On March 22, Governor Paul LePage will host an event for Jeb Bush and his merry team of market-model crusaders in Augusta, Maine.
Bush will present the full range of ALEC-inspired “reforms” guaranteed to bring privatization and for-profit entrepreneurs to Maine, while demoralizing Maine’s teachers and principals.
How clever to present the rightwing agenda as “reform,” and at the same time advertising Jeb’s Presidential run in 2016.
As Jersey Jazzman reports, on some days Rahm Emanuel blames poor test scores on children’s home environment. On other days, he blames it on teachers.
What is he thinking?
Here is what Chicago is thinking: Rahm’s approval rating is down to 33%.
He is polling about the same as Bobby Jindal and Rick Scott.
Could it be that making war on teachers and privatizing public education is not only bad public policy but bad politics? Maybe these politicians, birds of a feather, underestimated the voters.
We are not alone.
We are not the only great nation doing truly absurd things to our education system to advance the interests of private enterprise, under the guise of “reform.”
Great Britain’s Minister of Education Michael Gove has invited Bain & Company of the U.S. to advise him on how to make cuts to the national education budget and encouraged them to apply for contracts in the newly reconstituted Department for Education.
Bain is the company created by our own Mitt Romney.
Now if Minister Gove brings in Boston Consulting (the company that birthed Bain & Company), Stand for Children, and Andy Smarick of Bellwether Partners, he can get a report recommending full privatization of the British education system and finish the job.
Coach Bob Sikes reports:
“Floridians have not witnessed such an avalanche of legislation intended to shift tax payer dollars which once went to public schools to the education for profit industry.”
Charter industry supporters said they wanted to “ease the financial burden on charter schools.”
State funding will be very generous to for-profit charter corporations. One of the most successful at winning public money is Charter Schhools USA, headed by former Commissioner of Education Jim Horne, who is close to Jeb Bush.
A teacher in California heard Tavis Smiley and Cornel West interview Wendy Kopp, Jonathan Kozol, and me–in separate interviews–and this was her reaction. She wrote a post called “TFA can’t connect the dots.”
Here is a link to the interview with Kopp.
A link to the interview with me.
A link to the interview with Jonathan Kozol. I am not sure if this is the right link, as it is a panel discussion on poverty, not the 2:1 conversation found in the other links.
Here is a good account of the plans that Bill Gates and Rupert Murdoch have for your child’s personal information.
Hey, the data will generate a $20 billion industry. Not for you, of course.
Leave a comment, if you are do inclined.
Marc Epstein is an experienced history teacher in NYC who holds a Ph.D. In Japanese history. When the Department of Education closed his historic high school (Jamaica High School), Marc joined the ranks of teachers who are assigned to different schools weekly. He has written many articles for Huffington Post and New York City dailies.
He writes:
The Myth Of The Empowered Principal
The “empowered” principal was supposed to be the agent of radical change for the New York public school system. With every passing day it appears that the empowerment model has resulted in the death of institutional memory, atomization, and the end of accountability for anyone above the level of principal.
You need look no further than the scheduling and staffing fiasco that enveloped the new multi-million dollar high school located in one of New York’s most stable middle-class neighborhoods. The school is only three years old and is already being administered by its second principal.
The trouble first began when the administration proved incapable of programming students into their required courses when it opened.
New York 1 (the local TV news station) reported that students complained that they had no science teacher, and were taught by rotating substitutes; “…they were handed new schedules, with different teachers and courses, almost once a week.”
http://www.ny1.com/content/top_stories/151185/doe-officials-try-to-address-queens-high-school-s-massive-scheduling-headaches
The deputy chancellor for instruction claimed that the problem was rare, but at the same time was kept busy fending off parent protests over the same problems at Long Island City High School just a few miles away. For those of you who are unfamiliar with New York, the schools are located in Queens, the borough considered to have the most functional schools in the massive school system in years past. But all that has changed.
There’s more to the Metropolitan High School story. Fixing a programming glitch is easy enough. All you need do is bring an experienced programmer on board.
The news stories about the scheduling snafu made no mention of the former principal’s pedagogical decision to enroll the freshman class in Physics, before taking Living Environment (biology), or Chemistry. Physics is considered the most difficult of the Regents science courses and is usually reserved for the most capable students in their junior or senior year.
What’s more, we have no idea if this foolhardy decision was reviewed and approved before its implementation. I’m told that she actually presented this radical reorganization of curriculum as a selling point when she applied to the job!
If you want to make sense of this administrative breakdown you need look no further than the resume of Metropolitan High School’s former principal.
