KIPP and KOPP join Duncan in telling parents to boycott schools until gun law is passed

CHICAGO (WLS) -- It's been another violent weekend in Chicago, with at least 6 people killed and 32 others hurt in shootings across the city. [None shot in school.]

KIPP leaders and other corporate school "reformers" like Arne Duncan and Peter Cunningham, are telling public school parents to "pull their kids out of school until we have better gun laws."

The boycott proposition received momentum online, including support from parents and the founder of Teach for America, Wendy Kopp... 

...“I’m in — let’s pick a date and start a movement no politician can ignore,” replied Jim Manly, the superintendent of KIPP Public Charter Schools in New York City.

After taking 14 years before firing their co-founder for sexual misconduct, it's no wonder that KIPP charter network is now forced to offer cash and prizes to parents as recruiting gimmicks. But their call for parents to boycott public schools, even in the wake of the Santa Fe school shootings, smacks of opportunism.

As brother Fred Klonsky points out in this morning's blog post:

For many Chicago young people, their public school is among the safest places Chicago parents can send their children each day. But more to the point, those like Cunningham and Duncan have a dismal history in proposing ideas for public school parents and  as public policy for others to follow.

 Yes, we need strong gun control laws passed. No, that's not likely to happen with Trump in the White House and Republicans (many on the take from the NRA) controlling both houses of Congress without pressure from mass protests in the streets. Telling parents to keep their children home until that happens may be provocative, but it's hairbrained. Not serious. Poor leadership as usual.

In the same breath they propose it, they are already walking it back. 

“It’s wildly impractical and difficult,” Duncan said. “But I think it’s wildly impractical and difficult that kids are shot when they are sent to school.”

 “We will see whether this gains traction, or something does, but we have to think radically.”

Yes, r-r-r-radically indeed. But there's nothing radical about punishing public schools for the sins of the politicians.

I'm recalling how Duncan and Cunningham blasted the tens of thousands of activist parents who actually won some important victories for their children by opting-out of school testing madness.

But Duncan claimed the opt-outers were simply...

"white suburban moms who—all of a sudden, their child isn't as brilliant as they thought they were, and their school isn't quite as good as they thought they were."

I also recall how, when Democrats had even a slim chance to pass gun-control legislation during Obama's first term, Atty. General Eric Holder was told to "shut the f**k up" by none other than Obama's Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel.

Oh, and speaking of guns, remember how Duncan tried to militarize the D.O.E. back in 2010? His purchase of 27 assault rifles had me wondering back then, if we needed an assault weapons ban on Arne?

I think Duncan's and the reformers' credibility as advisors to public school parents has been used up. Maybe it's time for them to to hold that thought. 

Duncan's legacy

"It will take years to recover from the damage that Arne Duncan’s policies have inflicted on public education." -- Diane Ravitch

Arne Duncan says he will remain at the D.O.E. "until the final bell". At this point, no one really cares.

The damage is already done and with billions of Race To The Top money no longer in his back pocket, he has no more juice with states, school districts, or with Congress. According to most surveys, his version of school reform has been badly discredited (I hope I helped a little) and many feel he will be remembered as the worst ed secretary ever. 

Diane Ravitch documents the destruction left in his wake:

*He used his control of billions of dollars to promote a dual school system of privately managed charter schools operating alongside public schools; 

*He has done nothing to call attention to the fraud and corruption in the charter sector or to curb charters run by non-educators for profit or to insist on charter school accountability or to require charters to enroll the neediest children;

*He pushed to require states to evaluate teachers by the test scores of their students, which has caused massive demoralization among teachers, raised the stakes attached to testing, and produced no positive results;

*He used federal funds and waivers from NCLB to push the adoption of Common Core standards and to create two testing consortia, which many states have abandoned;

*The Common Core tests are so absurdly “rigorous” that most students have failed them, even in schools that send high percentages of students to four-year colleges, the failure rates have been highest among students who are English language learners, students with disabilities, and students of color;

*He has bemoaned rising resegregation of the schools but done nothing to reduce it; [Here, I would add that Duncan openly opposed, what he referred to as "forced integration" and abandoned fellow cabinet member, AG Eric Holder on his deseg suit in Louisiana--mk].

*He has been silent as state after state has attacked collective bargaining and due process for teachers;

*He has done nothing in response to the explosion of voucher programs that transfer public funds to religious schools;

*Because of his policies, enrollments in teacher education programs, even in Teach for America, have plummeted, and many experienced teachers are taking early retirement;

*He has unleashed a mad frenzy of testing in classrooms across the country, treating standardized test scores as the goal of all education, rather than as a measure;

*His tenure has been marked by the rise of an aggressive privatization movement, which seeks to eliminate public education in urban districts, where residents have the least political power;

*He loosened the regulations on the federal student privacy act, permitting massive data mining of the data banks that federal funds created;

*He looked the other way as predatory for-profit colleges preyed on veterans and  minorities, plunging students deep into debt;

*Duncan has regularly accused parents and teachers of “lying” to students. For reasons that are unclear, he wants everyone to believe that our public schools are terrible, our students are lazy, not too bright, and lacking ambition.

