WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Happy birthday, Rosa Parks

Actor and activist Cynthia Nixon 

“We have to be more than the anti-Trump party,” she said at the annual Human Rights Campaign Greater New York gala, where she was given the Visibility Award. “In 2018, we don't just need to elect more Democrats, we also need better Democrats.” -- Politico

Eagles tight end Zach Ertz

“If they had overturned that [touchdown], I don’t know what would have happened to the city of Philadelphia." -- MSN

Teaching Tolerance Project

"In the ways that we teach and learn about the history of American slavery," write the authors of a new report from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), "the nation needs an intervention." -- Teaching Hard History: American Slavery 

 Kristiina Volmari, Finnish National Agency for Education 

“We let children be children for as long as possible...We want our teachers to focus on learning, not testing. We do not, at all, believe in ranking students and ranking schools." -- SBS News

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

A setback for union organizing in the south. The struggle continues. 

Dennis Williams, U.A.W. president

“Perhaps recognizing they couldn’t keep their workers from joining our union based on the facts, Nissan and its anti-worker allies ran a vicious campaign against its own work force that was comprised of intense scare tactics, misinformation and intimidation.”  -- New York Times

Boyah J. Farah

I came to America as a refugee from Somalia. I know what happens when a group of people is labeled as a threat -- Salon

Andy Borowitz

The special counsel, Robert Mueller, just called Donald Trump to tell the President that he was “the most innocent person ever,” Trump told reporters on Thursday. -- New Yorker 

Sen Biss on Hitting Left

Candidate for governor, Sen. Daniel Biss

I support a complete moratorium on charters. The notion that we're opening charters and closing public schools is wrong-headed.  -- Hitting Left 

Pasi Sahlberg

The idea that Finland recruits the academically “best and brightest” to become teachers is a myth. In fact, the student cohort represents a diverse range of academic success, and deliberately so. -- Diane Ravitch Blog

Local Mississippi radio warns Nissan workers they'll go back to "picking cotton and digging ditches" if they unionize. (via @DoBetterNissan) pic.twitter.com/0ZO4PDSzer

— Jack Smith IV (@JackSmithIV) August 4, 2017

Now reformers want to "give back" New Orleans charters. 'Can't avoid democracy forever'.

“You can’t avoid democracy forever, nor should you.” -- Neerav Kingsland, who worked for New Schools for New Orleans

In a move designed to, "close the wounds left by the state takeover" without threatening the power of private charter school management boards, the state of Louisiana is "giving back" the 52 charters schools it took from the New Orleans public school system in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

According to the Washington Post:

In the decade since Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans and swept away its public school system, the city has become a closely watched experiment in whether untethering schools from local politics could fix the problems that have long ailed urban education.

Before we go any further, let's be clear about one thing. It wasn't Katrina that "swept away" the N.O. public school system. It was a gaggle of opportunistic profiteers and union-busters who made the hurricane their rationale for firing every public school teacher in the Big Easy and for breaking their union. What they did in N.O., Detroit and other cities was no natural disaster. It was man-made.

The district's charter operators are still fighting off attempts by their teachers to unionize.

As for the so-called "give-back", Karran Harper Royal, an advocate for special-education students and their families, called it a “Trojan horse.”

“This is the kind of bill you get when the charter schools want to give the impression that schools are returning to local governance,” she said. “It feels like a very patriarchal view of communities of color, and white people deciding that black people, or people of color, don’t deserve democracy.”

According to the Brookings Institute:

 The change in actual school functioning, at least in the short term, looks modest.  SB 432 preserves charter schools’ prominent role in the New Orleans school landscape.  It demands that local districts “shall not impede the operational autonomy of a charter school under its jurisdiction,” preserving the discretion over curriculum, instruction, and management provided to schools in their charters.

More from WaPo...Advocates for such choice frame it as a way to ensure that all children have fair access to good schools, no matter where their families live or how much money they earn. But critics argue that eliminating neighborhood schools has undermined the most vulnerable students by uprooting them from their communities and scattering them to schools citywide.

