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

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

University of California, Davis Police Lt. John Pike uses pepper spray to move Occupy UC Davis protesters while blocking their exit from the school's quad Friday

Charles J. Kelly

A former Baltimore Police Department lieutenant who wrote the department's use of force guidelines, said pepper spray is a "compliance tool" that can be used on subjects who do not resist, and is preferable to simply lifting protesters "When you start picking up human bodies you risk hurting them... What I'm looking at is fairly standard police procedure..." -- Daily Kos

Newt Gingrich tells jobless at OWS

'Go get a job right after you take a bath,'" continued Gingrich, to loud applause from the audience. -- At Family Forum in Iowa

Best Practices aren't...

"There is no such thing as best practices... One of the most common reasons for pursuing best practices in a given area is to avoid having to 'reinvent the wheel.' Think about it like this – if nobody ever reinvented the wheel, we’d still be riding around on wooden rims." -- Mike Myatt at Forbes

UFW co-founder, Delores Huerta 

“Yes we have got to occupy Wall Street. We’ve go to do that, but we’ve also got to occupy the school board, right? And we’ve got to occupy the city council, right? And we’ve got occupy the Congress, right? Because this is where the decisions are made; where our money is going to go... Sí se puede — we can do it.” -- Democracy Now!

Duncan's Law

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has announced that he will unilaterally override the centerpiece requirement of the No Child Left Behind school accountability law, that 100 percent of students be proficient in math and reading by 2014. -- NYT

All of Duncan's Race-To-The-Top stimulus money handouts, his speaking tours with Newt Gingrich, his embrace of T-Party govs like Chris Christie and Mitch Daniels, none of that could buy him the credibility with Congress he needed for re-authorization of No Child Left Behind.

Duncan & Spellings

NCLB is a law that even he now calls a “slow-motion train wreck.” But Duncan has been a vocal supporter of the test-and-punish law since the Bush days, when he, as Chicago schools CEO, journeyed to D.C. to buddy up with then Ed Sec. Spellings. Remember, it was Spellings who declared the law, "99.9% pure" while Duncan cheered her on.

Now embarrassed by the 2014 proficiency mandate and his own projected 82%  national school failure rate, Duncan is taking the law into his own hands. About 38,000 of the nation’s 100,000 public schools fell short of their test-score targets under the federal law last year, and Duncan has predicted that number would rise to 80,000 this year. That doesn't provide Obama with much of a record to run on in 2012 -- does it?

While maintaining the worst aspects of the law's of test-and-punish provisions and using them to promote massive school closings, teacher firings, and conversion to privately-run charter schools, Duncan is offering waivers to the states based on Jeb Bush's Florida model, which even brother George wouldn't tolerate. While Jeb was governor, many of the state's A or B schools were considered "failing" by NCLB standards. 

Now, instead of junking the Bush-era law Duncan is encouraging every state to apply for a waiver which he personally could approve-- or not. The Duncan waivers would come only if he deemed that a state was following the "reform" guidelines prescribed under Race To The Top, ie. school closings, mass teacher firings, and more charter schools.

The problem for Duncan is that without any more stim money in his pocket and with massive cuts in the education budget anticipated in the wake of the Obama/Boehner debt deal, he has no juice. NCLB is a dead law walking and Duncan's own future is very much in doubt. He has already lost most of his base of support on the left and now the right is opening up on him.

From the Times:

“It sounds like they’re trying to do a backdoor Round 3 of Race to the Top, and that’s astonishing,” said Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute. He called Duncan’s plan “a dramatically broad reading of executive authority.”  

Unfortunately, the real victims of all this top-down educational tyranny will be the cash-starved schools themselves operating under confusing federal mandates and a rudderless Dept. of Education.

Pres. Obama, it's time to dump both NCLB and Arne Duncan. 2012 is drawing near.

Hey, Arne Duncan!

Where's your pal Newt? Not touring together any more? Remember 3 bedfellows tour one year ago w/ Gingrich & Sharpton? Reaching across aisle? What happened? Why not tell us about it?

Duncan's OK with a Republican sweep

But he's "nonpolitical"

Arne Duncan is back on tour in anticipation of a Republican avalanche in the upcoming mid-term elections. This one reminiscent of his first Three Amigos tour with Newt Gingrich and Al Sharpton--a kind of early surrender tour which let the country know that the new administration was fully committed to building on Bush's No Child Left Behind policies--now called Race To The Top. This time around, he's letting letting the public know that he's still on board.

Though Mr. Duncan called his bus trip “a campaign for education,” there was little political edge. Should Republicans seize control of one or both houses of Congress, he vowed to find common ground.