Diane could have also included Duncan's unflagging support for autocratic mayoral control of urban school districts. He made mayoral control an essential piece of his top-down school reform model and went so far as to say he would consider his time as education secretary a “failure” if more mayors didn’t take over city school systems by the end of his tenure.

They didn't. It was and he is.

Final Note: According to a report in the S-T, while Duncan remains in D.C., is wife and two daughters returned to Chicago with the children to attend the expensive and private University of Chicago Lab School.

I leave it to Valery Strauss at WaPo to point out the obvious:

…now his children will attend a progressive private school in Chicago, a school that does not follow key school reform policies that his Education Department has set for public schools.

It does not, for example, use the Common Core State Standards (though many teachers there support them). It does not bombard its students with standardized tests or spend weeks each semester in test-prep mode. It does not evaluate teachers by student standardized test scores. In 2013, 20 Lab teachers signed a letter to Duncan protesting his policies that promote standardized test-based school reform. Also among the signatories were teachers from the Ariel Community Academy, a public school founded by a team of people that included Duncan.

[...]
Another irony is that Duncan will be sending his children to a private school in a city where he ran the public schools for seven years; he then went on to control federal oversight of the nation’s public schools for another seven years. One wonders if there is not a single public school — or public charter school — that Duncan could have chosen after being personally responsible in some way for the improvement of the public education system in Chicago.

Arne Duncan chooses a school free from his influence http://t.co/NIA1aWRXNf Because you know he has to do what is BEST for his kids

— linda (@breezydayz) July 10, 2015

'REVOLUTION' IN THE AIR

YOU SAY YOU WANT A R-R-REVOLUTION... Reading my campus email this evening. The list is topped off with this subject line: Revolutionary Case Takes The iPad To A Whole New Level. I feel certain that the masters of information-age metaphors who sent out this piece of "disruptive" drivel must have come out of the Kennedy School at Harvard.

And they say there's not jobs out there for these grads. Nonsense!

“Teacher turnover really destabilizes a learning environment,” said Hannah Nguyen, a University of Southern California junior who aspires to be a teacher but has helped organize protests against Teach for America. “So having a model that perpetuates that inequity in and of itself was also very confusing for me.”

But as ever, there's a real youth revolt brewing and it's impact is being felt right in the belly of the beast. Yesterday's NYT reports that lots of the best-and-brightest, who were flocking to TFA a decade ago, as our generation flocked to the Peace Corps or VISTA, are now opting out.

For the second year in a row, applicants for the elite program have dropped, breaking a 15-year growth trend. Applications are down by about 10 percent from a year earlier on college campuses around the country as of the end of last month.

The group, which has sought to transform education in close alignment with the charter school movement, has advised schools that the size of its teacher corps this fall could be down by as much as a quarter and has closed two of its eight national summer training sites, in New York City and Los Angeles.

My take on all this is that, given the ongoing exposés of TFA's horrific 5-week-wonder training regimen, its connection with privatization of public schools, the teacher attrition rates of its graduates, not to mention the organization's odious collection of reactionary, billionaire funders, it's become an embarrassment for many socially-conscious students to say they're joining TFA. 

According to the Times' Mokoto Rich, 

...as Teach for America grew, it became a magnet for criticism from teachers unions, education schools and some policy makers, who argued that sending enthusiastic but untested graduates to classrooms in some of the nation’s poorest communities with just five weeks of training would not produce great teachers. They also said the program’s two-year teaching stints brought instability.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY Bob Marley. He would have turned 70 today.

More unqualified teachers assigned to schools serving poor and minority students

Harvard students are calling for and end to the university's ties with TFA.

MORE STUFF WE ALREADY KNEW…The feds are telling us once again that there's a huge disparity in children’s access to fully qualified and experienced teachers. The U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights has begun collecting data on student enrollment by race and ethnicity and teacher characteristics. Their data indicates that 1) black students are more likely to be taught by a first-year teacher than white students, 2) their teachers are more likely to be paid less and 3) they are more likely to have an uncertified or unlicensed teacher.

In states like Pennsylvania, with wild charter school expansion, more than 20% of teachers are unlicensed in the schools with the largest concentration of minority students. In largely white schools, just 0.2% of teachers lack a license.

In southern, so-called right-to-work states like Louisiana, with weakened teacher unions, 20% of classes in the most impoverished schools are taught by teachers who don’t meet the federal definition of “highly qualified” — which generally means they lack a bachelor’s degree, are unlicensed or don’t have a strong academic background in the subject they’re teaching. In the wealthier schools, fewer than 8% of classes are led by a teacher who’s not highly qualified.

As I pointed out in yesterday's post, in response to the Southern Poverty Center's lawsuit, Louisiana has admitted that the state under-served special-needs students and those with disabilities.

OK, interesting, but why and what to do about it? Conservatives and corporate-style reformers are calling for more Vergara-type suits aimed at getting rid of teacher tenure  and collective-bargaining agreements which they claim, serve only to protect incompetent teachers who too often end up assigned to teach the neediest students in the most impoverished schools.

