Look what they've done to the GED. Aligned with Common Core and handed over to Pearson

Back in the '80s I got my start in adult education, teaching GED classes in a little classroom in the back of the public library on North and Pulaski. My students were mostly dropouts from Clemente, looking to finish high school so they could go to a community college or apply for a decent job. Most were good students, capable, thoughtful and curious. Many had dropped out because of the gang situation at Clemente or for personal reasons -- they needed to work to support their families.

The curriculum was geared to the test and involved mainly basic math and literacy. But I did my best to get to know my students and learn as much as possible about their previous schooling and out-of-school learning experiences. We managed to turn the classes into much more than an exercise in test preparation and most of my students passed the test and got excited again about learning.

Now I'm hearing that the GED exam has been overhauled, aligned with the Common Core and handed over to Pearson, the giant British testing and textbook corporation in order to supposedly prepare students for 21st-Century jobs. The new test is now much harder. The test prep classes are given on-line. No more personalization. It's also become much more expensive in order to build in a big profit margin for Pearson, making it less accessible to the kinds of students I was teaching back in the day. The changes have caused thousands to drop out and give up.

NPR reports there's been sizable decrease in  the number of people who took and passed the test, according to local and state educators and the organization that runs it. In addition, at least 16 states have begun offering or plan to offer new, alternative tests.

What effect did all of these changes have on test takers?

"Our number of graduates for this last calendar year has dropped about 85 percent," says Myles Newman, who helps coordinate GED preparation for one school district in Lexington County, S.C. States including Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Colorado are reporting large drops as well.

"Teachers are telling us that the new test is virtually impossible for students to pass," says David Spring, who with his wife, Elizabeth Hanson, runs the website Restore GED Fairness in Washington state. Both are educators who have spent years helping people prepare for the GED.

Here's some hard numbers:

--- In 2012, a total of 401,388 people passed the GED test.

--- In 2014, only 58,524.

What a disaster!

Rahm's Super PAC goes after my alderman

LAUGHABLE...Rahm's puppy dog in the 32nd Ward race is someone named Elise Doody-Jones. She's running against our progressive Alderman Scott Waguespack, Scott was one of only 4 aldermen with enough ganas to vote no on the mayor's rotten budget.

Doody-Jones, who doesn't even live in the ward, is the beneficiary of a big chunk of that $2M pot of gold from the mayor's Super PAC. "Chicago Forward" is run by his former CPS Liar-in-Chief Becky Carrol -- not the brightest bulb on the tree.

Case in point, this slick propaganda piece that came in the mail yesterday attacking Waguespack for supposedly voting against $10M to fix the city's potholes. Yes, it's true that hundreds of pot holes remain unfilled from last winter's storms --that's right, a year later-- and every driver whose car smashed through one has been heard screaming, "Fu*k you, Rahm Emanuel" at the top of their lungs (me included).

But the expensive card-stock  mailer tries to take the heat off the most-hated mayor in the country by blaming our alderman for the city's failure to fix the streets, even though Rahm's budget, including the pothole money, was passed easily by a gaggle of boot-licking city councilman. The flier even has a picture of a still-unfilled pothole at Racine and Wrightwood -- not even in Waguespack's ward -- to remind us how much we disdain this mayor.

Actually, Scott's ward ranks among the highest in seeking pothole work. He even sponsored a separate bill to boost spending.  But the way the machine works is that the mayor can punish an opponent's ward by denying them city services. Cutting back on services in black wards on the city's west and south side has become a habit with the machine bosses. Thus Rahm's single-digit approval rating in the city's African-American community.

Now Rahm is using the same tactic to punish members of the Progressive Caucus.

And that was also the theme behind the mayor's budget -- feed the wealthy downtown neighborhoods at the expense of the resource-starved ones. Scott was right-on in voting no and had the guts to do it in the face of adversity and Rahm's threats to punish him at election time.

But Becky Carrol's flier is the work of a rank amateur. It never even mentions Doody-Jones (can't really blame 'em for that). So readers aren't told who to vote for. We only see a picture of Scott with his name emblazoned in the headline. It reminds me of the kind of silly crap we used to get every day in the mail from the disastrous Toni Berrios campaign when she lost her state rep race to progressive Will Guzzardi despite the machine (Madigan and machine boss, "Big Daddy" Berrios) spending a ton of money on junk mailers that usually ended up in voters hallway trash cans and never even made it into the house.

I can't imagine that the good folks in our ward will fall for this crap.

For Rahm, education is just another profit center

"Chuy" Garcia

Mayoral candidate "Chuy" Garcia accused Rahm of treating education "as a profit center for people with powerful connections." He couldn't be more right. Latest case in point is the mayor's defense of his hand-picked board member, Deborah Quazzo, who uses her board seat to protect her ed-biz investments.