“I’m the most nonpolitical person there could be,” he said. “I’ll work with anyone.” (NYT)

The best quote in the Times piece comes from conservative Minnesota congressman, John Kline, the ranking minority member of the House Labor and Education Committee who pointed out that Duncan’s reforms, "especially ones unpopular with unions," came straight from the traditional Republican playbook.

“I said, ‘Arne, only you can do that, You’re the secretary of education for a Democratic president.’ ”

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Arne Duncan's partner in school reform

Former Republican House speaker Newt Gingrich said Obama and the Democrats will regret their decision to push for comprehensive reform. Calling the bill “the most radical social experiment . . . in modern times,” Gingrich said: “They will have destroyed their party much as Lyndon Johnson shattered the Democratic Party for 40 years” with the enactment of civil rights legislation in the 1960s. (Washington Post)

Michael Lux, author of "The Progressive Revolution"

We do not get all we pay for in this world, but we are certainly paying for everything we get. We have paid an incredibly heavy price to get to this moment on health care: now is not the time to falter. ("March Madness, D.C. Style")

At the immigration reform rally

Latinos, in particular, have criticized the Obama administration's record on enforcement, as the number of deportations of undocumented immigrants increased 5% to 387,790 in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, 2009.

Others at the rally were blunt, saying that officials will pay a price at the polls if they ignore the calls from a small but fast-growing electorate. "I can't vote, but I have 60 family members who can," said Elmo Siap, 55, a Filipino businessman who came from Chicago. (L.A. Times)

Can somebody tell me?

Why has Arne Duncan made Newt Gingrich his front man on school reform and put him on a national speaking tour?

Newt Gingrich tried on Wednesday to brush off the glaring gaffe he made this week on "The Daily Show" when he insisted that the Bush administration was right to read shoe bomber Richard Reid his Miranda rights because he was an American citizen.(Huffington)

View from right field

"Full throated support for the Bush doctrine."

Former House majority leader Newt Gingrich, who has become the biggest supporter of Arne Duncan's Race-To-The-Top education reform, told WNYC, Obama's Nobel Prize acceptance speech was "actually very good."

"He clearly understood that he had been given the prize prematurely, but he used it as an occasion to remind people, first of all, as he said: that there is evil in the world ... I thought in some ways it's a very historic speech."

In an interview with USA Today, former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin suggested the speech could have come from her mouth.

Palin praised President Obama for the speech he gave Thursday to accept the Nobel Peace Prize. She said the president's defense of war to combat evil could have been taken from the pages of her memoirs. Wow, that really sounded familiar," said Palin, a frequent Obama critic. "I talked, too, in my book about the fallen nature of man and why war is necessary at times."

A spokesperson for House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) added,

"As President Reagan said, Republicans believe in peace through strength, and we were pleased that today President Obama addressed and defended our mission in Afghanistan, where success is the only option."

Erick Erickson, the conservative founder of RedState.com, wrote,

"I was surprised by Obama's speech. Parts sounded like full throated support for the Bush doctrine."

Philly follow-up

Hey Newt--Are they really teaching the "same kids"?

Readers might recall that two weeks ago I began looking into unsubstantiated claims made by Arne Duncan and his runnin' buddy, Newt Gingrich.

They both had claimed that Mastery Charter School in Philly had made spectacular gains in measurable student achievement, with "the same kids" as its "failed" predecessor, Shoemaker School. As I pointed out then, Mastery, for all its strengths and good metrics, wasn't operating under the same rules as neighborhood schools either in its admissions protocols or its reporting of student learning outcomes and therefore the two shouldn't be compared head-on.

Rather, whatever Mastery is doing well, ie. personalization, longer school day, etc... should be spread across the district wherever applicable.

Being a long-time small-schools advocate and an early supporter of charter schools, I wouldn't be dwelling on this point if it weren't for the way today's chains of privately-managed charter schools are currently being pitted against all neighborhood public schools and being misused politically by the likes of Gingrich who claims there's some magic in the charter format.There's no evidence, either in Philly or elsewhere to substantiate such claims.

Chris Satullo at WHYY offers a more rational assessment:

It's not that charters can't work. It's that the movement harbors too many ideologues who will brook no criticism of their pet project; they seek to shield these PUBLIC schools from pesky questions about low test scores or misuse of public funds. To them the mere existence of charters is success enough. (Listen to the rest here)

Retired Philly teacher Edwin Smith takes on the claim about Mastery's "same kids" success, in an Inquirer opinion piece, concluding:

"The current charter school solution is producing an increasingly two-tiered educational system.

TWIE's John Thompson makes a similar point about another Duncan favorite, KIPP.

