You say you want a revolution? Go to post-Rhee D.C. says Toch

Okay, now that I'm done FBing about #convfefe, I can get down to more serious business -- revolution. It seems a revolution has taken place in D.C. and I somehow missed it.

But Tom Toch didn't. Toch, a leading pro-reform, education policy expert and a highly regarded education writer, has published his study of the progress of school reform in the district, titled, "How D.C. Schools Are Revolutionizing Teaching." 

I'd say, it's about time somebody did it. But who?

Toch says, it all began with former D.C. schools chief Michelle Rhee, who, despite her various "mistakes," cheating scandals and unfortunate picture on the cover of Time Magazine, got the ball rolling. But Toch's study concludes that it was her successor chancellors who carried the rev forward, bringing radical changes to the teaching profession and miraculous gains in student achievement. DCPS has not merely revolutionized teaching, says Toch; it has created a "reform blueprint" for the rest of us to follow.

No credit given to teachers, of course. In fact, Toch clearly sees bad teachers and their over-protective unions as the problem, and different performance-based evaluations with high stakes attached as the r-r-r-revolutionary solution.

According to Toch:

Building on Rhee’s early work, and learning from her mistakes, her successors have effectively transformed it into a performance-based profession that provides recognition, responsibility, collegiality, support, and significant compensation—features that policy experts, including many of Rhee’s harshest critics, have long sought but never fully achieved.

Ironically, Rhee’s successors at DCPS have redesigned teaching through some of the very policies that teachers’ unions and other Rhee adversaries opposed most strongly: comprehensive teacher evaluations, the abandonment of seniority-based staffing, and performance-based promotions and compensation. They combined these with other changes, like more collaboration among teachers, that these same critics had backed. Just as notably, the transformation is taking place not at charters but in the traditional public school system, an institution that many reformers have written off as too hidebound to innovate.

At last, a reformer who offers the possibility hope and transformation within the public schools themselves. A ray of sunshine in a very gloomy period.

Toch reports that as a direct result of performance-based teacher evals, daily attendance in D.C. has reached 90%, up from 85% in 2010–11. Chronic truancy is down by nearly 40% over the past four years and graduation rates (however they're defined) have climbed to 69%, the highest in the city’s history.

And student achievement has begun a long climb toward respectability. While Washington’s test scores have traditionally been among the lowest in the nation, the percentage of fourth graders achieving math proficiency has more than doubled on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) over the past decade, as have the percentages of eighth graders proficient in math and fourth graders proficient in reading. Scores have risen even after accounting for an influx of wealthier students. And DCPS has caught up to the middle of the pack of other urban school districts at the fourth-grade level on the national exams.

In addition, the school system’s strongest teachers are no longer leaving in droves for charter schools. In many cases, the flow has been reversed, leaving even Washington’s most prominent charters struggling to compete for talent.

Now, don't mistake my cynicism about the "revolution" for the joy I feel over any reports of progress in urban school districts, especially when that progress is reported in neighborhood schools competing for resources, students and teachers with privately-operated charters and private-school voucher programs like the ones started by Rhee in D.C. and now championed by Ed Secretary Betsy DeVos. Yes, I'm glad D.C. 4th-graders are scoring higher on the NAEP and that the district has finally made it to the middle of the urban school district pack score-wise.

If that is really happening, and I have no reason to doubt Toch's numbers, credit should mostly go those hard-working and dedicated teachers, not just to the string of top-level administrators like Rhee and her mentee and former D.C. Teach For America Director Kaya Henderson, and the others who followed in Rhee's wake, usually lasting about 2 years each before they are run out or quit.

But as Toch himself points out:

Achievement levels among Hispanic and black students, who make up 82 percent of enrollment, lag badly behind their white peers. Only 15 percent of black students scored “proficient” in reading last year on Washington’s new, more demanding, Common Core–aligned exams, compared to 74 percent of white students.

If that's his idea of  a "revolution," leave me out.

But it's mostly Toch's line about how his study "takes into account the influx of [white] wealthier students" that gets me twitching. It's such an easy way of dismissing the effects of concentrated poverty on measurable learning outcomes, and of the most dramatic democratic changes in D.C., Chicago, Philly and dozens of other large urban school districts. It's what I and others have referred to as the whitenizing of the cities.

In Chicago, for example, where a quarter of a million African-Americans have been pushed out of the city over the past three decades, by gentrification, de-industrialization and job loss, lack of social services, closing of neighborhood schools, gun violence, etc... Mayor Emanuel and his appointed school district leaders are also now reporting corresponding "miraculous" gains in reading scores and graduation rates.

