Stumbling towards exactitude

Michael Winerip, writing in Sunday's NYT ("10 Years of Assessing Students With Scientific Exactitude") reveals the discrepancy between testing and reality in Bloomberg Town.

Winerip tells the testing story year-by-year, listing every pile of disinformation, scandal, and resistance left in the wake of No Child Left Behind and current state testing madness.

Nearly a quarter of the state’s principals — 1,046 — have signed an online letter protesting the plan to evaluate teachers and principals by test scores. Among the reasons cited is New York’s long tradition of creating tests that have little to do with reality.

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Now that factories are gone, it's tee-time in Benton Harbor, Michigan

Now that the factories are gone

But at this point, it seems more likely that Harbor Shores will simply bring a new population to Benton Harbor and hasten the town’s fracturing into two distinct communities: the second-home owners and Whirlpool executives who live inside Harbor Shores and frequent the Arts District — and everyone else. -- Jonathan Mahler, NYT Magazine

A success?

"It's harder to end a war than begin one. Everything that American troops have done in Iraq - all the fighting, all the dying, the bleeding and the building and the training and the partnering, all of it has landed to this moment of success." -- Barack Obama

David Vitale

"Mr. Vitale is a banker who was picked by Rahm Emanuel to be president of the Chicago Board of Education. And as the Missile confidently presided over a cowed City Council on Wednesday, his schools emissary co-starred in melancholy political theater that gave insight into the mayor’s ultimate challenges."  -- "Marie Antoinette, I'd like you to meet David Vitale" by James Warren, CNC

Ron Paul

“She [Michele Bachmann] doesn’t like Muslims, she hates Muslims, she wants to go get them.”   -- Jay Leno Show

A great charter school hustle

Richmond

I've got to hand it to charter school authorizer and former lobbyist, Greg Richmond for coming up with this great hustle. A law recently pass by the Illinois state legislature created his new charter school agency called the Illinois State Charter School Commission which has the power to create new charter schools even when local school districts oppose them. The commission also has the power to monitor the same charters it authorizes. Richmond is the commission's chairman.

Okay, that's a little shady. But here's where the great hustle comes in (some cynics might call this a conflict of interest). The way the commission raises money for itself (aside from private dollars from pro-charter billionaires)  is by handing out more and more charters. You see, starting next July, Richmond's commission can begin collecting a fee from every new charter it creates. The more charters, the more money in its budget to authorize more charters.  And so it goes. Bada-bing. Bada-boom.

The nine commission members — recommended by Gov. Pat Quinn and appointed by ISBE — are already holding official meetings and overseeing a staff member, attorney Jeanne Nowaczewski. The money for the commission’s staffing and other expenses so far comes from the Walton foundation. Other recipients of Walton grants include the Illinois Network of Charter Schools, a statewide umbrella. The foundation reports that it gave the network more than $1 million in 2010. Andrew Broy, the network’s president, said the amount for 2011 is about $950,000.

The network also serves as an intermediary — a “fiscal agent” in nonprofit parlance — for Walton’s funding of the state commission. Richmond said Nowaczewski receives her paychecks from the network, not the commission. Exactly how big is that paycheck, I wonder?

Rail against the machine

Jose More pic

Community protesters drowned out the voice of CPS schools boss Jean-Claude Brizard yesterday, as he was about to announce the closing of more schools, turning them over to private charter school management companies.  “You have failed…You have produced chaos…You should be fired” they chanted. When they paused, billionaire board president David Vitale said he hoped they had “gotten it out of their system.”

They hadn't. 

According to CNC reporter, Rebecca Vivea, the protest marked the first time Occupy Chicago has been directly involved in a demonstration against CPS, though the group has been closely aligned with the CTU for other protests. Ashley Bohrer, an Occupy Chicago activist and graduate student at DePaul University, spoke against charter schools at the meeting and what she called the privatization of public services. 

“The goal of this action was not to shut down the Board of Education meeting,” Bohrer said. “When they walked out of the meeting, they made it very clear that they are not interested in an open democratic discussion about the future of social services in this city.”  -- Chicago News Co-op

The board unanimously approved 12 new charter schools at the end of the meeting.

