allowed the district to largely break off from state control, opting out of many of Texas’ accountability and oversight mechanisms…
Morath is on the advisory board of Texans for Education Reform, which has spearheaded much of the state’s focus on charter school expansion, opportunity school districts and other “school choice” initiatives in recent years….”

Categories Education Reform

BREAKING NEWS! Bombshell Report on Dark Money Behind School Privatization in Massachusetts

By dianeravitch
December 15, 2015 //
35

Massachusetts Jobs with Justice released a well-documented report on the dark money behind a shadowy group called “Families for Excellent Schools.” FES is leading the campaign for more charter schools in Massachusetts. Of course, FES flies under a fake flag, because the “families” are not representing the families of Boston or the families that need excellent schools. FES is a gross deception. They are representing hedge fund managers and other wealthy individuals. Their idea of “excellent schools” is Exeter, Andover, Deerfield Academy, Groton, Sidwell Friends, and other elite schools that their own children attend. But these are not the excellent schools they want for the children of Massachusetts; they prefer no-excuses schools, where discipline and uniformity produces higher test scores. In the battle between Eva Moskowitz and Mayor de Blasio over the expansion of the charter sector, FES came up with nearly $10 million to beat the mayor. That’s not the kind of money that one gathers in needy communities, but it is the kind of money one collects with a few phone calls to Wall Street movers and shakers.

 

The JwJ report tears the veil away from FES, revealing where the money comes from. Up until now, it had pretended to be just another grassroots group working for “excellent” schools, and not a hedge fund-front group pushing privatization.

 

The report also revealed that one of the directors of FES is James Peyser, the Massachusetts State Superintendent of Education. This was another shocker. Why should the public official responsible for the maintenance and improvement of public schools serve on the board of an organization dedicated to privatizing public schools. Peyser holds the same position as Horace Mann. He should be embarrassed and the people of Massachusetts should be outraged.

 

Just bear in mind that the push for privatization is occurring in the state that is far and away the best performing state school system in the United States. The expansion of the charter sector will undermine public education and divide communities. FES should be ashamed. Why don’t they take their millions and open health clinics for poor children?

 

 

Categories Billionaires, Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Massachusetts, Privatization

Texas: Governor Appoints Businessman as State Commissioner, Texans React with Concern

By dianeravitch
December 15, 2015 //
6

Pastors for Texas Children is an outstanding group of clergy who strongly support public education.

 

Their executive director, Reverend Charles Foster Johnson issued a statement remarking on Governor Greg Abbott’s appointment of a businessman as State Commissioner of Education and expressing the group’s earnest hope that he would recognize his responsibility to protect the children and to listen to experienced educators. The new commissioner served on the Dallas school board.

 

 

We wish Mike Morath all the best as he assumes the position of Commissioner of the Texas Education Agency. We look forward to working closely with him to ensure quality public education for all 5.2 million schoolchildren entrusted to our social responsibility, and to oppose any attempt to privatize this essential public trust.

 

We stand with our highly qualified, well-trained, and thoroughly experienced educators in Texas and trust their judgment on what is best for our schoolchildren. Education is a sacred servant-calling before God. We are privileged to submit to the authority and expert testimony of our proven educational leaders. We exhort our policymakers to do the same.

 
It is somewhat puzzling that Gov. Abbott would choose as our state educational leader someone from outside the field of public education, who has no formal training as an educator, no classroom experience as an educator, and no direct administrative experience in stewarding and shepherding the education of students. We hardly believe that such an individual could not be found among the 1200 active superintendents of our great state alone, not to mention the thousands more Texans who possess sterling educational credentials. Therefore, as we congratulate our new Commissioner, we invite him to join us in full cooperation with our established educational leaders.

 
We are eager to join Mr. Morath in empowering schoolteachers and school administrators in our 8500 community and neighborhood schools, in advocating for the proper funding of those schools, and in opposing any measure to privatize this public and communal trust. To take a center of learning overseen by the public interest and turn it into a center of profit controlled by private entities is a violation of God’s common good. We have every full expectation that Mr. Morath will join us in the protection of the fundamental provision of universal education for all Texas children by the public and at the public expense.

