Oh no. Look who's back. It's General Tata

Sarah Palin with Gen. Tata

I first wrote about Gen. Anthony J. Tata back in 2012. Back then it was considered hip for some reason, to put generals and admirals and such, in charge of the schools. We did it here in Chicago when Rahm Emanuel appointed Marine Col. Tim Tyrrell and paid him $180,000/year to run his mass school-closing operation.

Tata, a brigadier general who doubled as a right-wing ideologue, was brought into D.C. by evil corporate school reform demon Michelle Rhee as her second in command. He then became fast friends with Sarah Palin (remember her?) and wrote a glowing review of her book, "Going Rogue," on the Big Hollywood site operated by the late wing-nut journo-goofball Andrew Breitbart.

Tata wrote that Palin "is far more qualified to be president of the United States than the current occupant of the White House" and that she is "precisely the kind of leader America needs."

I guess that wasn't enough of a clue for the embattled Wake County, N.C. School Board that hired Tata as their schools chief to take command of the board's re-segregation initiative. The program, which was pushed mainly by Republican school board members, backed by national tea party conservatives, aimed at reversing years of gains by the North Carolina civil rights movement. Pledging to "say no to the social engineers!" the board rolled back one of the nation's most celebrated integration efforts.

After mass protests by the NAACP and court actions, the school board finally was forced to fire Tata. But he was then appointed by Gov. Pat McCrory to head of the State Dept. of Transportation.

Then there was this in 2015, when Tata was accused of having committed adultery with “at least two” women --- but I digress. 

FAST FORWARD...So quite naturally, who should pop up yesterday as Trump's proposed appointee to the third-highest post in the Pentagon? None other than Brig. Gen. Tata himself. The job includes managing policy decisions on everything from Afghanistan and the Middle East to China, North Korea, and Russia, as well as artificial intelligence, hypersonic weapons, and more.

Tata would succeed John Rood, who was ousted as undersecretary for policy in February after being viewed as insufficiently loyal to Trump.  TaTa could even become next in the line if the secretary of defense and the deputy resigned or were removed.

Only this time, the recommendation caused the shit to hit the fan. 

Tata, a frequent guest on Fox News and ardent defender of President Trump, was accused of making Islamophobic and inflammatory remarks against prominent Democratic politicians, including falsely calling former President Barack Obama a Muslim and a "terrorist leader".

In several tweets from 2018, Tata said that Islam was the "most oppressive violent religion I know of" and claimed Obama was a "terrorist leader" who did more to harm the US "and help Islamic countries than any president in history." 

 Tata, in one radio appearance, speculated the Iran deal was born out of Obama's "Islamic roots" in an attempt "to help Iranians and the greater Islamic state crush Israel."

Here's more Tata tweets.

Many among the top brass are worried about the "politicization of the military", especially after Trump used the military against the protesters in D.C. following the police killing of George Floyd. 

At least three retired Army generals have now pulled their support for Trump's nominee after the embarrassment of seeing Tata's comments.

If they would have asked me, I could have told them I knew him back then. 

You say you want a revolution? Go to post-Rhee D.C. says Toch

Okay, now that I'm done FBing about #convfefe, I can get down to more serious business -- revolution. It seems a revolution has taken place in D.C. and I somehow missed it.

But Tom Toch didn't. Toch, a leading pro-reform, education policy expert and a highly regarded education writer, has published his study of the progress of school reform in the district, titled, "How D.C. Schools Are Revolutionizing Teaching." 

I'd say, it's about time somebody did it. But who?

Toch says, it all began with former D.C. schools chief Michelle Rhee, who, despite her various "mistakes," cheating scandals and unfortunate picture on the cover of Time Magazine, got the ball rolling. But Toch's study concludes that it was her successor chancellors who carried the rev forward, bringing radical changes to the teaching profession and miraculous gains in student achievement. DCPS has not merely revolutionized teaching, says Toch; it has created a "reform blueprint" for the rest of us to follow.

No credit given to teachers, of course. In fact, Toch clearly sees bad teachers and their over-protective unions as the problem, and different performance-based evaluations with high stakes attached as the r-r-r-revolutionary solution.

According to Toch:

Building on Rhee’s early work, and learning from her mistakes, her successors have effectively transformed it into a performance-based profession that provides recognition, responsibility, collegiality, support, and significant compensation—features that policy experts, including many of Rhee’s harshest critics, have long sought but never fully achieved.

Ironically, Rhee’s successors at DCPS have redesigned teaching through some of the very policies that teachers’ unions and other Rhee adversaries opposed most strongly: comprehensive teacher evaluations, the abandonment of seniority-based staffing, and performance-based promotions and compensation. They combined these with other changes, like more collaboration among teachers, that these same critics had backed. Just as notably, the transformation is taking place not at charters but in the traditional public school system, an institution that many reformers have written off as too hidebound to innovate.