I do not understand how the first 123 students of Moon KIPP Academy could be mistaken for being "the same (501) students" who were "in the same building" the year before the neighborhood school was closed. Six years later and long after the demand for KIPP’s rigor has topped out, 215 KIPP students, with 11% on IEPs, get an excellent education - even though their turnover rate is 52%. This compares with the old school’s pattern of a 90 to 100% poverty rate with 24 to 33% of students on IEPs.

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An Inquirer editorial, refers to Philadelphia's "50 percent dropout rate and abysmal test scores." But what it fails to mention is that these "abysmal" results come nearly a decade after Duncan's mentor, Paul Vallas came to Philly and presided over the nation's largest experiment in privatized management of schools, with the management of over 40 schools turned over to outside for-profits, nonprofits, and universities beginning in Fall 2002.

No excuses Newt

Gingrich hearts Mastery

On Sunday's Meet the Press, starring Duncan, Sharpton and Gingrich, I heard Newt touting a Philadelphia charter school called Mastery. Mastery is also hailed by Duncan and the DOE as one of the nation's 15 "exemplar charter schools" and a model of a turnaround school (where they keep the kids and fire all the teachers and staff).

I'm not personally familiar with Mastery but it sounds like a good school for those who choose to attend and are able to get in. Of course I like its small-by-design approach with lots of personalized support and assessment based on content mastery. I also like students being able to take 5 years to graduate, if needed.

But because Gingrich pushed it so hard as a model, and Duncan went there to kick off his tour, it made me wonder--just who gets in, stays in, and graduates from Mastery? According to Gingrich, it's a "no excuses" school. That means that school leaders, believe that they can transcend all the negative effects that poverty and racial inequity.

Then Gingrich described Mastery this way:

Three years ago the state became desperate, took over the school, turned it over to Mastery, which is a charter school system. Same building, same students. Three years later, they're in the 86th percentile.

Amazing! In just 3 years, just by taking over a school and turning it over to a private operator, these "same kids" jumped 61 percentile points. Is that all it takes--no mention by Newt of anything curricular, competency of teachers, money, small schools size, etc...

As you might expect, Gingrich wasn't telling us the whole story. While Mastery students did well in some subject areas like reading, they scored low and the school failed to make AYP in others (math). Rather Newt was using Mastery to push his own political agenda--not fair to Mastery and not fair to the neighborhood schools against which Mastery is being pitted.

It doesn't appear for example, that Mastery operates under the same rules or conditions as did its predecessor. And they don't exactly teach all the "same kids." For one thing, Mastery admits only those students whose parents are willing and able to sign a contract. Then prospective students are made to attend a pre-enrollment meeting. Mastery says the meeting isn't evaluative. But right there you eliminate all those students without active parents or those intimidated by the process or who question Mastery's program or school curriculum. Not a bad approach for matching kids with a choice program. But it gives Mastery a decided edge over the neighborhood schools.

Mastery also has a small enrollment, an 11.3:1 student-teacher ratio, and millions of dollars in extra grant support,

John Thompson at TWIE points out that at Mastery's Pickett campus,"there was a 42% attrition rate - a rate that would have killed their reforms in a neighborhood school." I'm currently looking at Philly charter school data to see if it conforms with Thompson's assessment. But it does sound familiar. It's obvious that if you recruit selectively and if you're allowed to get rid of many of your low-scoring kids, you're scores will go up. And if you push them back into the large, neighborhood schools, your scores will look even better than their scores.

******

P.S. Last week, Mastery kids couldn't get to school due to a strike of transit workers. But even before the strike, students had a difficult time using SEPTA because a dean was caught stealing $6,000 in student tokens and TransPasses. I hope Gingrich won't use that as an excuse.

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Duncan, Gingrich & Sharpton on Meet the Press

Duncan: "I just want to say, as a country, we need more good schools." Me: Why the hell didn't we think of this?

More Duncan: "Good charter schools are a piece of the answer. Bad charter schools are a piece of the problem." Me: DOH!

Duncan on DOE INVESTMENT: "We will only invest in those states and districts where student achievement is part of the evaluation." Me: Yes, let the anti-testers starve.

Host Gregory: "I mean, in 1995, Speaker Gingrich, you were an advocate of dismantling the Department of Education." Me: That was before he discovered it was a cash cow for corporate reformers.

NYT editorial: RTTT favors "boutiques" like TFA

The language in the application reflects timidity at the White House and in Congress, where some voices wanted to delay the fight over this issue until next year when Congress will likely reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. The language also reflects the sometimes excessive influence of boutique alternative certification programs, which want to keep doors open for teachers who might be shut out under traditional criteria.

