Starving schools into "reform"

Arne Duncan has $4.35 billion (spread out over 50 states and several years) in Race-To-The-Top money to "incentivize" (is that a real word?) his top-down school reform model. It's about the same size as Bush's failed Reading First program. Aside from the fact that the model (lifting charter caps, more testing, performance pay) has no more research juice behind it than Reading First had, his RTTT leverage money is a piddling amount compared to what's needed to keep schools afloat--let along do systemic change.

Just look at California for a minute, with a state deficit of $26 billion and 99% of its schools failing to meet NCLB standards. The State Senate just cut $15 billion from education and health care.

Sure, some states will raise charter caps, as Illinois did (even where the previous cap hasn't been reached yet) just to have a better shot at the stim money. But is that a real reform plan? Uh uh. In fact, in some cases it's downright retrograde.

Take Wisconsin for example. A progressive Wisconsin Legislature has made it illegal to tie teacher pay to the sole criteria of test scores. Tipping his hat to the most conservative forces in the state, like the Bradley Foundation, Duncan is now threatening to deny federal dollars to already underfunded urban districts in the state unless the legislature revokes its own state law.

More chuckles...

Arne says lifting charter school caps, closing thousands of schools, firing teachers, etc... is ed reform's "moon shot."LOL.

GAO doesn't like D.C. school Rhee-form

The report criticizes supt.'s "lack of foresight in the often hurried implementation of new initiatives" as well as Rhee's failure to involve "stakeholders" like teachers and parents in much of her early decision making. (D.C. Examiner)

Sometimes you just have to laugh at them

Ron Huberman was surprised to learn of the "secret job fair."
(Rich Hein/Sun-Times)

Chicago Public Schools officials burst into laughter this week after a teacher announced at a School Board meeting that she heard a rumor CPS was holding a "secret job fair'' July 31."I can dispel the rumor,'' schools CEO Ron Huberman told the giggling crowd. "There are no secret teacher fairs. Any teacher fairs are public. Everyone is invited, and they are advertised.'' Hours later, Huberman hit the roof after learning CPS was, indeed, planning what some might call a "secret job fair.'' (Sun-Times)

It all makes Jesse Alred wonder, who are the real reformers?

Tough times for small-schoolers

Tom Hoffman doesn't mince any words with Commissioner Gist over the destruction of small schools in Providence.

The work done in small high schools opened in Providence over the past decade is being quickly and unceremoniusly ended in the name of uniformity and strictly standardized curriculum. (Tuttle SVC)

In Oskosh, smaller may be better, but...

“Small schools do a better job educating kids, but there is a point of no return. I’m sorry. I’m going to have to support closing green meadow and Lincoln,” said board member Dan Becker. (Northwestern.com)

Georgia has one of the lowest grad rates

Like Georgia, nearly half of the 17 states probed in the national study showed some improvement in their overall graduation rates during the study period. North Carolina gained some traction in improving its graduation rates, the report said, and became a leader in innovation with the New School Project, a public-private partnership that created up to 100 small schools designed to help students earn both a high school diploma and an associate’s degree, tuition free, in five years. (AJC)

And in Howard County, they're closing Friendship Elementary...

"It's a small, older school, but the infrastructure isn't old. It's well maintained," he said. "The staff seems to have a lot of longevity there. The staff seems very cohesive. "For me, the big draw is just the small school. They're making these mega-schools now. The kids could easily get lost in the shuffle."(Howard County Times)

We're talking real money here

Career pathways

The House Appropriations Committee has put $135 million into the pot for Career Pathways. While this may not sound like much for such an important program, it's a 10% increase over the Bush budget. Good. While the money is mainly targeted for community colleges and local adult ed providers, I would guess it's also another potential resource for high school Smaller Learning Communities and Career Academies.

Watch your back (knees) William

Bloomberg's opposition candidate, William Thompson better watch out. The mayor-for-life wannabe doesn't like folks he can't control and he has $60 million in his war chest to beat his opponents down. But that hasn't stopped Thompson from exposing the real numbers behind the Bloomberg/Klein reform. He says, the first thing he'd do if elected is fire Chancellor Klein.