At last, a reformer who offers the possibility hope and transformation within the public schools themselves. A ray of sunshine in a very gloomy period.

Toch reports that as a direct result of performance-based teacher evals, daily attendance in D.C. has reached 90%, up from 85% in 2010–11. Chronic truancy is down by nearly 40% over the past four years and graduation rates (however they're defined) have climbed to 69%, the highest in the city’s history.

And student achievement has begun a long climb toward respectability. While Washington’s test scores have traditionally been among the lowest in the nation, the percentage of fourth graders achieving math proficiency has more than doubled on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) over the past decade, as have the percentages of eighth graders proficient in math and fourth graders proficient in reading. Scores have risen even after accounting for an influx of wealthier students. And DCPS has caught up to the middle of the pack of other urban school districts at the fourth-grade level on the national exams.

In addition, the school system’s strongest teachers are no longer leaving in droves for charter schools. In many cases, the flow has been reversed, leaving even Washington’s most prominent charters struggling to compete for talent.

Now, don't mistake my cynicism about the "revolution" for the joy I feel over any reports of progress in urban school districts, especially when that progress is reported in neighborhood schools competing for resources, students and teachers with privately-operated charters and private-school voucher programs like the ones started by Rhee in D.C. and now championed by Ed Secretary Betsy DeVos. Yes, I'm glad D.C. 4th-graders are scoring higher on the NAEP and that the district has finally made it to the middle of the urban school district pack score-wise.

If that is really happening, and I have no reason to doubt Toch's numbers, credit should mostly go those hard-working and dedicated teachers, not just to the string of top-level administrators like Rhee and her mentee and former D.C. Teach For America Director Kaya Henderson, and the others who followed in Rhee's wake, usually lasting about 2 years each before they are run out or quit.

But as Toch himself points out:

Achievement levels among Hispanic and black students, who make up 82 percent of enrollment, lag badly behind their white peers. Only 15 percent of black students scored “proficient” in reading last year on Washington’s new, more demanding, Common Core–aligned exams, compared to 74 percent of white students.

If that's his idea of  a "revolution," leave me out.

But it's mostly Toch's line about how his study "takes into account the influx of [white] wealthier students" that gets me twitching. It's such an easy way of dismissing the effects of concentrated poverty on measurable learning outcomes, and of the most dramatic democratic changes in D.C., Chicago, Philly and dozens of other large urban school districts. It's what I and others have referred to as the whitenizing of the cities.

In Chicago, for example, where a quarter of a million African-Americans have been pushed out of the city over the past three decades, by gentrification, de-industrialization and job loss, lack of social services, closing of neighborhood schools, gun violence, etc... Mayor Emanuel and his appointed school district leaders are also now reporting corresponding "miraculous" gains in reading scores and graduation rates.

In 2008, DCPS was reportedly 84.4% black, 9.4% Latino, and 4.6% white.The racial breakdown of students enrolled in 2014 was 67% black, 17% Latino, 12% white, and 4% of "other races".

Now, for the first time in decades, the district itself no longer a majority-black city. Gentrification and demographic changes in many D.C. neighborhoods has increased the white and Latino populations in the city, while dramatically reducing the black and lowest-income population.  And isn't this the exact recipe of today's school reformers who claim poverty is just "an excuse" for low scores?

Of course, as anyone who went to D.C. schools back in the day will tell you, things weren't so great in the district's predominantly black and poor, racially segregated schools back before reform. And any improvements are welcomed, especially by parents and community members.

But good researchers never claim more than they should, especially for a small-scale study. Tom Toch should know that. A few reforms do not a revolution make. And if we are really serious about reform or revolution, we need to look well beyond the classroom for answers.

Thanksgiving a good day to resist Trumpism

Standing Rock

On this Thanksgiving Day, I'm thankful to be standing among so many good people willing to resist the wave of Trumpism sweeping over the land. First and foremost, the Standing Rock water protectors who are baring the brunt of it with power and dignity. We have to continue to stand with them, especially through this difficult winter.

I'm anxious to see what happens when they are joined by hundreds of veterans on Dec. 4th. Wish I could be there for that.

Pres. Obama still has the power to stop DAPL in the last weeks of his term. I hope he finds the courage. But not holding my breath.

I'm still surprised at how many liberal Clinton supporters still believe that Trump is "moderating" and are willing to "give him a chance". I don't know what else he has to do to them to show he's a for-real neo-fascist.

Trump lunches with NYTers. 

Case in point... NYT execs and staff held a lunch meeting with Trump in an attempt to find "common ground". The Times has been a favorite target of Trump, a 1st-Amendment denier.

Thomas ("Earth is flat") Friedman left the meeting somewhat assured that Trump was "rethinking" his extreme positions. Ie. on torture, not prosecuting Hillary Clinton,  and on environmental issues.

Not having any of it was NYT columnist Charles Blow who didn't attend the meeting but was overwhelmed by the "slime factor" as he read the transcript.

