Bribe 'em, jail 'em or teach 'em...

Three views on learning

D.C. Supt. Michelle Rhee wants to cut a check to kids who do their homework and attend school regularly. Like her backers, Bill Gates and Eli Broad, Rhee believes that everyone has their price and that student motivation can be driven primarily by money.

Then there’s those who think that the stick is more effective than the carrot.

“If we have to jail them, we’ll jail them,” says a Prince George’s County board member, threatening truant students and their parents.

Fordham's Liam Julian is also in the learning-through-discipline mode. He abhors Rhee’s pay-for-scores approach, opting instead for the stick strategy.

Even the best schools struggle with the recalcitrant youngster seemingly bent on doing anything but study, of course. But this rogue requires strict discipline, not bribes.

Thankfully there are still some progressive souls around who still believe, “school districts and foundations should invest instead in programs that tap into and build on kids' intrinsic motivation,” write Kathy Seal and Wendy Grolnick, in the LA Times (“Pay to learn shortchanges kids.”)

Oh yes, did anyone mention--McCain's a maverick?

'Equal access to education has been gained'--McCain

“Education has become the civil rights issue of this century,” says John McCain, proving once again that even the finest of words can be turned into meaningless clichés in the mouths of demagogues.

"The bunch who brought us 'No Child Left Behind' now claims that education is 'the civil rights issue of this century,'" says Sun-Times columnist Laura Washington.

McCain says that the battle for educational equity is over. He wants to put it behind us and replace it with vouchers, privately-managed charters, watering down of teacher quality and certification standards, imposition of merit pay, as well as an end to collective-bargaining rights and union contracts.

Here's all that in McCainspeak:

“Equal access to public education has been gained. But what is the value of access to a failing school? We need to shake up failed school bureaucracies with competition, empower parents with choice, remove barriers to qualified instructors, attract and reward good teachers, and help bad teachers find another line of work.”

What demagogue McCain won’t do is mention NCLB, which he voted for but now hides from. While most Republican leaders, like McCain’s top ed advisor Lisa Graham Keegan, still back NCLB testing madness, McCain won’t mention it during the campaign as he tries to distance himself from Bush. I can’t really blame him.

But Sec. Spellings assures us that McCain is not one of the old-line libertarian conservatives who used to rail against the DOE and big government. No matter than many Republicans oppose NCLB-driven federal involvement in local schools, they still appreciate the billions in ed dollars that were funneled to like-minded education contractors over the past eight years.

“I think he’s more a different kind of Republican than he is the federalist, abolish-the-Department-of-Education kind of Republican,” the secretary said in an interview in Minneapolis. “He voted for No Child Left Behind. He’s been supportive since.

Oh yes, and did anyone mention that McCain is a maverick? Remember, he "reached across party lines" when he signed on to Education Equality Project (EEP), the Democrats’ version of the Ownership Society.

Book burner

Former Wasilla Mayor John Stein in Time Magazine:

Stein says that as mayor, Palin continued to inject religious beliefs into her policy at times. "She asked the library how she could go about banning books," he says, because some voters thought they had inappropriate language in them. "The librarian was aghast." That woman, Mary Ellen Baker, couldn't be reached for comment, but news reports from the time show that Palin had threatened to fire Baker for not giving "full support" to the mayor.

Mary Ellen Baker resigned from her library director job in 1999.

Boston Herald writes about it here.

Free Sarah!

My friend Sid, the former ‘60s radical who’s now a honcho in Republican inner circles, admits that Sarah Palin is being gagged by Steve Schmidt. “It’s weird,” says Sid. “She's our hottest ticket and Schmidt wouldn’t let her go on any of the Sunday talk shows." Sid says, he wants to start a “Free Sarah" campaign. I told him to be careful what he wishes for.

Sid’s comments were confirmed--everything Sid tells me needs to be confirmed-- by Time Magazine’s, Jay Carney.

“…and they broke me.”

Remember Bush's attack on the "angry Left" at the convention?

"Fellow citizens, if the Hanoi Hilton could not break John McCain's resolve to do what is best for his country, you can be sure the angry Left never will."

So why aren't reporters asking John McCain what he meant by “broke me” in his convention speech? What really happened when he “broke?” Did he roll over on his comrades? Reveal military secrets? What? In his book, McCain claims that the information he “gave up” under interrogation was “of no real use to the Vietnamese.”

You mean, that's it? End of story?

Toppo drinks Williams' Kool-Aid

USA Today’s Greg Toppo has his head up his ass.

A funny thing happened to the Democratic Party on the way to an education platform: The party has visibly split with teachers unions, its longtime allies, on key issues.

It’s true that teachers and their unions are somewhat divided over the issue of merit pay. But to call this a “split” between the NEA and the Party is silly.

Toppo’s been sucking down Joe Williams’ kool-aid. Williams is paid to push the split story in the media and Toppo is one of the few dumb enough to run with it. Remember, Williams was the one who got the Sun’s Elizabeth Green to go with the phony story about Obama supporting school vouchers. Turned out to be wishful thinking at best.

Toppo mistakes DFER’s meeting of 500 union-bashers, which was frozen out of the DNC, for a union/Dem split.

