Have you ever gotten one of those seemingly innocuous phone calls where the caller asks if you will participate in a survey? You know, market research or social science.
Here is a fascinating account of a “push poll” that starts off innocuous and then turns into advocacy for Mayor Rahm Emanel’s agenda of privatization and teacher-bashing.
Was the caller really working for the University of Chicago? Who knows?
They called the wrong person. He knew too much.
Coach Bob Sikes in Florida knows how phony that state’s A-F grading system is. (This was confirmed recently by Matt Di Carlo of the Shanker Institute, who pointed out that the state changed the system to improve the results.)
Now he finds that Oklahoma State Superintendent Janet Barresi is copying the Jeb Bush playbook.
This is hardly surprising because she is a member of the Jeb Bush group of rightwing state superintendents called “Chiefs for Change.”
Barresi wants Oklahoma to grade its schools with a simple-minded A-F grade, just like Jeb Bush did. If Jeb did it, it must be right. Remember the “Florida miracle”?
Unfortunately a group of Oklahoma researchers examined her proposal and sharply criticized it.
No problem for Barresi. She has been going around the state telling people that the researchers have recanted their views. Except they haven’t.
Before Barresi was elected superintendent, she was a speech pathologist. In 1984, she became a dentist. Later, she opened Oklahoma City’s first charter school and served on the board of another charter school. She is a big supporter of privatization.
Tim Slekar gave a powerful speech to a meeting in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Watch it.
If all of us spoke out, we could stop this train wreck that dares to call itself “reform.”
A teacher who heard him wrote this letter:
Dr. Slekar,
You won’t believe what I just did!
I stood before my school board at a public meeting and asked them to
consider opting out of standardized testing!
I was asked to speak on the writing process in 8th grade, but as the meeting
went on and teacher after teacher and administrator after administrator
praised the achievements we were reaching with test prep, computer programs
and data, something snapped. I said to myself, if I’m going to be here I
might as well tell the truth.
So when it was finally my turn, I said I had good news and bad news. The bad
news was that there’s an elephant in the room we haven’t been addressing. I
told them I had severe reservations about high stakes standardized testing
and went on to explain them. I told them 8th graders conservatively take 7-9
standardized tests: PSSA Reading, PSSA Math, PSSA Writing, PSSA Science,
Three GRADE tests, Keystone Algebra and Keystone Literature! I told them
there was no academic study showing this was effective – in fact just the
opposite. I told them these tests don’t measure learning, only achievement.
I told them how parents, teachers and school boards were opting out. And I
told them about you and much more.
When I was done, most of the board agreed with me. They thanked me for
speaking out. My principal slapped me on the back and said it had to be
said.
I asked the board to please meet with you and consider it.
I have my doubts they’ll follow through, but this is a big step. Would you
mind if I sent them your contact info? I’d love to get us all sitting down
at a table or to have you address the board at a public meeting. Would you
be wiling?
My school district is Steel Valley in Munhal. We’re pretty close to
Pittsburgh.
Anyway, I just wanted to share this with you. I feel good for speaking out
but would like to build on this. Unfortunately there were hardly any members
of the public there and NO media.
Thanks again.
Yours,
Steve
A reader sent the following information about the planned destruction of public education in Indianapolis:
Unfortunately the Neighborhoods of Educational Opportunity/Indianapolis Mayor’s Office plan (NEO) presentation which has been made public is just the tip of the iceberg. There is a well documented, more detailed plan that select groups (The Mind Trust, Stand for Children, Teach for America, The New Teacher Project) are meeting about in private and making plans while they await the possible receipt of a Bloomberg grant of $5 mil to get this plan off the ground in Indianapolis.
This plan will not be publicly unveiled in Indianapolis until it is a done deal.
Certain members of the Indianapolis Board of School Commissioners were strategically placed there by the powers that be to weaken Indianapolis Public Schools and prime it for takeover.
Also, watch legislation in Indiana. The Mayor’s office is slowly taking powers away from other branches of government. For example, they now have oversight of four former IPS schools taken over under Tony Bennett’s watch.
There is legislation pending that would allow those schools to become “independent” schools at the end of the takeover period.
We now have a parent trigger law.
There is also legislation which would remove the involvement/oversight of the city county council in approving new Charter schools.
Another bill takes a funding source from public schools (proceeds from auctioned properties due to non-payment of taxes) and gives it to Mayor-sponsored charter schools.
Other legislation forces the sale or lease of closed public schools to Charter schools and other private entities.
All of this collusion is no accident. If you happen to believe it is a bunch of coincidental things, non-related, happening all at the same time, then I feel sorry for you.
The Sacramento school board is rushing to shut down 11 elementary schools. That’s 20 percent of the elementary schools run by the Sacramento City Unified School District.
The process has been indefensible. Board members and the Superintendent have short-circuited the usual decision making process on school closure in order to jam these through. The California Department of Education recommends a 6 month process, which includes formation of a citizen advisory committee. But the district has given just five weeks between announcing the list of schools on the chopping block, and the final vote on Thursday. There is no citizen committee.