Of course, Rahm's pay-to-play style extends well beyond school board contracts. There's good reasons for clout heavy companies to be over-filling his campaign war-chest.

Foulkes & Waguespack

He's using an outrageous sum of $2 million from his “Chicago Forward” super PAC to go after two members of the City Council's  Progressive Caucus -- Alderman Toni Foulkes (15th) and my Alderman, Scott Waguespack (32nd). Scott was one of only 4 aldermen with spine enough to vote against the mayor's budget, which fed downtown at the expense of the neighborhoods. We can't let Rahm take them out.

PENSION THEFT...The pension theft bill, signed by outgoing Gov. Quinn is likely to be declared unconstitutional by the State Supreme Court. But with pension-grabbing billionaire Bruce Rauner replacing Quinn, the battle on behalf of teachers and other public employee retirees is just heating up.

Rick Pearson reports today on Clout Street:

Unions pumped millions of dollars into the campaign in an effort to stop Rauner, who peppered his Republican primary campaign rhetoric with harsh anti-labor attacks before softening them in the later stage of his general election campaign against Quinn.
It's not that the unions were pleased with Quinn. They had little love for him after he signed into law the major pension measure that vastly changed retiree benefits and extended retirement ages in an effort to ameliorate the state's pension debt over 30 years.

 Quinn is going away, but the fate of the law he signed is in serious legal jeopardy. With Rauner taking over, the pension debt remains unsettled.

What still amazes me is how little weight supposedly pro-teacher progressives place on the pension-theft issue. It remains virtually ignored at most progressive-ed conferences, including a couple coming up here in the next few months. Plus many progressives turned the Quinn campaign into a (losing) religious crusade which sucked up union money like a massive vacuum cleaner, leaving little behind for the current battle to unseat Rahm in the mayor's race. Quinn got off without being punished by union leadership but the rank-and-file stayed home.

Quinn

Quinn leaves office wringing his hands and shedding crocodile tears over his pension "reform" failure, a mission he claims he was "put on earth" to carry out.

God cringes.

P.S... I wish Quinn well, hoping that once he's out of the State House and not hanging out with the wrong crowd, he will be able to return to the independent progressive values he had back when we knew him as a Local School Council member at our neighborhood school. Sometimes it works that way. But not often.

THE SMELL OF BLOOD... Elsewhere it's the same story. In Arizona, even former Enron trader and Texas billionaire John Arnold (why is he still at large?) has jumped on the pension-busting wagon, donating more than $1 million to a November 2014 initiative to reform the public pension system in Phoenix. Arnold’s donation to Proposition 487, also known as the Phoenix Pension Reform Act, constituted close to 75 percent of total donations for the ballot measure, which failed. Had it passed, it would have moved new state employees from a defined benefit plan into a less generous (and less expensive) defined contribution plan such as a 401(k).

Rahm's school administrators cooked the books on dropouts

“The annual OIG report is a testament of our cooperation and demonstrates we do not tolerate any wrongdoing, and CPS has either addressed or is addressing all the issues in the report.” -- CPS spokesman Bill McCaffrey

CPS I.G. Nicholas Schuler

Ooooh that smell...While Rahm and BBB scrambled for media coverage about supposed record grad rates, CPS School administrators were busy "misclassifying" dropouts to make their schools look better. This according to the annual report from Rahm's own appointed schools I.G. Nicholas Schuler.

At one school alone, nearly 300 dropouts were wiped off the books since 2009. At another high school officials did the same thing for 18 students.

I don't necessarily blame U of C's Consortium on Chicago School Research for running with the numbers they get from CPS. I just think they should be cautious in how they spin those numbers. I guess I'm still pissed at the Consortium's lead author of it's report on grad rates, calling for a "celebration" of the reported 4% bump.

I also don't know if Rahm/BBB are actively pushing administrators to cook reported dropout rates (remember Bush's Texas "Miracle") or if they acted on their own. But bureaucrats know full well what numbers they're expected to produce if they are going to survive in a high-stakes "data-driven" system where the mayor runs the schools autocratically.

I doubt that Schuler's report, which may be giving up a little to hide a lot, will go anywhere except Rahm's circular file. The CPS I.G. can only make recommendations and has no power to force system-wide changes. Also, I'm pretty sure Schuler got the nod from Rahm's people before releasing the report, which mentions among other things,

• Nearly $900,000 stolen from two Chicago high schools.

• Lying CPS employees who skirted the system to get their own kids into the best schools.

• And a CPS administrator who “engaged in questionable conduct” when a nearly $100 million contract was in the process of being awarded.

With the election only weeks away, it's always better to get the dirt out yourself before your opponents do it. Then you can prime your troops with prepared media hokum, like the statement above from CPS spokesman Bill McCaffrey.

Not on Duncan's VIP list?...One thing you can probably count on is punishment of those teacher/parents who allegedly "skirted the system" to get their own kids into elite selective enrollment schools. I mean, who do they think they are, Gov. Rauner?

