Paul Thomas, professor at Furman University in South Carolina and former high school teacher, warns of the risks of relying on standards and accountability to fix poverty.
South Carolina has families trapped in generational poverty. This is no secret or new discovery. What do policymakers propose: tougher standards and accountability, and school takeovers. They tell themselves and the public that the New Orleans Recovery Dchool District and the Tennessee Achievement District is the answer to poverty, although there is no evidence to back their assertion.
In effect, accountability is a hoax, a scam, a swindle. It is a 3-card Monte game. It diverts our attention from what must be done. It is a quick fix that fixes nothing.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Standards and accountability will eliminate poverty in exactly the same way that stylish hospital robes will cure cancer.
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“Robes that Tie in Back”
Robes that tie in back
That make you feel exposed
Are meant to hold you back
From questioning the clothed
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High stakes tests designed to rank and punish that are linked to standards and accountability are not even a quick fix or long term fix or a fix of any kind. All this agenda does is profit, with public money, the private sector corporations that sell these fake education products.
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YES. Why do any of us keep pretending that an outside testing of any kind continues to have value? The Emperor is entirely naked: there is no value. It is ALL “fake” educational product. Mixing metaphors, there is only that little guy behind the curtain, pulling levers and making a big noise.
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The first mistake is believing that education solves poverty. That mistake has been perpetuated since The Great Society began. It’s time for a change, and I don’t mean a third term for the President.
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I agree that education doesn’t solve poverty but a quality education helps a child who grows up to escape poverty.
But first, the child has to want that education, cooperate with teachers and work hard to learn. Some would allege that support from parents is crucial, but I’ve known a rare few students who earned an education on their own and escaped poverty on their own without any parental support.
Even the greatest, most fantastic teachers can’t teach a child without parental support and/or a child that refuses to learn.
You can present someone with an opportunity, but you cannot force him or her to take advantage of it — this age old wisdom has been deliberately ignored by the corporate public education demolition derby. They have to ignore it or they could not rob from the public 99% and turn that money over to the richest 1%.
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Education is a route out of poverty.
Accountability does not solve poverty.
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Education can be a route out of mental poverty, or poverty of the spirit, simply through the act of becoming educated. In order for education to be a route out of fiscal poverty, it has to be coupled with the opportunity for the educated person to obtain, and keep, a job that pays a reasonable wage. The powers that are attempting to ignore child poverty are often the same powers trying to suppress wages, move jobs overseas to cheaper labor sources, dismantle rights to collective bargaining, and destroy the social safety net that allows working middle class and low income families to acquire wealth (rather than having to hoard assets against potential medical or other calamity, or risk total loss of assets).
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Our School District of Palm Beach County has a new Superintendent as of last June.
We are embarking on a “Five-Year Strategic Plan” to promote excellence in our schools. The plan calls for, among other things, recruitment, development and retention of high-quality teachers, and improve learning outcomes for all of our students, not just some.
I gave a talk about these topics at a recent School Board meeting.
“Our School District’s 5-Year Strategic Plan, from the perspective of a teacher, and from the perspective of what’s best for our children and our students.”
https://youtu.be/EBIK1rh7hvU
Transcript:
Good afternoon. My name is Andy Goldstein. I’m a teacher at Omni Middle School and the proud parent of a seven-year-old daughter who attends second grade at one of our public elementary schools.
Our District’s five-year-strategic plan is an opportunity to embark upon a new beginning. And beginnings are very special. Beginnings are an opportunity to hope and to dream, and to dream big. And then make the commitment to make them happen.
I want to talk about our District’s strategic plan from the perspective of being a teacher, and from the perspective of what’s best for our children and our students.
The strategic plan identifies a Vision and Mission, stating, “What do we aspire to achieve? The school District of Palm Beach envisions a dynamic collaborative multicultural community where education and lifelong learning are valued and supported, and all learners reach their highest potential and succeed in the global economy.”
As I teacher, when I read that, I think, “We teachers are also learners and lifelong learners and we model the learning process for our students, and we’re part of the global economy. And yet for those of us who have committed to staying in the classroom, our District has punished us—making sure it has kept us at or near a beginning teacher salary, even those of us in mid-career at 14 or 15 years. We teachers are not succeeding in the global economy.