Writes Blow:

I will say proudly and happily that I was not present at this meeting. The very idea of sitting across the table from a demagogue who preyed on racial, ethnic and religious hostilities and treating him with decorum and social grace fills me with disgust, to the point of overflowing. Let me tell you here where I stand on your “I hope we can all get along” plea: Never.

DRESSED TO OPPRESS... Michelle Rhee and husband, Kevin Johnson leave Trump's golf club after being turned down for the Sec. of Ed job in favor of Betsy DeVos. Rhee assured Trump she's still on board with his program. 

On the eve of Trump's appointment of anti-"government school" extremist Betsy DeVos to the post of Ed Secretary, N.Y. charter bigwig Eva Moskowitz was still assuring us that, “There are many positive signs that President Trump will be different from candidate Trump.” Of course a positive sign to Moskowitz is Trump assuring her in a private meeting, that millions of dollars will continue to flow away from public schools and into the pockets of private charter operators like her.

And then, there are those corp-style school reformers like Peter Cunningham, who look at Trump purely from charter school perspective and wonder aloud, "is he really for "choice" or not? If he shows that he is -- and he will -- they will likely get on board the Trump train, even though he didn't hire their choice, Michelle Rhee as Ed Sec, and even while thousands of students (including their own charter school students) are being rounded up and deported.

I've also noted some cracks in their wall. First with a critical, but nebulous statement from the corporate-reform group Teach For America, following the DeVos appointment. Then from DFER Pres. Shavar Jefferies, calling on his people not to work for Trump.

But I wonder what TFAers and Jefferies will say and do when Trump and DeVos are pushing the very same legislation on charters and vouchers that they have supported all along. Tough choices ahead for them of they want to keep their base.

Corporate ed reformers throw in with Trump

Ivanka Trump visits Eva Moskowitz' Success Academy Charter School. 

It looks like they've dropped their phony rhetoric about charter schools being "the civil rights issue of our time." Following the Democrat's devastating loss to Trump, one by one, the corporate reformers and champions of privately-run charters are jumping the Dems' ship and throwing in behind the racist, anti-immigrant Trump education movement.

For some, the move is nothing new. Former D.C. chancellor, Arne Duncan fave, and Waiting for Superman star Michelle Rhee for example, turned to selling her talents to the far right as soon as voters ran her and Mayor Fenty out of town. She went to work advising FL Gov. Rick Scott on school privatization and union-busting matters.

Now that she's stepped down from leadership of her anti-union ed group, Students First,  she's considering leaving her new position with a national fertilizer company if Trump offers her the job as his secretary of education. Her problem is that she's a proponent of Common Core. Trump isn't. But either of them can easily accommodate the other's position since Rhee sees Common Core's value mainly in its testing provisions, enabling teachers to be evaluated, hired and fired on the basis of student test scores. There should be a basis for unity with Trump there somewhere.

And her scandal-ridden past, including her connection with D.C. test-cheating scandal shouldn't bother the Trump transition team too much considering the rest of his recent scandalized appointees and advisers. Not to mention, Trump's own $25M pay-off to make the Trump Univ. suit go away.

But Trump also has to placate his base. Upon hearing about his possible choice of Rhee, the right-wing group, Parents Against the Common Core, wrote Trump and open letter calling on him to cut federal funding of public schools, dismantle the D.O.E. and appoint someone like former Bush aide Williamson Evers to the top post.

BTW, Trump also met with Rhee's husband KJ, the disgraced mayor of Sacramento. They have some legal problems in common. Something about teenage girls. But let's not even go there right now. I just ate.

Then there's New York's own charter-hustler supreme, Eva Moskowitz who is now pulling down nearly a half-million a year for managing the city's Success Academy Charters. EM met with Trump last week, but reportedly turned down the Ed Sec job. Some NY friends told me she couldn't afford the pay cut. The Secretary of Education's salary is a measly $186,600. Others say, she has her eyes on the NY mayor's office. But she left the meeting on good terms, promising Trump that she would get behind his school reform plan.

So far, Arne Duncan has carefully avoided any mention of Trump. His successor, John King has  mainly followed suit, advising the nation's teachers simply to keep their heads down and "focused on the students." Duncan's former assistant Peter Cunningham, who now runs Eli Broad's Education Post blog, says he "skeptical" about Trump, but seems to be keeping his option open.

Can Joel Klein be far behind?

Asked to name women or people of color considered for Trump cabinet, Jason Miller on MSNBC gives 2: Michelle Rhee and Eva Moskowitz for Ed.

— Alex Seitz-Wald (@aseitzwald) November 16, 2016

Vouchers for private schools: This is what passes for 'school reform' in D.C.

D.O.E.-- The Education Pentagon in D.C.