Her entire teaching experience consisted of seven years of teaching, with only three of them in a public school setting. Prior to that she worked variously as a marine biologist, and educational consultant observing teachers in various settings for her father who was a retired principal.
http://www.timesnewsweekly.com/news/2010-03-18/Local_News/NEW_HS_LEADER______VISITS_FH_CIVIC.html
After that, it was on to the vaunted Jack Welch Leadership Academy established by Joel Klein, where graduates are molded to incorporate the ways of the business world into the management of schools. Think of it as a Wharton School for principals with a dollop of West Point discipline thrown in to keep teachers productive and in line.
This business model stresses teacher accountability based on a bottom line calculated by student test results. The institute purposely recruits candidates with minimal classroom experience, believing that experience outside of public education is preferential. So in this regard the Metropolitan High School principal fit the 21st century principal profile Mike Bloomberg wants running his schools.
But the evidence indicates that the principal wasn’t versed in the nuts and bolts aspect of the job that it takes to put a school together and run it. After watching events at the school unfold, I’m reminded of Donald Sutherland’s line to Robert Ryan after inspecting a line of soldiers arrayed in their spit and polish dress uniforms in the Dirty Dozen; “very pretty, colonel, but can they fight?”
That’s because the pre-Bloomberg route to the principalship of a new high school would involve years of seasoning in the classroom before a series of administrative jobs in the program office, the dean’s office, and as an assistant principal, before being given command of a school.
A school like the new Metropolitan High School would be handed to someone with twenty to twenty-five years experience in the system who had a proven record of successful supervision.
That principal would bring an experienced staff on board in order to ensure a successful shakedown cruise and hand off a functioning institution to the next principal some years down the line. Instead what we are witnessing is a new managerial class running schools aground on a regular basis.
Perhaps the most dramatic proof that principal “empowerment” is little more than managerial “newspeak,” is evident in the staffing crisis throughout the school system. That’s because the new business model actually constrains the principal’s ability to hire the best possible staff.
The so-called Bloomberg-Klein business model demands that teacher salaries come directly out of the school-operating budget. Under the old system a school was charged the same amount for a teacher line regardless of the teacher’s salary or seniority. This was a rational approach to staffing in a system of eighty thousand teachers and constant turnover.
But budget cuts to a system that has more than doubled its operating costs to over $22 billion dollars over the past ten years, have forced principals throughout the city to skimp on hiring qualified teachers while administrative costs have ballooned. The result has been the hiring of the cheapest day-to-day substitutes, many of whom aren’t certified to teach the courses they are covering, in lieu of using experienced teachers who are held in a reserve pool because their schools are either being closed or their student populations have dropped.
None of this makes any business or pedagogical sense to anyone but a willful mayor who seems only capable of demolishing what was once a functional system. Education has taken a back seat as the new school leaders ply the only trade they know by following Abraham Maslow’s maxim; “if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”
There will be a demonstration at the U.S. Department of Education from April 4-7.
One of the speakers will be Mark Naison, who teaches African-American studies at Fordham University.
Here he explains why he will be there:
I am coming to Washington because our public education system is being systematically dismantled by people whose power derives solely from the unprecedented concentration of wealth in a small number of hands. Without the Gates, the Broads, the Waltons, the Bloombergs and the hedge fund executives, the three bulwarks of current Education Reform policy- privatization, universal testing and school closings- would have never gained traction because they are unsupported by research and are abhorred by most educators.. What we are facing is not onlythe degradation of the teaching profession and the transformation of the nation’s classrooms into zones of child abuse, but an attack on what little democracy we have left in this country. Therefore, I am not only coming to Washington defend the integrity of the profession I have dedicated my life to, but to join a movement which is one of the most important fronts of resistance to Plutocratic Rule
I also come to Washington, as a scholar of African American History, and a long time community activist, to strip the false facade of “Civil Rights” legitimacy from policies which promote increased segregation, push teachers of color out of the profession, open our schools to profiteering by test companies,and promote narrow workforce preparation as a substitute for the creation of active citizens who can change the world. So I will not only be calling out the billionaires and those who are directly on their payroll, but those who call themselves “progressive- who give aid and comfort to those policies, either because of the hope of political gain or a deficit of courage.. ,
Paul Thomas chastises conservative leaders in South Carolina for doing the same thing over and over for thirty years and expecting to get different results.
Thirty years of testing, accountability, and choice have been expensive and have not solved the state’s education problems. The testing corporations have benefitted, but not students.
Meanwhile the root cause of poor academic performance is unaddressed: grinding poverty.