Duncan's mantra

Arne Duncan's recent mantra has been, mayoral control of urban school districts. OOPS! It's tough to run schools and make license plates at the same time.

'Selective Enrollment' in Chicago

Latest from inside Daley/Duncan's school Renaissance

At the time, then-CPS chief Arne Duncan insisted the selective enrollment program was free from bias. Duncan said a lottery system used to select students worked as intended, despite rumors that students were admitted based on other factors. (Chicago Breaking News)

A recipe for failure

After nearly a decade of standards-based (NCLB) reform, top-down, Gates-funded initiatives, school closings replaced by privately-managed charter schools, state takeovers (Oakland), and revolving-door superintendents (L.A.), here's where California is at:

Nearly all (99%) of the state's schools are failing to make AYP (Annual Yearly Progress) under NCLB requirements (FairTest projections).

Showering Bloomberg's enemies

That's how the N.Y. post describes a proposed community-based training program for parents, at NYU's Metropolitan Center for Urban Education.

Democrats in the state Senate want to shower enemies of mayoral school control with up to $1.6 million a year to operate a citywide parent-training center

OMG! "Showering the enemy"???

Isn't this why we invaded Afghanistan? Can we allow NYU to become a training base for the Mayor's enemies, ie. Al qaeda parents??

Deb Meier says:

"Today, parent power and citizen and community voices have entirely disappeared," Meier wrote for a book panning Bloomberg's education record. "There is nothing that lies between the million families whose children attend our public schools and the system itself."

Deb is obviously one of those shower-ers.

Quotables

The "turnaround" business

“States will have lots of money they have to spend quickly,” he said. “Providers could just hang out their shingles, rename their existing staff, and call themselves turnaround partners.” (William E. Guenther, president of Mass Insight)

Metaphors for change--Stab 'em or beat 'em

“You need to have an accurate diagnosis of why each of those 5,000 schools are failing,” he said. “It’s crucial. Sometimes you need a two-by-four to get change. Other times you need a scalpel.” (New Visions President Robert Hughes)

Klonsky quote

Huberman’s biggest challenge, however, will likely come as he tries to adapt performance management to a practice as subjective and heavy with variables as teaching children. Many educators, unconvinced by Duncan’s data-reliant efforts and aggravated by the testing-dependent federal No Child Left Behind law, remain skeptical. “You end up missing, devaluing the role of teachers. You’re turning teachers into delivery clerks,” warns Mike Klonsky, an education professor at DePaul and the director of the Small Schools Workshop, a consulting group. ("Numbers Man" by Ryan Blitstein in Chicago Mag)

Bloomberg: "We're going to have people in the streets..."

Mayoral Out of Control News

During last week’s radio address, Mayor Bloomberg sounded the alarm:

“they want to have this slush fund to train parents so that parents can disrupt the schools. I want our principals and our teachers to run the classroom…. [C]an you imagine?! We’re going to have people on the streets to tell our police department how to work? No, we don’t want to do that.”

Bloomberg was referring to a portion of the revised Better Schools Act that calls for the creation of a center for parent and student service and empowerment. The center would educate parents and students about ways to get involved in the school system and would encourage more participation in parent-teacher associations and school leadership teams.

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Then comes this item from the NYT reporting that as classrooms grow more crowded, New York public schools have been told to stop independently hiring teaching assistants with money raised by parents.

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How Mayor B gets charter scores up

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If Fenty is re-elected...

Harry Jaffe at WashingtonExaminer.com on Rhee's tenure

Rhee is here for the long haul. She's counting on Adrian Fenty getting elected to another term, which would give her six more years to remake the schools. "At the end of the second term," she tells me, "there's a good chance the achievement gap between white and black students will be closed."

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Gerald Bracey at Huffington: Mayoral control is "the new tyranny."

Power philanthropy

Bill Gates abandoned high-school reform. Said it was "too difficult." Instead he wants to stop hurricanes and make cows that don't fart. What fun, Bill!

What if charter schools had been included in the study?