In 2008, DCPS was reportedly 84.4% black, 9.4% Latino, and 4.6% white.The racial breakdown of students enrolled in 2014 was 67% black, 17% Latino, 12% white, and 4% of "other races".

Now, for the first time in decades, the district itself no longer a majority-black city. Gentrification and demographic changes in many D.C. neighborhoods has increased the white and Latino populations in the city, while dramatically reducing the black and lowest-income population.  And isn't this the exact recipe of today's school reformers who claim poverty is just "an excuse" for low scores?

Of course, as anyone who went to D.C. schools back in the day will tell you, things weren't so great in the district's predominantly black and poor, racially segregated schools back before reform. And any improvements are welcomed, especially by parents and community members.

But good researchers never claim more than they should, especially for a small-scale study. Tom Toch should know that. A few reforms do not a revolution make. And if we are really serious about reform or revolution, we need to look well beyond the classroom for answers.

Why did Antwan Wilson leave Oakland for D.C.?

Oakland former Supt. Antwan Wilson seems nonplussed by parent/community protest. 

A friend in D.C. asked me why I thought Oakland Supt. Antwan Wilson would leave his $400K/year job to take the job in his town. Here's what I told him:

I'll tell you why he's leaving. Oakland (like the A's) is the farm team to the major leagues. They sent us Tony Smith to IL to do Gov. Rauner's bidding. DC is a plum job for pay and visibility (Wilson did ok in Oakland, pulling down a tidy $400K/yr. Look for him to make about the same in D.C.). Heartbeat away from the DOE and Ed Sec job (if Dems make a comeback). Oakland’s schools have been led by 8 people in the past 16 years — some named by the school board and others appointed amid state takeover. It's the Broad Academy MO. Make a quick hit, chop heads, and get out before the shit hits the fan. Collect golden parachutes along the way. D.C. will be Wilson's third. 

Good luck.

If you want to understand how this game of musical chairs is played, consider this. Wilson is being hired because of his alleged "success in raising achievement [test] scores" in Oakland. But remember, Wilson only lasted two years and left in mid-year. So they must be crediting him with raising scores on tests that were given before he got there.

Here's the real deal on Wilson according to Post News:

Wilson’s tenure in Oakland has been marked by conflict with parents, community groups and students over school privatization, the superintendent’s support for the expansion of charter schools and his close alliance with pro charter school organizations.

They left out Wilson's attempt to dismantle special education, which caused the loudest parent protests. Look for him to do the same in D.C.

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Comey is "confused"

FBI Director James Comey

 “To speak of mass incarceration, I believe, is confusing and can obscure reality.” -- Sun-Times

Pres. Obama

"Learning is about so much more than just filling in the right bubble. So we're going to work with states, school districts, teachers, and parents to make sure that we're not obsessing about testing." -- Fox News

Arnie Duncan

“It’s important that we’re all honest with ourselves. At the federal, state and local level, we have all supported policies that have contributed to the problem in implementation." -- New York Times

Dean Leslie Fenwick

Howard Univ. Dean, Leslie Fenwick

The lie is that schemes like Teach For America, charter schools backed by venture capitalists, education management organizations (EMOs), and Broad Foundation-prepared superintendents address black parents concerns about the quality of public schools for their children. -- Washington Post

Delmarie Cobb

Barbara Byrd Bennett didn’t betray us by herself. She had help. She was not alone in the room. -- Bean Soup Times

Vouchers for private schools: This is what passes for 'school reform' in D.C.

D.O.E.-- The Education Pentagon in D.C.

Posting from D.C. --Remember back in 2010 when Michelle Rhee was ruling the roost in D.C.? Rhee, with plenty of back-up from Arne Duncan and the Gates Foundation, became one of the superstars of the Waiting For Superman set, and D.C. was touted as the model for corporate-style, urban school reform. Duncan even used his position as Secretary of Education to stump for Rhee's patron, then-Mayor Adrian Fenty.

How the mighty have fallen. Rhee has left the world of corporate reform to go to work for a fertilizer company. After she was booted out of Washington came the revelations about her role in a major test-cheating scandal.

Spending this past week in the D.C. area has given me a closer look at Rhee's school reform legacy which goes hand-in-hand with the whitenizing of the District. In 2011, Washington’s black population slipped below 50% for the first time in over 50 years.