 

 

*******************************************************************

 

And here is a withering condemnation of this choice by Governor Abbott, written by Donna Garner, a conservative teacher-blogger in Texas:

 

As a conservative, I appreciate Gov. Greg Abbott for the many courageous positions he has taken for Texas; but he really missed it on this one!

 

I cannot think of very many people whom Gov. Greg Abbott could have appointed who would have been a worse choice than Mike Morath as Texas Commissioner of Education. (12.14.15 — Press release- “Gov. Abbott Appoints Mike Morath As Texas Education Commissioner — http://gov.texas.gov/news/appointment/21773 )

 

Mike Morath is supporting almost everything bad in education – the same Type #2 philosophy of education that opens the door to subjective, digitized curriculum and assessments found in Common Core/CSCOPE; the same “innovative” school model pushed by TASB and TASA with their 21st century transformational “visioning” approach to education; and the greedy consultants, lobbyists, and vendors who make a fortune off education’s “Golden Goose” of public dollars.

 

Gov. Abbott had previously appointed Mike Morath as the chairman of the Texas Commission on Next Generation Assessments and Accountability (NGAA). It seems clear to me that the purpose of this commission is to recommend to the Texas Legislature that they replace the traditional public school classroom (where teachers teach fact-based curriculum directly and systematically while face-to-face with their students) WITH the 21st century transformational model where students receive all their instruction through digitized curriculum. Grading is done through subjective assessments (e.g., portfolios, projects, group work); and curriculum focuses on students’ feelings, emotions, and opinions – not on hard facts with right-or-wrong answers. Students graduate through online and dual credit courses with wishy-washy accountability standards and unsecure testing procedures.

 

Obviously if Mike Morath was chosen as the chair of this NGAA commission, he intends to implement this same Type #2 philosophy across Texas as the newly appointed Commissioner of Education.

 

America has hundreds of years of historical data to prove that the traditional Type #1 philosophy of education produces success. Americans became the leader of the world because of the many scientists, inventors, technicians, entrepreneurs, engineers, writers, historians, and businessmen who used their Type #1 education to elevate themselves to great heights. They were educated on a Big Chief Tablet.

 

Where is the proof that the Type #2 digitized “global citizen of the world” approach will make America great? In fact, there is no long-term, independent, peer-reviewed research to prove that that method of education works.

 

 

Categories Administrators, superintendents, Texas

John Thompson: A Closer Look at the “Success” in D.C. That Wasn’t

By dianeravitch
December 15, 2015 //
8

John Thompson knows that reformers point to the District of Columbia as one of their examples of success. After all, the district has been controlled by Teach for America alumnae Michelle Rhee and Kaya Henderson since 2007. They own whatever successes and not-successes that occurred over the past eight years. The centerpiece of their claims of success is NAEP scores, which are up.

 

In this post, Thompson identifies the flaws in the narrative of success. Thompson lauds John Merrow for critiquing the narrative of a district he once held up as an exemplar of successful reform. Merrow asked, in his post, why anyone was celebrating Kaya Henderson’s five-year anniversary in the wake of the disastrous scores on the Common Core PARCC tests, which showed a district where academic performance was dismal.

 

Thompson reviews the NAEP scores, using Rick Hess’s data.

 

Hess cites overall gains in NAEP growth under Rhee and Henderson, but those same NAEP studies actually support the common sense conclusion that the numbers reflect gentrification. Hess’s charts show that from 2005 to 2013, the percentage of D.C. students who are low-income dropped from 66% to 61.6%. (In my world, a 61.6% low-income urban school seems danged-near rich.) Per student spending increased by 40% during that time. (The new spending, alone, comes close to the total per student spending in my 90% low-income system.)