Harper Royal pointed to a 2015 Tulane University study estimating that there are more than 26,000 young people between the ages of 16 and 24 who are neither in school nor employed in the New Orleans metro area. They account for 18 percent of all the area’s young people, significantly higher than the national average of 13 percent.

Such high numbers of disconnected youth — as well as high rates of child poverty and unemployment — should factor into how the city’s education experiment is evaluated, she said: “You have to look at how it is working in the lives of the people, and it isn’t.”

She favors a competing bill that would have returned the schools to the Orleans Parish School Board without preserving the system of charter schools.

Louisiana has about 140 charter schools authorized by state and local school boards. The bill, signed by Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards returns some oversight of charters to the Jefferson Parish School Board and  abolishes outside charter authorizer groups, who are not accountable to anyone but themselves. But the state will still have the power to overrule local districts when it comes to authorizing charters.

Unpacking Big Data...One of my current favorite thinkers on so-called school reform is Finnish educator and scholar, Pasi Sahlberg. His running theme -- If you really want to improve your system of education, do pretty much the opposite of current U.S. ed-reform policies.

In their May 9 WaPo piece, Pasi and Jonathan Hasak, take a hammer to one cornerstones of corporate-style school reform, the reliance on big data to drive policy.

One thing that distinguishes schools in the United States from schools around the world is how data walls, which typically reflect standardized test results, decorate hallways and teacher lounges.  Green, yellow, and red colors indicate levels of performance of students and classrooms. For serious reformers, this is the type of transparency that reveals more data about schools and is seen as part of the solution to how to conduct effective school improvement. These data sets, however, often don’t spark insight about teaching and learning in classrooms; they are based on analytics and statistics, not on emotions and relationships that drive learning in schools. They also report outputs and outcomes, not the impacts of learning on the lives and minds of learners.

 You can follow @pasi_sahlberg and @JonathanHasak on Twitter. I do.

Pasi Sahlberg

At Harvard's Graduate School of Education, I got a handshake and a "keep up your great work" from renown Finnish educator, scholar, author and activist Pasi Sahlberg. 

Made my day.

Pasi is a former Director General of CIMO (Centre for International Mobility and Cooperation) at  Finland’s Ministry of Education and Culture in Helsinki and currently a visiting Professor of Practice at HGSE. I've used his best-selling book Finnish Lessons 2.0 in my own courses.

I've been a fan of his ever since I saw this interview with Andrea Mitchell back in Sept. 2010.

He told an astonished Mitchell that the secret of Finland's celebrated school success was essentially doing everything just the opposite of current U.S. school reform policies. Some of the major differences: Finland puts the focus on collaboration rather than on competition. Finnish education policy supports public good and equity over privatization and school choice. The Finnish school system de-emphasizes standardized testing. Finland has implemented high standards for entry into the teaching profession, rather than using mass purges of the profession and school closings.

Good Flick...I told Pasi that I had just seen him in Michael Moore's new film, Where To Invade Next, where he tells Moore essentially the same thing he told Mitchell.

Check out Pasi's website: pasisahlberg.com and Twitter: @pasi_sahlberg.

The Great Disconnect

Pasi Sahlberg

I went over to the Hilton this morning to take part in the Reframing Reform Conference.  Aside from getting to hang out with some of my favorite school activists, I was interested in hearing the conference keynoter, Pasi Sahlberg, Director General of the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture. In Finland, that's roughly the equivalent in rank to Arne Duncan, although the comparison stops there.

Pasi is a real thinker and a man of action. I've been a fan of his ever since I saw this interview with Andrea Mitchell back in Sept. 2010. He told an astonished Mitchell that the secret of Finland's celebrated school success was essentially doing everything just the opposite way from current U.S. school reform policies. Some of the major differences:  Finland puts the focus on collaboration rather than on competition. Finnish education policy supports public good and equity over privatization and school  choice. The Finnish school system de-emphasizes standardized testing. Finland has implemented high standards for entry into the teaching profession, rather than using mass purges of the profession and school turnarounds.

