Hey Rahm. Why are these suburban high schools opting for shorter school day?

Township H.S. Dist. 214 Supt. David Schuler: "Our kids are more than a standardized test score."

Memo to Mayor Rahm Emanuel:

Remember, you banked your entire school improvement plan for Chicago on an imposed longer school day? More seat time for students with no plan for how that time would best be used. And no plan for how to pay for it. You told us that your change model was Houston, TX and even made up this cock-and-bull story to make your point.

"If you start in the Chicago Public School system in kindergarten," offered Rahm, "and your cousin lives in Houston, and you both go all the way through high school, the cousin in Houston spends three more years in the classroom."

But Rahm, do you see what they're doing in wealthier and whiter northwest suburban districts, like Township H.S. Dist. 214 where today, the school board will vote on a plan to make the school day shorter, start school later, and put a limit on homework? Under the new plan, students would still receive the same hours of instructional time. But the school day would be restructured with the health and well-being of students in mind.

The plan aims to reduce stress and let students get more sleep for the students who attend schools in six suburbs. The plan also proposes to ease up on the amount of homework.  

"We've come to the decision that our kids are more than a standardized test score. We want them to be well rounded global citizens who can contribute in a meaningful way," said District 214 Superintendent David Schuler. -- ABC7 News

Wow! What a concept.

Oh, and BTW Rahm, here's the latest news from Houston:

Alicia's daughter came to Texas two years ago and began third grade in HISD. Since then, she has not conducted a single science experiment, has never had a social studies lesson and has been assigned one book to read in class. Instead Alicia's daughter has taken 75 practice STAAR tests and has completed approximately 1,200 STAAR prep worksheets.

Parents have had enough. We are opting out, or boycotting the STAAR test, to support stronger public schools and to oppose the high-stakes testing culture that is making our schools worse, not better.

Rahm's longer school year has morphed into furlough days for teachers

When Rahm Emanuel first ran for mayor of Chicago in 2011,  his education policy platform consisted of a demand for a longer school day and school year. As I pointed out back then, he made the case using  a bogus research model and Houston as his protype, a city where supposedly a longer school year had led to students "gaining three years" of learning time on Chicago students by the time they graduated.

But now, faced with a new budget crisis, Chicago, like Houston, is shortening its school day and year.  A new memo from CEO Forrest Claypool, tells principals to "stop spending" immediately.

The mayor's  own children were attending the prestigious Lab School, which had one of the shortest school days and years. Rahm himself had graduated from suburban Winnetka schools, where school days and years are far shorter despite spending double per student.

Funny, you don't hear anyone talking much about Houston schools these days. There hasn't been another "Texas Miracle" since George Bush was governor and Rod Paige was Houston's superintendent.

It is not the length of time but the quality of time that truly matters here.” -- CTU President Karen Lewis

After his election, Rahm went ahead and imposed his faux-research-based plan on resistant schools, teachers and principals. He did it despite having no money in his budget to pay for it and without any plan for how the extra seat time could actually improve teaching/learning. It didn't take long before lack of funds and parent protests forced Rahm to scale back his program, ending it completely for elementary schools.

Now we see the chickens coming home to roost. More seat time not only failed to produce better learning outcomes for students, the added costs have contributed to the current budget shortfall and a resulting 3-day furlough for city teachers and canceling school on Good Friday (a Catholic religious holiday). In other words, a shorter school year and more chaos and confusion for teachers, parents and students.

Oh yes, and guess what's happening in New York's Success Academies, the corporate-reformers' favorite charter schools network? That's the one that distinguished itself from district public schools by the length of its school day.

Behind Rauner's call to 'end unfunded mandates'

Rauner and Smith

Unfunded mandates. I hate 'em. Schools and school districts hate 'em.

It didn't take our demagogic, education-know-nothing governor, with help from his much-smarter State Supt. Tony Smith, very long to figure that out and issue a call to end all unfunded mandates -- which these days virtually means ALL mandates.

Former Oakland supt. Smith is a veteran of the old Coalition of Essential Schools and founder Ted Sizer's less-is-more philosophy. In Oakland, he talked the Sizer Essential Schools talk in order to close public schools, fire teachers, and replace them with privately-run charters in their place.

Sizer's progressive vision, expressed beautifully in his book, Horace's Compromise (a seminal text and must-read, especially for high school educators) was about smaller schools (including charters) and classrooms which were more like learning communities than shopping malls, where skilled teachers were empowered to make the most important educational decisions (and yes, compromise between what's nice and possible), to teach and not just test, and where students could engage in meaningful learning based on their interests and experience.