Not only is the city’s African American population shrinking — almost half of the District’s 650,000 residents are white — but it’s getting harder to be black in the nation’s capital. -- Washington Post

Petworth

Neighborhoods like Petworth are losing their public schools, as gentrifiers increasingly choose other options, like privately-run, publicly-financed charter schools. MacFarland, the only public middle school in Petworth, was one of 15 Washington public schools closed in 2013.

Vouchers...Congress seems to have a weird obsession with D.C. school vouchers, writes Valerie Strauss at WaPo.

Congress created what is formally known as the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program in 2004 as the only federally funded program that uses public money to pay for private school tuition, though the public has no say in how the schools are run or what is taught.

The D.C. voucher program has become the pet project of House Speaker John Boehner, who recently announced he is soon leaving Congress. Boehner this month introduced legislation to reauthorize the voucher program for an additional five years, and a bipartisan group of senators filed a companion bill to extend the program through 2025. (Pro-voucher Democrats also include two former mayors of D.C. Tony Williams and Fenty.)

In 2008, Rhee declared herself neutral on school vouchers But in 2011, she endorsed vouchers, saying that she supported "giving poor families access to publicly funded scholarships to attend private schools." Then again in a February 2011 speech before Georgia's legislature, she openly supported the D.C. voucher program as a supplement to the expansion of privately-run charter schools. She said that if a parent did not win the lottery to get a child into a charter school, then "who am I to deny them a $7,500 voucher to send their child to a great Catholic school."

This, even though a Washington Post review in 2012 found that hundreds of students use their voucher dollars to attend schools that are unaccredited. A previous report in 2007 found that some students in the program were attending private schools that had unsuitable learning environments and teachers without bachelor’s degrees.

The D.O.E.'s own evaluation of the voucher program found that it did nothing to raise measurable student learning outcomes.

The GAO reported that the local agency that administers the program lacks the “financial systems, controls, policies, and procedures” to ensure that federal funds are being spent legally. It also says the U.S. Education Department has not exercised its oversight responsibilities well enough.

Such is the state of what passes for D.C. school reform.

The 'Cone of Uncertainty' and other random notes...

The Cone of Uncertainty

We were heading out for D.C. this morning and then on to the Bethany Beach. We turned around. Lucky we checked the weather. I always thought the "Cone of Uncertainty" was a research/risk-management term 'til I heard Al Roker use it yesterday. I always called it, The Black Swan after Nassim Taleb's book of the same name.

This morning, I'm CERTAIN that Jauquin has the same travel plans as we do. Note to my old high school friend, Floyd at UM. I'll take a rain check on that beer.

Jake in Wauwatosa

Poll: There's 2 guys, Reggie and Bob, in Green Bay, Agnes in Oskosh, and Crazy Jake the exterminator in Wauwatosa, who still support Walker. -- Politico

Chiraq...After 14 people were shot here yesterday in just 15 hours, including an 11-month-old boy and a 2-year-old boy, the mayor jumps out and says gun laws must "reflect the values of the people". All this had me harking back to '09 when Rahm, while serving as Obama’s chief of staff, told AG Eric Holder to “shut the f--k up” on his proposed assault weapons ban. 

Speaking of Rahm, his boy Forrest Claypool ran a board hearing on charter expansion yesterday, that was shady enough to do the mayor and his predecessors proud. Critics were barred from entry and even run out of the hallways, while the room was stacked with Noble charter supporters. Final score: 86 speakers for Noble St. 10 for anti-expansion. 

Note to Sen. Warren...If you're serious about exposing think-tankers who are on the take from Wall Street, call me. I've got names and addresses. 

“Big oil companies shouldn’t be able to peddle phony research on climate change, and the financial industry shouldn’t be able to support phony economics hiding behind a think tank. People expect think tanks to be independent in the research they produce, and the fact that more and more of their work is funded by wealthy corporate interests — often in secret — further tilts the playing field for those with money and power.” -- Lacey Rose, a Warren spokeswoman.

Still cleaning up Rhee's Value-Added mess in D.C.

Seattle teachers protest Rhee-forms.

They're still cleaning up the debris from Michelle Rhee's signature reform in D.C.. Her top-down imposed Value-Added IMPACT system of teacher evaluation has long caused havoc in the system here and elsewhere. Remember, it's also a central piece of Arne Duncan's Race To The Top.

The teachers union should have never agreed to IMPACT and evals based on student test scores.  The formula for tying every student's test score bump or dip directly to an individual teacher is so complicated and inherently error-ridden that it's bound to confuse parents and negatively affect teachers and students.

