The district school board voted unanimously to close the Imagine School Charter due to poor academic performance.
“The El Centro Elementary School District Board of Trustees voted unanimously Wednesday to deny Imagine School Imperial Valley’s petition to renew its charter, citing the charter school’s failure to meet academic requirements.
“The vote came during a special meeting that drew an overcapacity crowd of ISIV personnel and supporters, many of whom were visibly saddened by the board’s decision.
“Following the meeting, Imagine School Principal Grace Jiminez said that the school would appeal the board’s decision to the Imperial County Office of Education.
Jiminez also expressed frustration that the ECESD board had limited the amount of time that the charter school’s supporters had to speak during the meeting’s public comment session.
“Between all of these people, we were only able to speak for 30 minutes and that’s unfortunate because we have a large community here that wants to be here to say what they feel,” she said.
“Yet, remarks made by board members prior to the vote raises doubts whether any additional public comments in support of Imagine Schools would have persuaded them to vote otherwise.
Although they acknowledged the familial atmosphere that the Imagine School campus community enjoys, board members were explicit about their concerns that the campus’ academic program was placing students at risk.
Ultimately, the board appeared to have come to their decision with the assistance of a 21-page report prepared by district staff which recommended the charter renewal’s denial and that cited a number of deficiencies with Imagine’s governance, academic progress, corporate structure and teachers’ credentialing.
“Every decision that we make is made in what’s in the best interest of our students,” said Trustee Michael Minnix.
Trustee George McFaddin said that it would be wrong to suggest that the district was not generally supportive of charter schools, and highlighted the fact that ECESD now has three separate charter schools
ECESD board denies Imagine School’s charter renewal – Imperial Valley… http://www.ivpressonline.com/news/local/ecesd-board-denies-imagine-s… operating within the district.
“We’ve embraced them more than any other district in the Valley,” he said.
Yet, he too cited Imagine School’s poor academic performance in comparison to ECESD and the county as the reason for his choosing to ultimately vote how he did.
“You still haven’t reached that magic number that we need,” McFaddin said. “The figures here tonight shows that, that is not happening.”
“Some of those figures highlighted the fact that approximately 75 percent of ISIV students did not meet English Language Arts standards and 88 percent did not meet mathematics standards last year.
In comparison, 40 percent met or exceeded ELA standards and 31 percent met or exceeded mathematics standards in the El Centro Elementary School District, according to the ECESD report regarding ISIV’s petition for charter renewal.
“During the 2015-2016 school year, 81 percent of ISIV students did not meet English Language Arts standards and 86 percent of students attending did not meet mathematics standards.
“During the same school year, 37 percent of students met or exceeded ELA standards and 28 percent met or exceeded mathematics standards in the El Centro Elementary School District, the report stated.
One of the many criteria that a supervisory board must consider when deciding whether to grant a charter school’s petition for a renewed charter is whether its academic standards are on par with those of the district, or districts, from which it draws its students.
“My biggest concern is the fact that you’re not growing academically,” said Trustee Frances Terrazas.
A common refrain among board members was how often they reportedly hear from community members and educators that Imagine students that transfer to another district often are a grade level or two behind.”
Imagine charters are known for making profits from real estate and dealing with related companies.
The company can bow appeal the decision to the county board of education. If unsuccessful, they can appeal to the state board.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
“My biggest concern is the fact that you’re not growing academically,” said Trustee Frances Terrazas.
Translation: Biggest concern is that test scores are not increasing, year to year.
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Decisions based on COMPLETELY INVALID standardized test scores are ludicrous and risible even in the closing of for profit charter schools.
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When politicians start limiting the public’s input, or they start meeting in private with privatizers, then it is time for the public to oppose this collaborator in the next election. The public should have a right to weigh in on big decisions like public schools and funds. This is only way for people to send a message that they will not stand for their democratic rights to be hijacked.
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You are assuming that the Charter administrator is being honest. She is not. I was at this meeting and the public comments lasted 48 minutes and every single speaker that asked to speak was given the opportunity. Board policy states a 30 minute public comment period. Also, this was not the only meeting. The board held another meeting where unlimited comments were allowed.
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PROFITS at the expense of the public and our young. TERRIBLE. I hope these charter school frauds are put in jail.
What GETS me is that they call themselves: “Public Charter Schools.” The only thing public about charter schools is they steal money from our REAL PUBLIC SCHOOLS where teachers are certified.