For Sizer, who served as dean of Harvard's Ed School, less-is-more was never about union-busting or forcing schools to choose between basic necessities because of draconian state budget cuts to public education. It was never about austerity and do-more-with-less.

For Rauner/Smith that's exactly what the call to abolish mandates means. Rauner wants nothing less than to privatize all public space and eliminate civil rights protections and public employee unions altogether.

Yes, let's get rid of unfunded mandates like, Rahm Emanuel's longer school day, like Common Core and PARCC testing madness. But we need to keep mandates that ensure student safety, special education, ELL, class size ceilings, caps on charters, and school desegregation as well as all other fundamental civil and human rights -- including teachers' right to bargain collectively with elected school boards.

The response to necessary, but unfunded, mandates, should be to adequately fund them, not abolish them.

WEEKEND QUOTABLES -- R.I.P. JOHN GOODLAD

John Goodlad (1920-2014)

John Goodlad on social justice

“It is my expectation that Teacher Education for Democracy and Social Justice will become a rich resource for continuing this multi-layered conversation-from democratic belief to democratic action-that is the hallmark of educational renewal.” -- Forward to Teacher Education for Democracy and Social Justice,

...On more schooling

However, a need to expand the length and breadth of schooling does not necessarily follow from well-founded arguments regarding the critical importance of education. As I have said repeatedly, schooling and education are not synonymous. -- A Place Called School 

...On test & punish

In our system, we receive test scores without having the faintest idea under what conditions students worked. For instance, we heard a lot about how the U.S. ranked so poorly in international tests. Why didn't we go study British Columbia, which is so much like us, and find out what students did to score better than we did? But we just blame the teachers and the schools; we have always used the villain theory. -- Ed Leadership

...On curriculum

 “The division into subjects and periods encourages a segmented rather than an integrated view of knowledge.  Consequently, what students are asked to relate to in schooling becomes increasingly artificial, cut off from the human experiences subject matter is supposed to reflect.” -- A Place Called School (Marian Brady in WaPo)

Prof. Roger Soder 

"John always argued strenuously against test scores as a serious measure of whether we had good schooling. He said what we really needed to talk about was the relationship between schooling and what it takes to maintain a free society." -- L.A. Times

Valerie Strauss, WaPo education writer

Dr. Goodlad’s research and teaching focused in part on curriculum and the “hows” of school teaching and management. But there was always a deeper issue. Teaching is an ethical act, Dr. Goodlad argued, and a critical part of being ethical is having a good sense of who you are. -- "The Passing of a Giant in Education

Rahm finds $100M for air conditioners. Does Ari have an A/C company client?

A cool $100M for A/C. 

A hundred million here. A hundred million there. It soon adds up.

But that doesn't seem to be a problem for Chicago's mayor, who can always find $100M lying around whenever he needs it for one of his favorite projects. It just so happens that contributing the city's required share to the pension fund or paying teachers and municipal employees what they deserve is not one of those projects.

This week, air conditioners are.

Chicago Public Schools put a $100 million price tag Tuesday on Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s sudden mandate to air-condition classrooms in 206 schools, even as CPS faces a $1 billion shortfall and many other pressing capital needs.

Irony is that the CTU pushed to make air-conditioned classrooms, especially following Rahm's longer-school-year mandate, part of the contract negotiations back in 2011. The mayor's response then was:

“Everything here is down to two final issues, and it’s not air conditioning, OK? ...We don’t go on strike for air conditioning.”

The change in course wasn’t lost on the teachers. “We were told it wasn’t possible to get, it was cost prohibitive. They couldn’t promise us and we would create a committee to discuss it. That committee hasn’t met. We never discussed it,” CTU vice president Jesse Sharkey said. -- Sun-Times

The number of schools without air conditioning, 1 in 4,  is about the same as the number of CPS schools without libraries or librarians.

Rahm & Ari.

My guess is that brother Ari or one of his pals must have a stake in the air-conditioning business. Maybe like Ari's stake in Uber, the web-based share-ride firm being hailed as the new alternative to taxi cabs. It's also become a favorite of the Mayor who's greasing the way for Uber to create hell-on-earth for cabbies everywhere.