Here's Checker Finn at his humanitarian best:

It's a fact that employment was an explicit purpose of stimulus funding--Congress said as much--and with today's jobless rate over ten percent only a churl would deny the humanitarian value as well as the political appeal of this.

Then Checker the churl adds:

That said, turning schools into a jobs program--while well-run public organizations and private firms use the economic crisis to purge weak performers, cherry-pick talent, and position themselves to be more productive going forward--is a dubious way to tone them up for the 21st century.

THE "LISTENING" TOUR

THE BEDFELLOWS' TOUR

Slate (h/t Russo)

Newt selling Duncan's plan in Philly road show

Gingrich, a Republican, wants more charter schools and stronger charter laws in all states. "When you go to those kind of schools, you realize what is possible for all American children," said Gingrich. "If we have absolute proof it can be done, why aren't we doing it? We are literally risking the lives of these kids."

Duncan acknowledged that some have called for tighter monitoring of charter schools. In Philadelphia, for instance, federal authorities are investigating at least six charters for alleged financial mismanagement. (Inquirer)

Quotables

"Not the time for Dewey"

Given the existing constraints of imposed instruction and the demand for orderly, acquiescent behavior, what can be done to modulate the rigid authoritarianism? This is not the historical moment to anticipate a resurgence of Dewey progressivism with its focus on harnessing student interests to an ever-evolving co-constructed curriculum. (Penn Prof. Joan Goodman, Edweek)

Obama, please visit Chi-Town

PRESIDENT OBAMA, your young people are dying in the streets of Chi-Town. Please stop by Chicago on your way back from Copenhagen (Sun-Times columnist, Stella Foster)

Civil rights leader, Newt

The odd couple of Gingrich and Sharpton found common ground in the concept that education is the new frontier on civil rights. (AP Wire)

Rhee's broom

The broom -- poised to sweep out the old, the failed, her employees -- has become convenient shorthand, a quick answer to the question I ask one D.C. schoolteacher after another: What makes you think Rhee doesn't respect teachers? (WaPo's Marc Fisher)



Related: More on—Aw shucks, Newt isn’t running 10/4/07

Obama's dream

This, from Paul Krugman's column last Thursday:

So much, then, for Mr. Obama’s dream of moving beyond divisive politics. The truth is that the factors that made politics so ugly in the Clinton years — the paranoia of a significant minority of Americans and the cynical willingness of leading Republicans to cater to that paranoia — are as strong as ever. In fact, the situation may be even worse than it was in the 1990s because the collapse of the Bush administration has left the G.O.P. with no real leaders other than Rush Limbaugh.

But then there's always Newt Gingrich, the former Dixiepublican congressman from Georgia and erstwhile 2012 presidential candidate, who, alongside of Limbaugh and Sarah ("Death Panel") Palin, has led the charge of the paranoids against Obama's healthcare reform and tried unsuccessfully, to deny Judge Sotomayor her seat on the Supreme Court by labeling her a "racist."

Yet Gingrich, desperately seeking a measure of credibility outside the shrinking base of the Limbaugh Party, now stands, anointed by Arne Duncan as the face of his Race-To-The-Top ed reform. Gingrich will stand next to Duncan on their current RTTT speaking tour. It's worth asking again, what is it about RTTT that makes it so attractive to the likes of Gingrich? And what is it about Gingrich that makes him so attractive to Obama and Duncan?

The Bedfellows Tour

Arne Duncan is going on tour with strange bedfellows, Al Sharpton and Newt Gingrich to promote the Race to the Top. Newt, as a leader of the most backward wing of Republicanism, launched a racist campaign against the appointment of Judge Sotomayor and has been rallying the T-baggers against Obama's health care reform. So the question is, does this version of united front around school reform represent an adjustment in Gingrich's approach to politics or is it a statement about the character of Duncan's reform agenda that makes it acceptable to someone like Newt?

I guess you can tell what I think.

Squabbles tearing the "bedfellows" apart

EEP's house of cards

There appears to be trouble brewing in EEP land. The unprincipled alliance between the "strange bedfellows," N.Y. Chancellor Joel Klein, Rev. Al Sharpton, and Republican wing-nut, Newt Gingrich, now appears to be coming apart at the seams. Shortly after the trio appeared at the White House two weeks ago, along with Mayor Bloomberg and Sec. of Ed Arne Duncan, preaching to their small choir the gospel of school privatization and unlimited mayoral control, the wheels began coming off.