WOW. has this country gone DAFT? I give Schools of Marketing one thing — the graduates sure know how to put SPINS on everything. So … If something is being marketed, look for what Propaganda Techniques are being used.
Heck dpt uses propaganda all the time. You’d think the people of this country would be good at spotting propaganda by now.
My question: Is sifting through PROPAGANDA techniques really being taught and learned?
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Yvonne, it seems to me that “identifying propaganda” is not a teachable skill, just like “judgement” , “taste” , “reading comprehension”, and “being a great scientist” are not teachable skills. What IS teachable is the knowledge that forms the foundations of these skills. All of these depend on a long, steady accumulation of knowledge in the brain. The broader the knowledge, the broader the skills. Yes, there are a few teachable tricks to help identify propaganda, but the best anti-propaganda fumigant is knowledge of how the world works, who the big actors are, the facts about the big issues (e.g. climate change), etc. Without knowledge, there is no effective propaganda “radar”. None of this is quick and easy.
The Fox viewers probably don’t care that they’re being fed propaganda, so getting people to identify propaganda is not enough –we must also teach why propaganda is bad –another huge matter that again entails teaching the World. Among the components of this curriculum: in-depth learning about totalitarian regimes. Perhaps if they had been told about Alexander Solzynizten, Stalin, Pravda, etc. they might start to be leery. Also teach about the struggle against feudalism and classism in Europe, the peasant revolts, the French Revolution, and the slow march to democracy and rule of law. This is a grand, important story that IS NOT TOLD WELL to 99% of kids. How can we expect them to be good stewards of our inheritance if we don’t teach them about it well? Instead we’re doing fake teaching of “skills”.
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The word “skills” exists because it actually means something. All the ranting in the world won’t negate that fact.
I used my propaganda detecting skills when I reread your first sentence, where you conflate a series of widely divergent activities and attainments (on varying levels of abstraction) and brand them all unteachable “skills.”
If you’ve never noticed the political and propagandistic aspects of Hirsch’s writings, then you might not notice them in your own blog comments. But some people might.
Yes, detecting propaganda is teachable, and teaching it is a must. We had a six-week propaganda unit during my sophomore year in high school. One of the propaganda techniques we were cautioned to look for was sweeping generalizations–or “glittering generalities,” as someone put it at the time. We did study historical examples in addition to the analysis of how propaganda works. That teaching has stuck with me, and I’ve been able to build on it independently.
One propaganda technique I’ve noticed lately is negation. You simply deny the existence of something that your opponent has reason to believe in, and you do it in a way that questions the sanity and intelligence of anyone whom might disagree. And you do it without offering a sound critique (built on evidence and logic) of the thing that’s being denied. This is a more drastic technique than one I learned back in high school–rejection out of hand. I’m taking about the kind of denial you find in Orwell’s 1984, or a Donald Trump speech, or a Ponderosa blog post.
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whom = who
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taking = talking
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icomplete:
I admit I made a weak case here and wish I hadn’t posted it. My gut tells me I’m right on this, but my thinking is still fuzzy about this particular matter.
Hirsch is a much smarter and more cogent writer than I am. Have you read his latest book, Why Knowledge Matters? It’s impressive. He marshals a lot of of new cognitive science evidence to show that a lot of the things we dub “skills” really don’t exist. He cites the 2006 Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance: “Research clearly rejects the classical views on human cognition in which general abilities such as learning, reasoning, problem solving and concept formation correspond to capacities and abilities that can be studied independently of the content domains.” Thus, all-purpose critical thinking and problem-solving skills don’t exist. They are domain specific and are products of knowledge about those domains. I lumped “propaganda detection” in with these non-existent general skills, but I’m not certain it fits.
I’m curious to know what you think the political and propagandistic aspects of Hirsch’s writings are, and which of his books you’ve read.
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As I told you before, I’m way too familiar with his very bad dictionary (written with two co-authors) of things every American should know. And I’ve paid probably $30 in library fines trying and failing to read a couple of his other books. Maybe I’ll have better luck with the new one.
The global problem I see with his argument is that it’s reductive. He has decided that the one pressing problem with American education is that American teachers don’t convey knowledge, and that the answer to this problem is to have them convey more knowledge.
Based on the courses I’ve taken and on my thirty-three years in teaching and a lifetime of independent learning, I can tell you that’s false. Even if there’s a grain of truth to it–as in the design of basal reading programs that flourished in the 1970s as a reaction to the popular book Why Johnny Can’t Read.