USA Today’s headline should have read: “Phony Democrats booted from DNC while Weingarten takes the podium.”

Gulp, gulp Toppo.

When you’re right, you’re right, Russo

And he's is right on for taking a poke at Fordham’s horse flies for supporting, “do-nothing scolds like Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich on the Chicago-New Trier school funding protest.”

Truants—the new criminal class

In San Antonio they are making kids wear GPS ankle bracelets if they miss school. But in Prince George’s County, where 6,000 students regularly miss school, they just lock ‘em up.

"If we have to jail them, I want them jailed,” says Board Member Rosalind Johnson.

Did Noonan say "it's over?" -- She meant, "Rover"

Report from my friend Sid at the RNC:

While Palin was speaking, the entire crowd was chanting, “DRILL BABY, DRILL!”

Scary. In fact, anytime you have thousands of white conservatives chanting anything in unison, it’s pretty scary.

“They went for this political bullshit…”

Sid says that his two friends, Peggy Noonan and consultant Mike Murphy, being caught off camera dumping on the Palin pick, should confirm what he’s been telling me about widening splits in the campaign and the fact that Alaskan separatist Palin was a last-minute, poorly-vetted desperation pick. “It’s over,” carped Noonan.

Conservative WSJ columnist Noonan sits on the board of the Manhattan Institute, as in Sol Stern and the racist Bell Curve theorists. She was one of the main attack dogs used against Hillary Clinton. She’s also Dick Cheney’s biggest fan and is buddies with Karl Rove (even sent him an email once, suggesting strategies for Bush butt-covering around the Pat Tillman killing).

Sid confirms that Rove hated the Palin pick and Noonan seconds that emotion even though in her WSJ column, the two-faced Noonan writes that Palin , "could become a transformative political presence."

Noonan off camera:

"The most qualified? No. I think they went for this — excuse me — political bullshit about narratives," she said. "Every time the Republicans do that, because that's not where they live and it's not what they're good at, they blow it."

She tries to recover here, stumbling and bumbling. Did I say "over?" I meant, "Rover." You see, I was calling my dog, Rover.

How resolute was my desk?

I think that each and every teacher should have a resolute desk, just like the President. It should be written into the union contract. In his speech to the RNC the other night, Bush said:

“I know what it takes to be president. In these past eight years, I’ve sat at the Resolute Desk and reviewed the daily intelligence briefings, the threat assessments, and the reports from our commanders on the front lines.

To which Politics, Baseball and Cant responds:

I say: go for the gusto. Live in the Resolute House and take orders from Unbending Dick. Send them down to the aides in the Unwavering Wing. Fly on Staunch One and go to bed with the Unyielding Missus. Renaming only your desk makes you seem like you’re weak on home decoration. What a wussy.

Meeks-- "Chicago school boycott over..."

The boycott’s over—for now

Day-one at at CPS

The first day of school at Robeson, in Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood, went something like this:

Robeson High School’s first floor was full of parents trying to find out why their children weren’t already enrolled. Incoming freshman Tyler Wade registered last week. But when he showed up for class, he was told he was at the wrong school.

Wade and his fellow students should have joined the school boycott on Tuesday. They might have learned something on day-one.

Daley’s big lie

Daley tells the Trib the BIG LIE that Tuesday’s school boycott by 1,000 CPS students cost the district $100,000 in state reimbursements. If that were true, the state would be providing between $18-$20K/per student. If that were true, there wouldn’t have been the need for a student boycott to begin with.

"Civics lesson"

When the Mayor pulled 30,000 students out of school on June 10^th for a Soldier Field political rally, he called it “the largest civics class in history.” Now he’s accusing Meeks and the boycotting parents of “using children as pawns.”

Eden Martin’s worse

Daley golf partner, Eden Martin is president of the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago. He’s also a lawyer for the giant utilities and corporate polluters and a big gun behind Mayor Daley’s so-called Renaissance 2010 Initiative. Like Daley, Martin blasts Rev. Meeks for leading Tuesday’s school boycott. Gee! What a surprise.

But Martin goes even farther than Daley in defending the two-tier system of public education, calling CPS a “monopoly” (you know how much Martin and the Civic Committee hate monopolies), bashing the teachers union, and opposing more funding for Chicago Public Schools.

Photos:

1. (Boycotting students at New Trier (M.Klonsky pic)

2. Eden Martin

No differences to bridge on phony Dems

Summer’s over. The leaves are turning. School is back in session and Bridging Differences is back on line to help us sort things out.

I don’t think Deb and Diane will have many differences to bridge over Ravitch’s latest post. Diane sticks it to both the phony Democrats at DFER and the D.C. media reform darlings, Mayor Fenty and Supt. Rhee.

Some formula for success. Some business model. So this is the strange new era we are embarked upon, in which the mantle of “reformer” has passed to those who would dismantle public education, piece by piece.

DFER’s voucher/union-bashing ship ran aground in Denver, despite big bucks from hedge-fund operator Whitney Tilson and lots of Gates/Broad $$$. All that money couldn’t buy them love inside the convention, says brother Fred at PREAPrez.