Monday's Washington Post reports that faulty calculations of the “value” that D.C. teachers added to student achievement in the last school year resulted in erroneous performance evaluations for 44 teachers, including one who was fired because of a low rating. School officials described the errors as the most significant since the system launched a controversial initiative in 2009 to evaluate teachers in part on student test scores.

Half of the evaluations for the 44 teachers were too high and half too low, said Jason Kamras, chief of human capital for D.C. Public Schools.

Current WTU Pres. Elizabeth Davis, called the disclosure disturbing.

“IMPACT needs to be reevaluated,” Davis said. “The idea of attaching test scores to a teacher’s evaluation — that idea needs to be junked.”

Now she tells us.

D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray and Chancellor Kaya Henderson, a Rhee protege, aren't likely to junk V-A regardless of its consequences.

We should also consider the shameful role played by some academics in the imposition of value-added evals. One case in point: It was back in October when Professors Thomas Dee of the Stanford Graduate School of Education and James Wyckoff of the University of Virginia were heaping praise on  Rhee's V-A program, calling it, effective and accurate.

D.C.'s Mayor Gray under fire for Rhee-ism without Rhee

Like President Obama, who campaigned as a critic of the war in Iraq but then continued many of George W. Bush’s military policies once in office, Gray ran as a skeptic of the reforms being implemented by Rhee but continued them under Henderson, who also has closed more than a dozen schools and fired hundreds of teachers. -- Melinda Henneberger, Washington Post

D.C. students protest 2010 teacher firings.

Following up on Monday's post which was critical of WaPo's excellent education writer Valerie Strauss. Remember, Strauss was dismissive in her response to D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray's drawing parallels between the conditions black people face today in the nation's capital with those faced under South African apartheid. I defended Gray on that one, but also pointed out that I was also critical of Gray who seems to be following in the path of his horrible predecessors Adrian Fenty and Michelle Rhee.

It was Fenty who brought in Rhee as his appointed school chancellor. In a matter of months, Rhee, with heavy backing from corporate school reformers and power philanthropists, threw the school system into financial chaos. Her regime was marked by a massive test-cheating scandal along with a successful effort to weaken the teachers union and take away many of the teachers' collective bargaining rights. Rhee fired hundreds of good teachers and regularly debased the entire teaching force, promoted vouchers for Catholic schools, and put many the district's schools into the hands of private charter operators. The list goes on. But while Rhee became the darling of the corporate school reformers,  including Arne Duncan, she drew the ire of parents and of the city's under-served black community.

Henderson and Rhee

Fortunately, both Fenty and Rhee were run out of D.C. in a populist revolt by district voters. Unfortunately, Mayor Gray, who ran as an outspoken critic of Fenty's policies, quickly appointed Rhee's deputy “for human capital” Kaya Henderson as his chancellor. She is now following in Rhee's footsteps. Back in 2010 I called it, Rhee-ism without Rhee. 

Instead of dismantling Fenty's "reforms", Gray has continued them. Henderson, has closed more than a dozen schools and has fired hundreds of more teachers and librarians. D.C. charters now have the third-highest market share in the nation, enrolling a larger proportion of students than in every city except New Orleans and Detroit

Gray is now running for a second term and like Fenty, he's coming under heavy fire from educators, parents and school activists for his Rhee(ism)-without-Rhee approach. At Monday's community meeting, Gray was confronted by a hostile crowd that packed Eastern High School's auditorium to slam his education policies and his appointment of Henderson.

The Post reports:

On Monday, upstart candidates including restaurateur Andy Shallal, the owner of Busboys and Poets, and Reta Jo Lewis, a Democrat and former State Department official, drew the biggest applause, indicting both Gray and members of the council who seek to replace him for alienating parents and teachers amid a forceful push for school reform.

It looks like the mayor is in for tough sledding in the months leading up to the election. But as we have seen, getting rid of a mayor or a corrupt schools chancellor is one thing. Getting rid of the powerful corporate interests behind them is quite another. They don't have to run for office.

WHO WILL DE BLASIO PICK?

On that point -- Now that New Yorkers have elected progressive Bill deBlasio as their mayor along with a slate of councilmen backed by the Working Families Party, all eyes are on that city to see who the new mayor will pick as his chancellor. Rumors abound that Henderson and Chicago school chief Barbara Byrd-Bennett have made the short list.

I hope those rumors are false. I'm also glad to see Valerie Strauss is back on track. Here's her take on a possible Henderson appointment in N.Y.