An "astonishing number..."

Remember last spring when Arne Duncan was pushing for reauthorization of NCLB, he claimed that 82 percent of public schools were "failing"? Three days later, President Obama repeated Duncan's foolish claim in a speech at Kenmore Middle School in Arlington, Va. “Four out of five schools will be labeled as failing,” Obama said , in March. “That’s an astonishing number.”

Astonishing indeed. The only thing "failing" was NCLB itself.

As Duncan himself admitted yesterday while brushing aside his horrible, demoralizing misstatements,  

“Whether it’s 50 percent, 80 percent or 100 percent of schools being incorrectly labeled as failing, one thing is clear: No Child Left Behind is broken,”

President Obama, get rid of this guy.

More video of today's battle in Chicago to save our schools

TWEETS FROM INSIDE TODAY'S CPS BOARD MEETING

lindalutton 

Protesters: ”these are our children, not yours” ”reject cps failed reforms”

cncschools Chicago News Coop 

Now shouting "who's meeting? our meeting!'

 @cncschools: Audience interupts Brizard, shouts "Mic check!" & procedes with loud chant. "These are our children not corporate products."

@cncschools: Chants start again after Brizard tries to begin presentation again. #SOSChicago
 

@CatalystChicago: Vitale says I hope they have gotten it out of their system. #SOSChicago

 CatalystChicago Catalyst Chicago Mag

People now being forcably removed from building.

cncschools Chicago News Coop

Each time one gets escorted out a new one starts. yfrog.com/hsnjjyvj 

lindalutton Linda Lutton

Mics cut board leaves

In Chicago: 'A fight for the soul of public education'

Carrying signs and bullhorns, several hundred parents and teachers gathered outside Chicago Public Schools headquarters Tuesday night to rally against the proposed closures, consolidations, and phase outs of 17 schools in low-income, African-American and Latino communities. About 40 people spent the night in the wind and rain to be first in line for a board meeting that will decide the schools' fate. Though rain reduced their numbers, their message in support of the schools did not waver.  

"This is a huge fight for the soul of public education," said CTU president Karen Lewis.

Unprecedented victory in Colorado school funding case

In a 183-page ruling in favor of the plaintiffs Friday, Denver District Judge Sheila Rappaport ruled in the 6-year-old Lobato v. Colorado case that the state's education funding is "irrational and inadequate" and violates the state constitution's pledge to provide a "thorough and uniform" education system. She specifically pointed to the lack of funding to serve the need of the state's poor, minority and disabled students. (Read the full report) "There is not one school district that is sufficiently funded," Rappaport writes in the report. "This is an obvious hallmark of an irrational system."

The ruling was a slap in the face to conservative, anti-public school forces, including the Hoover Institute's Eric Hanushek, who testified that more school funding wouldn't lead to better schools. The judge said that Hanushek's claim was 'contradicted by testimony and documentary evidence from dozens of well-respected educators in the State, defies logic, and is statistically flawed.”

Conservatives, led by right-wing Attorney General John Suthers, and some corporate "reformers" are already working to have Rappaport's decision overturned.

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Parents of children in Newark schools sign a petition to wrest control from the state and give the school board a more active role. -- New York Times

Resisting charter takeover of Newark school

“You could see the new furniture coming in,” said Shellian Peters, 38, a mother of three. “Whereas on the district side, it was the same as when the school was built. That’s how blatantly obvious it was.” -- "Growing Push in Newark to Retake School Reins" by Winnie Hu, New York Times

Diane Ravitch

"The entire current reform movement rests on a fanatical belief in standardized testing. Yet testing experts warn us that the tests should be used for diagnostic purposes, not to fire teachers and close schools. The basic rule of testing is that a test should be used only for the purpose for which it was designed." -- Speech to National Opportunity to Learn Summit December 9, 2011.

Author Judith Warner

"The chief promise of their brand of reform — the results of which have been mixed, at best — seems to be that they can remake America’s students in their own high-achieving image." -- "Why Are the Rich So Interested in Public-School Reform?