The message was pretty much the same this morning. Sahlberg was introduced by corporate lawyer and CPS school board member Jesse Ruiz, who applauded with the rest of us. Was he being polite or does he really like what Pasi is saying?

Sahlberg was definitely being polite, even generous, towards his host. But still, his words cut through the basic premises of  U.S. corporate-style reform like a scalpel.

The breakout sessions that followed were led by some of the nation's leading advocates against public school privatization, and corporate ed reforms. Andy Hargreaves, Pedro Noguera, Jitu Brown, Ralph Martire, Julian Vasquez Heilig, Jeannie Oakes, Kevin Kumashiro and others, carried on the critique of  current reform policies right up until lunch.

Jo Anderson

That's when, at least for me, the the other shoe dropped. Arne Duncan's senior adviser and former IEA Executive Director Jo Anderson got up to introduce the lunch speaker, Congressman Mike Honda (D-CA). But faithful apparatchik that he is, Anderson couldn't help but throw out a list of all the great things the administration is doing to support schools and teachers. I was OK with all of that.

But I almost fell out of my chair when Anderson offered that all of  "Arne's" policies and so-called reforms "were in step" with Pasi Sahlberg's earlier presentation. What!?

Anderson exited the stage before anyone could question such an outrageous proposition.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised. It's the great disconnect between our Democratic administration's words and deeds. No need to go into detail on this. But there would be no better place to start than right here in Chicago, where all the blather about school reform being the "civil rights issue of our era" goes hand-in-hand with the whitenizing of the city and with accompanying massive school closings and disinvestment in communities on the south and west sides of the city.

Thanks, Jo, for offering a brief surreal counter to what was an otherwise interesting and inspiring conference morning.

Shame of a nation

Millions of children growing up in poverty

A couple of new reports caught my eye yesterday. The first was a new study on child well-being put out by the Annie E. Casey Foundation. It  found that child poverty is on the rise in the U.S. with as many as 1 in 5 children living in poverty. Of course, that figure represents a nationwide average, with most of that poverty concentrated in inner cities and rural areas where poverty rates can range up to 90 percent. Child poverty, in turn, has a powerful negative impact on measurable student learning outcomes. Reports like Casey's help explain the ever-widening, so-called "achievement gap."

In the foundation's first examination of the impact of the recession on the nation's children, the researchers concluded that low-income children will likely suffer academically, economically and socially long after their parents have recovered.

"People who grew up in a financially secure situation find it easier to succeed in life, they are more likely to graduate from high school, more likely to graduate from college and these are things that will lead to greater success in life," said Stephen Brown, director of the Center for Business and Economic Research at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. "What we are looking at is a cohort of kids who as they become adults may be less able to contribute to the growth of the economy. It could go on for multiple generations." -- AP Wire

On top of that, according to “The State of America’s Children 2011,” a report issued last month by the Children’s Defense Fund, the impact of the recession on children’s well-being has been catastrophic.

As you could probably guess, Mississippi once again lags behind all other 49 states when it comes to child welfare. They're on the bottom of the scale for the 10th straight year.

Why is Mass first & Miss last?

 
Which brings me to the second report of interest. Thirty-two percent of U.S. students in the class of 2011 were proficient in mathematics on the PISA exams, according to the official U. S. report card on student achievement. That places the United States in 32nd place among the 65 nations of the world that participated in the math test administered by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

The lagging position of the U.S. has the neo-cons at the Hoover Institute jumping for joy. To Paul Peterson, Eric Hanuchek and their gang, this confirms everything they've been saying about the "crisis" in union-fettered public education  when it comes to preparing U.S. kids for competition in the global marketplace -- you know, the international Race To The Top.

Problem is, the PISA scores show quite the opposite.

In the top-scoring places, such as Shanghai, Korea, and Finland, well over 50 percent of students were proficient in math. But the proficiency rate in Massachusetts on PISA was 51 percent. At the bottom end, with less than 20 percent of students proficient, were countries such as Brazil and Indonesia, along with Mississippi and the District of Columbia.