The fierce urgency of now requires immediate action, and no democratic process whatever.
The district has wildly exaggerated the under-enrollment numbers at these schools, cherry-picked numbers regarding costs and revenue, and refused to take into account the impact that displacing so many students will have on enrollment–as students leave the district for charter schools and other districts. Charter operators are already checking out some campuses, eager to take them over. The superintendent is a graduate of the Broad Academy, which suggests that the mass closure is more about about ideology than cost savings or efficiency.
This is an outrage.
Why don’t they hold hearings?
The lights are going out on public schools in city after city because some billionaire thinks it is a good idea.
Some smart and sophisticated young activists in the Hmong and Latino communities have organized to fight this plan. Listen to them here.
Are there no public-spirited citizens on the Sacramento school board? Don’t they feel a civic obligation to protect public education against privatization?
Jeb Bush’s organization tweeted on the morning of February 20 that I “liken school choice to Nazi invasion.” Whoever posted that tweet under the name of Jeb Bush’s organization either maliciously ignored the fact that the first sentence of the post says that the post was written by a parent, or was confused by the formatting. I did not liken school choice to a Nazi invasion, period.
I can’t do anything to diminish the malice of others, but I did revise the post to insert the words, “she writes” to make clear where her comment begins. And I added the link to the Naison-Bernstein post to which the comment refers.
I want to add that I defend the right of everyone to use historical analogies to refer to current events. People do that all the time, as well they should. Free speech permits anyone to use analogies to slavery, Jim Crow, the Brown decision, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, the Great Depression, McCarthyism, Prohibition, the Holocaust, Chamberlain, the Munich Pact, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Pearl Harbor, or any other historical event or person to make a point. I believe in free speech. It is your choice to like their analogy or not like it, but it insults the intelligence of everyone to say that all historical analogies are out of bounds. If people make ridiculous analogies, then it makes them look ridiculous.
So to clear up any confusion, here is where the original blog begins.
This parent takes issue with Mark Naison and Bruce Bernstein, who wrote a post about how to tell whether your local charter school is avaricious. The few “good charters” are used by the corporate charter chains to clear the path:
She writes:
Superb list. Very true. However, I must disagree with this sentence: “We will not categorically write off charter schools because there are some great ones.”
Maybe. But the privatizers declared war on our schools, our kids, our teachers, our parents and our taxpayers.
We didn’t start this war, any more than Poland in 1939. But we must fight back. And ultimately, emerge victorious.
And when you’re in a war, and you’re defending the lives of your community, unfortunately, nuance or thoughtful qualifications become luxuries we can no longer afford.
Every “ed reformer” has lines like this down pat: “Well, charter schools aren’t a silver bullet. I’d never pretend that they’ll solve all of our education challenges. And I’ll be the first to admit that there are some bad apples. But we should all acknowledge that there are some great ones…” blah blah blah and before you know it, you wake up one day and you’re living in Detroit, New Orleans, Philadelphia or Indianapolis, with the mayor running the show, and cutting up “the pie” for all his fellow country clubbers and new billionaire buddies.
You may technically be right about some “good charters”, but I think such a reasonable concession is just what they’ll use as an excuse to then drive a truck right through it.
“Parent trigger” is a zombie policy. It has never transformed a single school. It has no evidence. It is a slogan pretending to be a policy. It is the quintessence of a corporate power grab.
In the wake of the Newtown massacre, no decent person should utter the words “parent trigger.”
But in Florida, Coach Bob Sikes alerts his readers to the return of the “parent trigger” legislation that failed to pass last year. It failed because–no matter how hard Jeb Bush and Michelle Rhee promoted it–every parent group in Florida opposed it. Somehow the PTAs understood that “parent empowerment” would benefit the corporations running charter schools, not their children.
Jeb Bush vowed to bring it back, and here it comes. Only here is an interesting turn of events. One of the sponsors is a Republican legislator who was not friendly to charters last year. Coach Bob wonders if her change of heart has anything to do with the campaign contributions doled out by the for-profit charter corporations.
By the way, he doesn’t mention it here, but Frank Biden is an executive with the for-profit Mavericks charter chain cited in his post. Frank is the brother of Joe Biden.
This just arrived in my email box:
When the school district of impoverished Muskegon Heights went broke, Governor Rick Snyder of Michigan felt no obligation to save public education. He appointed an emergency manager to privatize the whole district. The district was handed over to a for-profit operator, Mosaica, which promptly fired all the teachers. It hired a new staff and started fresh. About a quarter of the staff left in short order. There have been three principals at the high school in six months. And the schools have hired uncertified teachers, which is illegal in the state.
Not to worry. The private sector knows best.
A member of the Fort Wayne, Indiana, school board writes:
They are coming after Fort Wayne next. Please, all come to the faux public hearing on Carpe Diem application on Tuesday, 26th at 5:30, Taylor campus. I need a couple hundred.
