Here is a chance to make your voice heard.
Crain’s New York is running an opinion poll, asking which of Bloomberg’s policies the next mayor should get rid of. Bloomberg has promoted high-stakes testing, charter schools, school closings, co-locations of charters, and evaluation of teachers by test scores. Class sizes are at their highest in fourteen years.
Just an hour ago, I posted the story about how officials at the Tennessee Virtual Academy had instructed teachers to delete failing grades, allegedly to show “progress.”
The virtual school, run by the for-profit K12 corporation, is among the lowest-performing schools in the state.
This afternoon a state legislative committee blocked any discussion of the school altering grades and prevented efforts to limit enrollment in the school. Although the legislators refused to hear any reference to the school’s practice of deleting failing grades, they did hear a teacher who claimed that home instruction on a computer was a very positive experience for children with autism.
The legislators gave the virtual school an additional two years with no accountability, despite its poor academic performance.
The school gets about $5,000 per pupil and enrolls more than 3,000 students. It is known for its astute lobbying and well-targeted campaign contributions.
Another step backward for American education.
Mercedes Schneider continues her patient and painstaking dissection of the National Council on Teacher Quality board.
In earlier posts, she reviewed the qualifications of Wendy Kopp, Michelle Rhee, Joel Klein and others. In this post, she discovers some real educators on the board of this organization. NCTQ is especially important because it is rating the nation’s teacher education programs.
Deborah Meier founded the very popular Central Park East schools in East Harlem.
Deborah, with whom I used to blog weekly, is a pioneer of the small schools movement, a strong believer in public school choice, and an eloquent advocate of democratic education.
The CPE schools (I and II) have repeatedly asked the NYC Department of Education for space to expand.
But instead of allowing them to grow, Chancellor Dennis Walcott is placing a new and untried charter school in the space that CPE was hoping to win.
Just more evidence that there is no “competition” in New York City between public schools and charter schools.
When people talk about the power of competition, they overlook the districts like New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles, where the leadership is working for the other team.
No competition here. Our leader is throwing the game.
G.F. Brandenburg writes one of the best education blogs on the planet. Follow him.
He has a deep intolerance for fraud, cheating, and misrepresentation.
Here he explains in a few hundred words what is wrong with corporate reform.
As readers of this blog know, the corporate titans in Los Angeles have raised a huge fund to beat Steve Zimmer in his race for re-election to the LA school board. Eli Broad and his allies have raised over $1.5 million. NYC Mayor Bloomberg has tossed in $1 million to support the pro-privatization candidates.
Zimmer is the main target. It is all-hands-on-deck to defeat this good man.
This letter arrived from a parent in the Los Angeles school system. You might be interested in reading her comments on how charter schools are increasing segregation in the district:
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An open letter to my fellow, locally-politically engaged neighbors:
I’m writing because many of us Mar Vistans have lived and worked alongside Kate Anderson these past few years on local political issues and I see that her list of endorsing co-volunteers is lengthy, in many cases replete with a yard sign. I’m writing because I feel that supporting her in this school board election against Steve Zimmer is a mistake. I hope you will hear me out. This is a mostly personal argument and plea; but the personal is always political and this decision matters as deeply as anything can. I am heartsick to witness the slow-motion undermining of Steve Zimmer’s incumbency.
Just for some anchoring perspective, my family comes to the public school educational game from private school. My two girls attended the well-regarded private lab school at UCLA alongside some stratospherically rich and famous folks. It was an education indeed. For middle school they rolled back down the hill to Palms Middle School, a really interesting educational setup with a high proportion of relatively scholastically advanced kids learning alongside kids not thus-identified. Our experience in this school has been overwhelmingly positive for its superior academics and true, deep opportunity for integration of socioeconomic status, class, color, nationality, learning skills, social skills – this public school in the heart of our community educates a mixture of children so diverse that I never really thought it could be possible to address such disparate needs adequately. It is an existential breath of fresh air to interact with teachers and administrators steeped in professionalism and competence.
At the same time the deprivation in our academic (and social) system is breath-taking. Comprehending the why, how and ramifications of all this provides its own well-spring of educational learning. At some point I was so upset with the Los Angeles Unified School District I even thought of running for the school board myself. I really know next to nothing about the complicated nexus of academics and politics, but it seemed that there was a need for some practical eyewitness experience.
The relevant question in addressing this step was: who is our school board member; the system may be broken but is our explicit contribution to it as well? And the answer is: no. It is not only “no”, but it turns out the man representing us, Steve Zimmer, is uncommonly good at this thankless job of LAUSD school board member (salary: +/- 47K, district, ~ 300 square miles? Š that’s a guess; it is vast for sure). He is extremely thoughtful and knowledgeable, well-versed in a vast ocean of issues and quite frankly a deep, independent thinker. One with whom I might not even agree on some of the vast panoply of hot issues. But one I can trust to have considered very carefully an issue from all sides and developed a morally-anchored, reasoned opinion. Committing to binary yeah-nay decisions on such complex issues – never mind how many there are – is not easy. It is in fact monumentally difficult to choose yes or no about a complicated question come the end of the day. Steve Zimmer is a principled thinker and he comes to decisions through a circuitous route that includes priorities that are aligned properly: with kids – ALL kids, independent of color, class, even educational achievement. He is weighing a multitude of complex, competing interests toward an end of maximizing fairness and educational excellence for the whole community. This is huge.
And I very much fear it is not the case for his opponent. She is on record and takes money from big, deep-pocketed individuals and organizations, supporting a fractious system that would divide the education of our children into “separate but equal” camps. We have done that experiment, it did not and does not work and it was even ruled illegal, a long time ago now. Charter schools and providing “choice” to parents turn out to be just another way – in practice at least – to segregate and sequester resources for one sector of society at the expense of the rest. This is no way to engage in building and sustaining community, it is divisive and simply put: unfair. It is a repudiation, to my mind, of what makes our country great: the open and available opportunity for all. Without a good, publicly-supported education, young people stand no chance of securing a satisfying place for themselves in the social hierarchy. Closing the doors on certain classes of society to schools where the most resources are husbanded, does exactly that: it dooms those on the outside to inferior opportunities.
Please make no mistake that this is exactly and precisely what the charter schools are doing in reality. They are excluding the hard-to-educate, the needy, the resource-intensive pupils in ghettos of inferior quality. Conversely, the white-lining of certain schools where only a certain slice of society is allowed to matriculate, is quite simply hiding all the cookies in a drawer to which you control access, countenancing only your own. That is the narrow solution proposed by Kate Anderson and the lock-step corporate bloc that supports her.
And it is unnecessary. It is my personal experience at least, that it is possible to educate huge swathes of amazingly disparate people excellently. They do it at Palms MS. It’s the teachers, quite frankly, though I personally define the term “teachers” to include the entire community of adults in my children’s school. They all work together as a team toward educating their charges, my children and I wish yours: librarians, vice-principals, bathroom cleaners. I couldn’t learn without all these separate needs attended to and neither can your children: they are all ‘teachers’ in a learning community as far as I am concerned.
So I am writing to my fellow local stakeholders, because it has not been my impression, working alongside many of you in various neighborhood issues, that any of us is really in the business of excluding some. All the more reason, then, that supporting Kate Anderson seems misplaced for the values it was my impression that most of us do hold. We currently have a person working tremendously hard to steer a fair line through a very complicated field of competing interests. The solutions proposed by Ms Anderson are not fair, are not reasoned, are not democratic. They are not supportable. Why, therefore, would any support her?
Thanks for hearing me out. I am of course more than willing to communicate privately about this; I really, really hope you will reconsider any hastily made or incompletely understood endorsement. I do not think non-content-driven endorsements does anyone any credit but in fairness, I think it is easy to be insufficiently familiar with the reality of the code being bantered about regarding all of this. My own experience with children in public schools has opened my eyes to some fairly ugly truths about what is happening silently, in practice. It may not be what any of us would subscribe to knowingly, but that is the point: reality happens regardless of the words ascribed to it. Roses smell the same no matter what they are named. Please do not throw any weight behind a faction that intends to exclude another from their fair share of public education resources.
Please note as well that those of us near the 405 happen to live on an LAUSD district dividing line. Palms MS happens to be outside of Steve Zimmer’s district; my older child’s local school, Venice High School, is in his district. Because we are new to this school my own personal knowledge of it is more limited. But it is clear that Steve Zimmer has thrown his weight and support behind this local High School and is very, very well-liked by parents there; it is equally clear that he offers this sort of support indiscriminately – his support and weight goes to students, all over. While I understand he has “helped out” Venice High School, it is not my impression that he has done so in a way that means any other High School has not been “helped out”. And that is (my definition of) the meaning of democracy for the people; all the people.
In short, Steve Zimmer’s incumbency is not broken: this school board member is not the problem. Electing Kate Anderson would – to coin words she uses in a slightly different context – be a ‘solution in search of a problem’. Yet our current school board representative is not a problem. He happens to have done a fine job last term. IMHO.
Please feel free to email me.
But please, most of all, please take the time to watch this debate between Zimmer and Anderson in which he demonstrates superior familiarity with educational issues, experience, a laudable, morality-driven motivation and true, deep engagement with the needs of all members of our local community:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dShAAODskKA
– Sara Roos, roos@biology.ucla.edu
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http://venice.patch.com/articles/letter-to-the-editor-lausd-school-board-elections
Who is the miracle reformer of Colorado? Who wrote its law to evaluate teachers by their test scores? Who claimed that his high school graduated 100% of its seniors and sent them to college? Who so lauded by President Obama and DFER? Whose legislation became a model for ALEC? Why, Michael Johnston, of course.
Mercedes Schneider continues her portrait of the board of NCTQ by looking into Johnston’s history. NCTQ is the organization that tells the nation how to get high-quality teachers.
Previous posts by Schneider have included Wendy Kopp, Michelle Rhee, and Joel Klein, who have a cumulative teaching experience of three years among them (Rhee’s).
EduShyster wants to help promote Rick Hess’ new book, Cage Busters….or does she?
It is a ritual. Every author of a public policy book must launch it with a panel discussion at a think tank in DC. It’s a way of showcasing the book and branding it
Hess runs the education program at the American Enterprise Institute so he chose his panel. Hess branded his book by offering the views of people he sees as cage busters: Michelle Rhee, Kaya Henderson, Deborah Gist, Chris Barbic, and a little known principal from New York.
EduShyster deconstructs the cage busting concept. In the end, we are left to wonder who is in the cage, why it needs busting, and where these cage busters are taking the children and teachers of this nation.
Kevin Drum is a respected writer and blogger. He doesn’t usually write about education.
However, he has heard the claim that the best way to improve academic performance is to make school harder: higher standards, harder tests.
The San Jose school district tried this approach. It said that every student must take college prep classes. This is what Drum found:
“Do high schools with higher standards get better performance from their students? If you require everyone to take college prep classes, will more kids go to college? The San Jose school district has long been a poster child for this notion, but guess what? It turns out it was all a crock:
“San Jose Unified has quietly acknowledged that the district overstated its accomplishments. And a Times analysis of the district’s record shows that its progress has not, in fact, far outpaced many other school systems’….In 2000, before the college-prep program took effect, 40% of San Jose graduates fulfilled requirements for applying to University of California and Cal State University. In 2011, the number was 40.3%.”
Reality is a hard and pitiless teacher. Someday our policymakers will understand that saying something should happen will not make it happen. Like, for example, passing a law in 2001 declaring that all students would be proficient by 2014. Didn’t happen.
More on this story from Matt Di Carlo, who reminds us that it I’d always wise to be cautious and skeptical.
I would add that it is always wise to doubt miracle claims. They have an annoying habit of falling apart under scrutiny.
Mercedes Schneider continues her review of the board of the National Council of Teacher Quality.
Earlier entries reviewed the bios of Wendy Kopp, Michelle Rhee, and other prominent figures whose lives intersect again and again on the boards of the groups seeking control of American education, with the full-throated support of Secretary Arne Duncan.
Here is Joel Klein, the quintessential corporate reformer. This is part 9 of Schneidr’s deconstruction of the corporate reform leadership team at NCTQ.