Christian Muirhead, a spokesman for Ari Emanuel’s William Morris Endeavor agency, confirmed Tuesday that the agency continues to hold a stake in Uber. In a phone call from the agency’s offices in Beverly Hills, Muirhead said he couldn’t provide the exact size of the investment. “We made a minimal investment in Uber a few years ago,” he said. Minimal is, obviously, a relative term. Uber has reaped total investments of more than $410.6 million, according to PrivCo, a provider of financial information about private companies. -- Politics Early & Often

To paraphrase former Mayor Richard J. Daley: If a man can't reach out and help his own brother, what kind of society are we living in?

The city's cab drivers haven't had an increase in 9 years and are now trying to unionize. Good move cabbies.

Bhairavi Desai, executive director of the 17,000-member New York Taxi Workers Alliance and the president of the National Taxi Workers Alliance called cabdrivers among the “most exploited” workers in America because they are universally “misclassified” as independent contractors. But she called the working conditions for Chicago cabbies a new low. “It’s unacceptable to have conditions where thousands of taxi drivers are earning below minimum wage after laboring 60 to 70 back-breaking hours” a week, Desai said. -- Sun-Times

 I can relate. I wish we had a union back in the days when I was driving for American United and going to school at night to get my doctorate.

In Chicago, it's profits uber alles.

NO SURPRISE HERE...Guess what? Out of the 10 ten schools named best in the state by USNWR, 5 are CPS schools. All 10 have union teachers. And there's not one charter school or virtual school in the bunch. Go figure.

Rahm's 'Fog Machine'

“Their decision to modify their promise of a five-year moratorium on school closings is a smack in the face to the parents, teachers and students who are working so hard to secure vital resources for their neighborhood schools.” -- CTU's Stephanie Gadlin

If her lips are moving, Byrd-Bennett is lying.  Becky Carroll is lying even when her lips aren't moving. Crain's Greg Hinz calls it Emanuel's "fog machine."

There is no transparency at CPS or anywhere around City Hall. Everything said in Rahmville -- and make no mistake, CPS is square in the middle of Rahmville --has to be interpreted through the haze. 

Usually, it's CPS Liar-In-Chief Carroll framing the message. But this time around, it was Rahm's toadie BBB who was made to go in front of the cameras and assure an outraged community and teachers' union that there would be a 5-year moratorium on Chicago school closings once she was allowed to close 50. This despite the fact that 20,000 parents and community members came out to series of citywide hearings, demanding a stop to the closings. Or that even BBB's own hand-picked panel of VIPs advised against the closings.

Now as fractured and demoralized neighborhoods try and pick themselves up from the rubble, and some 30,000 children cautiously navigate their way through so-called Safe Passage zones just to get to school each morning, BBB is dragged out again. This time to tell us, "Remember what I said about a 5-year moratorium?..." 

Dizzy with success, they've come out with new "guidelines" which open the door to the hundreds more school closings they always wanted. 

Union V.P. Sharkey tells DNAinfo: 

"The intent of their message was if you put up with all this big instability you can appreciate a period of stability for the next five years. And now it turns out they're saying, well, no, we thought of some exemptions." 

Can they pull it off? We'll see. 

But Rahm's pulling-it-off track record is pretty dismal, says Hinz. He and a sector of the business community appear to have grown dissatisfied with the mayor's big talk accompanied by little do. Take the much vaunted Investment Trust for example:

 "...the one that was unveiled here in the presence of no less a personage than former President Bill Clinton [and AFT Prez Randi Weingarten -- m.k.]. A year and a half later, it's produced nada..."

As for Rahm's running of the schools, Hinz writes:

Remember all the promises about making teachers work more and extending the school day? Well, the school day was extended — and the Board of Education had to pay for it, despite a $500 million budget hole. And all of that promised "enrichment" in the form of more time for foreign language instruction and the arts and so forth? When the board ended up laying off hundreds of teachers, many schools lost that very same enrichment.

All politicians like to brag and strut their accomplishments, write Hinz. Mr. Emanuel is pretty good at it.

The problem is that none of that real-world reality ever seems to affect Mayor Rahm Emanuel's patented public relations fog machine, which works overtime to sell stuff that, in the end, far too often fails to deliver on the promise.

Hinz's column could easily serve as campaign talking points for a mayoral opposition candidate.