But their argument has been debunked simply by looking at the widening gap between no-union states like Mississippi, Alabama and Louisiana, on the one hand,  and union-strong states like Massachusetts where tenure rights are protected, on the other. Isn't it obvious that you don't get rid of inequality by eliminating the teaching standards that lead to tenure and other means of attracting keeping experienced, qualified teachers in the profession?

A better approach would target the regulation of the conduct and the expansion of privately-run charters schools which are often allowed and encouraged to hire uncertified teachers and teachers teaching outside of their field.

Another would be to take a long, hard look at corporate-reform groups like Teach for America (TFA) which receive an obscene about of funding from school districts, charter operators and power philanthropists  for placing hundreds of unqualified or under-qualified teachers into schools that serve poor and minority students.

ANOTHER SUGGESTION
USE supplemental Title I funding to disadvantaged schools to boost salaries to attract and retain top teachers. According to a report in POLITICO, in nearly every state, teachers of minority students and students from low-income families earn significantly less than teachers in wealthier schools, even after adjusting for the local cost of living.

More importantly, stop debasing teachers and rating them on the basis of student scores on standardized tests and other test-and-punish "accountability" systems which only discourages teachers from working in the very communities that need them the most.

Finally, we need to look at the inequities in the distribution of qualified teachers as but one component of an apartheid-like, highly-segregated education system that systematically denies poor students and students of color, access to a range of resources including equitable funding, newer and better equipped facilities and learning environments,  a rich curriculum, small class sizes and up-to-date technology.

FINAL NOTE… Pres. Obama tried to push the issue by proposing $300 million in competitive grants to push new strategies for getting high-quality teachers in front of needy kids. But Republicans scrapped the program in the Omnibus budget agreement (which many Democrats then supported and Obama signed into law).

Go figure.

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

"Black Turnout in '64 and Beyond." -- 1964 Freedom Summer voter registration project. (NY Times)

Newark Mayor Ras Baraka

Gov. Chris Christie likes to say that he is “the decider” of what happens in Newark’s public schools. What that means is that he and his appointees now own the failure of the state’s policies. -- New York Times

Kristen Crowell

"Actions have consequences, and United Working Families is committed to a fifty ward strategy to ensure voters have their say,” Kristen Crowell, executive director of United Working Families, told Ward Room. “The City Council may not want [the question of an elected representative school board] on the ballot—but we are determined to put this on the ballot so all of Chicago has a voice." -- The Ward Room

Rousemary Vega

“When they closed Lafayette, we asked Alderman Maldonado to fight for our schools. He didn't listen. We asked the school board why they closed our school while they continued to spend money building new privately operated schools in rich neighborhoods, and while the city continued to give our tax money to private developers downtown. They flat out ignored us parents. [26th Ward candidate Juanita Irazarry]  is listening.” -- Grassroots Illinois Action Press Release

Prof. Mitchell Robinson

"When traditionally prepared teachers leave the profession, it’s a bug–when TFA recruits leave, its a feature.” --  Washington Post

Mississippi, with strong Common Core and no unions, is losing Race To The Top

As long as we're racing to the top, let's take a look at how the race is going. The theory coming out of the D.O.E., the Gates Foundation and the think tanks is that implementing Common Core Standards is key to winning the race and that the main problem is "status-quo" teacher unions protecting bad teachers.

But according to the latest edition Education Week's Quality Counts report, Mississippi, with no teacher unions and strong implementation of Common Core, ranks 51st among the states and Washington, D.C., in K-12 student achievement. Only Mississippi and post-Michelle Rhee D.C. were graded "F'' in student achievement. Mississippi also ranked among the lowest 10 states in providing young people a chance for success in life, financing schools and improving teaching. Mississippi's best ranking, as has been the case for several years, was in the area of standards, where the state got an "A'' and ranked 10th.

How can that be? The answer should be obvious. As you could probably guess, Mississippi once again lags behind all other 49 states when it comes to child welfare. They're on the bottom of the scale for the 12th straight year. In fact, Mississippi’s child poverty rate is twice as high as Lithuania’s. One key indicator of the lack of school success is the State's bottom ranking when it comes to children being born with low birth weight. 

It's important to understand that Mississippi like all other states, shouldn't be looked at as a single entity when it comes to poverty and education. In Mississippi communities whose school districts have an “A” grade from the Mississippi Department of Education, the average median household income is more than $46,000 a year. In those whose district has an “F” grade, the average income is below $25,000, according to a Daily Journal analysis based on 2013 rankings.

The rest of the country has nothing to brag about when it comes to child poverty. The United States’s child poverty rate ranks second-worst among the world’s developed countries, ahead of only Romania.

Massachusetts, with  the 4th highest median family income in the country, captures the top ranking in the Chance-for-Success Index for the sixth year in a row, earning an A-minus. But even Massachusetts is really "a tale of 3 cities" when it comes to child poverty and school performance.

Side Note: Mississippi is also a state that spends a large chunk of its education and teacher training budget on imported TFA teachers. 