The white blindspot -- My response to Valerie Strauss

"We called it ‘segregation,’ they called it ‘apartheid,” it’s the same system and the same political and military and diplomatic players. We had to fight that same system running parallel.” -- Rev. Jesse Jackson

D.C. Mayor Gray at South
African Embassy (AP Photo/Cliff Owen)

I never thought I would be saying this, but I'm shocked and dismayed by Valerie Strauss's column in yesterday's Washington Post ("D.C. Mayor Gray needs a history lesson on apartheid"). Let me say first that I have been a big fan of Valerie's for years and not such a big fan of Mayor Gray's. I often link to her blog and re-post most of her columns on Twitter. She has been a superb defender of public education and a thorn in the side of the corporate school reformers and privatizers, while Gray often seems to be following in the path of his horrible predecessor and Michelle Rhee follower, Adrian Fenty.

That being said, yesterday's admonishment delivered to D.C.'s African-American Mayor Vincent Gray, over his daring, in a rhetorical way, to draw parallels between the conditions black people face today in the nation's capital with those faced under South African apartheid, was almost too much to bear.

Mayor Gray reportedly said:

I think there are some parallels because we have 632,000 people who continue to live under the yoke of a form of oppression.  You know, we can’t control our own money, we can’t control our own local laws. We have taxation without representation in this city. I think there are a lot of people who see a parallel between his experience and ours.

Strauss alerts us that Gray "didn’t say it just once on Friday," but "uttered similar words at least four times during the day." I guess that's the answer to who's counting?

Gray might have added (maybe he did elsewhere) that even as we speak, D.C. residents don't even have full voting rights including voting representation in the Congress. The Constitution grants the Congress exclusive jurisdiction over the District in "all cases whatsoever" including the District's public schools. D.C. is also a city that is in the process of being whitenized as thousands of poor black families are being pushed out of the district and its schools. D.C. is no longer a majority-black city and the black population has been shrinking steadily for the past few years.

Gray could have also pointed out, as Michelle Alexander does in her book, "The New Jim Crow", that the U.S. imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South African did at the height of apartheid.

Writes Alexander:

“In Washington, D.C., our nation’s capital, it is estimated that three out of four young black men (and nearly all those in the poorest neighborhoods) can expect to serve time in prison.”

Now Mayor Gray never said that conditions in D.C. were exactly the same or nearly as brutal as South African apartheid. But his drawing of "some parallels" between the two resonated, I'm sure, with many of the District's black residents -- of which Strauss is not one.

They also resonated with me. I have been to South Africa and spent time in schools there as well as in D.C. and couldn't help drawing numerous parallels between them and the apartheid-like, racially-segregated school system that still predominates in cities like D.C. and Chicago.

Gray wasn't really saying anything new here. Valerie (and all of us) would do well to read "American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass" by Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton. I'm sure she wouldn't find much to disagree with in the author's comparisons or with their emphasis on poverty as a driving force in the so-called "failure" of American schools.

It was author/activist Jonathan Kozol (who certainly needs no history lessons from any of us) who helped popularize the parallels between apartheid South Africa and school systems in D.C., Chicago, E. St. Louis and other cities, when he titled his 2006 book "The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America."

The irony here is that Strauss ran a great interview with Kozol on the eve of our 2011 Save Our Schools protest in D.C. In that interview, Kozol refers to NCLB as "an apartheid of the intellect."

NCLB, in itself, adds a whole new level of division on the basis of a child's economic class or race. An  One class enjoys the treasures of the earth and also learns to ask demanding and irreverent and insightful questions. The other class is trained to spit up predigested answers.

Valerie doesn't blink.

Obviously there are differences between the South African system of apartheid and U.S. post-slavery, post-Jim Crow, segregation. For one thing, hypersegregation here has become defacto instead of enforced by law as it was in South African and in Jim Crow America.

As Dr. King said in a 1963 speech,

"We like to draw parallels between forms of oppression to neatly summarize the experiences, but in the 1960s black Americans were recognized as human by their constitution, whereas black South Africans were not."

But the closer you are to systemic, historic, institutional racial inequities, often the harder they can be to see...for some people, even very smart people like Valerie Strauss.

The white blindspot.

The Legacy of D.C.'s Dunbar H.S.

Up! Men and brothers, be noble, be earnest!

Ripe is the time and success is assured;

Know that your fate was the hardest and sternest

When through those lash-ringing days you endured.