Also see, “Democrats (?) For Education Reform” on the Educational Justice blog.

******

Speaking of smooth-operator Tilson, is he really in bed with the guy from Crazy Eddie’s and involved in a short-selling stock scandal involving CNBC business reporters? Hmmm.

******

Wow! My recent post on my good buddy Bill Gates made it all the way on to Gates Keepers. That’s the second time. The first was when I tried to free Vicki Phillips.

******

Next up—the annual Broad Prize, doubled this year to $2 million. But the dollars are small compared with the feather it puts in the cap of the winning superintendent who’s usually on his/her way to another district in a year or so. Here’s Edweek’s puffy description of the award:

The award is given annually to a city school district that has made notable strides in improving achievement, especially in closing gaps among students of different racial and ethnic groups.

Note: Last year’s winner was New York’s Chancellor Joel Klein. The result? NY’s gap widened even further, says Eduwonkette.

Piling on

My friend Sid, the '60s N.Y. radical who went straight--to the Republican Party's inner circles, that is-- misled me on the VP choice. I don't think it was intentional. He told me Thursday night that it was going to be Tom Ridge. Instead it was Sarah Palin. I was pissed at Sid until today, for making me look like a jerk. But it turns out that Sid may have been right all along and that Ridge backed out at the last minute, leaving the campaign with Palin as their last and only resort. Sid tells me now that the Palin choice is ripping the party leadership apart and has broadened a rift between Karl Rove and his protege, Steve Schmidt, who pushed for Palin.

******

I was going to hold my thoughts about Palin, first because I don’t like piling on like the “angry leftists” Bush talked about yesterday (do I sound angry?) and second, because her shit is coming out so fast, I’m hardly able to keep up-- and it’s only day 4.

I loved the headline on Huff the other day--"DRIP, DRIP, DRIP..." I mean, Alaskan secessionists? Jews for Jesus? Gimme a break.

VET PEOPLE! VET!

All I keep thinking is that the deeply religious Obama must be down on bended knee right now, saying, “thank you Lord for sending me this gift.”

But this story is irresistible, I can't hold it in. Last December, AP reported:

Gov. Sarah Palin got a break from answering questions about federal corruption probes and natural gas pipeline applications this week to take on the heady subject of fashion. Palin struck a pose for Vogue, a fashion magazine that spent Wednesday morning at her Wasilla home. But don't let her black or red power suits fool you; the fashion photographer quickly learned this week that Palin is an Alaska girl at heart.

“At first they had me in a bunch of furs,” she said. “Yeah, I have furs on my wall, but I don't wear furs. I had to show them my bunny boots and my North Face clothing.”

Yes, yes, prays Obama. Please send us more like her.

What a scene yesterday!

Imagine bus loads of black folks from the South Side pulling up in front of New Trier High in a wealthy, white, North Shore suburb. Some 3,000 students, parents and volunteer teachers (including me) come pouring out of the buses and line up to try and register kids at local, heavily-resourced schools while white neighborhood residents wave welcomes and applaud. As we get off the bus, the media chase Rev. Meeks across the street like paparazzi.

Meeks, along with 50 other black ministers, organized the school boycott is an attempt to draw attention to the fact that Illinois, one of the wealthiest states, is next to last in the state’s share of school funding. The Chicago Tribune called it "a civics lesson" for the hundreds of students who skipped school to ride the buses. They learned first-hand, that with an over-reliance on county-based property taxes, schools with the most expensive housing stock, lots of corporate headquarters and fancy malls get two to three times the resources as do their schools in the inner city.

This has become one of the major civil rights stories of our time and has evoked similar responses as did the struggles of the ‘60s, including lots of liberal politicians, bureaucrats and even school reformers claiming to support the goals, "but not the tactics" of the movement.

Whatever the hand-wringing politicians and bureaucrats may think of his boycott tactics, Meeks has clearly already won this battle. The issue of fair and adequate funding for state public schools and for Chicago in particular, is now squarely on the table. He has emerged as the leader of the movement while Democratic leaders, from the Mayor to the Governor continue to do nothing.

******

I will never complain about my classroom environment again. Not after teaching an hour-long class on the political economics of Chicago school funding to 32 students, grades 5-12, on a school bus with no air-conditioning, windows wide open to catch a breeze in the 95-degree heat, as it raced up I-94 to New Trier H.S. But somehow, it all seemed to work. The kids seemed interested. They responded with lots of questions and volunteered facts they already knew ranging from the great divide—our two-tiered system of education, to the history of the civil-rights protests.

The kids learned a lot more, as several told me on the way back home, from the whole experience of visiting a school where the rich kids go and then attending a rally of 3,000 in the Forest Preserve, where they were fed lunch and listened to speeches and felt the real power of the Save Our Schools movement.

Not bad for the first day of school.

******

Mayor Daley’s attack on the thousand black parents who took their kids to the yesterday’s protest, didn’t go over well on the buses. Daley has been all over the media charging that students shouldn’t be involved in the protests. But as one member of Meeks congregation reminded me: “Where would we be today if whole families hadn’t marched together for freedom?” Meeks himself, evoked the memory of the heroic Little Rock 9 students who integrated Central High School back in 1957.