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

E.L. Doctorow (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer)

E.L. Doctorow at National Book Awards

We in this room especially have to appreciate metaphor. We're the descendants of writers who saw the sun as Helios' chariot riding across the sky. And yet... when was the last time, hearing the word mouse, that you thought of a small gray rodent? Or heard the word web and thought of a spider? -- "The Promise—and Threat—of the Internet" 

N.Y Times on de Blasio's pick

The choice [of Carmen Farina] reflected Mr. de Blasio’s desire to depart radically from the educational policies of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, including his emphasis on data and his policy of shuttering low-performing schools. -- "Veteran of City School System Is Said to Be Next Chancellor"

Carmen Farina

CUNY Prof. David Bloomfield

“Clearly the teacher evaluation system will be on the table immediately. That would be my day one activity if it hasn’t started already.” -- Carmen Farina to head D.O.E

TFA & KIPP Teacher

 "Five weeks was not enough to create the type of magic that Teach For America describes in its vision. Training was like leading us to the top of a cliff before we had to jump off into the reality of our own classrooms. All I can say is the mountain was high and the fall was hard." -- Julian Vasquez Heilig's blog

Right On, Pittsburgh

A Small Talk salute goes out to the new school board in Pittsburgh for giving the boot to TFA before its recruits even had a chance to put boots on the ground.

.“I really don't see Teach for America as a program to help us,” said new Pittsburgh Public Schools board member Sylvia Wilson, a former teacher and former official with the Pittsburgh Federation of Teachers.

D.C. 'A DIFFERENT CITY'

The latest round of testing madness shows that poorer urban school districts once again score lower than wealthier suburban ones. Anyone surprised here? Some testing mavens like Arne Duncan, are spinning the results of the 2013 Trial Urban District Assessment (TUDA) as an improvement for districts like D.C., where scores went up a few points. But "these huge cities still perform dismally," writes Huffinton's Joy Resmovitz. 

 "It's not a causal model," said Mark Schneider, a vice president at the American Institutes of Research, who used to oversee the Education Department's research arm. "I get very leery when people say that 'This shows that X happened, DCPS is doing everything right and we should be learning, it's had spectacular gains since 2003' -- we really can't do that. Demographics in D.C. have changed. The city is a different city."

More evidence showing that if we REALLY want to improve measurable learning outcomes and close the so-called "achievement gap" (a term you rarely here any more -- thank goodness) we have to recognize the correlation between test scores and poverty. Otherwise we are simply cheering the whitenizing of the cities.

DEMS SPLIT OVER TAXING THE RICH

Clinton-ite think-tankers at the Center for American Progress are trying to assure the hedge-funders and corporate 1%ers that they needn't worry about a Hillary election win. CAP Pres. Neera Tanden,  an alumnus of the Clinton White House, downplays concerns about Democratic "wealth distribution" strategies. But the issue has become the centerpiece in the struggle between contending Democratic Party factions headed nationally by the centrist Clintons and the more progressive-leaning Elizabeth Warren group. Warren has called on big banks to disclose donations to centrist think tanks like Third Way. It seems the victory of New York mayor Bill de Blasio has really got the Third Way-ers worried.

More on Byrd-Bennett's sleight-of-hand on charter schools

On August 14th, I commented on Byrd-Bennett's "sleight of hand" on Chicago charter school expansion. BBB had promised that none of the 49 neighborhood schools she was closing would be "handed over" to private charter operators. A Tribune editorial had referred to this as a "promise worth breaking." And that's exactly what she has done by rapidly expanding the number of charters right on the heels of the school closings, with many of them opening in the same neighborhoods as the supposedly "underutilized" closed schools.

A h/t goes out to EduShyster who has come up with a couple of TFA internal documents which reveal that organization's Chicago expansion plans, including the placing of hundreds of lower-paid, non-union, 5-week-wonders into an estimated 52 new charter schools -- almost the exact number of schools closed this year by Byrd-Bennett.

Funny --TFA Chicago’s executive director, Josh Anderson thanks EduShyster for "reaching out" and then offers a shaky denial. Phoebe Anderson, who works for charter authorizer, NACSA, disputes some of the facts, in the comments section.

We'll see who's credible here. We already know it's not Byrd-Bennett.

BTW, where is BBB? We haven't heard anything from her since she responded to community protests over the consolidation of Jesse Owens school into Gompers (what's in a name, right? Plenty). She warned community residents not to "let this cause become a bureaucratic, never-ending process.’’

Then radio silence. Is this J.C. Brizard ("Don't call me a puppet") redux?

Bomb-a-Rahma

I tried to stay up late enough to watch Rahm on Letterman last night, but no dice. Found out this morning that he used his appearance on late night to call for the bombing of Syria and to tell America to "stand tall" (I'm resisting the urge to make any Little Napoleon jokes here. I'm better than that.). He also gave Letterman the verbal flip-off when he was asked about pandemic violence in Chicago.

"What I hear about Chicago now is 'Oh, don't go to Chicago, the violence is unbelievable.' Now, tell us why people say that," Letterman asked. Emanuel laughed before making a joke: "Well, first of all they're watching CBS and you late at night," Emanuel said.