One way the Strategic Plan says we achieve our aspirations is through a strategic theme of talent development–recruiting, developing and maintaining highly effective talent to implement a world class education. But how is this possible when our District actively works at keeping our teacher salaries as low as possible? For those who have made the commitment to stay in the classroom and work with our children, our District has made sure that we and our families have been punished monetarily. As one teacher said, “If you want a world class education for our students, you need to pay a world class salary for our teachers.” The Strategic Plan calls for differing compensation systems, pathways of higher pay, career ladders, for so-called “lead teachers” that will teach other teachers. But our District needs to have an effective salary structure that rewards the teacher who stays in the classroom teaching. Not make them jump through a plethora of additional hoops for additional pay. Our District needs to value the teacher teaching in the classroom.
And finally, what’s best for our children? Our strategic plan’s aspiration calls for where all learners reach their highest potential and succeed in the global economy. Our global economy shows us that everything is interconnected. And it’s not possible for our children to reach this aspiration without addressing the elephant in the room—that of child poverty. Our country has the highest child poverty rate of any major industrialized county in the world. More than one out of every five children live in poverty. Education and poverty are inextricably interwoven. Martin Luther King said that to improve the outcomes, of education, abolish poverty.
Superintendent Dr. Avossa has said that to improve the learning outcomes for all of our children, not just some, we need to involve all of our stakeholders and all of our community.
I ask that our District dream big with this Strategic plan and work with all stakeholders, locally and nationally, toward the abolishment of all child poverty in Palm Beach County so that all of our children can learn.
Thank you.
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Accountability, as currently presented, is a farce. It is a setup designed to force kids into a small box full of word games and math riddles.
Having said that we must assure parents and the overall community that schools are serving their children well. For those who wish to read my plan, here it is. http://savingstudents-caplee.blogspot.com/2013/12/accountability-with-honor-and-yes-we.html Thanks for reading
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Question: There’s no doubt that education can be a route out of poverty for *individuals*, but can this possibly be true for an entire segment of society? It assumes that there are a lot of jobs that are going unfilled, just waiting for those with the right education credentials, but I think this is untrue. More likely, give someone a college degree and he’ll just take a job away from someone else with lesser education achievement. Same poverty, different people.
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Since 1993 many promises and one school has been rebuilt.
Read and you decide if HRC is just one more politician doing what they do well, making promises.
From The Guardian
Hillary Clinton confronts the past in South Carolina ‘corridor of shame’
Clinton is promising a partnership with officials that would provide investment to ‘lift up’ impoverished parts of the state – a plan warmly met by voters
Hillary Clinton South Carolina schools
The 1896 building of JV Martin Junior High School Obama visited in 2008 has since been donated to the local historical society.
Eight years ago, the man who would go on to be the first black president came to this decrepit school in rural black South Carolina with a promise to change things. He did. The 1896 building he visited, where the elevators didn’t work, the heating was inadequate and a roofs leaked, has been donated to the local historical society, and a slick new junior high school of gleaming brick has been built five minutes down the road. Better teachers and test scores followed, but the work statewide is far from finished.
If Hillary Clinton is sworn into office next January, her path to the White House will have run through the so-called “corridor of shame”, a stretch of impoverished, largely black school districts running along Interstate 95. The school Barack Obama visited in 2008, JV Martin junior high school, is but one. As she vies with Bernie Sanders for minority voters, Clinton has put the strife of such poor minority communities front and center in her campaign, speaking with civil rights leaders, meeting with younger activists and visiting Flint, Michigan, in the wake of the predominantly black city’s water crisis.
While some residents have voiced skepticism about Clinton’s devotion to their interests, expressed as it is in the middle of a surprisingly close Democratic primary, South Carolinians have welcomed her message. In their state, economic inequality stems from a history of racial inequality, rather than the other way around, as Sanders’ team often argues.
The question for many voters here, as Clinton appears poised to clinch her party’s nomination, is whether she’ll follow through on promises to the underprivileged communities like Dillon empowering her.
In one of Clinton’s very first visits to the state since her 2008 campaign, she pledged the “corridor of shame” would become a “corridor of opportunity” under her presidency. Earlier this month, she visited a school that runs along the corridor, Denmark-Olar elementary school. Since then she’s spoken of the experience along the trail, for instance in Kingstree this week.
“Parts of it are not usable because the walls are crumbling,” she told the audience of the school on Thursday. “And that’s where we send our children?”
Clinton promised a partnership with state officials that would provide investment to “lift up this part of South Carolina” – a promise warmly met by voters at the event. Apostle William Dunmore, the 65-year-old dean of the Kingstree Christian Academy, praised Clinton’s “long history of helping minorities”.