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

John Goodlad (1920-2014)

John Goodlad on social justice

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

...On more schooling

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

...On test & punish

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

...On curriculum

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

Prof. Roger Soder 

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

Valerie Strauss, WaPo education writer

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

China's testing factories. Duncan's fantasy.

The fact is that we are falling further behind our international competitors educationally. We should recognize that as an urgent wake-up call. But we are sleeping through the alarm. In the U.S., we are still just talking about the steps many leading countries are actually taking to prepare their students for a competitive global economy. Falling behind educationally now will hurt our country economically for generations. -- Ed Secretary, Arne Duncan

Duncan's "wake-up call" is a nightmare for schools and educators. His dream and vision is indicative, among other things, of our growing fear and jealousy of China's remarkable industrial and technological growth. According to the latest reports from the IMF, the U.S. is no longer the largest economy in the world. China has become number one. Duncan, along with the current batch of corporate school reformers are blaming the schools for this supposed decline in America's competitive position in the race for global hemony. They desperately want to make our schools more like China's with a single-minded focus on testing.

In her review of Yong Zhao's book, Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Dragon? Why China Has the Best (and Worst) Education System in the World, Diane Ravitch writes:

Policymakers and legislators are convinced that the best way to raise test scores is to administer more standardized tests and to make them harder to pass. This love affair with testing had its origins in 1983, when a national commission on education released a report called “A Nation at Risk.”

I hope that they (and everyone) will read NYT Magazine's amazing account of China's "testing factories", schools where thousands of students and teachers essentially live or die by the standardized test (the gaokao). 

China’s treadmill of standardized tests has produced, along with high levels of literacy and government control, some of the world’s most scarily proficient test-takers. Shanghai high-school students have dominated the last two cycles of the Program for International Student Assessment exam, leading more than one U.S. official to connect this to a broader “Sputnik moment” of coming Chinese superiority. Yet even as American educators try to divine the secret of China’s test-taking prowess, the gaokao is coming under fire in China as an anachronism that stifles innovative thought and puts excessive pressure on students. Teenage suicide rates tend to rise as the gaokao nears. Two years ago, a student posted a shocking photograph online: a public high-school classroom full of students hunched over books, all hooked up to intravenous drips to give them the strength to keep studying.

What irony! Just as China is trying to move away from its own testing madness, we are rushing towards it at full speed.

Civil Rights Movement Rebirth in 2014-15

Today makes it 6 years since Oscar Grant was killed at the Fruitvale Bart Station. 

The Fannie Lou Hamer-Ella Baker model...There's been a rebirth of Civil Rights Movement in 2014-15, says Politico. Thousands of youth and community activists have been energized, politicized. I'm wondering why few political candidates (including progressives) are addressing issues it's raised?

This re-energized millennial movement, which will make itself felt all the more in 2015, differs from its half-century-old civil rights-era forebear in a number of important ways. One, it is driven far more by social media and hashtags than marches and open-air rallies. Indeed, if you wanted a megaphone for a movement spearheaded by young people of color, you’d be hard-pressed to find a better one than Twitter, whose users skew younger and browner than the general public.

Ella Baker

According to Politico,

...the young activists are inclined to the “Fannie Lou Hamer-Ella Baker model”—an approach that embraces the grass roots and in which agency is widely diffused. Indeed, many of the activists name-checked Baker, a lesser-known but enormously influential strategist of the civil rights era. She helped found Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference but became deeply skeptical of the cult of personality that she felt had formed around him. And she vocally disagreed with the notion that power in the movement should be concentrated among a few leaders, who tended to be men with bases of power that lay in the church. “My theory is, strong people don’t need strong leaders,” she said.

Don't miss this excellent summary of 2014 corporate-style school reform and charter hustling, posted by Jeff Bryant at Salon.

In 2014, charter schools, which had always been marketed for a legendary ability to deliver promising new innovations for education, became known primarily for their ability to concoct innovative new scams.

Forecasts about what 2015 will bring to the education landscape frequently foresee more charter schools as charter-friendly lawmakers continue to act witlessly to proliferate these schools. But make no mistake, the charter school scandals of 2014 forever altered the narrative about what these institutions really bring to the populace.

Rahm wants all the credit for this pitifully weak Chicago minimum-wage law. This, even though he undercut the effort by the Progressive Caucus to push for a $15/hr. minimum, like Seattle, Tacoma, and San Francisco have. Instead he responded to massive protests and demonstrations and tried to outflank the Caucus by settling for a $13 increase over 4 years. Hardly a livable wage.

Jesus "Chuy" Garcia's spokesman Monica Trevino says "raising the minimum wage was not a tough choice, as the mayor likes to say. It was an easy one that he should have made his first year in office."