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Potter (Sun-Times)

Jackson Potter, CTU

“We were promised a better day, not just a longer one, and that’s out the window. And that means you’re seeing 98 art programs either very much reduced or eliminated.” -- CPS layoffs hit arts, specialty subjects hard (Sun-Times)

Paul Krugman

The result is what we see now in the House: a party that, as I said, seems unable to participate in even the most basic processes of governing. What makes this frightening is that Republicans do, in fact, have a majority in the House, so America can’t be governed at all unless a sufficient number of those House Republicans are willing to face reality. And that quorum of reasonable Republicans may not exist. -- NY Times

Lisa Goldman on Bennett 

"That man has been distraction since the day he walked into the state," said Lisa Goldman, founder of Testing is not Teaching, an advocacy group in Palm Beach County. "He shouldn't have come." -- Parents cheer as Florida schools chief resigns (Sun Sentinel)

Larry Cuban on Vallas

Vallas’s operating principle, according to one journalist who covered his superintendency in Philadelphia, is: “Do things big, do them fast, and do them all at once.” -- The problem with the Paul Vallas brand of school reform (Washington Post)

Rahm's budget cuts spark LSC revolt

Arts, foreign-language classes and even recess are among the first programs being shed by principals trying to deal with budget cuts of 10 percent or more. Many of those were added for this school year as part of Emanuel’s promise to make the longer school day that he demanded an improved “Full School Day.” -- Sun-Times columnist Greg Brown

Several Chicago Local School Councils are openly resisting the Mayor's draconian cuts and rejecting their school budgets. A full-scale LSC revolt could take place unless funding is restored.

DNA Info reports that Blaine's council has voted to reject the budget, "with Principal Troy LaRaviere abstaining, a move that was loudly applauded as the community agreed to fight for more money from the system." Expected losses at Blaine include the elimination of art, music and a middle school teacher position, LaRaviere told the group. Non-staffing expenses must be cut by 37 percent.

Reports are coming in that similar actions are being taken by the LSCs at Roosevelt H.S. and Whitney Young, where Principal Kenner has threatened to charge students $500 tuition for taking 7th period class.

Burley students protest cuts

At Burley Elementary, one of the city’s top-scoring neighborhood schools, parents and teachers gathered to protest elimination of all art programming and cuts to English, reading, technology and physical education programs.

“Our mayor talked about a full school day in terms of a broad curriculum,” parent Amy Smolensky said, referring to Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s extended school day that was implemented this year. “With these cuts, the school day is going to be an empty day, not a full day,” Smolensky said. -- Sun-Times

S-T also reports:

Lake View High School principal Lillith Werner told her Local School Council that “CPS put her between a rock and a hard place,” said LSC member Jackie Rosa. “She made it clear that the principals don’t have autonomy,” Rosa said. “They’re given this dismal budget and they’re told to work with it.”

At Lake View, a neighborhood high school in CPS’ top performing Level 1 category, the budget was sliced from $9.2 million to $7.7 million. It will mean no new textbooks and 14 teachers laid off.

Greg Hinz at Crain's:

Some folks, I guess, are just slow learners.I'm referring to the preliminary budgets that CPS sent to hundreds of local schools a couple of weeks ago, budgets that contain lots of bad news that CPS is going out of its way to hide, rather than use it as a rally to urge parents to lean on state lawmakers to come up with more money.

CPS Liar-in-Chief Becky Carroll says that, "the overall impact on schools is minimal.” But by now, nobody's buying anything she says.

How many more reasons do we need to get rid of mayoral control of the schools and this mayor in particular?

Rahm's great longer-school-day hoax. Charging students $500 for extra classes.

(Fred Klonsky toon)

The hoax began with a mega-political campaign which tried unsuccessfully to convince CPS parents and teachers that the magic bullet in school reform was more seat time for students. When hardly any schools bought into this bogus, baseless notion, the mayor imposed his will on schools, as usual, from the top down.

It was Karen Lewis and the CTU who, without opposing a longer school day and year, repeatedly asked questions like -- How will it be paid for? What will be done with the added time?

Now schools have to live with the longer school day, even while Rahm is slashing budgets, closing schools and firing hundreds of teachers and staff and cutting art programs from the curriculum.

In response, Joyce Kenner, principal at the city's top selective-enrollment school, Whitney Young, is threatening to charge students $500 each if they take a 7th-period class. If this threat is carried at successfully at WY, it will surely be picked up by other principals facing the same budget crunch.

From DNAInfo Chicago

Whitney Young Magnet High School, Michelle Obama's alma mater, may have to charge students $500 to attend a seventh period because of nearly $1 million in budget cuts the school is facing...Kenner, who said she was caught off guard by the depth of the cuts, confirmed that the $500 class fee is definitely an option to counter those costs.