 Trib reporter John Byrne comments:

Then he turned to his oft-cited statistic that overall crime is down about 25 percent in Chicago this year. Left unsaid by Emanuel on the program was that homicides remain stubbornly high in Chicago compared to many other major American cities, with 53 murders in August compared to 59 in the same month last year, following a July that saw 48 killings, a drop of just two from the same month in 2012. The first six months of the year had seen an improvement over last year's spike in homicides that led to the unflattering national headlines.

Well said.

Mantra of the corporate reformers: 'Teachers Wanted -- No Experience Necessary'

Noel Price teaching a class at YES Prep. Throughout YES Prep’s 13 schools, teachers have an average of two and a half years of experience. (NYT)

From the Times to Edweek, it seems like planted stories abound, hailing the coming of the new prototype teacher. You know, she's the one "most difficult to pick from of the group of students surrounding her", writes Edweek's Alexis Lambrau, about the subject of her photo shoot, Ferrin Bujan, a 24-year old teacher at the Brooklyn Community Arts & Media High School.

She often feels like student test scores are all that matter in her district. Yet she has students who rarely show up to class, and their scores still factor against her. This is particularly difficult given that Bujan is up for tenure this year, a process that involves an increasingly rigorous application process. She feels pressure to do well by her principal. “It’s hard. The city wants so much and they give you so little,” she said. 

The Times carries a similar piece about young TFAers, 5-week wonders now filling the ranks of the charter schools. I call them "drive-by" teachers who are expected to to have "short careers by choice".

Tyler Dowdy just started his third year of teaching at YES Prep West, a charter school here. He figures now is a good time to explore his next step, including applying for a supervisory position at the school.

Yes, the goal is get out of the classroom as soon as possible and into a "real job."

Charter leaders say they are able to sustain rapid turnover in teaching staff because they prepare young recruits and coach them as they progress. At YES Prep, new teachers go through two and a half weeks of training over the summer, learning common disciplinary methods and working with curriculum coordinators to plan lessons.

As you might expect, you won't find a preponderance of  these "no experience necessary" prototype teachers in wealthy, white suburban districts.

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 -- 'Let them eat chaos.'

While protesting teachers marched outside, parent Chitunda Tillman Sr, who has 3 kids who are CPS students, tells the board exactly what he thinks about their school budget cuts. (Alex Wroblewski~Sun-Times)

 “With a historic billion-dollar deficit, we are taking every step we can to minimize any impacts to the classroom."  --CPS Liar-in-Chief Becky Carroll

Homeowners, prepare to dig deeper. Schoolchildren — especially high schoolers — prepare to get less. -- Sun-Times

The Carroll quote is from a few weeks ago. The other is the lead-in to today's CPS budget story. Remember LIC Carroll assuring parents that budget cuts wouldn't target the classroom? Well they have, slashing classroom spending by $68 million. This while throwing the whole system into chaos by closing about 50 schools, mostly in African-American neighborhoods, further disrupting the lives of more than 40,000 children and their families and costing teachers and staff more than 3,000 jobs.

BBB claims that the big hit on classrooms is in response to the pension "crisis." Nothing could be farther from the truth. The CPS budget cuts have little to do with the size of retiree pensions or health care since the city and state haven't been paying their share into the pension fund for years. Rather it's a revenue problem in a state where the very rich and the big corporations pay little or no taxes.

Rosemary Vega wants at 'em as well.

Raising property taxes, and depleting district budget reserves, are wrong answers to a long-term funding problem. They're  the wrong way to generate revenue for the schools. Instead, Rahm should be pushing for a  larger and more progressive state income tax with less reliance on county property taxes. He should also be directing his huge TIF fund surplus towards school spending.

WINNERS AND LOSERS

As you might expect, with Rahm in control of city schools, not everyone came out losers in this year of draconian budget cuts. The pension "crisis" doesn't seem to have affected big budget winners including UNO's scandal-ridden charter schools and charter networks run by Chicago Int'l. and Noble St. who made out like bandits.Taking the biggest hits were Curie, Kelly, Fenger, Phillips and Morgan Park H.S.

Another big budget winner was Teach For America (TFA) who's 5-week wonders will be contracted with in record numbers to replace Chicago's fired teachers and staff. Since arriving in Chicago with 34 recruits in 2000, TFA's numbers have surged to a corps size of 500 this year, with over 1,700 alumni in the region.

A lot has changed in Chicago's education ecosphere since the '90s, however. Nowadays major budget cuts, layoffs, and school closings in Chicago have left an absence of vacant teaching positions. The added influx of TFA corps in the city means they now compete head-to-head for jobs with traditional teachers. But after almost two decades of sending their minimally trained elite college graduates into struggling schools across the county, the non-partisan data on TFA corp members' success is mixed at best. -- Gapers Block

Don't miss this HuffPost Live segment on TFA, including an interview with Chicago teacher activist, Katie Osgood.

GOOD GOSSIP

 I bet it got Rahm's attention.