"Mayor Emanuel took only two weeks to put out a TV commercial after the increase passed, and it should be clear to everyone that Mayor Emanuel only makes hard choices ... when they personally benefit him," Trevino added.

New Year's Eve but I'm just not feeling it

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

'Bring me flesh and bring me wine, 
Bring me pine logs hither, 
Thou and I will see him dine 
When we bear them thither.'

I mean, who talks like that?

Sorry, all you revelers, but I'm just not feeling it this year. No, it's not just that the year's ending with more assaults on public education, with a neo-fascist movement building within the NYPD or while 2.4 million, including way too many children, are languishing in prison. No, I'm too used to all that.

And there is cause for some New Year's joy in the movement here to unseat our own Little Emperor, Rahm Emanuel. Yesterday's endorsements for my guy Chuy Garcia by 100 African-American community leaders and activists should be enough to get me popping open a bottle of the bubbly around midnight. But it's not.

For one thing, I just left the perfect weather and waters of south Florida and landed back in Chicago with a sore back, only to be hit in the face by a sub-zero wind chill. Spirit Airlines charges $2 for a damn cup of coffee on top of $35 surcharge per carry-on and ten bucks more if you happen to want a seat.

Plus, if I see one more top-10 list from 2014 my head will explode. Remember, I've been listening all week to Christmas music on every station. No, I'm not joining the "war on Christmas" But enough!

So yes, I'm getting old and grumpy.

My friends Joan and Gus sum it all up for me. 

Speaking of little emperors and Christmas music, did you know that Good King Wenceslas was not so good, nor was he a king, nor was he necessarily Wenceslas? No, the first Christian martyr was actually a guy named Václav and he was the Duke of Bohemia.

Okay, so he may have gone out in the snow during the Feast of St. Stephen with his page to drop some alms on the poor. But the Duke only came to power after the murder of his grandma Ludmila, who raised him as a child, arranged by his mom Drahomira, a pagan (or so the story goes). While in power, Václav forced all the pagans to become Christians. Those who didn't -- well, let's just say, no alms for them. Václav the Good was then assassinated by his wicked brother, Boleslaw the Bad.

Ah, family!

Why am I rehashing this sad tale now, when we all should be getting together with family and celebrating the planet surviving another year? Well, aside from freezing my ass off this morning, I think it's a cautionary tale about 1%ers bearing alms. Except that our Little Emperor bears alms only for the city's billionaires. Maybe Václav the Good wasn't so bad after all.

Happy New Year! Chuy for Mayor!

Chuy's support growing in the black community

Civil Rights veteran Timuel Black leads parade of endorsers for Chuy Garcia

THIS MORNING... more than 100 African-American community leaders and activists endorsed Chuy Garcia for Mayor and helped celebrate the opening of the campaign's newest office. Perhaps there's hope after all.

NYPD: Arrest only when you "really have to"

“He [Mayor de Blasio] is not running the City of New York. He thinks he’s running a f- -king revolution,” said Lynch, head of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, during the private gathering in Queens last Friday. -- NY Post

Ah, if only it were so. After years of scandal, corruption and police shootings, a revolution within the department is precisely what's needed.

The aptly-named head of New York's police union, Pat Lynch now says the city's cops are striking back with a counter-revolution of their own, aimed at the citizens of New York, especially those in the black community, hands-up, don't-shoot marchers and their elected mayor who got 73% of the vote. How are they going to strike back? Well, it's kind of a work stoppage.

The New York Post reports that NYPD officers are making arrests only "when they have to," leading to a massive drop in their response to low-level crimes.

It all makes you wonder -- Who and why were they arresting before this change of heart? And if they had only implemented the arrest-only-when-necessary approach, would Eric Garner and dozens of other young black men still be alive today?

Stovall

DAVID STOVALL TELLS IT ALL

Chicago is a hyper-segregated city. Despite rampant gentrification in certain areas, Chicago is not a city of neighborhoods but a city of universes. People can spend lifetimes here never experiencing certain parts of the city due to age-old demarcated lines that live in our minds and bodies.

 To uproot massive numbers of people without any accountability is criminal. But as we say around here, it’s the Chicago way. -- Cities in Revolt: Chicago

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

President Robert Kelly of the Amalgamated Transit Union Local 308 announces the organization's endorsement of Jesus "Chuy" Garcia for mayor of Chicago. | Richard A. Chapman/Sun-Times

ATU Local 308 Pres. Robert Kelly 

“I’m a citizen of the city of Chicago. I’m tired of reading the papers and hearing about murders and school closings and transit issues,” said Robert Kelly, president of the Amalgamated Transit Union Local 308, which represents CTA train operators. “It just makes me sick to my stomach. I’m tired of it, and so is everybody else. 