-- Paul Laurence Dunbar

Don't miss this excellent NPR interview with Alison Stewart, author of  First Class: The Legacy of Dunbar, America's First Black Public High School. 

The nation's first black public high school, named after the great African-American poet, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and located less than two miles from the nation's capitol, opened its doors in 1870. But more than 140 years later, Dunbar — like many urban schools — has fallen on hard times. The crumbling, brutalist-style building is often described as a prison, and graduation rates hover around 60 percent.

But it wasn't always that way. Once upon a time, the yearbook read like a Who's Who of black America.

"It's really amazing because we're talking about people who literally changed America, who changed the United States," journalist Alison Stewart tells host Audie Cornish on All Things Considered. "The architect of school desegregation, Charles Hamilton Houston, was a Dunbar graduate. Elizabeth Catlett, the artist. Billy Taylor, the jazz musician. The first black general in the Army. The first black graduate of the Naval Academy. The first black presidential Cabinet member. The lists go on and on."

In 2008, then-Chancellor Michelle Rhee handed Dunbar over to a private, outside group to run. By 2010 the group had run Dunbar further into the ground and was given the boot by Rhee's successor, Kaya Henderson. Since then, it's been one new "reform" after another with a revolving door of leadership. Sounds a lot like Chicago's DuSable H.S., now "reformed" out of existence by corporate reformers and charter privateers to make way for neighborhood gentrification.

Be sure and read the comments section which add some interesting history to Stewart's account.

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

"Safe passage"? Yale kids will walk  past this abandoned and boarded up building at 73rd & Princeton on way to their "receiving" school.  | Jessica Koscielniak ~ Sun-Times

Rev. Marshall Hatch, in front of Tilton 

“That was a cartel, right on the side of the school. . . . This is where the folks know how to find them.” -- Sun-Times

Angelense Jones, a third-grade teacher at Overton Elementary

“You’re not taking them to a better school, to a better environment." -- Marchers, led by teachers union, speak out against school closings

Daniel del Pielago, Empower DC

“We are fighting not only to have equal access to neighborhood public schools but to save the fabric of our communities that is threatened by displacement and gentrification, This is as much about who gets to live in DC ten years from now as it is about our schools.” -- WaPo, "Judge declines to block D.C. school closures"

Fran Spielman, Chicago City Hall reporter

 Down was up and up was down as Emanuel joined business and labor leaders at McCormick Place to begin the formidable job of selling the concept of using more than $100 million in public money to bankroll a 10,000-seat arena near McCormick Place. -- Sun-Times

Award-winning Principal Carol Burris of South Side High School in N.Y.

Creating bell curves of relative educator performance may look like progress and science, but these are measures without meaning, and they do not help schools improve. -- The Answer Sheet

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Reaper Drone

License to Kill

"Creating a legal structure, processes, with oversight checks on how we use unmanned weapons is going to be a challenge for me and my successors for some time to come." -- President Obama 

D.C. Chancellor Kaya Henderson

"If we're going to keep a traditional school system, we can't just have schools pop up anywhere and cannibalize schools, right?" -- WAMU 88.5 News

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel

Chicago's initiatives come straight out of the playbook Barack Obama put forward in his campaign four years ago and has advocated since Day One of his presidency. -- "How to rebuild America"

Rep. Jack Franks 

I'm embarrassed for him [Gov. Quinn]. -- "Quinn faces key leadership test in coming weeks"

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Rauner's revolution

In any case, Rauner sees the strike as the start of "a multi-year revolution." His reactionary "revolution" imposed from above, however, now faces a revolution from below. -- David Moberg, In These Times

Poverty's death sentence

“We’re used to looking at groups and complaining that their mortality rates haven’t improved fast enough, but to actually go backward is deeply troubling,” said John G. Haaga, head of the Population and Social Processes Branch of the National Institute on Aging. -- N.Y. Times

Apartheid schooling in U.S.

 "Simply sitting next to a white student does not guarantee better educational outcomes for students of color," the report reads. "Instead, the resources that are consistently linked to predominantly white and/or wealthy schools help foster real and serious educational advantages over minority segregated settings." -- Study's author, The Root

Maureen Dowd

As a candidate, Mitt Romney is awkward, off-putting and hollow, so bad that if he were a Bain company, he would shut himself down. -- N.Y. Times

Jay Mathews

The team that former chancellor Michelle Rhee brought in five years ago, including current chancellor Kaya Henderson, can’t explain what it will do differently in the next five years. Even worse, the new goals might inspire more of the corner-cutting and dishonesty that have tainted the effort to help kids. -- Washington Post.