 

According to Hess’s chart, the percentage of the D.C. students who are black dropped by 1/8th from 2005 to 2013, and the percentage of students with disabilities dropped by 1/7th. And, the 2015 NAEP excluded as many as 44% of D.C.’s English Language Learners. The conservative reformer RiShawn Biddle calls that exclusion “massive and unacceptable test-cheating.”

 

Even so, as Merrow reminds us, the performance gap between low-income and more affluent students has grown even wider; for instance, from 2002 to 2015, the 8th grade reading performance gap grew from 17 to 48 points.

 

Before Rhee/Henderson, the growth in D.C. test scores was spread much more widely. Because I believe that 8th grade reading is the most important NAEP metric in terms of evaluating school performance, I will cite some of those metrics in support of Merrow. From 1998 to 2002, black 8th grade reading scores increased from an average of 233 to 238. By 2015, they were down to 236. From 1998 to 2002, average 8th grade reading scores for low-income students increased from 229 to 233. In 2015, they remained at 233.

 

Thompson says it is sad that the elites now re-engineering public education are utterly disconnected from the lives and realities of the children who attend those schools or the people who teach in them. They need a reality check, or maybe a course in sociocultural sensitivity training so that they stop stepping on the faces of children and adults whose lives they know nothing about.

 

 

Categories Billionaires, Common Core, District of Columbia, Education Reform, NAEP, Testing

The Shadow Chancellor of the D.C. Public Schools

By dianeravitch
December 15, 2015 //
21

Some people think that Kaya Henderson is the Chancellor of the D.C. public schools. Think again. The real chancellor is a very wealthy woman named Katherine Bradley. She is married to a media mogul (The Atlantic), and she is very very interested in the public schools. She is quite certain she knows how to fix them. She works closely with the Gates Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, and the Graham family that used to own the Washington Post. She is a power in D.C. politics. All decisions about the future of the schools must be cleared by her. You know by now that she believes in free-markets and privatization.

 

Katherine Bradley is a symbol of the erosion of democracy in our society. She has no obvious qualifications to make decisions about the future of public education. Being rich is not a qualification. I don’t know for sure, but I would wager that she didn’t go to public school, never taught in public school, and has never had a child in public school. So why is she the shadow chancellor? Why do her wishes decide the fate of a public institution?

 

A group called Empower DC sued to block the closure of D.C. public schools. Their request was rejected by a judge, but they were nonetheless able to obtain thousands of emails about the closures. Katherine Bradley pops up often in the correspondence.

 

This is one of the emails that was released:

 

“The bottom line is that overall there was not a huge difference performance change between students in schools which closed and all other students. The small difference there was was actually negative, so it’s probably just better to avoid this angle if it does come up.”
— Greg Garrison, DCPS Deputy Chief, Office of Data and Accountability (former) to Peter Weber, DCPS Chief of Strategy (November 7, 2012 – Bates # 014934)

Categories Charter Schools, District of Columbia, Education Reform, Privatization

North Carolina: The End of Public Education?

By dianeravitch
December 15, 2015 //
3

Lindsay Wagner describes the devastation of public education in North Carolina, once the most progressive state in the south. No more.

 

Since the Republican sweep of the Legislature in 2010 and the governorship in 2012, public schools have been set up for demolition, and replaced by unaccountable charters, vouchers, and virtual charters.

 

Since taking charge in Raleigh, conservative lawmakers have been steering public dollars into a range of alternatives to traditional public schools that march under the banner of “school choice.”
Beginning as a trickle, but with the potential to become a flood, spending is growing for vouchers to pay tuition at private and religious schools; an expanded roster of charter schools run by for-profit companies; and two virtual charter schools operated by a scandal-plagued company.

 

Meanwhile, those same legislators are squeezing conventional K-12 schools with budgets that place North Carolina near the bottom of national rankings for teacher pay and per-pupil spending. A central rationale for providing these alternatives is that traditional schools fall short in educating children from low-income households and communities, children of color and children with special needs.