Kelly’s remarks came as the local he presides over endorsed Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, one of Emanuel’s most prominent challengers in the upcoming February election. -- Early & Often

George Will

Bush’s support of Common Core is much less nuanced and persuasive, and there seems to be condescension in his impatience with the burden he bears of taking seriously the most important reason for rejecting Common Core. It is not about the content of the standards, which would be objectionable even if written by Aristotle and refined by Shakespeare. Rather, the point is that, unless stopped now, the federal government will not stop short of finding in Common Core a pretext for becoming a national school board.

Bush says “standards are different than curriculum” and: “I would be concerned if we had a national curriculum influenced by the federal government. My God, I’d break out in a rash.”  -- Washington Post

"Public school bashers"

David Sirota

Taken together with the new Department of Education numbers, we see that for all the elite media’s slobbering profiles of public school bashers like Mayors Rahm Emanuel and Michael Bloomberg, for all of the media’s hagiographic worship of scandal-plagued activist-profiteers like Michelle Rhee, and for all the “reform” movement’s claims that the traditional public school system and teachers unions are to blame for America’s education problems, poverty and economic inequality are the root of the problem.  -- Salon

 Palm Beach Cty. Board member Debra Robinson

"We're not going to approve these charters that just fill out the paperwork properly and don't have anything special to offer our children. This is an act of civil disobedience, because some of this stuff we're told to do is crazy." -- Sun-Sentinel

Author Anne Farrow

Slavery in America was not a footnote, not "the sad chapter" of our history but the cornerstone of our making. -- Philly.Com, Shrouded History of Slavery

Why is CPS going after pregnant teachers? Interferes with testing.

Maybe AG Holder was in Chicago for more than just a Rahm photo-op.

The lawsuit also alleges that [Scammon Principal Mary] Weaver asked a teacher who was nursing, "When will you be done with that?" and told a teacher who announced she was pregnant, "I can't believe you are doing this to me. You are going to be out right before (mandatory) testing!"

No, it's not just one principal. Byrd-Bennett and the district leadership are fighting a federal anti-discrimination lawsuit.

The Tribune reports:

Weaver subjected pregnant teachers "to disparate treatment with regard to performance evaluation ratings" and other matters, and "there existed a regular, purposeful, and less-favorable treatment of teachers because of their sex (pregnancies)," according to the lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Chicago.

CPS issued a statement, saying it "will not tolerate the kind of discrimination or retaliation that is alleged to have taken place at Scammon Elementary" but also that it intends to defend itself against the suit. 

Rahm and Weaver

Weaver was awarded a bonus last year under a principal quality award program that's supported by $5 million from the city's philanthropic community.

But the CTU wants her put on administrative leave during the Justice Dept. investigation. V.P. Sharkey says, it's not just the harassment of pregnant teachers, but the "the incredibly toxic internal environment of fear" she's created at Scammon Elementary.

"No woman should have to make a choice between her job and having a family," Vanita Gupta, acting assistant attorney general for the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, said in a statement.

So maybe Eric Holder was doing something in Chicago besides a photo-op with Rahm.

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.

Landmark charter special ed suit settled in Louisiana.

Post-Katrina New Orleans

Remember when Sec. Duncan called Hurricane Katrina, “the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans"? A suit filed by the Southern Poverty Law Center disputed that verdict, and shows that Duncan must have been ignoring, among other things, the plight of thousands of the district's special-education students when he made that idiotic assessment.

Governor Jindal and the state of Louisiana have now agreed to settle the landmark special education suit, agreeing that the state did not adequately educate children with disabilities in the fragmented network of charter and district schools that sprung up in New Orleans after the hurricane.

Duncan's positive view of the privatization/charter-ization of schools in Louisiana has been complimented by a host of embedded research groups. Most of these have ignored the consequences of racial resegregation and the displacement of thousands of families after the hurricane, which had a major impact--especially on N.O. schools. One Tulane research institute even had to issue a public apology for using discredited, so-called "Value Added Models" methods in assessing the progress of the privately-run charters.

Under the settlement agreement, the state must develop a plan to make sure all children suspected of having a disability are identified and evaluated. The state would also require charters to describe plans "for offering the full array of related services to students with disabilities who are or may come to be enrolled in the school," when applying for their initial charter or for renewal.

Okay, I'm not a lawyer. But it seems to me that Duncan is just a culpable as the state of Louisiana, since he put the official stamp of approval on this pattern of discrimination. 