First Gingrich twittered that Obama's Supreme Court appointment, Sonia Sotomayor, was "a racist." This put Sharpton as well as Duncan in embarrassing positions. How could Duncan be seen on stage, embracing the wing-Newt at the same time the wing-Newt was going off on his boss' most important pick? While Gingrich was forced to "take back" his abusive statements about Sotomayor, his attacks on Obama's policies have become even more strident and Limbaugh-like.

Meanwhile, Sharpton refuses to support Bloomberg's mayoral-control push. This also distances him from Duncan who has been threatening districts with loss of stim dollars if they refuse to give (urban) mayors control of the schools.

What a tangled web we weave...

More from Levy

I had to chuckle reading the NYT this morning. There was an op-ed piece by former N.Y. Chancellor and Wall Street (Citigroup) lawyer, Harold Levy, offering us the "5 ways to fix schools." And here I always thought there were 7.

Levy, who obviously hadn't yet discovered the 5 ways while he was still in power, now wants to make it "mandatory" that all kids go to college for a year. I suppose he hopes that will keep them out of the job market and off the unemployment line for a while longer and hopes that the feds will pick up the cost of tuition ($8,000 average for state colleges and $25,000 for private). As for those kids who want to take a year off after high school, to work or travel? I suppose we could arrest their parents. How will this "fix" schools? Maybe Levy will tell us later.

Levy, you may recall, helped engineer the back-door shipment of $500K to Sharpton via hedge-fund school reformers DFER which apparently bought Sharpton's temporary allegiance to the "bedfellows" club at EEP.

Duncan, Sharpton tour, but where's Newt?

Who got to Gingrich...?

Was it just the already badly isolated Limbaugh Party leaders and/or the badly embarrassed conservative EEP faction of the Democrats as well? The latter haven't said a critical word about their new-found bedfellow, Newt, even while Republican leaders beg him to tone down his racist comments.

After initially waiting a few nanoseconds to call Supreme Court nominee Judge Sonia Sotomayor a racist -- not to mention advising that she just ought to withdraw from consideration -- Newt Gingrich has had a sudden change of heart. (Gloria Berger, CNN)

...and why isn't he on the Duncan/Sharpton tour?

White education reformers were looking for a prominent African American to lend them credibility, while Sharpton needed the money because his non-profit, the National Action Network, was nearly broke. Considering the distastefulness of this financial back-scratching, it was surprising to see Sharpton received in the Oval Office -- alongside Newt Gingrich -- as an education visionary, just a few weeks after the donation story broke in the Daily News. And it's even more surprising, as Politico reports, that Sharpton and Education Secretary Arne Duncan will now be embarking on a five-city school reform tour. (Dana Goldstein, American Prospect)

Weekend Quotables

State Rep. Cynthia Soto's bill was an attempt to pull in the reins on Chicago's Renaissance 2010 school closings. It passed the Senate with unanimous support, despite vocal opposition from Mayor Daley's lobbyists and CPS administrators. In a May 28th press release, Soto spelled out the reasoning behind House Bill 363:

"The Act will lead to a framework of fair standards and procedures for building, repairing, and closing Chicago schools," said Soto. "To this point, Chicago's lack of clear standards has created two different worlds in which are children are educated, which are grossly unequal." (Designs for Change)

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The same Newt Gingrich who once said that bilingual education was like teaching “the language of living in a ghetto” tweeted that Sotomayor is a “Latina woman racist.” (NYT columnist Charles Blow)

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This may be an oppressive, even fascistic charter school, the model of what neo-con George Will lovingly calls, "the new paternalism," but the misnamed American Indian school, does succeed in raising test scores. And after all, isn't this what public education for poor kids is all about?

Reporting from Oakland -- Not many schools in California recruit teachers with language like this: "We are looking for hard working people who believe in free market capitalism. . . . Multicultural specialists, ultra liberal zealots and college-tainted oppression liberators need not apply." (LA TIMES)

What happened to "the civil rights issue of the 21st century"?

Who's with Newt? EEP?

A week ago, race baiter Newt Gingrich was at the White House, lecturing Obama about education being the "civil rights issue of 21st century." He's one of the three top leaders and spokesman for the "no excuses" EEP education policy coalition, along with Joel Klein and Al Sharpton. Now Gingrich is joining conservative wing-nuts Limbaugh and Tancredo ("National Council of La Raza is equivalent to the KKK") in calling Judge Sotomayor a "racist".

So the question is: what brand of "civil rights" are Gingrich and his bedfellows in EEP really talking about? Fellow Republicans are running as fast as they can from Newt, hoping to salvage some credibility among Latino voters. But will Klein, Sharpton, Bloomberg, and Duncan (who spoke with Newt at the EEP White House rally) and the rest of the EEP leaders follow suit and repudiate?