 

But even as they cite end-of-grade test results and other data to demonstrate the shortcomings of conventional schools, the legislators are requiring no such accountability from voucher programs and charters. So far, there is no evidence that at-risk children fare better on average in the alternative settings and an abundance of anecdotal examples in which they are clearly worse off.

 

Join the Network for Public Education in Raleigh, North Carolina, when we convene April 16-17. Our keynote speakers include Rev. William Barber, the great civil rights leader and founder of Moral Mondays, and Bob Herbert, former columnist for the New York Times and author of Losing Our Way.

Categories Education Reform

Things Are Not Going So Well for the Privatizers

By dianeravitch
December 15, 2015 //
66

It is true that they have a lot of money–Gates, Broad, Walton, Dell, Wasserman, Arnold, Helmsley, and about two dozen other foundations. Maybe more. And they have the U.S. Department of Education. But none of their big ideas is working. Study after study shows that charters on average do not produce higher test scores than public schools; many are far worse than even the lowest-performing public schools. New Orleans is just so much hype and spin. The Tennessee “Achievement School District” is far from reaching its ambitious goals; it may never meet them. More hype and spin. Vouchers put kids into religious schools without certified teachers, where they will learn the religious version of history and science. Does anyone think that moving more students into religious schools to study creationism is a winning strategy for the 21st century? The latest study from CREDO shows that online charters are a disaster and kids actually make no progress at all in math in a year of “instruction.”

 

Then there is the big bet on teacher evaluation by test scores. It has fallen flat everywhere. No one can say with assurance that the test scores weed out bad teachers and identify the best. Mostly, the test scores identify who is in the class. Gates showered hundreds of millions of dollars on a handful of districts to prove his pet theory, but thus far there is no proof. One of the Gates’ favored districts, where he pledged $100 million to try out his pet ideas, Hillsborough County in Florida (Tampa), abandoned the project after realizing that it was draining the district’s reserves with nothing to show for it (Gates eventually put up $80 million, but the evaluation plan cost about $250 million). The American Statistical Association warned against the use of value-added scores to rate individual teachers, as did the American Educational Research Association. VAM is dead man walking.

 

The Common Core standards were supposed to be the mechanism to standardize all of American education: The standards were supposed to align curriculum, instruction, assessment, teacher education, professional development, technology, and textbooks. Bill Gates boldly proclaimed that common standards were like a common electrical system, but children are not toasters, and teachers are not robots. States are backing out of the testing, and a few have rebranded the Common Core because the “brand” is toxic. However the Common Core shakes out, it will not be the basis for national standards and national tests. It will not create a single marketplace for vendors of products, as its sponsors hoped. Some will use it, some won’t. No one knows what part of this Grand Experiment will survive. The big gamble on stitching U.S. education into a seamless garment that was standardized from sea to sea has already failed. Some states will continue to use the Common Core standards, others will not. Most states have dropped out of the two federally-funded tests, PARCC and Smarter Balanced.

 

And oh my goodness! Where are all those reformer stars of yesteryear? The debut year of 2010, when they launched with “Waiting for Superman” to a breathless media, seems long, long ago.

 

Michelle Rhee has stepped away from the national stage, into apparent obscurity, even though her organization continues to fund rightwing anti-public school state-level candidates (and her book bombed).

 

Wendy Kopp has gone into seclusion, running TFA international, while her  heirs continue to manage TFA here. As more and more ex-TFA go public with their critiques, the bloom is off the rose. TFA recruitment has fallen by 25-30%, because all that teacher-bashing unleashed by the reformers hurt TFA as well as every legitimate teacher preparatory institution. Is there anyone who still believes that children need inexperienced teachers who will be gone in a little while?

 

Joel Klein went to work for Rupert Murdoch, selling technology for schools; his division, called Amplify, accumulated hundreds of millions of dollars in losses, because its tablets and chargers melt or break (his book bombed, too). After Amplify had lost over $500 million, Murdoch sold it to the highest bidder (Joel Klein and friends). The bid may have been $1.