Posting from D.C. --Remember back in 2010 when Michelle Rhee was ruling the roost in D.C.? Rhee, with plenty of back-up from Arne Duncan and the Gates Foundation, became one of the superstars of the Waiting For Superman set, and D.C. was touted as the model for corporate-style, urban school reform. Duncan even used his position as Secretary of Education to stump for Rhee's patron, then-Mayor Adrian Fenty.

How the mighty have fallen. Rhee has left the world of corporate reform to go to work for a fertilizer company. After she was booted out of Washington came the revelations about her role in a major test-cheating scandal.

Spending this past week in the D.C. area has given me a closer look at Rhee's school reform legacy which goes hand-in-hand with the whitenizing of the District. In 2011, Washington’s black population slipped below 50% for the first time in over 50 years.

Not only is the city’s African American population shrinking — almost half of the District’s 650,000 residents are white — but it’s getting harder to be black in the nation’s capital. -- Washington Post

Petworth

Neighborhoods like Petworth are losing their public schools, as gentrifiers increasingly choose other options, like privately-run, publicly-financed charter schools. MacFarland, the only public middle school in Petworth, was one of 15 Washington public schools closed in 2013.

Vouchers...Congress seems to have a weird obsession with D.C. school vouchers, writes Valerie Strauss at WaPo.

Congress created what is formally known as the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program in 2004 as the only federally funded program that uses public money to pay for private school tuition, though the public has no say in how the schools are run or what is taught.

The D.C. voucher program has become the pet project of House Speaker John Boehner, who recently announced he is soon leaving Congress. Boehner this month introduced legislation to reauthorize the voucher program for an additional five years, and a bipartisan group of senators filed a companion bill to extend the program through 2025. (Pro-voucher Democrats also include two former mayors of D.C. Tony Williams and Fenty.)

In 2008, Rhee declared herself neutral on school vouchers But in 2011, she endorsed vouchers, saying that she supported "giving poor families access to publicly funded scholarships to attend private schools." Then again in a February 2011 speech before Georgia's legislature, she openly supported the D.C. voucher program as a supplement to the expansion of privately-run charter schools. She said that if a parent did not win the lottery to get a child into a charter school, then "who am I to deny them a $7,500 voucher to send their child to a great Catholic school."

This, even though a Washington Post review in 2012 found that hundreds of students use their voucher dollars to attend schools that are unaccredited. A previous report in 2007 found that some students in the program were attending private schools that had unsuitable learning environments and teachers without bachelor’s degrees.

The D.O.E.'s own evaluation of the voucher program found that it did nothing to raise measurable student learning outcomes.

The GAO reported that the local agency that administers the program lacks the “financial systems, controls, policies, and procedures” to ensure that federal funds are being spent legally. It also says the U.S. Education Department has not exercised its oversight responsibilities well enough.

Such is the state of what passes for D.C. school reform.

Florida Blues?

F. Klonsky pic

I can think of worse things than being stuck down here in Sarasota while the east coast is buried in snow. I'm flying back to Chicago and trying to get there before my class starts on Wednesday evening. I'm  wondering if the chain reaction from backed-up N.Y. flights will affect airports here. But not panicked either way. Although the sun's glare on the windshield makes driving down the coast difficult and the price of sunscreen hasn't gone down with the fall in oil prices.

In the meantime, I'm getting a close-up view of ed "reform"Florida-style where Tea Party Gov. Rick Scott wants to take $100 million from the state's public schools and hand it over to private-run charters and their operating companies. That's a $25 million increase from the current year.

According to the Bradenton Herald, "charter schools and traditional public schools have been battling over facilities funding since the economic downturn, when the state's school construction fund began drying up".

Gov. Scott & Michelle Rhee

Scott is privatization crazed and even tried to privatize FL's health-care system as well as the state's prisons.  According to the Center for Media and Democracy, prison privatization has resulted in a record number of inmate deaths.

Before becoming governor, he made millions in the privatized health care industry. In 1987, at age 34, he co-founded Columbia Hospital Corporation with two business partners; this merged with Hospital Corporation of America in 1989 to form Columbia/HCA and eventually became the largest private for-profit health care company in the U.S.

He resigned as Chief Executive of Columbia/HCA in 1997 amid a controversy over the company's business and Medicare billing practices; the company ultimately admitted to fourteen felonies and agreed to pay the federal government over $600 million, which was the largest fraud settlement in US history.

Oh yes, I almost forgot to mention Scott's right-hand education adviser -- Michelle Rhee.

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

Top-ranked ed states all have union teachers. Rhee's legacy in D.C.

Former Obama White House press secretary Robert Gibbs, along with another ex-White House aide, Ben LaBolt, supports former CNN anchor Campbell Brown's fight against teacher tenure. 

Once again top-ranked education states have strong teacher unions and have the highest education budgets. Bottom states, mostly non-union and lowest spending. The ranking was based on 12 factors, including student dropout rate, pupil/teacher ratio, test scores, rates of bullying and school safety measures.