People learn “about” things by repeated experience “with” those things. Focusing on telling students about things you believe to be true, as you advocate, is a reductive and ineffective prescription for student learning. By contrast, my idea of teaching and learning is eclectic and expansive. And yes, it involves learning by doing–an idea that in no way contradicts the quotation you cite. (I’d be cautious, though, about claims based on a 2006 publication–brain science has been revolutionized in the past dozen years. As an example, you keep saying that the brain isn’t at all like a muscle. It turns out that yes, the brain IS kind of like a muscle, In that the more you use it for a particular task, the more skillful and more efficient you become at that task.)
In one sense, the idea of a “skill” is a philosophical issue. A complex set of related physical skills, such as a tennis serve, can actually be broken down into discrete component parts. Through direct instruction, modeling, and practice, the tennis student can improve. Intellectual skills such as writing are harder to pin down, but writing teachers know that the more you have students write, the better writers they become. Just as tennis students must hit the ball over and over again if they want to improve.
In addition to Hirsch’s reductive approach, by which he ignores the social setting of the school–which includes how students are treated, how often an adult says their name and whether their cafeteria lunches are served with a smile, how often their asked to make a meaningful choice in school–he uses quite a few propaganda methods. Among them: straw man arguments, over-generalizations, alarmist language (which was picked up by the media and transformed him from an English professor to an “education expert” overnight), rejecting opposing arguments out of hand (as in his attacks on Dewey and progressive education). There’s more, but I’ve got other work to do.
Politically, his approach appears to be based on the assumption that students need to accept uncritically the received wisdom of the dominant culture’s version of the past. That’s a profoundly conservative stance. And it’s what comes across loudly and clearly in the dictionary I mentioned earlier. For an antidote, I recommend Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States.
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I’ve been meaning for quite a while to give credit to Yvonne Siu-Runyan, past president of the National Council of Teachers of English, for first alerting me to the enormity of the Test-and Punish system and inspiring me to fight it.
If I remember right, her impassioned speech at the 2010 NCTE convention in Orlando is where I first heard about the 2011 SOS rally in Washington. I believe that’s where Jesse Turner got up and talked about his planned walk to D.C. When I got home from the convention I bought the new Diane Ravitch book and decided to make the trip myself. It was at the rally that I first heard Diane speak, and that’s how I ended up commenting on her blog.
Ponderosa, the person you dismissed above has decades of actual, successful teaching experience, and no doubt made a career-long practice of improving her teaching. I think it would be a good idea to listen to her and follow up on her suggestions, instead of parroting Hirsch. As far as I’m concerned, she deserves a mention on the blog honor roll.
Randal Hendee
(For some reason, I’m not able to respond to your comments using my computer and my actual name, and when I enter my actual name, it always comes up as icompleat.)
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Randall, your characterization of Hirsch is inaccurate, but not surprising given that you haven’t read any of the work he’s published in the last 25 years.
One of the baleful effects of the belief in skills, as Hirsch points out, its the purgatory of stultifying skills drills in which many of our students now find themselves. I refuse to put my students in that purgatory. What I find is once I carefully and lucidly fill kids’ heads with knowledge about, say, life in Constantinople, they can write, read, infer, analyze and do all sorts of creative things about Constantinople –I don’t have to do a bit of skills teaching. Teaching knowledge is the heavy lifting –and central job –of education; the skills stuff takes care of itself because that’s what our brains are born to do. The education orthodoxy has this exactly backward: it says skills instruction is the heavy lifting, and, yeah, yeah, yeah, kids can pick up the knowledge as needed in a jiffy as they power through life with their Jedi thinking skills. Wrong.
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Sorry I didn’t make myself clear. I’ve read parts of those books I checked out of the library. I just couldn’t make it through them, partly because I didn’t buy his rhetoric. I’m quite familiar with his arguments.
I’m not a fan of mindless drills. But one of the flaws in Hirsch’s work, and your commentary, is that he doesn’t give actual teachers credit for their work. Good teachers do a lot more than mindlessly following a curriculum guide and passing out worksheets. The testing mandates make it tougher in some states and in big urban districts to do inspired teaching, but it can be done and is being done even in those supposed test-prep mills, and in well funded schools with well informed teachers who are NOT slavishly focusing on “skill drills.”