"If it's something legal says that we as a school can do, then yes, we're very seriously considering it," she said Thursday morning. "Luckily, we do have families and parents who are able to afford a little extra."

Yes, we know Ms. Kenner. That's why they call it, "selective" enrollment. But what about the thousands of students and families who can't afford $500/class hour?

Kenner says, a scholarship program would be set up to offer waivers for students who couldn’t afford the fee. Yes, kind of like Harvard or Princeton, Francis Parker or Lab School (where Rahm's kids attend school). But I thought this was a PUBLIC school system!!!

In addition to the recommended $500 class fee, Kenner has suggested laying off nine more faculty members, eliminating the Writing Center and reducing the number of languages taught at the school, among other ideas.

Already, the school has reduced it deficit to $800,000 by eliminating an art position, cutting substitute teachers and a security position, and having department chairs take on additional classes

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Rahm responds to another weekend of gun violence by offering $1 milllion in funding for youth programs. The money comes from private funds raised for the NATO summit that were never spent.

Rahm Emanuel

"This [left over NATO money] is what it takes to make sure a community is safe and secure for our children and our families." -- Chicago Tribune

Indiana's Tea Party Gov. Mitch Daniels

“Despite all of the progress that has been in states like ours, the forces of [resistance] never quit.” -- Washington Times

Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform. 

"Tea party two is going to dwarf tea party one if Obama pushes us off the cliff." -- CBS Political Eye

Curtis Black

Take the longer school day.  Emanuel’s rush for immediate implementation – and an entirely unnecessary adversarial, “win-lose” approach, using the issue (unsuccessfully) as a weapon against the teachers’ union – led to a chaotic, alienating rollout. -- Rahm Emanuel, Job Creator, For President?

Boner

 “We’re nowhere, period,” he said. “We’re nowhere.” -- Boehner Braces America For Going Over The Fiscal Cliff

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Thousands of union members and workers rallied in Philadelphia's Center City Saturday afternoon. While labor is obviously supporting Obama's candidacy, the rally hit at anti-union policies of both parties including the holding of the Democratic Convention in anti-union North Carolina.

Rick Smith, CWA activist

"This is much like the tea party started out to be, These are people who are tired of being screwed over." -- Daily Times

 AFL-CIO Pres, Richard Trumka 

"Anyone who says America can't afford retirement security, or health care, or decent pay for honest work, or great schools, or a postal service, or cops or firefighters and teachers and nurses, well they don't know what they're talking about and we won't accept their defeatism!" -- The Mercury

Columnist Eric Zorn

Jesus Christ is said to have fed multitudes with a handful of loaves and fishes. CPS CEO  Jean-Claude Brizard is planning to lengthen the school day for multitudes with a similarly minuscule deployment of new resources. -- Chicago Tribune 

Charter school cheaters 

"We are a corporation that is winding down and we are not required to provide that information to you," said Crescendo board member Donna Jones. -- L.A. Times

Another look at Rahm's Texas model

"If you start in the Chicago Public School system in kindergarten," offered Rahm, "and your cousin lives in Houston, and you both go all the way through high school, the cousin in Houston spends three more years in the classroom." -- Rahm Emanuel

Romney's ed adviser and former Houston Supt. Rod Paige

Chicago's mayor, in his demagogic appeal for a longer (not necessarily better) school day, is fond of holding up Houston, Texas as his model. This piece in the Texas Observer details some of the reasons why Houston schools and Texas schools in general, may work for some of their students, but certainly not for poor students or students of color, and why they provide no example for Chicago to follow.

Observer reporter Cindy Casares writes:

People who question the existence of systemic racism need only look at the numbers. Take the emotion out and see for yourself. The statistics are quite simply stacked against people of color in this state. Yet the media covers the issue in code, leaving it to sound like some unsolvable mystery.

• Poor and minority students in Texas are far less likely than others to have certified math teachers.
• 58 percent of Algebra I teachers in predominantly African-American schools are certified in math, compared to 82 percent of the teachers in schools with the fewest African-American students.
• Of the state’s 
50 largest school districts, 43 have the highest concentration of novice teachers in the poorest schools.
• Across Texas, at every school level and in all
core subjects (English, math, science and social studies), Hispanic, African-American and low- income students are more likely than their more affluent and white peers to be taught by teachers who do not meet state requirements.
• A similar analysis of teacher and student data in Los Angeles concluded that “having a top- quartile teacher rather than a bottom-quartile teacher four years in a row would be enough to close the black-white test score gap.”
• In Arlington, for example, the average teacher salary in the district’s highest-poverty middle schools is $4,750 less than the average teacher salary in the more-affluent middle schools.
• In Amarillo, teachers working in elementary schools serving mostly Hispanic and African-American children earn on average $2,405 less than those in the elementary schools serving greater numbers of white students.