On New York's Testing Madness

“I think the last thing we want is a test of stamina,” said Richard Organisciak, superintendent of the 11,000-student New Rochelle district in Westchester County. “The thought of a third grader sitting there for three hours — it boggles my mind that he would stay as focused or perform as well on a high-stakes test.” -- New York Times

The real Chicago "miracle" -- Arne Duncan still has a job

The only miracle emerging from the past decade of Chicago's corporate-style school reform is that former CEO and current Sec. of Education Arne Duncan hasn't resigned from either posts out of sheer embarrassment.

The latest results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) once again put Chicago near the bottom compared to other large urban districts with similar demographics and concentrations of poverty (85% of CPS students live in poverty). Significantly, the biggest drops in reading scores came during Arne Duncan's time as CEO when the media was spinning the myth of a Chicago "turnaround miracle."

A new report on the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress taken by 21 big-city districts was the second analysis in less than a month to indicate that, despite more than a decade of massive investments in corporate-style reform, and despite a heavy administrative emphasis on test-prep and big push on  reading skills,  Chicago’s elementary-grade reading performance has barely budged for years. The Sun-Times reports that the so-called "achievement gap"  between white students and black and Latino students— showed no real shrinkage since at least 2003 in fourth- and eighth-grade math and reading. In fourth-grade reading,

Most interesting -- Chicago’s NAEP reading doldrums occurred during a huge reading push ordered by former Mayor Daley and carried out by then-Chicago Schools CEO Arne Duncan, now the nation’s Education Secretary.

The Sun-Times reports however, that "real progress didn’t show up until 2011 — after Ron Huberman took over the Chicago Schools CEO helm in 2009 and shifted the district from Duncan’s emphasis on reading coaches to a new emphasis on data analysis."

I suppose the lesson here is that the real key to progress in school reform is manipulating and spinning data reports (Huberman's specialty) rather than the imposition of programmatic reform. Duncan's success came after he and his media team fabricated the myth of a Chicago turnaround "miracle" which later formed the basis for federal education policy, including Race To The Top.

Peter Cunningham, Duncan's media guy, tells the S-T: 

“The information we had [from state achievement tests] showed [CPS] was showing great success... We weren’t gaming the numbers."

My experience tells me that whenever the spinners claim that they aren't gaming the numbers -- they're gaming the numbers."  If Cunningham has some previously unrevealed evidence of great progress, perhaps he wouldn't mind sharing it with us. Until then, we'll go with the NAEP results.

Obama's Osawatomie speech

"Here, finally, is the Barack Obama many of us thought we had elected in 2008." -- Robert Reich

If you had any doubts that the Occupy Movement was impacting the presidential elections, check out President Obama's Osawatomie (Kansas) speech made yesterday as protesters occupied the National Mall. Obama channeled trust-busting Teddy Roosevelt in a rousing bit of populism aimed directly at Wall Street greed and the growing wealth gap that remains the biggest threat to democracy.

Inequality...distorts our democracy. It gives an outsized voice to the few who can afford high-priced lobbyists and unlimited campaign contributions, and runs the risk of selling out our democracy to the highest bidder. And it leaves everyone else rightly suspicious that the system in Washington is rigged against them - that our elected representatives aren’t looking out for the interests of most Americans.

The speech was hailed by liberal economist Robert Reich as "the most important economic speech of his presidency." Reich's in-depth analysis of the speech ends with a most telling statement:

"Here, finally, is the Barack Obama many of us thought we had elected in 2008."

Obama tipped his hat to the occupiers. But in a strange attempt to be balanced, he lumps them together with the T-Party that was the spawn of the very forces the president seems to be criticizing.

Throughout the country, it has sparked protests and political movements - from the Tea Party to the people who have been occupying the streets of New York and other cities.