As for yesterday’s absences costing the district money, Daley/Duncan, if they truly supported the movement for funding equity, as they claim, should have made this an official field trip,
provided teachers and buses and fed the kids. Duncan could have taken a lesson from New Trier’s principal, educators and parents who provided cold water, snacks and opened up the school for the visitors. A large group of New Trier students, including student government leaders, came to the afternoon rally in a show of solidarity.

(Mike Klonsky Photos)
1. Getting off the buses
2. Meeks and the media
3. Net Trier parents greet us

The boycott is on

I'm on my way to the South Side

I spent a great holiday weekend with the family out at the beach in Michigan, far from the Louisiana disaster zone. But today, school starts and it’s back into the fray. Talk about disasters. Eight years into the Mayor’s Renaissance 2010 reform, Chicago schools are on the brink of bankruptcy—this with a Democratic mayor, governor and legislature. Still no funding forthcoming. Illinois is 49^th out of 50 states when it comes to state funding for education.

Rev. Meeks has taken leadership of the fight-back away from Duncan/Daley who continue to piss and moan about students missing a day of school to join the struggle for justice and equality.
Shades of the civil rights movement when so many white liberals stood on the sidelines criticizing each and every tactic of Dr. King and the young SNCC activists.

_________________________________

“The big national picture is that food and fuel costs are going up and school revenues are not,” said Anne L. Bryant, executive director of the National School Boards Association. “We’re in a recession, and it’s having a dramatic impact on schools.”-- NYT

______________________________

But not everyone’s buying the hand wringing and whining. Some 50 churches in the black community are backing the boycott and filling up some 250 busses to take kids up to the rich, white suburb of Winnetka where schools get $19,500/students as compared with $9K in Chicago. CEO Duncan was running from church to church Sunday, desperately trying to head off the boycott. He attacked Rev. Meeks for “using students to fight adults’ battles.”

To which Wade Tillett comments, on my Aug. 31^st blog post:

Funny, but I don't remember Arne Duncan having this sentiment this spring, when he used our students as a backdrop for his funding spectacle at Soldier Field for the "Shout Out for Schools".

******

Here's a prayer on Huff (Chicago) for the first day of school from poet Kevin Coval:

… let his crusade continue beyond week one. May the students he brings to Winnetka see the gigantic inequity in public education, and have the courage and communal counsel not to feel bad about where they come from but to demand wrongs turned right. Perhaps they will not be turned away by fire hoses and German Shepherds, but they will still return to a quarter of the public funding spent on some suburban schools, they will still return to racial-profiling, a proliferation of prisons built to house their bodies and non-livable wage service sector jobs, they will return to the shackles of neighborhood segregation and canyons of disparity which have not disappeared since Little Rock but have grown and will not magically vanish when a democrat is in the white house…

Also listen to Miles Davis’ son Erin, talking about the Chicago school boycott:

"I think people are fed up, and they're trying to do something to change things," said Davis, whose family has long supported the elementary in South Side Englewood. (See the NBC5 Video: New school honors Miles Davis ).

As for me, I am heading down to the South Side to lend a hand as kids ride the buses to New Trier High School and attend classes for the next few days in Rev. Meeks’ Freedom School. I have a hunch they will be learning more from this experience then they ever did on day-one at CPS.

Reports to follow.

Shooting straight on Obama/Ayers

Chicago Catalyst's Linda Lenz ("Annenberg Challenge a radical enclave? Gimme a break!") gives us the real story on Obama and Bill Ayers and the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. It's all in today's Chicago Sun-Times.

Thanks Linda.

Why not test ‘em in the womb?

Bloomberg/Klein now want to give standardized tests to kindergartners, says the NYT.

In an e-mail message sent on Monday evening, the Education Department’s chief accountability officer, James S. Liebman, urged principals to join a yearlong pilot program with five testing options for kindergarten through second grade, including timed paper-and-pencil assessments in which students record answers in booklets for up to 90 minutes, as well as ones in which teachers record observations of individual students on Palm Pilots.

WGN Swift-boater torpedoed

Chicago’s superstation WGN gave over two hours to swift-boater Stanley Kurtz on Milt Rosenberg's Extension 720 show, to "expose" Bill Ayers' alleged ties to the Obama campaign. The campaign struck back, getting angry listeners to call in their protests in record numbers.

"I would say this is the biggest response we've ever got from a campaign or a candidate," he said. "This is really unprecedented with the show, the way that people are flooding the calls and our email boxes."

Was McCain really tortured?

Not according to the definition of torture used by George Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. Andrew Sullivan, at the Daily Dish, says:

In the Military Commissions Act, McCain acquiesced to the use of these techniques against terror suspects by the CIA. And so the tortured became the enabler of torture. Someone somewhere cried out in pain for the same reasons McCain once did. And McCain let it continue.

Palin???

That's the last time I ever listen to Sid.

The big chill

I’m sorry Bill. Can’t we all just get along?

I’m a living example of what can happen to those who’ve been openly critical of the Gates Foundation. A decade ago, the Small Schools Workshop was on the foundation’s good-guy list. But since I first began making critical comments about the role Gates and other top-down “muscle foundations” are playing in the world of school reform, I’ve become persona non grata.