 

Geoffrey Canada, the superman of the privatization movement, retired from the Harlem Children’s Zone and now apparently spends his time lecturing about the glories of privately managed charters, although few have or ever will have the resources of HCZ or two billionaires on the board to make sure that every class is no larger than 15 with two teachers, that every student gets personal tutoring, that every student gets free medical care, and that prizes for performance include trips to Disneyland and even the Galapagos. Other charters–and public schools–can only dream about that kind of financial largesse.

 

Tony Bennett, the state superintendent in Indiana, once acclaimed by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute as the reformiest of all the reformers, was beaten in 2012 by Glenda Ritz; Bennett then became state chief in Florida, where he quickly resigned when news broke about a grade-changing scandal to benefit a campaign contributor and charter school founder during his tenure in Indiana.

 

Kevin Huffman resigned from the state superintendent’s job in Tennessee.

 

John White, the state superintendent in Louisiana, soldiers on, but his future is in doubt since Louisianans elected a Democratic governor who declared that he wants to get rid of White.

 

Deborah Gist, hailed as a national leader for mass firings at the high school in Central Falls in 2010, was not reappointed as state superintendent in Rhode Island and is now superintendent of schools in Tulsa.

 

John Covington abruptly resigned from the floundering Educational Achievement Authority in Michigan, which has been mired in scandal and produced no results for the students.

 

Cami Anderson resigned in Newark.

 

Mike Miles resigned in Dallas.

 

The Broad Superintendents Academy used to post on its website the names, photos, and bios of their “graduates, to show their significant roles, but that page has not appeared since 2011, probably because so many of the “stars” have been fired or resigned.

 

Arne Duncan is leaving the U.S. Department of Education. The new “Every Student Succeeds Act” strips future Secretaries of Education of any authority to tell districts or states what to do. His major legacy has been a bipartisan loss of confidence in the federal Department of Education to address the needs of American education. His successor, John King, inherits the bully pulpit and a much diminished role under the new Every Student Succceds Act.

 

Janet Barresi, the state chief in Oklahoma who was both a dentist and charter school founder, was beaten by Joy Hofheimer, a Republican who strongly supports public education.

 

Eva Moskowitz is going strong, having crushed Mayor Bill de Blasio and having a firm grip on Governor Cuomo. Her reputation took a hit when John Merrow showed on national television that she believes in suspending five- and six-year-olds.

 

Jeb Bush, the puppet master of corporate reform, is faltering in single digits in his quest for the Republican nomination for president.

 

Hanna Skandera hangs on as State Superintendent in New Mexico, despite her lack of teaching credentials (which state law requires), but a state judge struck down her punitive use of VAM to fire teachers.

 

Not an impressive track record. The stars and celebrities of corporate reform have faded, and no one with star power has come to the fore to take their places. How many are on the bench? Many states remain in the grip of privatizers bent on destroying public education, starving it of funding while demanding higher performance. Think Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, Florida, Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, North Carolina, Georgia, Louisiana. Did I forget some others? Yet in all of these states, there is a growing resistance to the privatizers.

 

I don’t mean to imply that the corporate reform movement is on its last legs. It isn’t. As long as there are hedge fund managers and other billionaires ready and willing to fund efforts to privatize public education and to de-professionalize teaching, there will be people ready to do their bidding. The hedge fund managers and billionaires aren’t going away. But they may get tired of losing. They may find that it is no longer fun. They say they care about results. They say they are data-driven. If they are, there will come a time when they stop funding failure. How embarrassing it would be for them if students from the Newark Student Union or Journey for Justice or other grassroots groups picketed their homes or offices and discredited their claims that they are civil rights leaders.

 

In the meanwhile, across the nation, teachers keep doing their jobs every day, doing the work that the reformers do not appreciate and could not do themselves. This will be a long struggle, but in the end the reformers and their movement will fade away. The annual PDK-Gallup poll shows that the American public has little confidence in public schools (thanks, reformers, for 30 years of defamation of public education!). But the same poll shows that parents hold their own public school and their own teachers in high esteem. Reformers think that parents don’t know how bad their schools really are, but parents know their local public schools better than the reformers do; they know their principal and the teachers. They don’t want to close them or turn them over to a charter chain.