Rahm needs to find himself a new model, especially now that Mitt Romney has named former Houston Superintendent and Bush's Ed Secretary Rod Paige as his chief education adviser.  Remember, Paige's Texas Miracle was a fraud.

New studies show, it's Rahm who needs a longer school day

"Research, schmeesearch!"

But the extended day approach being implemented in many schools as a result of the department’s push to increase instructional time falls short. It largely ignores the deep body of research on what makes effective expanded learning. Instead, too many schools are merely adding another hour or so of regular class time onto the school day. Not surprisingly, two very recent studies suggest we might not accomplish much with this approach to improving schools. -- Washington Post

Excuse me, Mr. Mayor. Did you see that there's more "new" research -- two new studies, in fact -- "flashing warning signs about the move to extend the school day."  Of course there's really nothing new here as I've been reporting for months now. 

Now I know you're not a big ed research guy and prefer repeating things planted in your noggin by people like Jonah Edelman of Stand For Children. Remember? He was the guy who told you that if your cousin lived in Houston, he/she would get three more years of education because of their longer day. What a load of crap that turned out to be.

Houston schools are floundering and parents there are also pushing back on longer school day plans. Your poll ratings are plummeting. Parents and teachers are rebelling against your imposed 7.5-hour day and you have become the poster boy for getting rid of mayoral control of the schools. Even Mayor Daley is bright enough to make some political hay over this at your expense.

Stop everything and read, Mr. Mayor. 

The Empire Strikes Back

Emanuel/Daley rift sharpens

Smiling faces...

The rift surfaced back in November. Actually, autocrat Rahm started it with his pokes at his predecessor.

His line of attack has been the longer school day initiative. His education plan is essentially a continuation of the failed Daley/Duncan reforms, previously known as Renaissance 2010 -- school closings in under-served  communities, turning neighborhood schools over to private charter school management companies, attacking teacher collective-bargaining rights and pensions.

None of these things has ever produced any significant improvement in measurable student learning. In fact, during the past two decades of mayoral control of the schools, the so-called "achievement gap" has grown wider. 

In response, Rahm claims  it's all because Mayor Daley didn't push for a longer school day -- a plan that has no basis in ed research and one that is being met with growing opposition among parents and teachers. The Daley faction is furious over Rahm's attempt to diminish the Daley legacy. I guess they feel Daley has diminished it enough on his own by selling off the parking meters to Morgan Stanley (his brother's bank) and the UAR in exchange for a retirement job with the law firm that swung the deal.

On Tuesday, Daley slapped at the longer school day plan, claiming that what we really needed was "quality instructions" [sic].  Today, Rahm and his boy Ald. O'Connor slapped back, calling Daley a "flip-flopper."

But this is more than a petty squabble among Chicago machine factions. Rahm seems to be making enemies everywhere he goes. His approval ratings are plummeting. The Obamas hate him. Nancy Pelosi flew into Chicago and sided with Jesse Jackson in his fight with Emanuel. Then Obama pulled the G8 Summit from Chicago without consulting with Rahm. And now the feds have put Chicago under virtual martial law in the run-up to the NATO protests -- discrediting Rahm's claim that there would be business as usual down in the loop.

In the midst of current contract negotiations with the teachers union and a growing community-based resistance to Rahm's top-down "reforms", it's a rift worth paying attention to by the CTU and ed activists.

Daley strikes back with poke at longer school day

The growing rift between Rahm Emanuel and former Mayor Daley has begun to surface publicly. Daley is punching back (well, maybe slapping is a better word) at Rahm's longer-school-day initiative.

Lengthening the school day at Chicago public schools is a key part of Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s agenda, but his predecessor doesn’t think it’s the answer to providing a better education. “At first I thought it was, but I don’t think so,” former Mayor Richard M. Daley said in an interview Monday night on WLS-Channel 7 News. “To me, to take a fourth-grader or a sixth-grader or a high school student, and say you’re going to stay more than six hours — we need quality instructions.” -- Sun-Times

That's more than one instruction, in case you missed the malaprop. 