Then there's the legacy of union-busting Rhee-form in dead-last D.C. I don't know how or if they figured in D.C.'s cheating-skewed test results. Probably didn't go there.

IS ANYONE SUPRISED that it's former Obama aides picking up where Rhee and Tea Party govs left off, leading the latest national assault on teachers and public employee unions? I'm not.

We will take the Senate," said the GOP official, who asked not to be named to preserve his business options. "The future is bright for us. Shit, we may even take on the teachers unions with Obama campaign operatives-turned-lobbyists."

Weird Al

WEIRD AL… People keep sending me on-line petitions to sign. I sign them but I'm not sure what they do or who ever reads them. According to @Salon...

Man drunkenly drafts petition to have "Weird Al" Yankovic play the Super Bowl, gets +20K signatures http://t.co/OK2NWhMOAY
— Salon.com (@Salon) August 7, 2014

PLAYING THE BULLY...In case you didn't really believe he said it. N.Y.'s MORE Caucus has posted UFT Pres. Michael Mulgrew's "I'll punch you in the face" (if you try and take away my Common Core) speech. I'm not sure who it is he's threatening here besides his own members.

More on Fariña pick: You can't go wrong expecting the worst from Duncan.

In yesterday's post on de Blasio's appointment of Carmen Fariña as schools chancellor, I implied that pressure from Arne Duncan and his assistant, Jim Shelton (a Gates Foundation insert at the DOE), was being exerted on the new mayor to appoint a corporate reformer type. As it turns out, I was right on the money. I've learned long ago, that you're almost always on safe ground when anticipating unethical behavior from the Duncan gang.

Yesterday's Washington Post reports:

U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan and at least one other Education Department official urged New York Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio and his team not to choose Montgomery County Schools Superintendent Joshua P. Starr as the city’s next schools chancellor, according to several people knowledgable about the selection process. It was an unusual move by the nation’s top education official and came in the wake of Starr’s vocal criticism of some of the Obama administration’s school reform policies.

Starr was reportedly on BdB's short list that included Rhee disciple, Maya Henderson and Chicago's school-closing CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett. Credit both Starr and de Blasio for not giving in to Duncan's bullying. BdB reportedly offered Starr the number 2 job on the assumption that he would soon take over for the 70-year-old Fariña. Starr declined, opting instead to continue his work in Montgomery County, where he earned the wrath of Shelton by criticizing Duncan's Race To The Top.

Duncan used his position to stump for Rhee and Fenty in D.C.. 

Duncan and Shelton were both big fans of Michelle Rhee in D.C. and Duncan even tried to provide cover for her in the D.C. test-cheating scandal.

According to the Post,

In January 2011, while D.C. Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) deliberated on who would succeed Michelle A. Rhee as D.C. schools chancellor, Duncan said publicly that he hoped Kaya Henderson, Rhee’s deputy, would get the job. She did.

Still cleaning up Rhee's Value-Added mess in D.C.

Seattle teachers protest Rhee-forms.

They're still cleaning up the debris from Michelle Rhee's signature reform in D.C.. Her top-down imposed Value-Added IMPACT system of teacher evaluation has long caused havoc in the system here and elsewhere. Remember, it's also a central piece of Arne Duncan's Race To The Top.

The teachers union should have never agreed to IMPACT and evals based on student test scores.  The formula for tying every student's test score bump or dip directly to an individual teacher is so complicated and inherently error-ridden that it's bound to confuse parents and negatively affect teachers and students.

Monday's Washington Post reports that faulty calculations of the “value” that D.C. teachers added to student achievement in the last school year resulted in erroneous performance evaluations for 44 teachers, including one who was fired because of a low rating. School officials described the errors as the most significant since the system launched a controversial initiative in 2009 to evaluate teachers in part on student test scores.

Half of the evaluations for the 44 teachers were too high and half too low, said Jason Kamras, chief of human capital for D.C. Public Schools.

Current WTU Pres. Elizabeth Davis, called the disclosure disturbing.

“IMPACT needs to be reevaluated,” Davis said. “The idea of attaching test scores to a teacher’s evaluation — that idea needs to be junked.”

Now she tells us.

D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray and Chancellor Kaya Henderson, a Rhee protege, aren't likely to junk V-A regardless of its consequences.

We should also consider the shameful role played by some academics in the imposition of value-added evals. One case in point: It was back in October when Professors Thomas Dee of the Stanford Graduate School of Education and James Wyckoff of the University of Virginia were heaping praise on  Rhee's V-A program, calling it, effective and accurate.

D.C.'s Mayor Gray under fire for Rhee-ism without Rhee

Like President Obama, who campaigned as a critic of the war in Iraq but then continued many of George W. Bush’s military policies once in office, Gray ran as a skeptic of the reforms being implemented by Rhee but continued them under Henderson, who also has closed more than a dozen schools and fired hundreds of teachers. -- Melinda Henneberger, Washington Post

D.C. students protest 2010 teacher firings.