 

It is best to be on the side of children and their families, not on the side that attempts to use children as political pawns and to set children against their teachers. “Corporate reform” is a mean-spirited venture that has spread disruption in the schools and disruption in the lives of children and their teachers. Some of its backers are there because of their worship of the free market; some are enjoying the novelty of being on the board of a school, “their” school; some are in it for profit, making money from charter leases or technology; some are naive innocents, not aware that they are in league with the anti-union, anti-worker Walton Family of billionaires, ALEC, and the rogues’  gallery of rightwing governors.

 

The corporate reformers think that disruption is good. But disruption is not good for children or schools. The corporate reformers think that choice will improve education. It doesn’t, and it hasn’t. It turns parents into consumers, not citizens. It undermines any sense of responsibility for the common good. And it will not prevail.

 

 

 

Categories Corporate Reform, Education Reform

California Teachers Planning to Visit K12.Inc Shareholders Meeting in DC

By dianeravitch
December 14, 2015 //
8

The latest report from the Stanford-based CREDO research group found that online charters deliver a poor education. Students in online charters lose 42 days of reading in a year, and 180 days of instruction in math. Zilch. K12, Inc. is the largest of the online charter chains. It was founded by the Milken brothers, Michael and Lowell. It is listed on the New York Stock Exchange.

 

****************

MEDIA ADVISORY
California Teachers Association/NEA December 14, 2015
1705 Murchison Drive
Burlingame, CA 94010
http://www.cta.org

Contacts: Claudia Briggs at 916-296-4087 or Mike Myslinski at 408-921-5769.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Dec. 15 Media Conference Call to Discuss Educators’
Struggle in One of Nation’s Largest Online Charter Schools to Address Major Issues Impacting 15,000 Students
California Educators to Deliver Report Card of Straight Fs
at Dec. 16 Washington, D.C. Shareholders Meeting

 

***Tuesday, December 15, 2015***

 

BURLINGAME – More than 750 educators at the Simi Valley-based California Virtual Academies (CAVA) have been seeking a stronger voice in improving working conditions and student learning for 15,000 students. The recent Public Employment Relations Board decision declaring the California Teachers Association as the exclusive bargaining agent comes at a critical time and promises to provide momentum for the teachers’ on-going efforts to make their online school more responsive to the needs of their students.

 
Concerned CAVA teachers have been calling for improvements at their school for years. In March 2015 they shared their experiences in an in-depth study of CAVA released by the “In the Public Interest” group that called for better oversight of the school. In June they filed complaints with school districts that authorized CAVA charters throughout California in an effort to protect students. Recently, new research from Stanford University and the University of Washington came out reinforcing many of the concerns CAVA teachers have voiced.

 

WHO: Educators at California’s largest virtual charter school will discuss in a Tuesday, Dec. 15, media conference call why their colleagues plan to deliver a report card with Straight Fs the next day at the annual shareholders meeting in Washington, D.C. of the controversial Virginia-based K12 Inc., a for-profit education company providing management services and curriculum to CAVA.

 

WHEN: Conference call is at 1 p.m. PST/ 4 p.m. EST on Tuesday, Dec. 15.

 

SPEAKERS: Eric Heins, president of the California Teachers Association; teachers working to improve California Virtual Academies.

 

MEDIA CALL-IN INFORMATION:
Media should call toll-free 1-888-505-4368 to get on the teleconference. The password code is 4500878.

 

WASHINGTON, D.C. EVENT: California CAVA teachers will be educating shareholders of K12 Inc. at their annual meeting and will be joined by other concerned supporters. The event starts at 9:30 a.m. EST Wednesday, Dec. 16, at the law offices of Latham & Watkins LLP, 555 Eleventh Street, NW, Suite 1000, Washington, D.C., 20004.
###

Categories California, Education Reform, K12 Inc., Virtual Charter Schools

Will Cuomo Support a Democrat for State Senate?