Last month, the Consortium on Chicago School Research came out with its report, "The Schools Teachers Leave: Teacher Mobility in Chicago Public Schools," revealing CPS's chronically high rates of teacher turnover, especially in schools serving low-income, African-American children.

You may remember that the study failed to include any data from Chicago charter schools. Even without that data, CPS still showed an alarmingly high teacher attrition rate. Chicago schools, under the Duncan regime, lost more than half of all their teachers within five years -- and about two-thirds of their new ones.

One researcher later told me that such data was never made available by the charters nor by CPS. Part of the problem, it seems, was the cheating that went on at the time, with Duncan circumventing the charter law by allowing charter management organizations to operate nearly 50 schools under 27 charters. As a consequence, data collection on each school was made extremely difficult.

Many of us wondered at the time, how much worse Chicago's teacher attrition rate might have looked had charters been included in the study? Some indications might be found in this national study by two Vanderbilt researchers and mentioned back in April in Debra Viadero's Edweek blog, showing that the odds that a teacher in a charter school will leave the profession are 230 percent greater than the odds that a teacher in a traditional public school in their state will do so.

Other studies show about 40% of new charter school teachers leaving the profession. That's about twice the rate of regular public school teachers.

'Improved statistical housekeeping' in D.C.

Another miracle?

No, it's not the Texas miracle (Rod Paige). It's not the Chicago miracle (Arne Duncan) either. No, this time we're all talking about the Michelle Rhee miracle in D.C. If you haven't already heard the news, test scores have gone up in the nation's capital, under Rhee's precise and decisive test-prep strategy.

Yes, elementary schools increased their scores by 8.1 % in math, 3.8% in reading. In the middle and high schools it was a 2% increase in reading and 4% in math.

What's the significance of all these numbers? Do they indicate a real improvement in teaching and learning? Well no. Not exactly. Do they reflect an improvement in the living conditions for students outside of school? Well no, not that either. Do they mean anything at all has changed in the classroom? No. Then what exactly did Supt. Rhee to increase scores on the DCComp tests?

It's simple, according to the Washington Post report. Taking her cue from Chicago, she used a strategy that relied on "improved statistical housekeeping."

Rhee's version includes,

"intensive test preparation targeted to a narrow group of students on the cusp of proficient, or passing, scores, and "cleaning the rosters" of students ineligible to take the tests -- and also likely to pull the numbers down." Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee described some of these approaches as the pursuit of "low-hanging fruit."

Others call it educational triage.

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The Second International Handbook of Educational Change is out. The blurb reads: "Written by the most influential thinkers in the field." Sounds like a must-read for a guy like me who aspires to be such a thinker. It's edited by some of my favorites--Andy Hargreaves and Ann Lieberman. So I went on Amazon to order a copy. Figured I'd read it over the summer break. Maybe even use it in my class next quarter. Guess what?Amazon has it on sale for only $588.73 (they throw in free-shipping). That's a savings of 18%, down from the list price of $679. It makes me wonder, what kind of "educational change" they're thinking about and who they think will make it?

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Another horrific story about the American Indian Public Charter Schools in Oakland, "The Education Revolution: Cookie Cutter Kids?

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How it all plays out in East Austin.

Buchanan's history lesson

Soldiers of the all-black 320th Battalion landing on the beaches of Normandy, France, shortly after dawn on June 6, 1944.

Pat Buchanan invoked a string of white supremacist arguments in making his case against Obama's Supreme Court nominee, Sonia Sotomayor. When asked by Rachel Maddow, why the Supreme Court has historically been a white men's club, Buchanan gave this account of U.S. history.

"White men were 100% of the people that wrote the Constitution, 100% of the people that signed the Declaration of Independence, 100% of the people who died at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, probably close to 100% of the people who died at Normandy. This has been a country built basically by white folks, who were 90% of the nation in 1960 when I was growing up and the other 10% were African-Americans who had been discriminated against.

Buchanan's diatribe, which obviously ignored centuries of black and brown labor, not to mention slavery (how could he not mention slavery?) in the building of this country, also purposefully whitewashed the pages of military history. Since Buchanan prides himself on his knowledge of history and knew full well that the Sotomayor appointment was a lost cause, his lies were obviously intended only to rally the dregs of what's left of his (Gingrich's and Palin's) Republican base.