Okay, I admit that there's not much there there. That's typical of a timid Obama who has always carefully distanced himself from his activist base and from black and Latino communities (except when foot soldiers are needed to turn out the vote). But at least he's recognizing Occupy as a force in other ways besides Justice Dept. phone calls to 18 city mayors, advising them how to disburse the 99-ers from city parks. Hopefully, by next November, any Democratic politicians who hope to get elected will have to at least give positive recognition to OWS and its leadership in the fight against the Wall Street profiteers.

While I'll leave it to the progressive economists like Reich and Krugman to analyze the entire speech, there are many parts of it that are troubling and confusing. One is the "New Nationalism" theme which smacks of saber-rattling (TR's imperialistic specialty). Obama even invokes the Race To The Top theme --not about test-driven school reform this time-- but about global competition with China. The speech offers little hope to those of us who see the Afghan war not only as the main threat to world peace and stability, but as one of the prime sources of the current economic crisis.

Observations

Here's a few of my favorite observations from this morning's media scan. 

There is an “autumn of the patriarch” feel to Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg these days. -- Michael Powell, New York Times.

Diane Ravitch

I have said it before, and I'll say it again: There are no silver bullets in education. There are no magic feathers that enable elephants like Dumbo to fly. It's hard work to improve schools. It takes dedication, resources, and time. And the work is never done, the magic number of 100 percent is always out of reach. Just when you think that you've achieved success with this year's students, another new group arrives, each student with his or her issues. Or students leave and arrive mid-year. Or the state changes the testing program or releases new regulations requiring more paperwork. Claims of overnight or one-year transformations should be suspect on their face. -- Diane Ravitch, Bridging Differences

U.S. among world leaders in growing income inequality.

According to a new report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, income inequality — which has sparked the Occupy Wall Street movement in the U.S. — is increasing all across the developed world, led by bankers and executives reaping bigger and bigger income gains. 

“The social contract is starting to unravel in many countries,” OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurria said in a statement. “This study dispels the assumptions that the benefits of economic growth will automatically trickle down to the disadvantaged and that the greater inequality fosters greater social mobility.” -- TPM

CTU Teach-in on school closings

More than 400 parents, community organizers and union members packed a "teach-in" at King College Prep High School in Kenwood Saturday to build grassroots opposition to plans for shutting down or overhauling 14 Chicago public schools.

"We need to be here. If it's not my school on the list (to be closed) today, it could be tomorrow," said Jeanette Taylor-Smith, vice chairwoman of the Kenwood Oakland Community Organization, who has two children attending local public schools. -- Chicago Tribune

Next battle front: Dec. 13th for a vigil and possible occupation at CPS Headquarters, 125 S. Clark St., 6 PM and then, the following morning, sign up to speak at the Dec. 14th board meeting and make your opposition known. 

Chicago's new top charter school bureaucrat

She's in a "relationship."

Her name is Carly Bolger. She's never taught, as far as I can tell. She's two years out of college. Hired by Chris Cerf to run his bloated and troubled charter schools bureaucracy in New Jersey but quit after just 10 months on the job. Emanuel then hires her to head his Office of New Schools. That position has been empty since Josh Edelman left town to work for Michelle Rhee in D.C. 

T-Party Gov. Chris Christie has pushed for the rapid expansion of the state's charter schools despite strong evidence that they are under-performing traditional schools. A report by the Washington-based Center for Education Reform has slammed the application process for what it called its lack of transparency and objectivity. His hand-picked schools chief, Cerf doubled the size of the charter office to 11 people, including Bolger. 

But the controversy over charters has been fiery, especially from suburban districts that haven't welcomed the schools into their communities and have argued that state oversight is inadequate. Several legislative bills remain pending that would significantly tighten restrictions on charters... The department over the past year has been criticized for using outside reviewers, whom it has refused to identify but turned out to be largely charter school leaders and advocates. -- N.J. Spotlight

Why is she coming to Chicago? She says her decision was "100 percent personal," since she is moving because of a "relationship" in Chicago.

Perfect!