This story in the Seattle Times talks about the “chilling effect” all this has had on the world’s biggest foundation and confirms that it’s not just me:

"It would be suicidal for someone who wants a grant to come out and publicly criticize the foundation," said Mark Kane, former leader of a Gates-funded program to expand childhood immunizations in the developing world. "The Gates Foundation is very sensitive to PR."

Now they tell me.

**********

But Bill, I’ve been rehabbed

Ace Chicago Sun-Times journalist Laura Washington interviews ‘60s movement vets Marilyn Katz and Don Rose at In These Times web edition (“The Whole World Was Watching”). It’s all about the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago and the “revolutionary” decade in which it took place.

Don points to Chicago as “the crucible of everything that was happening in America” in ’68 but thinks times have really changed. A look at the Denver convention makes that clear.

Looking back on '68, Chicago was the crucible of everything that was happening in America. It was a crucible of the student movement. We had the SDS headquartered here. We had the SDS meeting here. It was a crucible of the civil rights movement, beginning with the formation of CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) and SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee). It was the crucible of the anti-war movement. Everything that epitomized the '60s was occurring here, and it looks as if it is beginning again. The movement is not revolutionary, at this point, but evolutionary.

Marilyn then gives me and other ‘60s rads a clean bill of health.

What is really interesting to me is that (’60s radicals) like Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn and Mike Klonsky have managed to live evolved lives in tune to fundamental social ideals, while figuring out a way to not only join the system but make changes. Small schools movement, juvenile justice, a whole series of things.

Thanks Marilyn (I think). And thank god for evolution.

Spirit of '68

Mixing me up with Henry?

Another thanks (I think) goes out to Time Out Chicago’s Martina Sheehan (“Spirit of ‘68”) who writes about me and other ’68 Chicago activists, like Congressman and former Black Panther leader Bobby Rush, the late, great Fred Hampton, and of course the omipresent Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, in this week’s Museum & Culture section (?????). I’ve got news for you Martina. I ain’t ready for the museum quite yet.

Here's Martina's take on me (90% accurate):

Mike Klonsky
Then National secretary for Students for a Democratic Society, the era’s largest and most radical student-activist group that organized for peace and participatory democracy

Now Author, and cofounder and director of the Small Schools Workshop at University of Illinois at Chicago

Activist legacy Neo-con bloggers still seethe at the mention of the “Maoist hardliner” whom they allege enjoyed more than one state dinner in Beijing. Lately, though, Klonsky’s been busy trying to improve schools and education: His Small Schools Workshop helps educators create new charter schools or restructure large schools into smaller learning communities. He also recently coauthored Small Schools: Public School Reform Meets the Ownership Society and writes a blog on education and politics.

All kidding aside, Martina, thanks for the book and blog plugs. And BTW, I don't mind keeping those neo-con bloggers seething. But this I know--I never enjoyed a state dinner (maybe they mean steak dinner) in Beijing or anywhere else. State dinners are usually reserved for other state dignitaries. They must be mixing me up with Henry Kissinger.

Sid leaked it to me...

It's Ridge!

An old '60s activist friend, now a Republican insider, emailed me right after the Obama speech to tell me I was wrong about Romney. "It's Ridge," said Sid, a veteran of the Lower East Side ultra-radical group called Up Against the Wall Mother F******. He's since cut his hair and got his law degree at Yale. I can't tell you any more about Sid lest I get him fired.

Sid says they picked Tom Ridge to counter Biden's influence in swing-state Pennsylvania. But I'll always think of him as the former governor who funneled hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars to the now discredited education privateer Chris Whittle and his Edison Schools, Inc.

Ridge of course, then went on to head up the largest and most dysfunctional bureaucracy in the history of mankind--Bush's Office of Homeland Security.

More on all this later. I just wanted to break this story before the Republicans let the cat out of the bag.

Obama: “They call this the Ownership Society…”

"In Washington, they call this the Ownership Society, but what it really means is - you're on your own. Out of work? Tough luck. No health care? The market will fix it. Born into poverty? Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps - even if you don't have boots. You're on your own. Well it's time for them to own their failure. It's time for us to change America."

Why wait?

San Antonio schools have an answer for increased student truancy. No it’s not making schools more interesting, smaller, more personalized, or any of that touchy-feely stuff. Rather, it’s making students wear ankle bracelets that emit GPS signals when they are absent. As one local official tells AP:

"We are at a critical point in our time where we can either educate or incarcerate," Penn said, linking truancy with juvenile delinquency and later criminal activity. "We can teach them now or run the risk of possible incarceration later on in life.”

By all means, incarcerate them now. Why wait?

Too poor to play

While Chicago schools CEO Arne Duncan and board president, Rufus Williams continue to oppose coordinated actions on Sept. 4th which would call attention to inequitable funding for schools, inner-city students are paying the price. Duncan and Williams argue that the kids shouldn’t be involved in the struggle. But, 8 years into the district’s Renaissance 2010 initiative, these same students still sit in under-resourced schools and, according to the Sun-Times, are “too poor to play.”