Not that it matters for the purposes of defeating his ignorant argument against Sotomayor, but black soldiers and sailors did fight heroically against their former slave masters at Milliken's Bend during the Battle of Vicksburg. In fact, it was the first major Civil War battle in which African-American troops were extensively involved.

Some 60 years later, African-American soldiers would shed their blood on the battle fields of Europe in the fight against the nazis. The all-black 320th Battalion, was recently honored (by France) for being among the troops that fought and died on the beaches at Normandy on D-Day.

So far I've heard nothing from Buchanan's fellow Republicans, nor from Democrats for that matter, refuting this purposeful distortion of history.

Bloomberg tells senators...

If you aren't for me running things, "you want to ruin the schools."

The mayor wants to "drag" senators back to Albany, by force if necessary, and make them pass mayor control legislation. As for those who still think mayoral control is up for further discussion--Bloomberg says, hell no.

“You wonder what goes through their heads,” he said, adding that the time for negotiations over mayoral control had passed. “It’s over. It’s stopped. You just can’t do that.” (Gotham Schools)

More on Obama's speech to the NAACP

A large portion of the speech was devoted to the topic of education. But these words never once appear in the speech:

• Charter schools
• Mayoral control
• Performance pay
• Turnaround schools
• Ton of bricks
• The Chicago Model
  

Can't we all get along?

Want to hear a speech where the great revolutionary thinker, W.E.B. DuBois and the neocon southern strategist Newt Gingrich each draw praise? Check out Obama's speech to the NAACP convention.

From the beginning, Du Bois understood how change would come – just as King and all the civil rights giants did later. They understood that unjust laws needed to be overturned; that legislation needed to be passed; and that Presidents needed to be pressured into action. They knew that the stain of slavery and the sin of segregation had to be lifted in the courtroom and in the legislature.

The state of our schools is not an African-American problem; it’s an American problem. And if Al Sharpton, Mike Bloomberg, and Newt Gingrich can agree that we need to solve it, then all of us can agree on that.

And what finer group could one find to be representative of America? I ask you. I wonder if Newt feels comfortable in such high-minded company? After all, he just led the attack on Obama's Supreme Court pick, Sonia Sotomayor, calling her a "racist."

Scientist shortage?

Scan Bureau of Labor Statistics projections and you won't find words like "crisis" or even "shortfall."

Hey, remember all those reports about scientist shortages? Remember how Bill Gates and others were blaming the schools for not turning out enough scientists and engineers and for hurting us in our competition with China and India?

Well, maybe not:

Numbers from the U.S. Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics issued Tuesday showed the unemployment rate for electrical engineers hit a record high, 8.6%, in the second quarter, more than doubling from 4.1% in the first quarter... Meanwhile, emerging nations such as India and China produced nearly 700,000 engineers alone. But the slow growth of U.S.-born STEM workers, analysts say, may have less to do with funding commitments than with cloudy career paths and low wages relative to other specialized careers such as medicine, law and finance. (USA Today)

Unemployment, especially among older Silicon Valley engineers, has been a constant reality for the past 20 years. "But it's certainly gone into 'hyper mode' in the last six," says Alan Weissberger, a 61-year-old telecommunications engineer in Santa Clara, Calif., who admits to being "stumped" when people say there's a shortage of engineers..

No "quick turnarounds", Sec. Duncan

So warns Chicago parent organizer Julie Woestehoff (PURE) in response to Duncan's pushing the "Chicago model" on other school districts. Duncan had claimed that, “Chicago’s success proves that we as a nation can expect dramatic and quick turnarounds in our lowest-performing schools.” In a letter to EdWeek, Julie proves that Duncan's claims don't add up.

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Even the far-right libertarians (no-govt. anarchists?) at the CATO Institute are calling the Chicago Miracle "a myth." And remember, these were the guys who actually made up the name, the Ownership Society.

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Think Tank West looks at Chicago's NAEP scores and finds that CPS's 1% increase is "pretty darn close to zero." Certainly nothing to write home about.