Weekend Quotables

"Privatopia"

David Segal

With public employee unions under attack in states like Wisconsin, and with cities across the country looking to trim budgets, behold a town built almost entirely on a series of public-private partnerships — a system that leaders around here refer to, simply, as “the model.” -- "A Georgia Town Takes the People’s Business Private."

Natalie Hopkinson

Today, as the quality of life improves, there is a subtext to change, that in order to make progress, black people must be pushed out of the way. They had it for 50 years! -- "Farewell to Chocolate City."

Charles Blow

The Republican-Democratic divide is increasingly becoming an all-white/multicultural divide, a male/female divide, and a more religious/less religious divide — the formers the traditional power classes, and the latters the emerging ones. -- "Bullies on the Bus"

Jay Mathews

I have been a reporter for 45 years. I have seen many cover-ups. This looks like one to me, and to many educators I have spoken to. D.C. officials have never investigated in any depth the wrong-to-right erasures that the District’s testing company began reporting in 2008. -- "D.C. keeps ignoring its test erasure scandal"

No "payoff" so D.C. cuts "investment" in school libraries

Whittier School parents struggled successfully in 2010 for a school library

Taking their cue from Chicago's mayor, D.C. officials are proposing to get rid of 34 school librarians in the 2012-2013 academic year as part of a cost-cutting measure proposed by Chancellor Kaya Henderson.
Henderson, who replaced Michelle Rhee as D.C. schools chancellor, had this to say in a discussion with a local reporter:

“We have invested in full-time librarians for the last three or four years and we haven't seen the kind of payoff we'd like” with reading test scores, Henderson countered, adding she is not disparaging librarians. "We have pulled away from programs where we haven't received a return on our investment.”  -- Washington Post

What kind of "payoff" was Henderson looking for? Test scores of course. Standardized test scores, which correlate more with poverty that anything else going on in schools, have now become the one and only standard for public investment in schools. We're looking at the obvious here. The poorest of inner-city schools will continue to see cuts in that "investment."

Washingtonians would do well to take their cue from the Chicago parents who occupied this city's Whittier School for months, successfully demanding a library. There are still some 160 CPS schools with no library.

DC Voices of Concern

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Austin Poly's first graduating class.

Austin Poly H.S. junior Deandre Joyce

The spring protest over the teachers’ firing was a highlight of his year, Mr. Joyce said. He was among the 36 students suspended for participating in the walkout and sit-in. “Our voices can be heard,” he said. “There is power in numbers.” -- Chicago News Cooperative

D.C. Chancellor Kaya Henderson

Upon hearing of principal Bill Kerlina's resignation: “I guess that we all know everything ain’t for everybody.” -- Bill Turque, Washington Post

Shael Polakow-Suransky

“The dilemma that schools will face is whether to cut a teacher who has been working with kids all day long in a classroom or cut teachers who are working in a support capacity, like librarians." -- NYT

The Reform Pretenders

"I do not blame Mr. Brizard for not raising the graduation rate to 75% in so short a time. Anyone who has engaged in real school reform knows that it would be virtually impossible to do what he promised that quickly. However, I do blame him for pretending that he could. Yet if one is a Klein reformer, trained by the Broad Superintendent Academy, one is taught to scoff at incremental change. The hard work of deep reform that transforms systems is for those old apologists who stay in town for a decade." -- Principal Carol Corbett Burris, 2010 New York State Outstanding Educator

Cheating awards?

Okay, so I agree with Jay Mathews that D.C. Public Schools chief Kaya Henderson shouldn't  have chosen J.O. Wilson Elementary School Principal Cheryl Warley to receive the Post Foundation's Distinguished Educational Leadership Award, even though she sounds like a pretty good principal.

Yes, it's obvious that Wilson and dozens of other D.C. schools were part of the pattern of systematic, widespread cheating that led to the district's reported test-score gains, which in turn were erroneously credited to Michelle Rhee's leadership. It was Rhee who took all the credit and built her reputation on the supposed test gains and who left town before the cheating scandal was uncovered. She bailed out, leaving principals like Warley holding the bag.

Oddly, Mathews never once mentions Rhee in his entire column, leading one to assume that Erasure-gate was simply a matter of 103 district schools each individually having their children erase incorrect answers and replace them with correct answers, with the blame falling entirely on principals like Warley and her faculty. Henderson, who was Rhee's assistant during erasure-gate, in a way has set up Principal Warley by nominating her for the award.