The typical affluent school featured far more phys ed than the one period a week usually found at the impoverished schools. And both art and music were common at advantaged schools, while impoverished ones mostly offered art and no music...

Rove's Hand

While Bush hatchet-man, Karl Rove denies having a direct role in John McCain's campaign, his finger prints are all over it, especially since the hiring of Rove attack dog Steve Schmidt. Those prints include racist Muslim-baiting (see the PUMA interview with Chris Matthews below) and 50's-style McCarthyism and Swift Boating of Obama/Bill Ayers).

But tomorrow, we will see just how influential Rove is when McCain announces his VP pick. McCain and many of his biggest campaign donors want Lieberman. But Rove hates Lieberman and is closest to Romney. My prediction? I''ll bet on Rove/Romney.

Rove/McCain PUMAs to Matthews...

"I'm not going to tell you. So nah nah!"

Quotables

Shakin' his money maker

When Mitt Romney says that it was "hard work" that got John McCain all those houses that he got for marrying Cindy Hensley, what does he mean exactly? --Josh Marshall at TPM

From the Veep

"A child is more then a test score. So how can you expect our students to build a new economy if all they are doing is filling out bubbles? How can you expect them to think critically if all we are doing is testing their ability to memorize things?" --Joe Biden

Rothstein saw it in Park Ridge first…

PREAPrez shares some history as he welcomes teachers back to school.

The view from USA Today

Have Karl Rove’s boys, now running the McCain campaign, succeeded in making this election revolve around Obama’s “relationship” with Chicago educator and school-reform leader Bill Ayers? Probably not. But reading the front page of USA Today would certainly make one wonder. Here's some of the best quotes:

Tom Hayden, an anti-war activist who met Ayers in the 1960s and later was elected to the California Legislature, says Ayers' past should be forgiven:

"I have met and like John McCain, but he bombed, and presumably killed, many people in a war I opposed," Hayden says. "If I can set all that aside, I would hope that Americans will accept" that Ayers has changed, too.

McCain asked after April's debate how Obama can "countenance someone who was engaged in bombings." In May, McCain said his campaign "is not going to be about" Ayers nor other Obama associates.

LOL! I wonder who he’s referring to?

For a great analysis of the McCain/Rove Swift Boating campaign, complete with flow chart, see Media Matters Action Network.

Klein knows what's best to read

The chancellor is basing the district’s new reading program on the assumption that he—not the teachers-- knows what’s best. Forcing E.D. Hirsch’s Core Knowledge program on schools will further enable Klein to teacher-proof the curriculum.

Core Knowledge will soon replace the BalancedLiteracy reading program which taps into student interest and which is largely responsible to recent increases in reading scores, claimed by Klein (disputed by many others). Teachers are getting the Reading First agenda without the scandal-ridden Reading First program. My assumption is that this change has little to do with the teaching of reading and much more to do with Ownership Society politics that have become hallmarks of the Bloombert/Klein era. Here he’s funneling $24 million in contracts to Hirsch’s consulting group for a pilot program.

Was it just me?

Did Sen. Kennedy’s dramatic appearance in Denver last night remind anyone besides me, of Willis Reed? A die-hard Laker fan in 1970, I still have vivid memories or the badly-injured Knicks center suddenly appearing on the Garden floor, igniting the crowd and sparking the underdog Knicks to victory in game 7 over my Wilt Chamberlain/Jerry West led Lakers.

They all had one thing in common…

American Prospect’s Dana Goldstein reports on DFER’s recent pre-convention seminar in Denver which brought together a well-heeled group of business-type school reformers. They all had one thing in common—their hatred of teacher unions. About 10% of the convention delegates are teachers union members.

The event, billed "Ed Challenge for Change," was sponsored by a coalition of foundations, nonprofits, and businesses supporting the charter-school movement, including Ed in '08, the advocacy group founded by Bill Gates and real-estate mogul Eli Broad. The evening provided a truly unusual spectacle at a convention: A megawatt group of Democrats, including Mayor Cory Booker of Newark, Mayor Adrian Fenty of Washington, D.C., and former Gov. Ray Romer of Colorado, bashed teachers' unions for an hour.

A more sympathetic blogger, Michelle McNeil portrays the DFER group as having only “a slight anti-union message” and then links them to the McCain-endorsed policy group, EEP.

I thought the (unintentionally) funniest part of McNeil's post was her description of D.C. Supt. Michelle Rhee, who left early to catch a flight, bashing the Democratic Party:

“ It’s supposed to be the party that looks out for poor and minority kids,” when that’s not actually happening.

This in a congregation underwritten by the world’s richest men, hedge-fund operators, Ownership Society privatizers and politicians.

Vallas says no to Dems

Why in the world was Paul Vallas offered a speaking gig at the Democratic Convention? And why did he turn it down? It seems that Vallas, an old Chicago machine Democrat who is currently busy privatizing the New Orleans public school system, is again feathering his nest back in Chicago. His ambitions, according to the Sun-Times' Carol Marin, include running for Cook County Board president --as a Republican.