By dianeravitch
December 14, 2015 //
11

This seems like a strange question, but it is real. The political buzz around New York is the question of whether the Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo will support a Democrat running for election to take the place of former State Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos, a Republican, who was convicted of various financial crimes.

 

Skelos represented a majority-Democratic district in Long Island, and his seat is up for grabs. Will Cuomo support a Democrat? The Governor has had more power by working with a Republican-dominated State Senate, which agrees with him about keeping taxes low for the rich and for corporations.

 

When the Working Families Party appeared about to endorse insurgent Zephyr Teachout, Cuomo changed the party’s mind by pledging to help elect Democrats to the State Senate, where progressive legislation goes to die. He won the WFP nomination, but he didn’t work to elect Democrats to the State Senate.

 

Once again, the Governor will have a chance to show whether he prefers a Democratic-controlled State Senate or a Republican-controlled State Senate.

Categories Cuomo, Andrew, Democrats, New York, Politics

CTU: Only Two Certified Librarians Left at Virtually All African-American High Schools in Chicago

By dianeravitch
December 14, 2015 //
6

When Jeb Bush’s Foundation for Educational Excellence expresses outrage, it should direct its outrage towards the budget cuts that have gutted necessary services for the students in Chicago, not at the teachers’ union that is fighting for the restoration of services. Patricia Levesque, if you were a high school teacher, wouldn’t you go on strike if your students didn’t have a librarian in their school? Wouldn’t you demand a restoration of budget cuts that took away most of the city’s librarians?

 

This press release came with graphics, which I did not include. The graphics show a dramatic contrast between schools that are majority African-American, and schools that are not, in terms of their having a certified librarian. The higher the percentage of black students, the less likely is the school to have a certified librarian. For example, 75% of the schools where the enrollment is less than 50% African-American have a certified librarian; 16% of the schools with a student body that is 50-90% African-American have a certified librarian; only 9% of the schools that are 90% or more African-American have a certified librarian. Contact Stephanie Gadlin if you want to see the graphics.

 

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE CONTACT: Stephanie Gadlin
December 14, 2015 312/329-6250
StephanieGadlin@ctulocal1.com

 

 

A CTU SPECIAL REPORT:

 

 

Just two certified librarians left at virtually all African-American CPS high schools

 

 

By Chicago Teachers Union Researcher Pavlyn Jankov, with assistance
from the CTU Librarians Committee

 

CHICAGO – For the last several years the CTU and the CTU Librarians Committee have been documenting the loss of professionally staffed libraries from district schools. The district’s failure to provide adequate funding has led to position closures, shifted librarians into classroom positions and left in disuse libraries that have been painstakingly built and supplied by their teachers. Constant funding precarity has also pushed out experienced and veteran librarians to seek other opportunities.

 

In 2012, 67 out of 97 schools had a dedicated certified teacher staffed as a librarian. After three years, half those high school librarians lost their positions or left their schools. This year, the proportion is reversed with just a third of all high schools having a librarian.

 

With the district’s implementation of student-based budgeting alongside deep budget cuts, and its continued reckless expansion of charter schools, CPS’ lack of support for neighborhood schools has led to enrollment losses and severe budget cuts across high schools. Segregated Black schools on the South and West sides have been hit especially hard, and when it comes to access to school libraries, the disparity has become startling.

 

The number of librarians staffed at high schools with a student population greater than 90% African American with a librarian on staff has dropped 84%, from 19 schools in 2012 to just 2 this year, at Chicago Vocational Career Academy, and Morgan Park High School. Across the 46 high schools with a majority African American student population, just 15% have librarians, and across the 28 high schools with an African American student population above 90%, just 7% do. In comparison, the dismal rate of librarian access across all CPS high schools is 32%. Such a deep disparity did not exist several years ago. In the 2012-2103 school year, 61% of high schools with a majority of African American students had a certified librarian on staff, compared to 69% across all district high schools.