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Author Mike Rose

If we determine success primarily by a test score, we miss those considerable intellectual achievements that aren’t easily quantifiable. If we think about education largely in relation to economic competitiveness, then we ignore the social, moral, and aesthetic dimensions of teaching and learning.  -- The American Scholar

Mayoral Candidate Bob Fioretti

“We’re the only one in the whole state that’s not an elected school board? Aren’t we shaking our head and saying: 'what’s going on here?' I think the school board needs it. It would reflect the diversity of our city.” -- Sun-Times

Mayoral Candidate Jesus "Chuy" Garcia 

“This is the board that closed our schools and cut the education budget, following Mayor Emanuel’s orders. Would this have happened with an elected board, responsible to the citizens?” -- Sun-Times 

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

The Police Aren’t Under Attack. Institutionalized Racism Is. Those who are trying to connect the murders of the officers with the thousands of articulate and peaceful protestors across America are being deliberately misleading in a cynical and selfish effort to turn public sentiment against the protestors. -- TIME

Belafonte and Williams

Jesse Williams (Grey's Anatomy)

“Police have been beating the hell out of black people for a very, very, very long time, before the advent of the video camera. And despite the advent of the video camera, there’s still an incredible trend of police brutality and killing in the street.” -- Washington Post

Adam Green

“There are a lot of unchecked boxes with Hillary Clinton when it comes to economic populism and corporate accountability,” said Adam Green, cofounder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. “There are definitely red flags.” -- Boston Globe

The Nation

The data 'washing machine'

Rahm's red light cameras had no real safety benefits.

Ald. Anthony Beale, 9th, chairman of the council Transportation Committee, said the city's numbers come as no surprise: "Those numbers the city uses have never made any sense. Of course they are skewing the numbers."

Okay, I may be beating a dead horse here. In two previous posts, one on CPS's modest improvement in grad rates and one on supposedly rising growth scores, I added the following qualifier:

 If that is, you have faith in the transparency of the system and faith that the researchers are measuring the same thing. I don't. But that's for another blog post.

We'll here's another another post.

You see, in our new, data-driven world order, Rahm Emanuel's regime is quickly become number-one in lack of transparency and in data fudging. I actually started writing seriously about this last summer when the Chicago media couldn't get its numbers straight about how many shootings had taken place on a given weekend.

It was back in April when Chicago Mag writers Bernstein & Isackson kicked the whole thing off with their 2-part series, "The Truth About Chicago’s Crime Rates". They called the system of crime data collection, "the washing machine".

The city’s crime numbers seem too good to be true. One former lieutenant has a name for the system: the washing machine. “They wash and rinse the numbers,” the lieutenant says.

The pair went on to document how Chief McCarthy's boys had actually gone back in and reformed the crime data in the face of mounting criticism of how he and his boss, the Mayor, were handling the shooting pandemic on the west and south sides.

This morning's Tribune's report on Rahm's red-light cameras shows more of the same data washing. The Trib's study demolished the mayor's claims that the massively expensive installation of hundreds red-light cameras had large safety benefits for the citizens.

Emanuel has credited the cameras for a 47 percent reduction in dangerous right-angle, or "T-bone," crashes. But the Tribune study, which accounted for declining accident rates in recent years as well as other confounding factors, found cameras reduced right-angle crashes that caused injuries by just 15 percent.

 At the same time, the study calculated a corresponding 22 percent increase in rear-end crashes that caused injuries, illustrating a trade-off between the cameras' costs and benefits.

And then, when the numbers aren't there to produce the needed politically-necessary outcomes, the cheating begins. Just look at the national pandemic of cheating cases relating to standardized testing madness.

In the wake of Tribune revelations, the city's contractor was fired, that company's top executives were ousted and federal prosecutors charged a former City Hall manager with taking up to $2 million in bribes from the former CEO of the company, Redflex Traffic Systems, to build its Chicago business into the largest automated traffic enforcement program in the country.

But the real story here is about numbers and what meaning we make of them, whether about miracle jumps in test scores, and drops in crime statistics. The red-light cameras turn out to be just another regressive tax while the mayor's data-washing machine takes us all to the cleaners.

Garcia and Fioretti working the neighborhoods to challenge Mayor 1%

Don't miss Curtis Black's excellent piece today in the Chicago Reporter, "Mayoral candidates drum up community spirit." Black focuses on the efforts of Rahm's two top contenders, "Chuy" Garcia and Bob Fioretti, as they work the neighborhoods, trying hard to pick up the grassroots support they need to keep Mayor 1% under 50% and send February's election into a run-off. 

Black shows "Chuy" picking up the endorsement of a new activist group in Bronzeville, People United for Action. A huge turnout for him from the African-American community will be essential for him to have any hope for victory.

Fioretti is seen working South Chicago -- not too far from the neighborhood where he grew up, Roseland — to support the Alliance of the South East and the Coalition for a Lakeside CBA, pushing for a community benefits agreement from the developers of the vast tract that once held U.S. Steel’s South Works.

Emanuel has been a protest magnet throughout his administration, beginning with his closing of six mental health clinics.  Add the NATO summit, the teachers strike, the school closings and various other mayoral actions, and it’s undeniable that he has done much to energize the labor-community movement that demands new priorities for the city.