Mariah Chatman, a 56-year-old public school teacher, was similarly enthused: “People who enter politics, they need to care about people and she really cares!”
Still, the portion of Clinton’s speech dedicated to “the corridor” was given just a few minutes of airtime in a longer speech. And some feel the positive messages whitewash entrenched problems.
Bud Ferillo, a former state deputy lieutenant governor and the director of a documentary on the issue, was underwhelmed.
“She’s late to the subject in South Carolina, but I take any support for our rural schools from anybody at anytime,” he said from his office on the campus of the University of South Carolina, where he serves as coordinator for the SC Collaborative for Racial Reconciliation.
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“There’s always room on the caboose of a train if you don’t get on at the engine room.”
Ferillo’s documentary made national headlines in 2007, when Obama, then a senator, called him to ask for a meeting with every administrator and executive featured in the film. Obama then sat down with local administrators for hours, impressing principals like Rodney Cook of JV Martin – the school most prominently featured – with his command of the academic situation and a knack for remembering student names.
The senator’s sustained attention attracted a media circus. “Just the publicity itself made the people in the county say, ‘Well, we need to do something!’” Ray Rogers, Dillon school district’s superintendent, recalled on Friday.
Ray Rogers with Barack Obama at the old junior high school. Photograph: The Guardian
The publicity inspired the community to pass a penny sales tax to finance the replacement of the old, dilapidated school, and Obama used it as an example of how states would benefit from his stimulus package, even flying one student to Washington to tout the case.
Rogers holds such reverence for Obama that, when we return to his office after the tour, he can produce dozens of photos from the president’s visits. The most famous, by internet archive standards, is one of Rogers standing in a shabby hallway of the old school, pointing at some misery just beyond the camera’s focus while a younger Obama squints his displeasure.
When change finally did come to JV Martin, it wasn’t a moment too soon for Rogers, who has been working in the school system since 1987. At 66, he is the only superintendent involved in a 1993 school equity lawsuit who’s still on the job. The suit charges the state with failing to provide a “minimally adequate” education to the state’s poorest children.
In 2014, Rogers and his cohort finally got the ruling they were seeking, after more than 20 years of court battles and receiving the personal attention of a sitting president. But even that victory came by the grace of a single vote in the state supreme court, and thus far, no money has been distributed to schools as a result.
And so Dillon’s success remains something of a one-shot wonder, born of a presidential contender’s attention to a well documented disgrace.
“He was as good as his words to me,” Ferillo said of Obama’s campaign promises. “The last things he said to me the night of the South Carolina primary was: ‘I won’t let you down. I will follow through.’ He looked me in the face and I knew I was looking at a man I could trust.”
Of course, Obama’s work at Dillion helped the candidate himself, too. In the months that followed, he swept the state’s primary with 55% of the vote to Clinton’s 27%. Close observers suspect Clinton has learned something from his reform-studded victory, noting that she has started pointing to her early work with the Children’s Defense Fund in Washington.
But for so many other South Carolinians, nothing is more meaningful than what she’ll do after a victory, while their children remain trapped in struggling schools by an accident of geography.
“For those schools to be the only places they could go to get an education in America, that’s a function of the hand that they were dealt centuries ago as slaves,” Ferillo said, “and now as the children and great grandchildren and great-great grandchildren of slaves. They’ve gotten a raw deal from America for a long time. This cannot, must not, continue.”
But back at Clinton’s “corridor of opportunity” event, near the cotton fields that have haunted the state for generations, Jack Scoville, the mayor of Georgetown, said the problem does continue, and will grow worse without leaders’ real commitment to solving it. He praised Clinton as a “hardworking serious lady”, but said he hopes she’s up to the task.
“Education in this state, especially for minorities,” he said, “has been intentionally neglected.”
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Accountability, not so much for Ohio charter schools. On Tuesday, March 8, the Dayton Daily News reported on a secretly recorded June meeting, that occurred during a state audit of a charter school (the state says the charter school owes taxpayers, $800,000). The chairman of the board (and, former state legislator) of the charter school, met with a top official of the charter school. The newspaper reported the following quote, “It seems to me this is a cash cow. That is bothering the crap out of me because I’m not positive we’re educating anybody.” The final paragraph of the article states, ..”a sampling of 30 students’ attendance records (showed), seven did not log in for even 1 hour a day and only 2 logged in for more than 3.5 hours per day.”
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It does fix something–it fixes paying money to teachers.
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