Following up on Monday's post which was critical of WaPo's excellent education writer Valerie Strauss. Remember, Strauss was dismissive in her response to D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray's drawing parallels between the conditions black people face today in the nation's capital with those faced under South African apartheid. I defended Gray on that one, but also pointed out that I was also critical of Gray who seems to be following in the path of his horrible predecessors Adrian Fenty and Michelle Rhee.

It was Fenty who brought in Rhee as his appointed school chancellor. In a matter of months, Rhee, with heavy backing from corporate school reformers and power philanthropists, threw the school system into financial chaos. Her regime was marked by a massive test-cheating scandal along with a successful effort to weaken the teachers union and take away many of the teachers' collective bargaining rights. Rhee fired hundreds of good teachers and regularly debased the entire teaching force, promoted vouchers for Catholic schools, and put many the district's schools into the hands of private charter operators. The list goes on. But while Rhee became the darling of the corporate school reformers,  including Arne Duncan, she drew the ire of parents and of the city's under-served black community.

Henderson and Rhee

Fortunately, both Fenty and Rhee were run out of D.C. in a populist revolt by district voters. Unfortunately, Mayor Gray, who ran as an outspoken critic of Fenty's policies, quickly appointed Rhee's deputy “for human capital” Kaya Henderson as his chancellor. She is now following in Rhee's footsteps. Back in 2010 I called it, Rhee-ism without Rhee. 

Instead of dismantling Fenty's "reforms", Gray has continued them. Henderson, has closed more than a dozen schools and has fired hundreds of more teachers and librarians. D.C. charters now have the third-highest market share in the nation, enrolling a larger proportion of students than in every city except New Orleans and Detroit

Gray is now running for a second term and like Fenty, he's coming under heavy fire from educators, parents and school activists for his Rhee(ism)-without-Rhee approach. At Monday's community meeting, Gray was confronted by a hostile crowd that packed Eastern High School's auditorium to slam his education policies and his appointment of Henderson.

The Post reports:

On Monday, upstart candidates including restaurateur Andy Shallal, the owner of Busboys and Poets, and Reta Jo Lewis, a Democrat and former State Department official, drew the biggest applause, indicting both Gray and members of the council who seek to replace him for alienating parents and teachers amid a forceful push for school reform.

It looks like the mayor is in for tough sledding in the months leading up to the election. But as we have seen, getting rid of a mayor or a corrupt schools chancellor is one thing. Getting rid of the powerful corporate interests behind them is quite another. They don't have to run for office.

WHO WILL DE BLASIO PICK?

On that point -- Now that New Yorkers have elected progressive Bill deBlasio as their mayor along with a slate of councilmen backed by the Working Families Party, all eyes are on that city to see who the new mayor will pick as his chancellor. Rumors abound that Henderson and Chicago school chief Barbara Byrd-Bennett have made the short list.

I hope those rumors are false. I'm also glad to see Valerie Strauss is back on track. Here's her take on a possible Henderson appointment in N.Y.

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Susan Ohanian.org

John Merrow

The erasures stayed buried for years. The official who had spotted the problem and urged Rhee to investigate has kept her mouth shut. Five months after she had informed Rhee of the widespread erasures, Deborah Gist resigned to become State Superintendent in Rhode Island. -- Michelle Rhee's Reign of Error

Jay Mathews

In the 42 years I have worked for this newspaper, I have adopted many of this town’s mental habits. One is a deep respect for inspectors general, those stewards of truth whose work we often herald in The Post. That is why I am disappointed by the failure of not one, but two, inspectors general to expose test tampering in the D.C. schools. -- Washington Post

Valerie Leonard, Lawndale Alliance

“I am concerned that when you close these [school] buildings, the effect it’s going to have is that people won’t want to stay in an area without a school they can walk to. Just like when International Harvester closed — people left in droves." -- "Are School Closings Racist?" Truthout 

Tom Torlakson, Calif. Supt. of Public Instruction

"People can call themselves Democrats for Education Reform — it's a free country — but if your agenda is to shut teachers and school employees out of the political process and not lift a finger to prevent cuts in education, in my book you're not a reformer, you're not helping education, and you're sure not much of a Democrat." -- L.A. Times 

Guantanamo Bay prisoner, Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel

I’ve been on a hunger strike since Feb. 10 and have lost well over 30 pounds. I will not eat until they restore my dignity. -- New York Times

It's Duncan's Race To The Top that should have been indicted

Indicted!

When the Atlanta test cheating scandal broke two years ago, Arne Duncan pooh-poohed it. He started out saying how "stunned" he was and then called it an "isolated" problem. 

"I think this is very isolated," Duncan said. "In Baltimore, there's two schools and they dealt with it. This (Atlanta) is an easy one to fix, with better test security.

Isolated? An easy one to fix?