The blanket statements about teachers not imparting knowledge to their students are flat out wrong. (At the same time, if you listen to the researchers that study how little information is retained over time, you might think twice about relying on the lectures you’re so proud of.) I’m a big fan of teacher talk in the form of storytelling, imparting unusual facts, and other ways of sparking kids’ curiosity and eagerness to learn. Lectures do have their place, certainly in the context of helping kids learn how to do something with the knowledge being conveyed. And that something could actually be a set of relatively abstract skills–for example, how to think like a historian. In any case, to accuse teachers of being anti-knowledge, which you do frequently, is to not understand teachers, or to not know any good ones.
Why do you and Hirsch give teachers no credit for imparting knowledge to their students? If your accusations were true, that most teachers don’t teach their students knowledge, there’s no way American kids from low poverty schools could be scoring so well on those horrible international tests. Now I don’t believe in those tests as a true measure of anything important. What I do believe is that good teachers working in rich communities actually are giving American students a good education. That was certainly true in the prosperous suburb where I spent many of my school years. (And it was also true in the socially homogeneous small town where I spent the rest.) Most of the students that go to those schools receive advantages that affect their school performance, but those advantages can’t be duplicated in poor communities by injecting the kids with “knowledge”–i.e., Hirsch’s Core Curriculum. Among the many reasons kids in high poverty schools don’t perform well on tests: toxic stress, homelessness, lead contamination, and other traumatic conditions of poverty.
Hirsch has fastened on a bogus remedy for what ails American children living in poverty. It isn’t that they didn’t receive a course of study teaching them everything that rich kids supposedly soaked up in their trips to the local museum. It’s that the conditions of too many of their lives get in the way of doing well in school. That’s not to say they’re not as smart or knowledgeable in their own way as kids from rich schools. It’s to say that you and Hirsch are barking up the wrong tree.
I’m writing this in the early hours of the morning due to sleeplessness brought on by some kind of upper respiratory bug. And because your blanket accusations about American teachers–and mischaracterization of their work–have been annoying me for quite some time. You simply do not have the authority to make the sweeping generalizations you keep making. Even if you’re a candidate for teacher of the year, you have no business vilifying the rest of the profession, especially if you’re going to base your argument on the highly debatable work of an academic with an axe to grind.
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And another thing. Your fantasy description of “the education orthodoxy” is a classic Straw Man. You invent an extreme position (cribbed from Hirsch) that doesn’t actually exist, and then you try to knock it down. In this case you try to knock it down with a single word: “Wrong.”
This is the essence of propaganda. And in case you haven’t noticed, this is precisely what Donald Trump does.
And to a great extent it’s what Arne Duncan and Betsy DeVos do in advocating for charter schools. They propagate the fiction that “American education is broken,” and they offer the spurious solution of privatization. This way they conveniently sidestep the actual facts that contribute to poor school “performance.”
Yvonne is right. We need to teach kids how to identify propaganda. Maybe if you tried teaching the same thing, you’d learn it, too.
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Randall, not one of my 180 seventh graders knows his senators and
congressman. I’m pretty confident that many of their parents don’t either. Many adults don’t understand what Congress is, that the president is not an elected king,, etc. I don’t know how we’re going to keep our democracy if our people don’t even understand it, much less why it’s better than other systems. These are facts that can stick and must stick. Good teaching makes facts stick. The dogma that facts don’t stick, that they’re not very important, that Google obviates factual learning….it’s a threat to our democracy. Teaching is about helping kids build a roughly accurate model of the world in their heads by feeding them knowledge lucidly and memorably. Once the knowledge is in there, their innate thinking skills can go to work on it, and they can participate in the public sphere. If it’s not in there, the gears spin idly, or fixate on social lives, celebrities and video games –stuff they do know. They can be good friends, but they cannot be good citizens unless we expand their horizons by teaching about the wider world.
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You’re building the straw man again. Nobody said facts don’t stick. (I did suggest that researchers have found students don’t retain much of the content of lectures over the long term.) Nobody said that kids shouldn’t be civically aware. And absolutely nobody said that teachers shouldn’t expand their students’ knowledge of the wider world.
You’re changing the subject, too. The fact that your students don’t know their senators can’t hide your fallacious claims about America teachers. You’re using propaganda techniques to promote a fixed idea that an academic with little or no K-12 teaching experience came up with and turned into a personal brand. (I’m sure his intentions were noble, but I’m not buying his main premise.) In fact, neither he nor you know what the bulk of American teachers believe, or what their actual classroom practice is. Instead you build the straw man and try to knock it down. Over and over.