And so why might the Obama campaign, loyal to the core to the Daley administration, invite Vallas? Maybe to make sure there was video of him at the DNC before he jumped to the GOP.

Eduwonkette unmasks

Let’s see how this changes the line of attack by Bloomberg, Klein, Rotherham, etal., on the young caped crusader. Norm at EdNotes Online, tells how it all got started.

The Urban League's suit

I wonder how Arne Duncan got this photo op when he opposes the suit?

Fiddling while inner-city schools burn

Thanks to Rev. Meeks’ call for a Sept. 4^th school boycott, the inequities in Chicago and state school funding are getting lots of media play ( here and here) and hopefully forcing legislators off the dime. Last week, the Urban League filed a lawsuit in Cook County Circuit Court against the State of Illinois and the Illinois State Board of Education, claiming the defendants violated students’ civil rights by providing unequal funding to schools based on race, particularly black and Latino students.

Unfortunately, schools CEO Arne Duncan refuses to get behind Meeks’ efforts, arguing that this is a "job for adults" and that kids “shouldn’t be used” in the struggle for school funding. Problem is, the adults—the governor,the legislature, the mayor, and Duncan--are sitting on their hands. Now that some adults are finally acting, Duncan has come out against the Urban League’s lawsuit. He tells the Chicago Reporter:

“By definition, lawsuits pit side against side. We should all be on the same side when the issue is properly funding the education of 2 million children throughout our state.”

Kumbaya.

Targeting Obama/Ayers and Chicago school reform

Karl Rove’s boys have stepped in and taken over McCain’s resurgent campaign. They want to turn the election into a referendum on Obama’s patriotism and his supposed ties to ‘60s radicals like educator Bill Ayers. They certainly don’t want the election to be a referendum on the Republican’s last 8 years in office.

So they're spreading the word that Obama is a closet “socialist” (Manchurian candidate) and have dredged up swiftboater Jerome Corsi’s trashy book Obama Nation to spearhead their assault. They've also enlisted a handful of wing-nut bloggers who continue to recycle their own lies about Obama and others (including myself) in this latest Rove-inspired disinformation campaign, reminiscent of the 1950’s red scare.

Along with trying to frighten undecided swing-state voters, the wing-nuts have also targeted school reform efforts and the old Annenberg Challenge in Chicago, which they claim were all part of the Ayers-Obama socialist conspiracy from hell. Their lies include: 1) Obama was the chair of the Annenberg Challenge Board and directed its funding; 2) that Ayers was on the board; 3) that Obama gave thousands of dollars to Ayers. Not a word of any of this is true.

School reformers and ed bloggers seem to be running scared, afraid to speak out against the swiftboaters. This is the kind of fear that gripped the Kerry campaign in 2004 and helped lead to his defeat. It’s this fear that Rove and his boys are counting on in their desperate attempt to cut into Obama’s lead.

Travelling in Massachusetts, I just read this excellent piece by Boston Globe columnist Scot Lehigh, who has obviously not fallen into fear’s grip. He writes:

Corsi notes that Obama was once a community organizer in Chicago, and not just any community organizer, he maintains, but one trained in the tradition of Saul Alinsky, the self-proclaimed radical organizer who died in 1972. For Alinsky, Corsi asserts, the word change "invoked radical socialism" and was "nothing more than a code word for the typical income redistribution those on the left have sought since the days of Karl Marx."

Perhaps you find it hard to believe that Obama, who declines to call for either a single-payer healthcare system or even an individual mandate for healthcare coverage, is either a radical or a socialist. Well, consider these tidbits Corsi presents about the college days of one of Obama's youthful campaign bloggers: In his Harvard suite, he hung "a Communist Party flag that he and a roommate brought back from Russia." Further, the same future blogger's bookcase "included titles by Karl Marx and Howard Zinn. . ."

Hopefully Lehigh’s needle will encourage others, especially some of the reformers here in Chicago who worked on the Annenberg Challenge with Bill Ayers and Obama, will come out of their shells.

If it's about public education, Obama wins

I've been working with some large high schools on the east coast all week and haven't had time to blog. But here's some things that have caught my attention:

According to the 40th annual Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup poll on the subject, if ppeople were voting "solely on the basis of a desire to strengthen the public schools," they'd choose Barack Obama over John McCain by a margin of 46 percent to 29 percent. Four years ago, in a similar poll, President Bush and the Democratic nominee, John Kerry, each polled 41 percent. The latest poll, based on telephone interviews this past June with a national sample of 1,002 people, includes these other findings:

People trust Obama to do a better job on closing the achievement gap (59 percent,
compared with 18 percent for McCain) and on funding education (48 percent to 28
percent).

People are dissatisfied with the No Child Left Behind Act, with 42 percent wanting to change the law significantly and another 25 per cent saying it should be allowed to expire.

Read the rest of the Kappan/Gallup survey here.


Save Our Schools

While I've been gone from Chitown, my brother Fred has kept us posted on the latest developments around Rev. Meeks' call for a 1st-day-of-school boycott.