Two good reads

Garrett Delavan's book, The Teacher's Attention (Temple U.) makes the case for smaller schools and smaller classes, or as he calls it "relationship load reduction." Delavan is a high school teacher in Salt Lake City.

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Blue-Chip Black (University of California) by Karyn Lacy, is a study of middle-class African-Americans in Prince George's County, Maryland, one of the largest such communities in the nation. It's a community set apart from both poor blacks and whites -- avoiding traditional classrooms in favor of selective enrollment magnet schools or elite private schools. It is also a community being devastated by the current economic disaster, making Lacy's work that much more significant. She writes:

Cross-racial alliances are most prevalent in Prince Goerge's County, where the county's dismal fiscal conditions united black and white residents on key issues, namely development and schools.

Ownership Society News

They're still hoping

Here's the title of the Fordham Institute's next panel discussion: "With charter schools ascendant, is there still a future for vouchers?"

Another neocon wingnut think tank, AEI, likes the general direction Arne Duncan is heading, but doesn't think he is going far enough or has enough "sticks" to get him there. AEI's Andy Smarick is also turned on by DFER, the pro-voucher, pro-privatization Democrat "reformers" who have lots of clout at Duncan's DOE. Smarick finds DFER "exciting," but he worries that these hedgefund reformers may be too gah-gah over Duncan and claiming victory "too early." He is right.

Bill Gates' card game

"Gates Foundation: Teachers trump class size" reads the E-School News headline. Makes me wonder whether Bill Gates' kids have to choose between a good teacher and small class size.

Duncan at the AFT Conference

As he sat on a stool yesterday next to federation President Randi Weingarten, Duncan, in a gesture of solidarity, wore a button the union had distributed to the audience: "With us, not to us."--Washington Post

Boos and comity

It sounds like Arne Duncan turned a typically boring meeting into a hazardous-duty adventure.

Members of the Chicago local laughed, almost theatrically, when Duncan claimed to have supported broad, community-based anti-poverty efforts while working as that city's superintendent. A series of questioners pressed Duncan to reevaluate his positions. One teacher from West Virginia told him that after merit pay was instituted at her school, "The result of this has been a crash in morale. ... We are looking upon it as a very elaborate process of favoritism." Duncan was conciliatory. "That system...has a lot of work to do," he said to the West Virginia woman, "I appreciate your frustration." To a questioner concerned about charter schools weeding out special-education students, he replied, "To be clear, I'm not a fan of charters. I'm a fan of good charters." For that, he was gifted with disbelieving boos.

That's not to say there were no genuine points of comity at the event. Duncan's take on No Child Left Behind won him plaudits. He praised NCLB's success at dis-aggregating achievement numbers by race and class, while criticizing the legislation for being underfunded and stigmatizing "failing" schools. Most significantly, he used NCLB's existing state-by-state standards system to make a plug for common national standards, a concept that seemed popular with the crowd. Under the Bush administration, NCLB was "very, very loose on the goals...and they were very, very tight on how you get there. I want to fundamentally flip that," Duncan said. "I think it's backwards." (Dana Goldstein, American Prospect)

Day one of the AFT/Quest Conference

AFT President Randi Weingarten lays out the union's line on charters

Weingarten said charter schools should be held to the same standards as other public schools and they "should not be pitted against each other."

"Successful charter schools should be applauded and should share their lessons; troubled charter schools that fail their students should be held accountable and closed; and charter school teachers should be supported and given the right to union membership and voice," she said.

Weingarten cautioned elected leaders not to walk away from their responsibility to help all public schools succeed "by turning entire public school systems into charter schools." (AFT-Quest 2009)

The Duncan rationale

According to Sec. Duncan,

"2,000 high schools produce half of the dropouts in the country...They are perpetuating poverty and social failure... But if we agree that the adults in these schools are failing these children then we have to find the right people and we can't let our rules and regulations get in the way."

By rules and regulations, Duncan means collective bargaining agreements. Forget the rules negotiated between teachers and districts. Fire 'em all. Let God sort 'em out, says Arne.