Today AJC reports:

 Former Atlanta Public School Superintendent Beverly Hall and 34 others were indicted Friday indictment on charges of racketeering, theft by taking, influencing witnesses, conspiracy and false statements in connection with the cheating scnadall that has dogged Atlanta Public Schools for years.

How isolated is the Atlanta cheating scandal? According to a FairTest's press release we received this morning, cheating is widespread --in 37 States And D.C. to be exact. FairTest has the list.

Of course this scandal is really just a symptom of a much larger problem and Duncan bares as much responsibility for it than the 35 who were indicted. It's his test-crazy Race To The Top, a continuation of No Child Left Behind that is behind the cheating wildfire. And his initial response, downplaying the scandal, was in a way a cover-up.

Next question -- is Michelle Rhee and her former team in D.C. next?

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Michael Madigan

"We are telling people who have worked for governments, and who have been told for years how much their pension would be, that the number is going to change." -- Ward Room

 Geri Armitage,  Naperville North High School teacher

“The state has not paid their portion — we have paid our dues — and now they are attacking us from every which way saying it’s our fault when, in reality, this is their obligation to us.” -- Daily Eastern News

Charles Blow

As [Michelle] Alexander confirmed to me Friday: “Today there are more African-American adults under correctional control — in prison or jail, on probation or parole — than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began.” -- NYT

Michelle Rhee's Test Cheating 

“My speculation: They didn’t want to hear what I had to say."  -- Former D.C. Principal Adell Cothorne on Frontline 

Norm Fruchter 

So counter to the mayor and the former chancellor’s assertions, ZIP code, race or ethnicity and income still strongly determine students’ academic outcomes across the city’s classrooms. -- "Demography & Destiny: College Readiness in New York"

 Charles Krauthammer

Larger Sandy Relief Bill Was "Rape Of The Treasury" -- Huffington

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Duncan remains

"We came out of the gates flying" in the first term, he said, and he plans to "replicate that as much as we can." -- Edweek

Michelle Rhee on Duncan

"The signaling by Secretary Duncan that he will continue for another term is an enormous win for children." -- Huffington

Bobby Jindal says something stupid

Republicans "need to stop saying stupid things... We're not the party of big—big businesses, big banks, big Wall Street, big bailouts." -- The Hill

School districts brace for more cuts

“It in essence widens the gaps between the haves and have-nots,” said Daniel A. Domenech, executive director of the American Association of School Administrators. “The wealthy suburban communities that receive very little federal funding — it’s not going to have much impact on them.” -- NYT

Michigan affirmative action ban overturned

 George Washington, the Detroit lawyer who argued the case, said  “The Big Lie told by the supporters of Proposal 2 is that grades and test scores are a neutral means for judging merit,” he said. “But that system is openly biased against black, Latino and Native American applicants.” -- NYT

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Election Results

"Mitt Romney is the president of white male America." -- Maureen Dowd, NYT 

Rehabilitating Michelle Rhee 

Debate about how to improve schools will continue, as in the sadly effective effort by the teachers union in Chicago and in some election-day initiatives to defeat reform. Evidence that the common-sense changes engineered by Ms. Rhee are paying off should be part of the discussion and hopefully will spur other systems to follow the District’s lead. -- Washington Post editorial

Testing: Enough is enough

About a month and a half ago, astute journalists covering the historic Chicago teachers’ strike realized the issues brought up by the strike weren’t just about money, but were also a reaction to the tsunami of testing that is overwhelming teachers and students. -- Lisa Guisbond of FairTest

'YOLO --"You only live once"

  738 minutes in 3 weeks

In my school, in just three weeks’ time, I have calculated that we spent 738 minutes (12 hours and 18 minutes) on preparing for and administering standardized tests. -- Adam Heenan, WaPo

The Government and the Storm

Over the past four decades we have sown the seeds of privatization and relentlessly eroded our public services. With Katrina, Irene and Sandy — and more names surely to come — we are reaping the whirlwind. -- Kenneth M. Coughlin. Letter to the Times

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

On Sunday afternoon, nearly 1,000 people, practically all of them African American, answered Ed Gardner’s call to rally at 95th and Western to protest the continued lack of black workers on construction sites in Chicago.|

Mary Mitchell

They were young and old, teachers and parents, churchgoers and hell-raisers, politicians and their bashers marching alongside the well-to-do and those not doing so well. Protesters converged from both directions on Western — at times spilling out into the street and stopping traffic between 95th and 91st and Western, chanting: “If we don’t work. No one works.”  -- Sun-Times  

Carl Hiaasen 

Next time you reach for Angel Soft toilet paper, think of the Koch brothers. -- Miami Herald

Michelle Rhee

 Although his stance made perfect sense to me, it surprised many political observers. After all, Emanuel is a favorite within the Democratic Party, and teachers unions have long been allied with the party. --  Charleston Daily Mail, "Democrats need to stand up to teachers"

Kathryn Strom

The “no excuses” rhetoric (i.e, “poverty is not an excuse for failure”) is one that is dearly beloved by the corporate education reformers  because it allows them to perpetuate (what many recognize to be) the American myth of meritocracy and continue the privatization movement under the guise of “improving schools” while avoiding addressing deeply entrenched inequities that exist in our society and are perpetuated by school structures. -- Washington Post, "The bottom line on ‘no excuses’ and poverty in school reform"

Jay Mathews

The best charters don’t use the assessment systems reformers want regular schools to use.  -- Washington Post, Class Struggle

Good riddance, Gen. Tata

Sara Palin and Gen. Tata hawking their books. 