Meeks and the Save Our Schools Movement are calling a meeting this Sunday for educator volunteers interested in helping out during the boycott. Freedom School classes will be held in the churches that day and help is needed from teachers and other volunteers. The meeting is scheduled for 12:30 p.m. at: House of Hope 752 East 114th Place (Baptistry Room, located near Gate 4).

Contact Kenya Jackson (KJACKSON@sbcoc.org) for more details.

Vallas: After Katrina, 'no one can tell me what to do...'

Management guru Tom Peters, had this advice for his corporate followers: “DESTRUCTION IS COOL!” and “DESTRUCTION IS JOB 1....It’s easier to kill an organization, that to change it. Big idea: DEATH!”

Peters’ organizational death mantra has been picked up by shock-and-awe neo-cons (in Iraq) and school-reform privatizers in cities like D.C. and New Orleans. In Paul Tough's Sunday NYT Magazine piece, “A Teachable Moment,” N.O. schools chief Paul Vallas explains why Katrina’s destruction was a godsend for him.

When I asked Paul Vallas what made New Orleans such a promising place for educational reform, he told me that it was because he had no “institutional obstacles” — no school board, no collective bargaining agreement, a teachers’ union with very little power. “No one tells me how long my school day should be or my school year should be,” he said. “Nobody tells me who to hire or who not to hire. I can hire the most talented people. I can promote people based on merit and based on performance. I can dismiss people if they’re chronically non-attending or if they’re simply not performing.”

Who got the grant? Who takes the credit?

I’ve worked with high schools around the country on quite a few grant proposals. So I know that the process for winning a federal Smaller Learning Communities (SLC) grant is a pretty rigorous one. A lot of work and teacher time usually goes into the planning and writing of these proposals and the review committees look carefully at each large high school to make certain that they have the will and the capacity to successfully restructure the entire school over a four-five year period.

A recent winner of a $2.7 million SLC grant, writes the Northwest Indiana Times, was a consortium of Indiana high schools, including schools in Hammond and Merrillville. So far, so good.

Now I’m not foolish enough to believe that politics doesn’t play any roll in the way DOE funds are distributed to districts—especially these days. But read over the lead sentence in the article and see who takes all the credit for the schools’ winning grant proposal.

Rove dredges up Floyd Brown, the Willie Horton guy

Karl Rove is pulling out all stops in his racist, slime campaign against Barack Obama. Rove and McCain have enlisted Floyd Brown, the man behind the racist 1988 Willie Horton ads. Brown’s latest video blames Obama for Chicago’s murder rate and according to the Tribune, plays on people's fears about race and crime. “Twenty years later, the racial dynamic remains,” says the Trib.

When he’s right—he’s right

Pat Buchanan is a shade to the right of Attila the Hun. But when he’s right, he’s right. He was right in bashing modern-day Attilas, Bush/Cheney for invading Iraq. He’s right this time in exposing Bush/Cheney/McCain for neo-con hypocrisy and blundering in the Russia/Georgia conflict. Can the world take another four years of the neo-cons in power?

Trigger-happy

Today’s NYT reveals McCain as a trigger-happy war monger who was not only ahead of the other neo-cons in pushing us into the war in Iraq, but was also hot to invade Syria and Iran as well, in the days immediately following 9/11.

Edwards? What about McCain?

From Politico:

"His marital history has been duly recorded," said Caldwell, referring to McCain, "and as recently as yesterday I think it is, our pastor from Saddleback, Rick Warren indicated that he would not feel comfortable voting for an adulterer and I don't know exactly to whom he was referring but I think the data speaks for itself, and again, at the end of the day, and I really appreciate you raising this because, at the end of the day again I think the American public deserves full revelation of the candidate's character and competency.

Meeks brings attention to “national sore”

Hermene Hartman, posting on Huff’s new Chicago blog, offers support to Rev. Meeks call for a 1-day school boycott. Savoy Magazine publisher, Obama supporter, and former deputy-chancellor of Chicago's City Colleges, Hartman writes:

I support Reverend Meeks wholeheartedly. He is moving with the spirit of protest to dramatize the situation. His traditional legislative means have not worked. His coalition politics style of organizing has not worked. His preaching has not even worked to push the envelope. His premise is basic, pure, correct and hard to argue: How do you bring about change if you don't change?

What will Stern think about this?

I wonder how all those conservatives who are delirious over their grand “choice” experiment in post-Katrina New Orleans, will respond to Channa Cook’s new charter school, the Sojourner Truth Academy. It’s theme, Social-Justice, complete with programs to help incarcerated teens and a strong community-service component. Isn’t this the kind of “Little Red Schoolhouse” Investor’s Business Daily, Sol Stern, and the boys at the right-wing think tanks have been railing against? Listen to NPR story here

The trouble with heroes...Eduwonkette digs a little deeper to get a more balanced and realistic view of a New York small school. Teachers do good work, but the school selects its students making comparisons with neighborhood schools, invalid.

This is American education's favorite past-time - find inspirational principal/teacher and tell an uplifting/touching story about how kids from tough backgrounds beat the odds. Preferably, someone easy on the eyes like Hilary Swank or Morgan Freeman plays the lead…We do teachers and schools a great disservice by clinging to the teachers/principals as heroic, self-effacing figures storyline.