Okay, now fast forward to a report cited by the Hechinger Institute at Columbia Teachers College, which says: "17 states produce some 70 percent of the students who don’t graduate." Never mind, as Sherman Dorn is quick to point out, that 17 states also enroll 70 percent of the nation's students. The question is, using Duncan's logic, aren't these states guilty of perpetuating poverty and social failure? Shouldn't we fire all the teachers in those 17 states and replace them with teachers from the remaining 33?

Actually, the Hechinger folks are asking the right questions, including:

• What investments can states make to turnaround lagging schools in a time of economic crisis?
• How will funds from the stimulus package help transform underperforming high schools and how can government and school officials be held accountable?
  
• Are changes needed in federal education law?
  
• What can and should state policymakers do to make sure that increasing graduation rates will become a top priority?
  
• What interventions and are most effective in improving high school graduation rates?
  

The AFT/Quest Conference

The American Federation of Teachers' Quality Educational Standards in Teaching (QuEST) conference starts today at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel in Washington, D.C.

Among the conference highlights will be U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan taking questions from the audience, a speech by U.S. Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, a keynote address by AFT President Randi Weingarten, a session on teacher quality with Linda Darling-Hammond of Stanford University, events with unionized charter school teachers and a panel on community schools.

The taking of P.S. 123

In N.Y, charter profiteers like Eva Moskowitz don't even wait for board approval before sending movers into a Harlem school, to haul away teachers' materials, desks and computers without their knowledge. Juan Gonzalez of the Daily News pointed out back in February, that "Moskowitz, who makes no secret of her desire to create 40 charter schools across the city and run for mayor some day, raked in $371,000 in salaries in the 2006-2007 school year from organizations connected to her four schools,"

Previous posts on charter hustler Moskowitz here & here.

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Of the 10 N.Y. schools with the worst student performance in math tests this year, half were opened in the past four years as part of Mayor Bloomberg's new schools initiative. (Daily News)

Report: 'Schools are safer without metal detectors'

The NYCLU, the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University, and Make the Road New York have released a report arguing that schools can create a safer environment without metal detectors and harsh discipline. (Gothamist)

Included in the report, this factoid:

The police force in New York City schools is now the fifth largest police force in the country—there are more police in New York City schools than there are on the streets of cities such as Baltimore, Las Vegas, Boston and Washington D.C.

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PURE does some good reporting on the "turnarounds" in Chicago including this on turnaround "model" AUSL. It also turns out that Julie at PURE had beaten me to the punch on the suppression of the SRI report. She noted back in May that the critical report on Renaissance 2010 had been "purposely delayed."

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Minneapolis charter advocate Joe Nathan doesn't like the "false choice" between charters and district schools. He says research shows both district and charter schools vary enormously in their effectiveness. So lumping them together makes little sense, and doesn't help improve any classrooms.

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This week's stupid headline award goes to Chicago Public Radio (WBEZ). Since when is firing every teacher in a school, a "radical school reform?" What's next, firing all the surgeons in a hospital for some radical health care reform?

The way they think

Deb Meier's latest (and last for the summer) post on Bridging Differences, quotes IBM's Louis Gerstner wanting to replace the country's 16,000 school districts with just one. It made me think back to the wish expressed by L.A. Supt. Ramon Cortines for a "dictatorship" over his district. Deb also offers some good summer reads.

The Duncan Era

I don't know why it took me so long. But I finally got around to reading Matthew Blake's comprehensive assessment of the Duncan era in Chicago, "The educators new clothes: Everybody loves Arne Duncan. But do his reforms work?" It was well worth the read. Check it out.

More on mayoral control

The Tribune carries the latest chapter on the Daley machine's job/patronage dealings. That Arne Duncan still touts mayoral control of the schools as the "model" for every city is almost laughable. The only question is when the federal prosecutor's noose will tighten around the Fifth Floor of City Hall.

• Inspector general wants Daley to fire HR chief (Chicago Breaking News)
• Daley defends resigned personnel aide (Chicago Breaking News)
• Mayor Daley's personnel chief quits (Chicago Tribune)
• Former Daley aide upset IG made report public (Chicago Breaking News)
• Accused of lying, Daley's personnel chief quits (Chicago Breaking News)