Ken Previti, a retired teacher, has been watching the evolution of school “reform,” and he wonders when the public will catch on to the schemes and fear-mongering. What is it all about? Sell-sell-sell.
Just doing what business does. Monetizing the children.
A reader commented on an earlier discussion with these thoughts:
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“”Does anyone else feel like we are basically being ignored?” – 2old2tch
While I applaud the sentiment and aspirations of this letter I am saddened with the weak tea rhetoric and carefully qualified points in academic insider language. This is how academics exchange views at conferences. Arne Duncan is not an academic and he has yet to show any respect for or interest in anything academics have to say.
Offering a long list of research citations is great if your are publishing in a peer-reviewed journal. Otherwise they indicate a false belief in the authority of the research, which the reform movement has largely ignored and dismissed all along. This high flown rhetoric doesn’t stand up well to Duncan’s canned talking points outside of academia.
A non-academic reading this might well ask: So what exactly are they saying? What exactly are they asking for? Where’s the beef?
Can we get a plain-spoken English translation, something like: You are destroying public schools and the teaching profession. Standardized testing is out of control, cruel, and useless in determining success of students and teachers. Your “Race to the Top” creates losers as well as winners. These programs have been tried over and over and always fail — why are you still promoting them?
If the purpose was to convince other academics then it serves that purpose well, a preaching to the choir moment. If the purpose is to impact and change wrong-headed policies then the audience should be much broader and the language much less academic and their tone much more forceful. That’s how the game is played today.
“Does anyone else feel like we are basically being ignored?” – 2old2tch
“Yes.”
Rhonda Brownstein, the executive director of Pennsylvania’s Education Law Center, says that it is time to stop trusting the claims of cyber charter promoters. For years, they have promised that students would get “innovative” education and that wondrous things would happen when virtual charters became reality, but Pennsylvania now knows that none of that turned out to be true.
Pennsylvania has allowed unchecked growth of cyber charters. They have drained funding away from public schools while providing a low-quality of education.
She writes:
“Attorneys at ELC have heard from the families of many students attending cyber charter schools. Here’s what those families have reported: Students spending countless hours behind computer screens without any required human interaction; students with disabilities who are not receiving any appropriate academic instruction; and students who have been pushed into computer-based programs as a result of behavioral incidents.”
And she adds:
“Cyber charter supporters tout policy recommendations that focus on a theoretical version of the future without addressing the ill effects of Pennsylvania’s 13-year embrace of cyber charter schools. Some of those supporters go so far as to say that Pennsylvania is in jeopardy of falling behind other states in an imagined race to expand the number of cyber charter schools. But the truth is that, despite mounting evidence of the academic failure of these schools, Pennsylvania has blindly led the full-time cyber schooling movement for years. In fact, during the 2011-2012 school year Pennsylvania accounted for 16 percent of all students enrolled in full-time cyber schools in the entire country.”
“Pennsylvania has been experimenting with students in cyber charter schools under the guise of “innovation” for more than a decade. We no longer need to hypothesize about the results. Cyber charters do not work for the majority of the students they enroll.”
This just in.
Here is the flyer in downloadable form:
Education supporters plan huge grassroots rally at Mich Capitol June 19th
Grassroots power in action!
Please join us on the Capitol lawn beginning at 11:30 am on Wednesday, June 19th. We’re still working on lining up our speakers for the event, but we’ve already confirmed the following superstar advocates for public education:
Sen. Gretchen Whitmer (Senate Minority Leader)
Sen. Bert Johnson (D-Highland Park)
Rep. Brandon Dillon (D-Grand Rapids)
John Austin (President, State Board of Education)
Thomas Pedroni (Associate Professor, Wayne State Univ)
Superintendent Rod Rock (Clarkston Community Schools)
Jeff Kass (Ann Arbor Public Schools Teacher & Poet)
Sherry Gay-Dagnogo (Education Chair, National Congress of Black Women)
Steven Norton (Michigan Parents for Schools)
John Stewart (former member MI House of Representatives)
Mary Valentine (former member MI House of Representatives)
Stephanie Keiles (Plymouth-Canton Community Schools Teacher & Michigan Friends of Public Education)
Betsy Coffia (Save Michigan’s Public Schools)
K-12 Students Representing School Districts Around Michigan
And Master of Ceremonies … Tony Trupiano (Progressive Talk Radio Show Host/Night Shift with Tony Trupiano)
WHO ARE WE?
Save Michigan’s Public Schools is a non-partisan grassroots network of concerned citizens. Our goal is to connect parents, students, educators and communities across Michigan and raise awareness of threats to public education.
We believe a free, quality public education is the cornerstone of a democratic society. We believe every child in Michigan deserves access to equal and excellent educational opportunities through public education. We believe public education must be locally-controlled, fully-funded, delivered by highly qualified professional teachers, and devoid of corporate involvement.
To this end, we support policymakers and public officials who reject the corporate, profit-motivated takeover of public schools, massive school closures, and meaningless high-stakes testing. We support wise policies and laws that forward sound, research-based, evidence-based solutions to support and improve our existing public school system.