Sneed hears [CTU Pres. Karen] Lewis may be enlisting the advice of a bazooka, the silent victim of Rahm’s verbal war: former Mayor Richard M. Daley, who made peace with the teachers union during his tenure in office — and who is the unnamed culprit in Rahm’s criticism of the Chicago school system.
◆ To wit: Sneed has learned that Lewis and Daley were spotted huddling at Gibsons eatery Tuesday in the wake of CPS officials announcing what Lewis called a bloodbath”: The layoffs last week of 2,113 teachers and other employees, a month after 850 CPS layoffs because of school closures. -- In Sneed's column this morning.

The Art of War
 If your opponent is of choleric temper, seek to irritate him. Pretend to be weak, that he may grow arrogant. -- Sun Tsu

TFA in trouble as internal revolt brewing

Teach For America (TFA) which has been used as a wedge against higher paid, veteran teachers in mainly  urban district for years, is now feeling the layoff pinch themselves, according to NBC News Philly..

According to [Isha] Lee, during the 2012 school year, TFAGP had 115 total teachers in Philadelphia. That's down nearly 46 percent compared to a corps size of 252 in school year 2011. And in 2012, only 20 of the 115 corps members were in placed SDP schools; the rest were placed in charter schools. When the district laid off 676 of its teachers last month, all but two of the 20 TFAGP corps members in SDP were included in that number.

TFA claims some growth in Mississippi, according to a report in the Clarion-Ledger.

 Despite large or long-term TFA presences, overall results are still poor in many districts, including Hazlehurst, Holmes County and Greenville. Nationally, some research shows that Teach for America’s members do at least as well as other teachers. But critics say one of the biggest drawbacks is they’re likely to be gone after two years.

It costs TFA about $41,000 over two years to recruit and train a teacher in Mississippi. State taxpayers put up about 60 percent of TFA’s budget here each year. Though some states give public money, Nurnberg said Mississippi’s public share is unusually high. He attributes that to a shallow pool of wealth in Mississippi. The next largest donor to TFA in Mississippi is Arkansas’ Walton Family Foundation.

Non-Profit Quarterly reports that Minnesota hasn’t been all that welcoming to TFA. In May, Minnesota governor Mark Dayton vetoed a $1.5 million TFA earmark in the state budget.

Despite the Waltons’ all-in support, TFA seems to be facing some pushback. One cause is that the short training period results in TFA’s least experienced teachers being placed in classrooms in desperately need of teachers with experience and solid educational training. Another is that in the places where most TFA candidates want to work, there really aren’t teacher shortages, resulting in low-paid, non-union TFA people replacing higher-paid unionized teachers.

Teach for America has been a sacred cow of social enterprise ever since founder Wendy Kopp got the nonprofit going and added Laura Bush as the honorary chair of the TFA board when George W. Bush was elected president. Are we seeing some nonprofit and community leaders becoming willing to challenge this favorite of education reformers?

I wasn't able to attend last weekend's summit meeting of TFA alums at the Free Minds, Free People conference, and am anxiously awaiting a report.

The Atlantic Wire carried a story, "Meet the Teach for America Resistance Movement That's Growing From Within", leading up to the meeting of alumni  who have become outspoken critics of the organization. The anti-TFA summit was also the topic of an earlier piece in American Prospect, "Teach for America's Civil War" and in the Washington Post.

Yes it's 2013 and prisoners can finally talk with their families in languages other than English

Chesa Boudin

I'm immensely proud to know Chesa Boudin, a young (damn, he's not a kid any more) super-hero without cape, who seems to pop up whenever the powerless need a voice. 

AP --  Utah prisoners will be allowed to talk with visitors in Spanish or any other language now that a long-standing English-only rule has been scrapped. By Aug. 1, signs in the Utah state prison saying, "All visits will be conducted in English," will be taken down in a policy change ordered by Utah's new prison boss, Rollin Cook.

That will put an end to the nation's only written rule from a state prison system forbidding foreign languages during visits, said Chesa Boudin, a federal public defender in San Francisco and one of three authors of a Yale University law school study that reviewed prison rules across the United States.

"I was shocked," Boudin said  when he learned of the rule. "This is a country that prides itself on its diversity: racially, ethnically, linguistically. Utah, while not the epicenter of immigration in this country, has many language groups."

Then there's Chesa's uncle, Rick Ayers, career educator supreme, armed with a razor-sharp pen. Don't miss Rick's latest jab at TFA -- Doctor for America to Debut This Fall, on Huffington.

What about surgery? "Hey, sometimes you have to use the ambulance personnel, emergency medical technicians, you know? They are pretty awesome. But for a lot of surgery... did you ever see those Civil War movies and those doctors working with saws and tourniquets? Awesome stuff." We will rely on a battery of tests to determine if patients are well and to evaluate how quickly the hospitals manage to move them out.

Hey Rick, I think one of those DFA guys "fixed" my broken finger after my last b-ball injury. Now seems to go off in direction of its own.