Mathews also fails to mention that the Post and its Foundation--the award giver--is intimately tied up and invested in the current national obsession with standardized testing which has led to similar cheating scandals from Georgia to Maryland and beyond.

The Post Company's subsidiary and main profit center, Kaplan, Inc., is one of the leading purveyors of the kind of high-stakes testing that has helped create the climate for cheating. Of course, they're only a small part of the profitable system of standardized testing madness that is foisted on schools and teachers by No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, supported by power philanthropists like Gates and Broad, and directed by Secretary Duncan. Melinda Gates herself was on the Post's board before another scandal involving Kaplan and the Gates Foundation forced her to resign.

So in a way, the Post Foundation is simply awarding schools and principals for playing a dangerous (for kids) game that it has helped create. If they are going to reward cheating and fraud, then Rhee and their own Kaplan, Inc. should be the first two recipients.

Erasurehead

Replacing the broom as symbol for D.C. reform

What a tangled web Michelle Rhee has woven for herself. Erasure-gate is now the talk of the town in D.C. now that Rhee seems to have traded in her broom for a pencil with an eraser on its end. Even Rhee buddy Jay Mathews has turned on her. Maybe because Mathews' wife Linda, helped break the USA Today story which sparked a wild counter attack by Rhee when she went on the Tavis Smiley Show.  

"When the academic achievement rates of a district like D.C. go up, people assume that it can't be ... because the kids are actually attaining higher gains in student achievement, but that it's because of something like cheating," Rhee told Smiley. When he asked Rhee if she believed the USA Today investigation to be lacking in integrity, she said, "Absolutely."

But even so... Mathews is now asking Arne Ducan if he'll take back the Blue Ribbon awarded Rhee and the district for its bump in test scores now that we know it wasn't a bump at all, but a pot hole. You may recall that Duncan gave D.C. the award on the eve of  D.C. elections in November, his way of campaigning for defeated mayor, Fenty who first appointed Rhee. However, it's not likely that Duncan will renege on the award. He staked the reputation of the president and the D.O.E. on Rhee's success and stardom as did Mr. Guggenheim and the Waiting for Superman crowd along with power philanthropists, Gates, Broad and Walton.

Rhee was quite willing to take personal credit for the test scores (even those that were scored before she had any affect on the district) when they looked good. But now she refuses to take any responsibility for the widespread and systematic cheating that went on under her watch.

USA Today reviewed test scores from 2008 through 2010 and found an unusual rate of erasures on answer sheets from 103 schools in which wrong answers were consistently replaced with the right ones. In one seventh-grade classroom in Northeast D.C., USA Today found nearly 13 erasures per student on a 2009 reading test. The citywide average that year was no more than one erasure per student. -- NPR

Now it looks like she may be called in front of several investigating committees where she risks perjury charges unless she comes clean. All the Gates and Broad money (and there's plenty) in her war chest may not be able to save her from hitting bottom on this one.

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

April 4, 1968

Dr. King's Legacy

On this, the 43rd anniversary of Dr. Kings assassination, thousands of union workers, including teachers, will be marching around the country remembering that King died fighting for the rights of city workers to unionize. In Detroit and march and rally is being organized to protest the legislature's recent passage of union busting legislation. 

"The Detroit 5000" March Co-Organizer; Mr. Ernest Johnson, Chairman of Community Coalition feels strongly that allowing the new bill to be exercised will be "detrimental to the civil rights and liberties that Dr. King and countless others fought and died for.

"...this dark cloud makes our pension susceptible to takeover! Everybody who believes in civil rights should be alarmed about what is taking place. If they can do this in Detroit, they can and will do it in any city that has fallen on hard times." -- Detroit 5000

Transocean execs get big bonuses

 "As measured by these standards, we recorded the best year in safety performance in our company's history, which is a reflection on our commitment to achieving an incident free environment, all the time, everywhere." -- Company report to the SEC

I'm glad he qualified it

 "Nuclear energy is per kilogram 250,000 times better than hydrocarbons or any chemical ... as long as the earth exists, you wouldn't run into fuel problems." --Bill Gates

Rhee's former deputy 

Kaya Henderson wants to ease a testing regimen that she concedes has left students and school staff “stressed-out and crazy.” -- Bill Torque at WaPo

Rhee the Reformer: A Cautionary Tale

By the brilliant Teacher Sabrina (Shupe)

I know up on top, you are seeing great sights,
But down at the bottom, it doesn’t look right.
At home, I struggle with my son’s errant math,
But on your new tests, he’s proficient at that!”