Faced with the fact that mayoral control of Chicago schools has brought no real improvement over the past two decades, and asked what if anything would be different in his administration, Rahm came up with the only thing he could -- a 7.5-hour school day, implicitly blaming Daley for past failures.  

“It doesn’t bother me,” Daley said. “It’s all part of the rhetoric.”

Daley's people, seeing the growing parent resistance to Rahm's imposition of the longer-school-day, must have figured this as an easy point of counterattack. They're right, of course. As I and others have pointed out over and over again, there's no research to support Rahm's approach. 

Oops...wrong decree!

Plane reading -- Heading back to sweet home Chicago today, thank God. I hate hotels. Need my own pillow to sleep, these days. I've been lugging around my review copy of Education and Capitalism. Maybe I'll get into it on the plane home.

The Reader's Ben Joravsky, as usual, knocks it out of Wrigley Field with his piece on bananas dictator Rahm's longer-school-day insanity.

If you recall, I valiantly tried to save Mayor Emanuel from the mess he got himself into when he unilaterally declared that, from here on out, the public school children of Chicago would have to wear their underwear on the outside of their clothes. Whoops—wrong decree.

The view from D.C -- (actually neighboring Fairfax County, VA) where Woody should film his Bananas sequel. Fairfax schools could become the first in the Washington region to create Virginia Virtual Academy that would allow students to take all their classes from a computer at home.

No sports teams. No pep rallies. No lockers, no hall passes. Instead, assignments delivered on-screen and after-school clubs that meet online. It’s a reimagination of the American high school experience. And it’s a nod to the power of the school choice movement, which has given rise to the widespread expectation that parents should have a menu of options to customize their children’s education.

If I owned an ipad -- which I don't, I'd be keeping my eye right on it even while getting groped.  

Rahm, the artless dodger

Rahm retreats "this much."

“Now that the mayor is starting to listen to parents, teachers and research regarding the pitfalls of the longer school day program being pushed in school districts across the country, it is now time he used both ears to hear everything we are saying about the types of schools our children deserve.  It is not the length of time but the quality of time that truly matters here.” -- CTU President Karen Lewis

Here's how the mayor works politics. First he throws out some education catch phrase that might grab the attention of unwitting voters in the short run --- like a longer school day. I suppose the logic is that if schools are "failing" more seat time will produce better outcomes. Of course, there's no research in the field to validate such nonsense and nothing can be further from the truth.

So the next step is to throw out some arbitrary school-day length. How about 7.5 hours, with no high-quality content added in nor any plan to pay teachers for extra work time? He knows that no high-performing school, especially the private school where his kids go, would ever accept such a long day or thoughtless plan. 

You see, all of Rahm's demagogy was never really about improving the teaching/learning environment. It was always about his grab for naked power. The immediate target was the teachers union and it's collective bargaining agreement. Rahm knows that if he can impose new work rules on teachers and other public employees, rather than allow them, as typically done, to be collectively bargained between the teachers and the board, he has won the battle, regardless of the final outcome of the length-of-day struggle. 

So when parent groups around the city finally get wise to all of the mayor's phony research baloney and start marching against the 7.5-hour school day, Rahm offers a weak compromise without dealing in any of the fundamental issues raised by the parents and the union. 

Pretty slick -- he thinks. 

Research shows...

"Figures don't lie but liars figure" -- Mark Twain

It seems that all political charlatans, demagogues, and think-tankers need to do these days to push their agenda is make some absurd declaration and put the words, "research shows" or "Study:" in front of it.

Here's one example: "Study: Obama's health care law would raise deficit." In this case, a conservative think tank, George Mason University's Mercatus Center, created with Koch Bros. money, produced an obviously biased "study" by a well known, right-wing political hack and held a press conference. Some lazy journalist or campaign news-hungry media inevitably takes the bait and presents it as if the research is genuine and speaks for itself.

Chicago mayor, Rahm Emanuel has taken a page from the Koch Bros. book of tricks by using the "research says" tactic to push his longer-school-day campaign on resistant city schools. As I have shown numerous times on this blog and elsewhere, there is no reliable or valid research to support Rahm's claim that more seat time in school produces better learning outcomes. But buoyed by support from corporate reform groups like Stand For Children, the mayor's publicists at CPS, like Becky Carroll and his hand-picked CEO J.C. Brizard, continue to claim that there are studies to validate this obvious political and anti-union agenda.

I am elated to see that a group of CPS parents has done their own investigation of Rahm's longer-school-day research and guess what they found.