CPS privatizes its training of principals as test pushers

Yesterday, as local parent groups at 37 schools, gathered signatures on petitions calling for more limited assessment tests, CPS announced that new principals are going to trained by private companies, basically as test pushers.

The board has handed out lucrative contracts to politically-connected New Leaders for New Schools and Teach For America (TFA) to train Chicago principal candidates.

Local school councils, who by law have the power to hire new principals, will now be limited to selecting those who have been trained by these two corporate "reform" groups. One can only imagine what's on the new Five-Step Principal Quality Strategy training table. The Sun-Times report gives us a clue.

Anyone aiming to take the helm of a school will have to prove a knack for dealing with parents who are upset or breaking up a student fight in the hall and other routine situations, Schools CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett said.

Yes, "dealing with parents." If there was ever a motto to be inscribed in Latin over the front door at Clark Street., this is it. Or maybe something like -- Parentes Sunt Stulti (Parents Are Fools)

As one would expect, no mention is made of the role of principals as teacher supporters, modelers of good teaching, trust builders, power sharers, or community leaders. That's the kind of principal preparation we were doing at UIC and other schools of education back in the early days of school reform, when LSCs had some real power and the principalship was gradually being liberated from the backwardness of white-only political patronage.

But under mayoral control, the clock is being turned back and principals are once again being rapidly rotated and sent out as anti-union enforcers for City Hall and the corporate school reformers. They are now going to be  evaluated and paid not as professionals, but on the bonus system, like a sales manager, with the product being standardized test scores. The bonus money is coming from private sources and the power philanthropists with half of the criteria for these bonuses based on higher student test scores.

It's hard to believe that principals and their association will let all this go down without a peep. Shame on them if they do.  

In L.A. the least experienced teachers are being placed with the neediest kids

A new Harvard study shows the so-called "achievement gap" growing wider in L.A. as the neediest of the district's students are taught by the least experienced teachers. Under Supt. John Deasy's control,  LAUSD has increased its reliance on extended substitutes and TFA five-week wonders as an austerity measure and a way of undermining the union contract. First-year teachers are assigned to students who begin the year academically behind students assigned to more experienced teachers.

According to the L.A. Times:

No single finding can produce a strategy to erase the district’s substantial achievement gap between white students and their black and Latino classmates, the study said, noting that the difference in performance on fifth-grade math tests is roughly equivalent to more than one and half years of learning. 

The study also shows the limitations on the district's use of value-added or "teacher affects" evaluation based on student standardized test scores.

Further, teacher effects are only as good as the assessment used to formulate them. Assessments that are insufficiently challenging or that are poorly aligned to the curriculum that the district expects its teachers to cover will not yield useful estimates.

Yet, it is just those types of assessment that the study and the district rely on to generate their evaluations.

Guest blogger Susan Klonsky's response to Wendy Kopp

Guest blogger Susan Klonsky responds to Wendy Kopp's critical review of Jonathan Kozol's latest book, Fire in the Ashes. Kopp is founder and chief executive of Teach for America. 

Wendy Kopp derides Kozol's  Fire In the Ashes for not being the book she wanted  him to write, and for not "being more current" nor embracing the world view that she champions. She implies that Kozol's exposures of "savage inequalities" embedded throughout Fire in the Ashes are outdated due mainly to the great progress being made by contemporary school reformers like herself and New York Mayor Bloomberg.  Kopp characterizes Kozol's  book as "misleading" and "pessimistic" because it does not hail the Bloomberg education agenda in New York Public Schools, an agenda of  school closings, privatization, and union-busting.

Little of Kozol's book is actually about schools at all. Rather, it is a study in the long-term effects of profound, prolonged trauma and poverty experienced in childhood. It poses a number of hard questions for our society.  Why do some kids "make it," while others succumb to depression,academic failure, drugs, violence?

In this book, Kozol revisits some of the now-adult children who peopled his earlier books. He completes the loop not simply to learn how their stories turn out, but in order to ask:  How did we allow this to happen to these children? Which systems failed? Which individuals and systems helped?

The protagonists of these tales pre-date the advent of charter schools, Teach for America, the Harlem Children's Zone. They were untouched as kids by the largesse of huge and powerful foundations. Yet Kopp faults Kozol for not recognizing that -- in her opinion -- great improvements have been made--the giant homeless shelter hotels have been shut down, a huge network of privately operated charter schools has replaced many of the neglected schools described in Kozol's early works.

For America's poorest children, there is still a separateness which Kopp can't seem to see.  Kopp talks as if  the bantustan of subsistence living in substandard schools and substandard housing  are vestiges of a bygone era. She charges Kozol with dwelling in the past.

Far from projecting hopelessness, Kozol describes transcendence, at least for some of his children. The ones who survive and persist and, indeed, luck out, express their determination to become rescuers, teachers, writers, organizers. In Kozol's view, these are the hope. Not the hedge-fund manager who figures out a way to make a charter school his tax shelter, but the kid who grew up poor and disadvantaged and who has figured out a way to help change society.

Yes, Kozol paints a grim picture, but grim isn't wrong. There is still this shadow world, invisible to many of Kozol's  readers, on the other side of a gaping economic chasm. This new book shines a bright light on some of  those individuals who choose to stand in the gap, rather than stepping on those who are still on the bottom of the food chain.