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Visiting a wealthy suburban school

"This is a school? I thought it was a museum." -- Terence Lewis, 17, a senior at Furness High in South Philadelphia

Chicago Rep. Cynthia Soto

“We need explanations, specific explanations” for the decisions to close or restructure the schools. -- Chicago News Co-Op

GOP candidate Buddy Roemer

"I believe that Mitt Romney represents the one percent and I believe that Newt Gingrich is the lobbyist for the one percent." -- ThinkProgress

Operation 'Urban Shield'

The use of anti-terror techniques to suppress a civilian protest complemented harsh police measures demonstrated across the country against the nationwide “Occupy” movement, from firing tear gas canisters and rubber bullets into unarmed crowds to blasting demonstrators with the LRAD sound cannon. -- Max Blumenthal, MondoWeiss

Transparent moments

Every once in a while, a bit of truth comes seeping through the pores of the corporate media. Corporate moguls, media tycoons or politicians become a little remorseful or a little drunk and let us know what they really think.

N.Y. Mayor Bloomberg let the cat out of the bag in a recent speech at MIT, admitting that if he were king (isn't he?) he'd fire half the teachers and double class size.

He looked like he was from another planet when he dressed as a hippie for a political show, but the mayor’s blueprint for fixing city schools have some asking “what was he smoking?” -- CBS News

"Big money owns everything ..."

On November 22, Dan Rather upon receiving the prestigious Burton Benjamin Memorial Award at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York City, shared his thoughts on media and the Occupy Movement.

 But now, we see our fellow citizens taking to the streets. And, that my friends, is our cue to get back to work. As the People of our nation begin rising up, they expect the business of news to be about inquiry and accountability. And, luckily for us, we can still do that ... but it may not be within the confines of big corporate media. As you know, we are living in an age when big money owns everything ... including the news. -- RSN

Then there's former Chase Bank V.P. James Theckston whose Florida team wrote more than $2 billion in mostly bad mortgages, who in a remorseful moment told NYT's Nicholas Kristof:

“The bigwigs of the corporations knew this, but they figured we’re going to make billions out of it, so who cares? The government is going to bail us out. And the problem loans will be out of here, maybe even overseas.”

Kristof adds:

All this came into sharper focus this week as Bloomberg Markets magazine published a terrific exposé based on lending records it pried out of the Federal Reserve in a lawsuit. It turns out that the Fed provided an astonishing sum to keep banks afloat — $7.8 trillion, equivalent to more than $25,000 per American.

Yes, it's out there. You just have to dig for it and try and make sense out of it.

Michigan's union-busters caught sending secret emails to pols

The Mackinac Center for Public Policy in Michigan, calls itself a "nonpartisan research and educational institute dedicated to improving the quality of life." But recently this far-right, free-market think tank has been exposed for its shady, very partisan, and possibly illegal lobbying of state politicians, aimed at nothing less than breaking the back of the state's teachers union and outlawing collective-bargaining in the state of Michigan.

According to Dave Murray, writing in the Grand Rapids Free Press, the Mackinac Center's true purposes were revealed in secret email communications with state lawmakers, including one from Mackinac's Jack McHugh to state Rep. Thomas McMillin, R-Rochester Hills, the newly appointed head of the House Education Committee. In his June 1 email, letting McMillin know exactly what was expected of him, McHugh wrote: 

“Our goal is (to) outlaw government collective bargaining in Michigan, which in practical terms means no more MEA.”

McMillin, described as a "vocal school choice and reform advocate," was named head of the Education Committee after former chairman, Rep. Paul Scott, R-Grand Blanc, was recalled by angry voters earlier this month. Before being recalled Scott had become the darling of Michelle Rhee and Michigan's T-Party Gov. Rick Snyder, after leading the charge against teachers' collective bargaining rights and raids on their pension fund. Rhee's front group, Students First donated heavily to help Scott avoid a recall effort.

Doug Pratt, the MEA’s public affairs director, said the comment reveals the Mackinac Center’s conservative, anti-union leanings that he believes are often cloaked behind glossy publications.

“It’s right there in black and white, exposing the group for what it really is,” Pratt said. “That proves that the Mackinac Center is nothing but a front for corporate special interests intent on destroying the middle class.”