Two low-performing for-profit Imagine charter schools in Fort Wayne, Indiana, were supposed to close because of their poor academic records. But instead of closing, they are merging with Horizon Christian Academy, where students will be encouraged to apply for vouchers.
Karen Francisco, the editorial page editor of the Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette, says that we now know that school “reform” has nothing to do with accountability as this move enables failing charters to evade any accountability for their performance.
Meanwhile, some public schools in Indiana are closing because of budget cuts.
A reader offered the following comments on the relationship between Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and the Broad Foundation:
“There is no way Duncan limited testing when he was in Chicago because it would have impeded the corporate education reform agenda.
Arne Duncan was on the board of the Broad Foundation while he was the leader of Chicago schools. The modus operandi of Broad Foundation is deception. It is the method of implementing the Broad Foundations anti-democratic agenda.
On Page 10 of the 2009/2010 Broad Foundation Annual Report http://tinyurl.com/6w5sps2
it says:
“Prior to becoming U.S. secretary of education, Arne Duncan was CEO of Chicago Public Schools, where he hosted 23 Broad Residents. Duncan now has five Broad Residents and alumni working with him in the U.S. Department of Education.”
On Page 35 of the same annual report it says:
“The election of President Barack Obama and his appointment of Arne Duncan, former CEO of Chicago Public Schools, as the U.S. secretary of education, marked the pinnacle of hope for our work in education reform. In many ways, we feel the stars have finally aligned.
With an agenda that echoes our decade of investments—charter schools, performance pay for teachers, accountability, expanded learning time and national standards—the Obama administration is poised to cultivate and bring to fruition the seeds we and other reformers have planted.”
President Obama will unveil his technology plan for American education today in Mooresville, North Carolina.
Joy Resmovits reports on Huffington Post:
“President Barack Obama imagines a country where teachers know what’s happening in their students’ brains.
“He wants “teachers to have an ability to assess learning hour by hour and day by day,” a senior White House official said Wednesday. “That vision … is really not possible with the connectivity we have today.”
“That’s why on Thursday Obama will speak at a school in Mooresville, N.C., to unveil an initiative that aims to give 99 percent of America’s public schools high-speed connectivity over the next five years.”
Mooresville has won national attention because it provided laptop computers to every student in fourth grade and above, and its graduation rate shot up. The superintendent says there were other reasons for the increased graduation rate.
A few things about North Carolina: the Democratic Party held its 2012 National Convention there. It is a right-to-work state. The state spending on public education is 48th in the nation. Teachers’ salaries are 46th in the nation. Legislation introduced this spring by the president pro tem of the state senate would strip teachers of all tenure rights. At the same time that the legislature is attacking the pay and tenure of career educators, it allocated $6 million to hire inexperienced Teach for America teachers. The legislature also plans to expand the number of charters, free of conflict of interest regulations, free of diversity requirements, and free to hire uncertified teachers.
Technology is a wonderful thing, and all schools should be connected to the Internet.
But I would respectfully suggest to President Obama that there are far larger issues he should tackle right now, like defending the very existence of a teaching profession, defending academic freedom of educators, supporting the nation’s public schools, resisting privatization, and helping states provide equality of educational opportunity, with enough resources to meet the essential needs of students.
As thousands of activists plan to rally in Albany against the stat’s heavy reliance on standardized testing on June 8, many parents and educators are speaking out against Pearson’s field tests. The testing corporation is trying out questions in the state’s classrooms that might be used on future tests, but opponents say “enough is enough.” The students recently completed two weeks of grueling state tests.
One reward of opening the link is that you get to see a picture of Peter DeWitt, one of the state’s best principals and an outspoken opponent of high-stakes testing. DeWitt was recently the target of an effort by the State Education Department to intimidate him. He is one of my heroes. For he steadfast defense of children, he certainly belongs on the honor roll. He is a champion of children, a champion of public education, and a champion of ethics in education,
David Sirota sees the current disastrous era of school “reform” as a shell game that blames teachers and schools while diverting the gaze of the public from the root causes of poor academic performance.
Persist. This too shall pass.
ACTION ALERT!
publicschoolsfirstnc.org
Help Us Deliver 15,000+ Signatures
to Governor McCrory on Thursday!
It’s time to wake up the people of North Carolina and let them know that our public schools are in danger! Pending bills in the General Assembly could devastate our schools as we know them — lifting the cap on classroom sizes, eliminating classroom positions, slashing eligibility for Pre-K, authorizing vouchers that send public money to private/religious schools, and funneling public money into for-profit schools with no oversight.
Join us for a press conference and rally as we deliver our petition to Governor Pat McCrory! Children are especially welcome to join us — let’s show our lawmakers who will pay the price if they go through with these terrible ideas.
If we don’t let our friends and neighbors know what’s going on, no one will — and it will be too late!
Join Us
Thursday, June 6 at 4:30 PM
State Capitol Building
1 E Edenton Street
Raleigh, NC 27601
Public Schools First NC
(919) 576-0655
info@publicschoolsfirstnc.org