Wendy Kopp would do well to acknowledge that it takes more than 5 weeks of Teach For America training to prepare educators to make a difference for disadvantaged children. Perhaps her negative reaction is moored in defensiveness. Until we get serious about ending poverty, even our most highly trained teachers will be working with a hand tied behind their backs. Time to quit blaming the messenger.

Susan Klonsky is a Chicago writer and public school advocate and activist. 

IN THE MAILBOX

From Anne Pritchett in Kansas City:

We have hundreds of TFAs in Kansas City. 5 in my building - this is their second year. They are nice, dedicated young people who believe they are doing something noble. But the time the rest of the staff has to spend helping them is unreal. Imagine 5 brand new teachers - but none of them have any background in education. They majored in business, law, Spanish and psychology. The one who has a Spanish degree doesn't speak Spanish well enough to be any help with translation at parent conferences. Of the others the one who is doing the best was a psychology major. So she has a background in child development. But the others are clueless. Hard working but clueless.

The rest of the staff has spent lots and lots of time helping the TFAs. They needed less help as the year went on, but they still needed a lot more help than other beginning teachers I have worked with. I've been a mentor for about 15 years now and I have to meet weekly with the teachers I mentor and turn in a log of what we discussed. When I look at last year's log, I see a lot of the same topics all new teachers focus on, but many more as well. Since they had no experience in an elementary school setting since being students themselves, we had to talk about lots of basics. Recess supervision, how to organize an awards assembly, what to put on bulletin boards, classroom seating arrangements, grading papers, ---- lots of basics other new teachers have some familiarity with from student teaching and practicum experiences.

District wide, we have lost about 20% of our TFAs who quit either midyear or didn't come back for their second year. I don't know how that compares nationally.

Anne

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio

"I think people from Mexico are now going to feel, 'Hey come on in and we'll get by with it.' But it won't happen in this county. They will still be arrested." -- After arresting 6-year-old suspected illegal immigrant. 

 Diane Ravitch

Isn’t it strange that you never see a group like “Education Reform Now” or “Democrats for Education Reform” or “ConnCAN” or “50StateCANN” advocating for smaller classes or more librarians or a reversal of budget cuts. -- "Big Money Joins Chicago Fight" 

Gary Orfield

"If you have choice without civil rights policies, it stratifies the systems. People who have the most power and information get the best choices." -- New York Times

Experience matters

“Teaching is no different than any other profession — experience matters. Researchers have found that teachers reach peak effectiveness with about seven years of experience. But 80 percent of the teachers hired by D.C. this year will be gone before they get there.” -- Tom Carroll, president of the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future

CHRISTMAS QUOTABLES

Community activist Martha Sanchez, right, shares an emotional moment with her children, Gonzalo Romero, 17, and Catherine Romero, 12, celebrating victory in an eight-year battle to shut down a metal-finishing plant across the street from 28th Street Elementary School in Los Angeles. (Luis Sinco, Los Angeles Times)

Danny Schechter

I did my Christmas penance back in a very cold and all too empty Zuccotti Park on Christmas day. There had been a 24 hour prayer event and vigil. I had only stopped in for a two hour stint—call it my Holiday witness—in time to hear the writer Jay Janson and others read from the still moving statement by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr on the need to get out of Vietnam and other countries Washington was then occupying/invading in the false name of freedom. -- The News Dissector

P.L. Thomas

Choruses of “no excuses” and “poverty is not destiny” punctuate almost all of the discourse and even reform plans coming from Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, Bill Gates, and Michelle Rhee, and the implications of these bromides are where the problems rest.  In short, the real debate is not whether or not one side believes poverty matters and the other does not (this is genuinely a false dichotomy that likely does not exist). The real debate is where the source of what matters lies and how to address the impact of poverty on the lives and learning of children. -- Poverty Matters!: A Christmas Miracle

Ross Caputi

What we did to Fallujah cannot be undone, and I see no point in attacking the people in my former unit. What I want to attack are the lies and false beliefs. I want to destroy the prejudices that prevented us from putting ourselves in the other's shoes and asking ourselves what we would have done if a foreign army invaded our country and laid siege to our city. -- I am sorry for the role I played in Fallujah (Guardian)

Andrew Hartman

TFA is, at best, another chimerical attempt in a long history of chimerical attempts to sell educational reform as a solution to class inequality. At worst, it’s a Trojan horse for all that is unseemly about the contemporary education reform movement. -- Teach for America: Liberal mission helps conservative agenda (WaPo)  

Katharine Mieszkowski

At Cesar Chavez Elementary School, physical education lessons, taught by classroom teachers, are held on a fenced-in blacktop lot below a huge, colorful mural of the school’s namesake. In the mural, Mr. Chavez, the late civil rights leader, is surrounded by a crowd of children as he carries a banner that reads “Help me take responsibility for my own life so I can be free at last.”--The Haves’ Children Are Healthier Than the Have-Nots’ (NYT)