When Murray's story broke, McMillin, obviously trying to avoid Scott's fate, immediately tried to distance himself from Mackinac, claiming that McHugh's emails “don’t represent my views.”

For more on the Mackinac Center see Fred Klonsky's blog and the MEA's website.
Cross-posted on my Schooling in the Ownership Society blog. 

More questions for J.C. Brizard

Sorry I can't make it to UIC at noon today for J.C. Brizard's speech. If there were time at the end, I would ask him the questions I posted below. But if you are attending, you might also ask him about this story in today's Trib: "Report finds charters struggling like other CPS schools."

 Mayor Rahm Emanuel and other city leaders have long heralded charter schools' innovative approach to education, but new research suggests many charters in Chicago are         performing no better than traditional neighborhood schools and some are actually doing much worse...At Shabazz International's DuSable Leadership high school on the South Side, just 7 percent of students met state standards on the PSAE. A few miles south, nine out of every 10 students at CICS' Hawkins high school missed the state benchmark.

For example, you might ask: Mr. CEO, doesn't this report make it clear that standardized test scores are more a measure of poverty than they are a measure of school quality or teaching skill? Doesn't this suggest that your strategy of closing (rather than supporting) low-scoring schools and replacing them with privately-managed charters only diverts us from the real issues facing schools and students?

Uncapping and de-regulating charter schools

Spurred on by Race To The Top

While public education budgets are being slashed, federal support for privately-managed charter schools has increased to new heights including a $52 million increase in charter school funding last year. Since 2009, with $100 billion in stimulus funding for education, including $4.35 billion in the competitive Race to the Top fund behind him, Arne Duncan has offered a stern warning to states: "Embrace charters or risk losing stimulus dollars."

But while Duncan claims it's all about "quality, not quantity" when it comes to charter school expansion and while he tells us that "charters are not inherently anti-union," the administration's Race To The Top policies have opened the door wide for anything-goes charter schools. The current trend is increasingly towards unlimited charter school expansion with fewer regulations, less transparency, more racial re-segregation, and definitely no unions allowed. This despite growing evidence that charter schools on average, fail to outperform traditional public schools despite discriminatory enrollment and expulsion practices.

States currently dominated by right-wing politicians and T-Party governors, like Michigan, are moving quickly to take advantage of the current political environment to uncap and deregulate charter expansion.

Case in point: Fulton County, Ga. which has applied to the state to become a "charter district" and where charters like the  Fulton Science Academy are asking legislators for blanket waivers of state and local provisions and 10 year contracts limiting the community's oversight over the charter schools finances, procurement practices and overall governance.

Questions for Jean-Claude Brizard

“We have to take immediate action this year. . . . Too many of our students are in what I call an educational emergency room.’’ -- J.C. Brizard

With today's announcement by Brizard, that 10 more Chicago schools were being "turned around," complete with mass firings of faculty and staff and the contracting of new management groups to take them over, a few questions come to mind.

1. In your telephone interview with reporters you say: “We can no longer defend a Chicago Public School system that fails our students year after year.’’ If that's true, exactly how many years-after-years has the system been failing its students? Is that an assessment of the Daley/Duncan years? Does it include Arne Duncan's "Chicago Miracle" tenure? Mayor Daley's Renaissance 2010 reform years? The more recent Huberman period marked by previous turn-arounds, teacher firings and mass school closings? The entire Daley era of mayoral control and top-down reform? Has it all been a bust?

2. Why do you think that more of the same, more turn-arounds, more teacher firings and more school closings  will produce different results? Any evidence in the research or from your previous experience in Rochester that firing entire school faculties improves student learning outcomes? Where can we find it?

3. Why are you and the mayor going it alone again on top-down reform? Doing it to teachers and communities rather than with them? Any evidence in the research or from your previous experience with your bungled longer-school-day initiative that the war on teachers and their union is an effective reform strategy?

4. Where are all these great replacement teachers going to come from? Do you have a thousand of them stashed away someplace we don't know about? Or is this just a ploy to get rid of veteran teachers and bring in TFA 5-week wonders who will be more compliant and take home smaller pay checks?

You have my number. I await your answers.