A coalition of 16 parent groups Monday demanded a meeting with Mayor Rahm Emanuel to go over the real research on a 7 1/2-hour school day, and not the “misinformation” they charged district officials with spreading. “They are either misinformed or deliberately misleading the public,’’ said Jonathan Goldman of the new Chicago Parents for Quality Education coalition. “In either case, that’s not how we should be deciding public policy, especially when it comes to our children.’’ -- Sun-Times

When veteran Sun-Times reporter Ros Rossi followed up on the parents' investigation she uncovered even more research deception. She called the author of one analysis of 15 studies cited by CPS as proof that longer school days work.  Erika Patall of the University of Texas said the evidence the studies cited was “weak’’ and their conclusions were “very tentative” because “a good deal of the research does not rule out something other than time causing the improvement.’’

Parents also questioned CPS contentions that the system needed a 7.5 hour school day to get “on par with other districts.’’ CPS officials have said their numbers were based on weekly instructional minutes in a National Center for Education Statistics chart, multiplied out annually. 

But an author of the NCES report told the Sun-Times that the chart was based on weekly teacher minutes, not student minutes, of instruction. Plus, the NCES researcher said, every district counts school days differently, so NCES would never extrapolate student instructional minutes in a year from one week’s worth of teacher instructional minutes.

“In putting it all together, somebody is making a lot of assumptions,’’ the NCES researcher said of the CPS calculations. “We do not do that at the National Center for Education Statistics.’’

Research shows that Mark Twain was right.

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

In Sanford, Fl  the police chief threatened to stop the game if Robinson did not leave the field

Chris Lamb

"A specter of Jackie Robinson" haunts the city of 53,000 people to this day. People want to forget it and it shouldn't be forgotten." -- Racist past haunts Florida town where Trayvon died

Judy Rabin

"Like Pharoah, Duncan's heart is hardened and although members of United Opt Out met with him last week and he has heard the cries of the people, he refuses to let them go." --  Schools Matter

 Karen Lewis

"In all of my 22 years of teaching I have never seen a climate as hostile as the one created by Rahm Emanuel, his hand-picked school board and his handpicked leadership of Chicago Public Schools." -- CTU Net

Eric Zorn

"Parents, who were shut out of the key decision here, deserve a greater voice and individual schools should be able to customize their schedules based on what’s best for their student populations, not for someone else’s sweeping reform agenda." -- Change of Subject

The Texas Two-Step -- Cut budgets, increase class size

"I try to meet their needs. I'm not sure I am anymore," says Sara Estrada, who has been teaching for 27 years, says of her pre-kindergarten class at Lion Lane School in Houston, which has grown to 25 students even as it lost its full-time teacher's aide. -- Houston Chronicle

Rahm Emanuel loves the way they do schooling in Texas. Time and time again, he has held up Houston as his model school district because of its supposedly longer school day. Chicago's mayor claims, for example, that children in Houston graduate high schools with "three more years in the classroom." than do Chicago kids. Forget for a moment, that this nonsense was cynically fed to the mayor by Jonah Edelman of the union-busting group, Stand For Children. It sounded believable enough until you start doing some digging and find out what's really going on down in Rick Perry's state

Today's Texas Tribune pulls the shade on the real "reform" forced on Texas schools. It all amounts to massive budget cuts and fewer teachers teaching more kids in larger classrooms. Texas Education Agency data for the 2011-12 school year show that the number of elementary classes exceeding the 22-student cap has soared to 8,479 from 2,238 last school year.

The Republican-dominated state Legislature has cut $4 billion in education funding over the next two years while eliminating an additional $1.4 billion from grant programs, even though statewide enrollment is increasing by about 80,000 students annually.

No wonder Rahm grins when he thinks about Texas.

******

Ceresta Smith

Yesterday's Educating South Carolina blog reports on Ceresta Smith's talk in Sumter, Tuesday night. Ceresta is a longtime educator, civil rights and parent activist who is a member of the SOS National Steering Committee.

She told a community meeting at the North HOPE Center that moves across the nation to require more standardized testing in schools limit the curriculum and hurt students, and ultimately will result in schools in poorer, largely minority neighborhoods being shut down and replaced with privately run, profit-seeking charter schools with no accountability to the community. It's up to parents, students and teachers, Smith said, to resist test-based curricula.

 "Our children are being robbed, slowly, of a free, quality public education," Smith said. ESC blogger responds: "Somebody say, amen!: