G.F. Brandenburg writes a terrific blog, where he uses data to refute reformer exaggerations. He was one of the first, for example, to break the story about Michelle Rhee’s inflated claims of success as a young teacher in Baltimore.
Here he displays the data comparing DC public schools to charter schools. It is a healthy antidote to the fantasy so often spun by Arne Duncan, Michelle Rhee, Joel Klein, and the other luminaries of the reform movement.
In an earlier post, a parent expressed frustration that her child’s teacher never explained how awful the testing is, how it was stealing time from instruction and was of little or no value.
Many teachers wrote to say that without tenure, they can’t take any risks, can’t upset administrators, can’t speak up without endangering their jobs.
This parent has a different take. I wish Arne Duncan would read this and realize that he is destroying teacher morale and professionalism in schools across the nation. His policies are misguided at best, deceptive and harmful at worst.
I spoke to the teachers at my sons’s school. They are EXHAUSTED. They hate the testing, they are fearful for their jobs but they are even more fearful that their beloved principal will be replaced if they don’t follow these crazy mandates. They are on a watch list now due to NCLB mandates ( special ed failure rate had dipped). This is the BEST school in the whole district- national ranking for newspaper, mock trial, debate, the highest SAT scores in the district, the highest number of AP passing exams score in the district and is ranked in the country. These fantastic teachers, who are dedicated to special needs students and needs of special students, are being crucified by the weekly lesson plans, the state oversight by under-aware and under trained ‘professionals’. These teachers HATE the tests being implemented by this VAM measure that is their prize for winning RTT. They are ridiculous tests that have no merit but the teachers who give their all to the kids in the class and before and after are flat out EXHAUSTED by these VAM measures.
Burning out teachers, who are seasoned and fantastic professionals, for no educational reason at all. That is why parents don’t know.
Education was mentioned several times in the debate, yet got very little attention.
President Obama mentioned Race to the Top three times (at the Democratic convention, neither he nor Arne Duncan mentioned it even once). He claimed it was already showing results. I wish Romney had asked him what the results are. The President seems to think that the fact that states have adopted the Common Core standards shows that reform is working, but it will be years before their effects will be known. Might be good, might not. No one knows.
The President has this strange belief that Race to the Top was not top down, but that’s simply not the case. To qualify for the $5 billion in federal funds, states had to agree to meet specific federal requirements, such as evaluating teachers by their students’ test scores and opening more privately managed charter schools.
Many teachers know Race to the Top as a singular disaster for children and for their profession. The Chicago strike was a revolt in part against Race to the Top’s punitive ideas.
Not surprising that Romney sort of praised both Arne Duncan and Race to the Top, since Duncan has made it his mission to placate the nation’s most conservative governors. But by the same token, large numbers of teachers dislike Duncan and may not vote because of this administration’s fondness for placating governors who are hostile to teachers, like Chris Christie.
Obama said nothing about the attacks on unions and on teachers. It seems both candidates love teachers as long as they compete for a bonus and don’t have tenure.
Romney boasted that Massachusetts has the best schools in the nation, but didn’t mention that he had nothing to do with their success.
The Massachusetts reforms were passed by the Legislature ten years before Romney became Governor in 2003. The reforms doubled state funding of public education from $1.3 billion in 1993 to $2.6 billion by 2000; provided a minimum foundation budget for every district; committed to develop strong curricula for subjects such as science, history, the arts, foreign languages, mathematics, and English; implemented a new testing program; expanded professional development for teachers; and tested would-be teachers. In the late 1990s, again before Romney assumed office, the state added new funds for early childhood education.
So, yes, the Massachusetts reforms were costly, but Romney has no plans to fund anything new other than charters and vouchers, which were not part of his state’s academic success.
All in all, the little that was said about education by the candidates was empty rhetoric, disconnected from reality and offering no real change from the failed policies of the past decade.
In a speech at the National Press Club, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan reached out to the nation’s teachers to assure them that he understands how they feel.
He understands that change is hard, especially when almost every state and district is imposing untested, experimental and possibly destructive methods of evaluation on them.
The end game, he is sure, will be higher test scores.
Of course, no one should be evaluated by a single score.
Truly, he understands. Message: I care.
The Gates Foundation has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into teacher evaluation programs.
The US Department of Education has used its billions in Race to the Top funding to push for teacher evaluation programs.
The big winner of the latest grants is the District of Columbia, which presumably already has Michelle Rhee’s IMPACT program. But nonetheless, it just won another $23 million of our taxpayer dollars.
Millions more went to Los Angeles and to charter schools. The teachers’ union in LA still has not agreed to accept test-based evaluations. Seems someone there has read the research and knows how useless this stuff is.
Arne Duncan is certainly priming the pump where it matters least.
A reader in Indiana appeals for help to stop the ALEC-inspired takeover and privatization of public education in that state:
Tony Bennett is the lead character in Alec’s plan to privatize public education. Alec has always been populated by nearly every Indiana state senator and representative, but these past few years have seen Indiana overly represented with State Representative Dave Frizzell as president of the board of directors and a Senator Jim Buck as a member of the board. The recent education reform laws were word for word the laws that Alec wrote several years ago. Tony Bennett and these radical conservatives have set the stage for a disgusting takeover of public education. They know that Mike Pence will be elected governor and with a GOP legislature they will implement a school corporation take over law. With that in hand they will take over Indianapolis Public Schools and possibly try for Gary and Fort Wayne. These people are worse than disgusting; they will say anything to discredit and dismantle public education to see their dream of bringing in corporate education. Sadly there are some Democrats that help with this such as former Indianapolis mayor Bart Peterson and several Dem legislators who have bought into the Arne Duncan style of Democrats for Education Reform. Indiana is being sucked into a black hole and the educators are screaming for help. We need national attention which would bring some bigger dollars to help Bennett’s opponent, Glenda Ritz get elected. Diane help us, please spread the word of this dire situation!
The Washington Post has a good article about the aggressive way that the Obama administration has imposed its education agenda in the past three+ years.
The article notes, almost in passing, that there is no evidence for the success of any part of this agenda. No one will know for many years whether the Obama program of testing, accountability, and choice will improve education.
When reading the article, it is easy to forget that the U.S. Department of Education was not created to impose any “reforms” on the nation’s schools. It was created to send federal aid to hard-pressed districts that enrolled many poor children.
When the Department was created in 1980, there were vigorous debates about whether there might one day be federal control of the schools. The proponents of the idea argued that this would never happen. It has not happened until now because Democrats and Republicans agreed that they didn’t want the other party to control the nation’s schools.
But now that the Obama administration has embraced the traditional Republican ideas of competition, choice, testing and accountability, there is no more arguing about federal control. Republicans are quite willing to allow a Democratic administration to push the states to allow more privately managed schools, to impose additional testing, and to crush teachers’ unions.
Republicans would never have gotten away with this agenda at any time in the past three decades. The Democrats who controlled Congress would never have allowed it to happen.
Who would have imagined that it would take a Democratic President to promote privatization, for-profit schools, evaluating teachers by student test scores, and a host of other ideas (like rolling back the hard-won rights of teachers) that used to be only on the GOP wish-list?
Alex Kotlowitz asks this important question in the New York Times on Sunday.
The question is important for several reasons.
First, because the self-proclaimed reformers assert that great teachers can and do overcome poverty. You might say that this slogan is their anti-poverty program. Wendy Kopp, Bill Gates, and Arne Duncan have all said on many occasions that if there is a “great” teacher in every classroom, that will take care of poverty. Or, in a variation, fix the schools first, then fix poverty.
They never explain how a great teacher overcomes homelessness, hunger, poor health, and other conditions associated with poverty. Lyndon B. Johnson said in 1965 that you can’t put two people in a race at the same starting line and assume it’s a fair race if one of them is shackled. LBJ knew then what the reformers today never learned.*
Second, it’s heartening to see this article in the New York Times because the Times has been hostile to teachers and their unions on the editorial page. The Times is no friend of public education. Its editorial writer thinks that teachers need carrots and sticks to raise test scores, indifferent to the consistent failure of such policies.
How nice to see Alex Kotlowitz in the pages of the Times.
*At Howard University, President Lyndon B. Johnson said, “Imagine a hundred-yard dash in which one of the two runners has his legs shackled together. He has progressed ten yards, while the unshackled runner has gone fifty yards. At that point the judges decide that the race is unfair. How do they rectify the situation? Do they merely remove the shackles and allow the race to proceed? Then they could say that “equal opportunity” now prevailed. But one of the runners would still be forty yards ahead of the other. Would it not be the better part of justice to allow the previously shackled runner to make up the forty-yard gap, or to start the race all over again? That would be affirmative action toward equality.”
Commencement Address at Howard University (June 4, 1965)
John Thompson has a good article at Huffington Post asking why President Obama did a “Nixon-to-China” maneuver with education.
That phrase “Nixon-to-China” comes up again and again, and Thompson makes a telling point: It describes a political decision, not an education policy. The President’s education policy is indeed very little different from that of the GOP. As Thompson puts it, “It is a political gamble designed to beat up on two of the Democrats’ most loyal constituencies, teachers and families with children in urban schools, to show the “Billionaires Boys Club” that the administration could be tough on its friends.”
Is this a wise political strategy? “Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s “reforms” opened the door to Scott Walker’s and John Kasich’s attacks on collective bargaining. Worse, Duncan and President Obama mostly stayed silent as workers fought back in Wisconsin and Ohio. Had the administration joined with workers, perhaps the Wisconsin recall election would have been won. Regardless, if the administration remains silent in Chicago, fed-up teachers could stay home in droves. That would be a case of chopping our noses to spite our faces, but it would be understandable if teachers allowed our outrage to rule.”
Hopefully, the President has told the Mayor to settle, and to do so without humiliating the teachers.
But the question will remain: Why is the Obama administration wedded to the carrot-and-stick policies of the GOP? Why is it so devoted to handing public schools over to private management despite the lack of evidence that private managers in non-union schools are more successful than public ones?
Investigative journalist Greg Palast digs into the story of the Chicago strike. He begins with the story of a teacher who was fired: Was she the worst teacher in Chicago? What happened to her? You would be surprised.
Diane Ravitch's blog 