Mike Deshotels wrote an amazing post about the shortcomings and failures of charters in Louisiana. I asked him for his permission to repost it in full and he graciously granted it. Mike blogs at http://louisianaeducator.blogspot.com/. Mike, an experienced educator, taught high school science in Louisiana.
NOLA.com, Blackboard Wars Reveal Charter Shortcomings
Recent reports in NOLA.com have described California charter school developer Steve Barr’s problems with expanding his charter concept to New Orleans. Barr has a contract with Oprah’s OWN network to produce a documentary series on his efforts to turnaround John McDonogh high school in New Orleans
Barr’s comments in the NOLA story contradict each other. In one instance he talks about how “beautiful and brilliant” he finds the students of John DcDonogh High School. In another instance he criticizes the New Orleans community and students exclaiming “this is what seven generations of crap looks like!”
The OWN network documentary focuses on some of the new TFA teachers struggling to succeed in their teaching assignments at John McDonogh. Steve Barr is quoted explaining that such teachers are having problems because of inexperience. He points out that it takes at least 4 or 5 years for a teacher to become proficient at his/her craft. If he knew that beforehand, then why did he hire so many minimally trained TFA teachers for his experiment at John McDonogh?
The NOLA article reveals discontent in the parent community and on the charter board and advisory committees. Two of the Board members have threatened to resign because they were not consulted on the approval of the documentary series filming. They also believe that Board members should be able to vote on hiring of staff and teachers. (Note: This is contrary to Jindal’s Act 1 of 2012 which places all hiring totally in the hands of school administrators. This provision of Act 1 has been ruled unconstitutional by a district court, so the charter board at McDonogh may still have some say so in employment matters.)
But the real issue is that charter board members are not elected by the public the way the law provides for traditional Louisiana public school districts. Charter schools are really run by their charter management organizations (In this case Steve Barr who lives in California) and by corporate reform power brokers like John White. There is a related story about Lycee’ Francais, another charter in New Orleans, which is in the process of being reorganized by John White and Charter School Association head, Caroline Roemer Shirley, using ad hoc appointed puppets.
These recent disputes highlight one of the weaknesses of the charter system. Like other recent school reform schemes, the charter concept assumes that schools cannot be run effectively by democratically elected school boards. The corporate reform movement assumes that schools need to be taken over by business oriented managers like Steve Barr or even for-profit organizations like Edison Schools or K12 or Connections Academy. All of these have proven to be failures in Louisiana, yet the Jindal and White power structure wants to give them more and more students to experiment with. They even want out-of-state Course Choice Providers to be able to freely recruit students from Louisiana public schools paid for by our tax dollars with minimal accountability, just because they are privately run.
There is absolutely no research that shows that these schemes educate children better. But there is plenty of evidence that for profit groups like Edison, K12 and Connections squander our tax dollars with minimal service to students. Jindal and White talk about “the urgency of now” as justification for throwing out democratic systems upon which our successful public school system has been built.
The chickens are now coming home to roost. All over the state we are witnessing dramatic charter school failures. Absolutely all the schools taken over and converted into charters in EBR, St Helena, Pointe Coupee and Caddo are failures by the very grading system forced upon our schools by Jindal and White. In recent months we have seen scandals in charter schools from unreported child sexual abuse to embezzlement, to financial collapse with schools not being able to pay utility bills, and to sheer mismanagement by incompetent amateur administrators. Now White and his TFA administrators have announced they will form an “Achievement Zone” in Baton Rouge with the very schools they have so badly mismanaged. Yet the Baton Rouge Advocate reports on the Achievement Zone as though it is an innovative action designed to correct the failures of our local school boards!
The secret weapon of Jindal and White is a strategy of appointing local power brokers such as business leaders, ministers and state legislators to puppet advisory boards for all these hair brained schemes. This assures buy-in from the powers that be. The same strategy has been used in Chicago, Philadelphia and Washington D. C. to implement the corporate reform models while bypassing professional educators. These schemes are all failing to produce academic results and end up in the closing of schools serving at-risk students dislocating thousands of students and ruining the careers of thousands of professional educators.
My questions are: When will our news media start doing their job of exposing the fraud and abuse of charters, vouchers, and reform profiteers? When will our legislature call a halt to this misuse of our tax dollars? When will our District Attorneys start prosecuting the crooks who are using our public school children to raid our school funding?
One way for educators and parents to fight the corporate takeover of our schools is to participate in groups like my Defenders of Public Education. Please consider signing up in the manner described in my previouspost.