In other words, national averages once again tell us very little about what's really taking place. When you break out U.S. math scores by state, the wealthiest states, the states with the lowest child poverty rates do as well as or better than any country in the world. The poorest states, like Mississippi, with the worst concentrations of child misery, score among the lowest in the world. This shows once again that child poverty is not "an excuse" for low test scores, as corporate reformers (including Arne Duncan) maintain; but rather it's the driving force when it comes to comparing student and school scores on high-stakes standardized tests.

Massachusetts, a state with strong teacher unions and relatively low child poverty rates, is number one when it comes to math scores. Mississippi, with no teacher unions and the highest child poverty rates, is among the worst. And, Mr. Gates, it's not because all the great math teachers have moved to Boston.

Yes, we need well-resourced schools with great, well-regarded, well-trained and well-compensated teachers. But if we are serious about school reform, we've got to close the child poverty gap.

Lessons from the International Summit on Teaching

The great WaPo columnist Valerie Strauss has been reporting on the first ever International Summit on Teaching, convened last week in New York City. She takes note of the key difference between current U.S. ed policies and politics and those countries that are leading the world, like Finland and South Korea. The difference being that in those countries, teachers are "well-respected, well-paid, well-supported with resources and development, unionized, and considered capable of designing curriculum and lesson plans themselves without interference from non-educators.'

Strauss follows up with a commentary on the Summit by Stanford's Linda Darling-Hammond, who President Obama rightfully should have chosen to be our secretary of education over the corporate toadie who currently sits atop the DOE. Writes LDH:

For contrast, wade through Arne Duncan's (DOE's) murky, bureaucratic report on the Summit and see how all the meeting's important lessons sailed right past them.

"How poignant for Americans to listen to this account while nearly every successful program developed to support teachers’ learning in the United States is proposed for termination by the Obama administration or the Congress... These small programs total less than $1 billion annually, the cost of half a week in Afghanistan."

Duncan lied

Vivek Wadhwa

U.S. schools aren't really falling behind

Arne Duncan has been grabbing as much media time as he can, sounding the alarm that the U.S. is losing it's dominant position in the global education race to the top. He's been calling the results from the latest PISA tests, "a wake-up call" in order to spread panic and push through his corporate reform agenda. Duncan, running through the town square shouting, "the Chinese are coming," "the Finns are coming," conjures up memories of Cold War rhetoric after the Russians put Sputnik up in space. The fear mongering volume was turned up again during the Reagan years with the publication of A Nation at Risk.

If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.

In an official DOE press release, Duncan claims:

“Today’s PISA results show that America needs to urgently accelerate student learning to remain competitive in the global economy of the 21st century. More parents, teachers, and leaders need to recognize the reality that other high-achieving nations are both out-educating us and out-competing us....The results are especially troubling because PISA assesses applied knowledge and the higher-order thinking skills critical to success in the information age.”

It turns out (as usual) that most of this is a pile of crap. 

So says (not in those words, of course) Vivek Wadhwa, a visiting scholar at University of California-Berkeley, senior research associate at Harvard Law School, and director of research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University.

Writing in Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Wadhwa argues:

"Much is made of the PISA test scores and rankings, but the international differences are actually quite small. Most of the U.S. ranking lags are not even statistically significant. The U.S. falls in the second rank on some measures and into the first on others. It produces more highest-performing students in science and reading than any other country does; in mathematics, it is second only to Japan. Moreover, one has to ask what the test results actually mean in the real world. Do high PISA rankings make students more likely to invent the next iPad? Google? I don't think so."

Learning from Finland

Finland is one of the few nations that have accomplished both a high quality of learning and equity in learning at the same time. And Finnish children never take a standardized test. This according to Pasi Sahlberg, director general of the Center for International Mobility and Cooperation at Finland’s Ministry of Education and Culture. (Boston Globe)

If you want to be tops in the world in education...

Do what Finland does

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Pasi Sahlberg is Finland's Arne Duncan. Compare and contrast.