If there was ever a guy you would never want to run your public schools, it was Brigadier General Anthony J. Tata. But after a brief stint at Eli Broad's training camp for school superintendents, Michelle Rhee brought him in as her second in command in D.C.

Then Tata became fast friends with Sarah Palin, and wrote a glowing review of her book, "Going Rogue," on the Big Hollywood site operated by the late wing-nut journo-goofball Andrew Breitbart. Tata wrote that Palin "is far more qualified to be president of the United States than the current occupant of the White House" and that the she is "precisely the kind of leader America needs."

I guess that wasn't enough of a clue for the embattled Wake County, N.C. School Board who hired Tata  as their schools chief to take command of the board's re-segregation initiative. The program, pushed mainly by Republican school board members, backed by national tea party conservatives, was aimed at reversing years of gains by the North Carolina civil rights movement. Pledging to "say no to the social engineers!" the board rolled back one of the nation's most celebrated integration efforts.

Tata was up to the task. When asked if it's the school districts job to promote diversity Tata said, "I think it's the school systems responsibility to insure student achievement happens in every single school."

"I'm talking about diversity sir," ABC11 I-Team reporter Jon Camp said. "I'm talking about achievement," Tata replied. 

Yesterday it was announced that Gen. Tata has been given the boot after six to eight months of "strained relations" between T-bagger Tata and the Democratis on the school board.

According to NewsObserver.com, "Tata and his staff made rough going out of situations such as the rollout last week of a test version of an address-based assignment plan."  That's another way of saying re-segregation of Wake County schools.

Good riddance Tata.

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Rauner's revolution

In any case, Rauner sees the strike as the start of "a multi-year revolution." His reactionary "revolution" imposed from above, however, now faces a revolution from below. -- David Moberg, In These Times

Poverty's death sentence

“We’re used to looking at groups and complaining that their mortality rates haven’t improved fast enough, but to actually go backward is deeply troubling,” said John G. Haaga, head of the Population and Social Processes Branch of the National Institute on Aging. -- N.Y. Times

Apartheid schooling in U.S.

 "Simply sitting next to a white student does not guarantee better educational outcomes for students of color," the report reads. "Instead, the resources that are consistently linked to predominantly white and/or wealthy schools help foster real and serious educational advantages over minority segregated settings." -- Study's author, The Root

Maureen Dowd

As a candidate, Mitt Romney is awkward, off-putting and hollow, so bad that if he were a Bain company, he would shut himself down. -- N.Y. Times

Jay Mathews

The team that former chancellor Michelle Rhee brought in five years ago, including current chancellor Kaya Henderson, can’t explain what it will do differently in the next five years. Even worse, the new goals might inspire more of the corner-cutting and dishonesty that have tainted the effort to help kids. -- Washington Post.

D.C. mass teacher firings and Randi's "new unionism"

Back in 2009 in D.C., the union's acceptance of the  IMPACT Evaluation System marked the start of what Randi Weingarten now refers to as "results-based" unionism. IMPACT drew national attention as one of the first attempts to link teacher pay and job security with classroom performance measured largely by student scores on high-stakes standardized tests. Weingarten's current new unionism approach calls for similar collaborations on merit pay and test-based teacher evaluation. 

The D.C. Teachers Union went along with Michelle Rhee's plan, supposedly in order to gain a seat at the table and avert even more draconian measures. But even though the union leadership bought into IMPACT, many rank-and-file teachers opposed Rhee's mass firings in exchange for merit-pay for the teachers. Rhee's IMPACT program proved to be full of holes. Her polices were soon met with voter revolt against her patron, Mayor Fenty and Rhee got the boot under new Mayor Vincent Gray. 

Rhee is gone but the district is still practicing Rhee-form under the new regime even though Gray has voiced concern that IMPACT is unfair to teachers working in the city’s poorest neighborhoods, where many children come to school with intensive needs. IMPACT still survives and the union is still going along with it. Today it was announced that 98 teachers are being fired under the rules of IMPACT agreed on under the contract. By the way, no charter school teachers are being fired. The numbers released Wednesday include only teachers in traditional public schools. Public charter schools have latitude to use their own evaluations.

The chickens have come home to roost.