You might want to concentrate on your own classroom. Notice that I never criticize your classroom practice. That’s between you and your supervisors. I believe teachers need the autonomy to make decisions about how and even what they teach. Your methods, unless they’re abusive (and chances are they are not), are great if they work for you and your students.
But if your students still don’t know their senators after you’ve delivered the lecture, you might want to dip into the progressive education tool kit… Have them write a letter to their senators about a topic that affects them personally. Have them invite the senators to speak at your school. Have them interview voters in their neighborhood to find out their opinions on those senators. Or ask whether they voted and why. The list of potentially meaningful activities related to your students’ senators is endless. A teacher can actually tap into the social urges of middle school kids to make the learning happen. In any case, familiarity through repeated, meaningful engagement with the subject matter–that’s one example of how to make learning stick. It’s learning by doing, rather than by just receiving. That’s what I believe, anyway. (Easier stated than carried out in the classroom, of course.)
I’m not saying that’s what you must do. I am saying, though, that the so-called constructivist approach, where the student does interesting things related to the topic at hand (so as to build a personal knowledge base), actually celebrates the knowledge students create. It’s not anti-knowledge at all. And that personal knowledge is more likely to stick than imposed knowledge. Those meaningful activities can, in turn, spark a student’s curiosity for the topic and help build a foundation for further learning.
Again, I’m not saying you should try those methods. If you have 180 students and no teaching assistant, the odds are against you. The underfunding of urban education is a crime, and you’re one of the victims. If you’re having any success at all, beyond bare survival, you deserve warm praise. Please, though, stop spreading anti-teacher propaganda.
By the way, I first learned how to spot a straw man argument in that six-week propaganda unit my sophomore year. The teacher explicitly taught me how to do it. She didn’t need to drill it into me, though. She was an excellent teacher, using techniques that you’re on record as opposing because you don’t think they don’t work.
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… because you think they don’t work.
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Charter schools rarely innovate with respect to basic approaches to education. They add cheap teachers and more tech and call that innovation. If they truly innovated, based on sound principles, they might be a force to be reckoned with, given public schools’ seeming inability to critically examine the foundations of their pedagogical approach.
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The key word in your statement is “might”.
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Yes, fortunately they haven’t, for the most part. I forgot one charter innovation: excluding the weak.
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Whom = who
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I find it difficult to make a judgement call about this particular charter school based in the explanations given by the school board. What are the demographics and how does this school compare to other schools with similar demographics? If the school is full of nonEnglish speaking students of course their test scores aren’t comparable to other schools, chapter or not.
If we consider test scores invalid when rating public schools we should do the same for charter schools.
That does not mean I support charters, even the “good” ones, since they damage the public schools in numerous ways, especially financial.
Obviously the parents felt a sense of ownership for their school – similar to the sort of support people have for their local public schools.
However, if the school board did their due diligence and discovered that the teachers were not following a set curriculum and that those teacher were not certified or that the school was not providing appropriate services and that there was a high attrition rate of both students and faculty, then they are following a justifiable protocol. The fact that the students from this charter were consistently behind grade level when “transferring” to the public schools indicates there were definitely some issues. I suspect that there were other criteria (in addition to test scores) which red flagged this school and that were justifications not listed in the above article.
Ultimately, parents who choose charter over public are taking a chance – fly by night vs stability. (Unless you live in a place like Chicago which targets long standing public schools for “demolition”).
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What do you call a rheephorm school that has “a number of deficiencies with… governance, academic progress, corporate structure and teachers’ credentialing”?
This is as good a time as any to remind visitors to this blog that the enablers and salespeople and apologists for corporate eduction reform coined a phrase for public schools that describes this charter and so so many others: “factories of failure.”
😏
And don’t blame those that defend and promote genuine teaching and learning aka a “better education for all.”
No, the source of your problems is easy to find.
Step one: go to your bathroom. Step two: look in the mirror. Step three: keep your eyes open, not shut. Source of problem found, easy Deasy.
Rheeally! and Really!
😎
P.S. A bit of advice if there is even one rheephormista out there that has the honesty and good sense to do the above. School yourself. Popular music. To wit:
Michael Jackson. The Man in the Mirror. A verse from same.
“I’m starting with the man in the mirror
I’m asking him to change his ways
And no message could have been any clearer
If you wanna make the world a better place
(If you wanna make the world a better place)
Take a look at yourself, and then make a change
(Take a look at yourself, and then make a change)
(Na na na, na na na, na na, na nah)”
😄
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