Under Emanuel, “we get school closings, we get speed cameras all over the place, our residents are being nickled and dimed to death, we’re forced to pay higher property taxes,” said protest organizer Rebecca Martinez.  “And yet the poverty rate has gone up under this administration.  Downtown continues to progress and our neighborhoods continue to go down.”

PRO-BONO,,, I've given my brother the number of my distinguished attorneys at Pro, Bono & Plead as I'm expecting SEIU 73's sell-out leader Christine Boardman to threaten him, as she did me, with lawsuits, if he keeps up his blog exposures. See his latest (with cartoon) here.

Karen Lewis, Milwaukee Vouchers, and NEA's Worst

Brother Fred asks a great question: Why didn’t Arne Duncan make the NEA’s worst of 2014 list? Has Arne gotten any better since the NEA membership called for his resignation at its Representative Assembly back in July? Or has the leadership just forgotten what the rank-and-file had to say?

Students board buses at Milwaukee voucher school.

Sadly for Milwaukee, it will long be remembered as the birthplace of the nation's miserably-failed school voucher system which takes badly-needed public school funds and turns them over to private (including) Catholic schools.

See my recent piece on the city's early voucher proponents, Howard Fuller and the late Polly Williams. Before she died, Williams had become a vocal critic of voucher expansion and of the direction her own movement had taken, under the leadership of the right-wing think-tankers.

The latest episode in this sad saga comes to us from Journal Sentinel reporter Erin Richards who exposes the foul play of the private Ceria M. Travis Academy, one of the city's longest-operating voucher schools and one of its poorest performing.

Edushyster

The invisible hand...When prolific blogger, Jennifer Berkshire (EduShyster) was in Chicago last month, not only did she speak to my class of education undergrads at DePaul, she also did a great interview with CTU leader Karen Lewis. Here's a piece:

Berkshire: The Chicagoland version of the invisible hand always seems to end up in the cash register. For example, the Chicago Tribune recently ran a devastating investigative series on how risky bond deals are costing the Chicago public schools a fortune, even as these deals enrich Mayor Emanuel's allies.

Lewis: And now they're getting ready to do the same thing again with the pre-K program. People need to understand who the players are here. Because we don't have the ability to elect a school board, the president of our school board is a bankster. He is unrepentant about these toxic swap deals that were made, and argues that, well, they were good deals at the time. Well these deals may be great when the stock market is up, but because of the crash in 2008 we owe tons of money to banks, tons of money to pensions. And so now you have the same people who got us into this saying "you have to give up your pensions so we can balance the budget." No one says that maybe the banks shouldn't get paid. The problem is that as long as the mayor controls the school board, there is nothing we can do.

Rahm says he really means it this time. Unveils his 'roadmap' to end the violence.

Johnson College Prep High School basketball player Demacio Bailey dedicated Monday night's game against Marist High School to his twin brother Demario, who was killed this past weekend during a robbery. After the game, the team exited the locker room alongside the boys’ family. With Demacio in the lead, the players lined up single-file and marched to their bus chanting, “We will live, not die.”

Rahm says, this time he really means it. He says that last weekend’s slaying of Johnson College Prep student Demario Bailey reminds him of the "urgency of this work."

So what is the Mayor going to do in response to Demario's death? He's unveiling a new "road map" to combat violence. I haven't seen this new map and don't know what's in it or in which direction it takes us. But if there's nothing in the plan to deal with equitable use of well-trained, professionalized police resources, the re-opening of shuttered schools and health clinics, providing jobs for massively unemployed and under-employed black youth, and for slowing the flow of drugs and guns into the neighborhoods, then it's a map to nowhere.

According to the Sun-Times:

 Some of the recommendations include: creating a “training bridge” for kids to build on skills they learned during city summer jobs programs; enlisting “high-profile ambassadors” to help promote city youth programs; create a pilot “homicide crisis response” model that helps surviving victims deal with the emotional trauma of violence.

A training bridge -- really Rahm?

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

John King behind NY Common Core disaster

Carol Burris on John King 

Despite the spin of supporters, King’s move to Washington during the final two years of a lame duck administration is hardly a promotion. King will now work for Duncan as a senior advisor, even as Congress has defunded Race to the Top. -- WaPo What Arne Duncan’s new senior adviser did to N.Y. schools

Arne Duncan

He called New Orleans an example for the nation in school innovation and noted that New Orleanians, more than most, know the pain that comes with drastic school change. In the battle for better public education, he said, "you are absolutely winning."