 

LIBRARIANS RE-ASSIGNED TO FILL TEACHER SHORTAGE

 

Some schools that have library rooms without librarians actually still have librarians – but they are assigned as full-time classroom teachers. In 2013, 58 librarians were shifted into non-librarian positions. A librarian at a southwest-side high school reports that while her school has had a vibrant and collaborative library program that circulated over 9,000 books to students last year, her duties now include teaching several English classes. However, she felt lucky, as she has had an assistant, and managed to keep the library going with funding and grants.

 

Librarians are indispensable to not just students, but to fellow educators. Coworkers of Ms. Tamela Chambers, a librarian at CVCA – one of the few remaining librarians in a south-side neighborhood high school, described how invaluable it is to work with her: “We continue to challenge each other with projects that stretch our creativity. Working with Ms. Chambers literally leaves me ‘jumping at the bit’. I can’t wait to finish one project so that I can get into the next one.” At CVCA, they have collaborated over student projects for newscasts, documentaries presented at the Chicago Metro History Fair, service learning projects, children’s books on food deserts, collecting songs for use in AP U.S. History. Facilitating such projects are so important, Tamela said, because “libraries bridge the gap between academia and personal interests; a crucial connection that makes learning meaningful and relevant”.

 

Records indicate that CVCA has had a certified-librarian staffed for at least the last 15 years, a duration that many other south side high schools also shared until the last several years of budget cuts. This week, the librarian at DHW, housed at the DuSable school campus along with Bronzeville Scholastic Academy and the Dusable Leadership Academy, was notified that her position was closing. With the closure of the DuSable Library, a library that has been in continuous existence since the start of the historic DuSable school, the district shuts down the only functioning library staffed with a fully-certified librarian in a Bronzeville neighborhood high school. Sara Sayigh, the veteran librarian who received the layoff notice, explains the historic importance of school libraries: “Since 1936, DuSable has always had a librarian and during most of the time, more than one. This historic Black school is the alma mater of Harold Washington, Nat King Cole, Ella Jenkins, Timuel Black and many, many others. The library in this school always has given a sense of community to the building and it still does today. When you remove a librarian, you remove an entire service, and take something essential away from the whole building. At my school, it’s connected to the sense of the greater community.”

 

BY THE BOOK: CPS IS BROKE ON PURPOSE

 

Total funding for libraries across district schools has shrunk again this year, down to just $24 million, a cut of 20% from last year’s $30 million. The precarity of the CPS budget constantly weighs on teachers. K.C. Boyd, a veteran and celebrated certified librarian formerly at Phillips Academy left CPS this past summer to run the libraries program across the East St Louis school district. In CPS she faced a situation familiar to many veteran educators of subjects that are not considered by central office as core curriculum with dedicated funding – annual uncertainty of a continued position. She said “I had experienced a position closing on me in 2009 and vowed that I would never go through that again… This was a painful decision because this was the first high school library I was assigned, I had re-built the library from scratch, developed an awesome collection through grants and donations and turned non-readers at Phillips into readers.”

 

K.C. was one of several Chi School Librarians activists who met with former CPS CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett last year to advocate for library funding and more teacher representation in curriculum development. She recounted how at the end of the meeting, it was apparent that CPS was not committed to their library programs: “Dr. Byrd-Bennett said that the projected figures for next school year looked grim along with our positions. She paused and looked all of us sitting at the table in the eye when she said that. I caught that message loud and clear.”

 

K.C. is happy in her new role managing and re-building a library program for East St. Louis schools, and she expressed concern that CPS has not prioritized libraries, especially in communities that have suffered disinvestment: “I think it is appalling that the south side of Chicago, in particular greater Bronzeville, the home of the Black Migration from the South has so few sitting certified librarians.”

 

The Chicago Teachers Union is committed to fighting for sustainable resources for CPS, for the district to re-prioritize our neighborhood high schools, and for dedicated funding for a certified librarian at every school.

Categories Budget Cuts, Chicago, Education Reform, Funding, Libraries
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