Asked about a statement he once made that Hurricane Katrina was the best thing to happen to New Orleans education, Secretary Duncan apologized for that remark. He says, though, there is no doubt New Orleans is getting better faster than the rest of the state, and he is in awe of improvements here. -- New Orleans Public Radio

John Kass

If you get Rahm into the deep water of April, out where Rahm's feet won't touch the ground, if you get him out there alone, one-on-one, then Rahm's well-larded political war chest isn't all that scary. And then you'll see what happens. --Tribune

Fioretti

Ald. Bob Fioretti

We should demand a full audit and accounting of Chicago’s TIF fund and declare a surplus with the vast sum that is not committed to any specific projects or debt. That money is the beginning investment we need to restore our public education program, guarantee the retirement we promised to our teachers, police, firefighters, and other public employees, and put Chicago back on track to financial health for all. -- Sun-Times

Keith Olbermann

America does not negotiate with terrorists, unless it's a group of terrorists...and it comes from a city. For argument's sake, then, let's call these terrorists...Citigroup. --The Fucking News

Why not blame torture on teacher unions?

OINK! -- Rudy Giuliani blames "liberal guilty whites", teachers, and their unions for violence in black community. He claims that by resisting vouchers, expansion of privately-run charters, and teacher pay based on test scores, teachers are fomenting black violence.

BTW,Giuliani is an admitted water-boarder (of Americans and Italians).

MIXED SIGNALS...And how about former Chicago cop Steve Mandel, sentenced yesterday to life-plus-5 years for plotting gruesome kidnapping and torture. I guess it's illegal -- unless the government does it. I doubt that even monster Mandel could have imagined rectal feeding.

Burge

The Chicago PD has an inglorious record of such stuff. And it's not just about Daley's guy Commander Burge. Last month, a U.N. committee addressed the issue of torture committed by Chicago Police Department Commander Jon Burge and other police officers between 1972 and 1991 and share its dismay that no officer has been “convicted for these acts of torture for reasons including the statute of limitations expiring.”

It acknowledged that a federal investigation had asserted there were no “prosecutable constitutional violations” uncovered, however, the committee criticized the fact that the “vast majority of those tortured—most of them African Americans—have received no compensation for the extensive injuries suffered.”

Now top U.N. officials are calling for  individuals responsible for the "criminal conspiracy" revealed in the torture report to be "brought to justice, and must face criminal penalties commensurate with the gravity of their crimes." Good luck on that one.

Maybe Burge, Giuliani, Brennan, and Cheney types will blame it all on the teacher unions.

BEST CHUY QUOTE...Chuy Garcia held a news conference at Dyett High School in Bronzeville where he embraced the community's plan to turn the school that has been on the chopping block for years into the Dyett Global Leadership and Green Technology High School.

Emanuel’s handpicked school team recently reversed course and announced that Dyett would remain open. But instead of adopting the community plan, CPS is issuing a request-for-proposals from all comers.

Garcia likened the mayor’s decision to ignore the community plan for Dyett to his giveaway of 17 acres of precious lakefront parkland to movie mogul George Lucas to build a new interactive museum.

“You fly into Chicago from Hollywood. You give the mayor a lot of money and say, 'I would like to build a museum for Darth Vader.'” City Hall says, 'I like it. Here’s some of our lakefront. We’ll lease it to you for a $1. The mayor calls it 'bold,' " Garcia said.

“If you don’t live in Hollywood—if you have to take the bus downtown from Bronzeville—[but] still, you bring a plan supported by thousands of people to improve your community and save your high school. You bring a plan backed by the best institutions. City Hall says, 'You don’t know what’s best for your own kids. You’re not an expert. You don’t understand your own neighborhood.’ ”

CPS score-rigging adds new meaning to 'growth'

LaRaviere

In yesterday's post on Chicago's reported gains in graduation and college completion rates, I added this qualifier:

 If that is, you have faith in the transparency of the system and faith that the researchers are measuring the same thing. I don't. But that's for another blog post.

Well, here's that post. 

Today's Sun-Times reports that CPS quietly changed some growth scores from standardized test results released in August, resulting in a rise in school ratings for seven charter schools. AAPPLE, an activist arm of the Chicago Principals and Administrators Association, pointed out the discrepancies after school ratings were released last week — differences the Sun-Times confirmed in its own analysis.

AAPPLE head Troy LaRaviere has called for a full investigation by the district’s inspector general.

“In a system based on ‘choice,’ parents and other stakeholders must be provided with accurate indicators of school quality. [CPS’ ratings system] cannot serve this purpose if there are clouds of suspicion about tampering with the data used to determine these ratings,” LaRaviere said in an email.

Furthermore, he said, “the changing of scores happened without any public disclosure.” CPS would not say why the ratings usually released in October around school report card pickup were delayed.

The back-room rigging of growth scores proved an embarrassment even to the charter schools whose scores were raised.  The chief of strategy (yes, they have such a position) for Chicago International Charter School, which saw ratings for four of its schools rise, agreed.

“I would have preferred the asterisk. We essentially asked for an asterisk at one point,” Daniel Anello said. CICS had always used the test that wasn’t aligned to the Common Core through the school year to measure their students’ learning, so they saw no reason to change it while it remained an option, he said.

Figures don't lie, but liars sure can figure.