Double win in GA could provide resources needed for a safe national school-reopening campaign

What a great double victory in GA! I stayed up most of the night watching the results come in like any good political junkie would. Now I'm trying to unwind and crank out a blog post before grabbing some badly-needed shut-eye. 

Wins for John Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, against tough odds, open up new possibilities for Biden to transcend his "bi-partisan" fantasy and advance a progressive agenda that begins to undo much of the damage from the Trump era. As of this writing, Warnock has been declared the winner while Ossoff's lead of 16,370 votes is now greater than that of Joe Biden's over Donald Trump in Georgia (11,779 votes). 

I'm imagining with glee how DT must be beating up on his white supremacist toadies Loeffler and Perdue, over losing to a Jewish liberal and the Black preacher from Dr. King's old Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta.

Thanks and some dough should go out to all the organizers on the ground throughout the state, led of course by Stacey Abrams and her statewide political organization as well as many union brothers and sisters from around the country (including Chicago) and the multi-racial movement of the poor and civil rights groups who have been plowing the Georgian political fields for decades. 

That progressive agenda includes real federal pandemic relief (immediately including $2,000 checks), rent, and debt-relief for those working, unemployed and poor families in greatest need and aggressively leading the war against COVID. 

It must also include a massive program of relief for public school systems ravaged under Betsy DeVos and her predecessors, as well as support for a national reopening of schools on the scale of the Marshall Plan. This federal initiative needs to be put in place apart from or alongside current hit-or-miss efforts by local school boards, many of which have been marked by confusion and division at a time when trust, clarity, and unity in the community are necessary prereqs. 

The key to a safe, full-scale reopening is prioritizing teachers and school staff for vaccination. They should be classified nationally as essential workers with schools used centers for vaccine distribution and community health education.

I'll be talking more about reopening our schools tonight at 10 ET on the Rick Smith Show. Tune in at thericksmithshow.com. 

The path towards safe school reopenings

Chicago has plans for a phased school reopening starting in January if the spread of the virus stabilizes, but the local teachers’ union says cases remain too high. Credit...Taylor Glascock for The New York Times

I don't see any pathway to safe urban school reopenings without first classifying teachers and school staff as essential, frontline workers, and putting them near the top of the vaccine priority list. This should be part of a national campaign championed by the incoming Sec. of Education. Schools should also become centers for mass community inoculation. 

Two things are clear to me. Schools can't open without support from a critical mass of teachers and teachers aren't going to be bullied back into the classroom without evidence that those classrooms are reasonably safe. 

The nation’s roughly three million full-time teachers are already considered essential workers by the C.D.C., which means that in states that follow federal recommendations, they are already eligible to receive the vaccine after hospital employees and nursing home residents.

But, says the New York Times...

The essential worker group is huge — some 87 million Americans — and states will have flexibility in how they prioritize within that population. Many more people work in schools than just teachers, including nurses, janitors, and cafeteria workers, and it is unclear how many of them would be included on the high-priority list.

Last month, more than 10 educational organizations, including the nation’s two largest teachers’ unions, wrote to the C.D.C. asking that school employees be considered a priority group.

But even after educators are inoculated, lots of other measures will need to be put in place before city classrooms can be truly considered safe learning places for both teachers and students. Even after being vaccinated, Teachers could still be silent spreaders. Schools will likely need to continue requiring masks and distancing students for many months until community spread has sharply dropped. 

Public school educators and outside experts need to consider radical school redesigns to meet community needs in the pandemic and post-pandemic era. But that kind of project will require massive federal and state resources and an effort to find common ground between school boards, big-city mayors, and the unions. Either on the national from or here in Chicago, I don't see that happening for the time being.

Certainly not without Democrats in control of the Senate, and even then... 

Cardona & Fenwick

CHOOSING HIS ED SECRETARY...It looks like President-elect Biden is finally close to naming his education secretary. His people just dropped the names of two short-listed candidates to the Washington Post -- Howard University emeritus Ed School Dean Leslie Fenwick and Miguel Cardona, the commissioner of schools in Connecticut.

I don't know much about either one. So I'll go by WaPo's description of each:

Fenwick is a Black woman, and Cardona is a Latino man. Both have experience as classroom teachers, though Fenwick has worked as a dean and scholar in higher education for many years...

...Fenwick has criticized education programs such as Teach For America — a nonprofit that for years recruited only new college graduates, gave them five weeks of summer training and placed them in high-need schools — and the move to inject competition and corporate-inspired management techniques into schools. She’s also spoken against for-profit charter schools and taxpayer-funded private school vouchers.

... Cardona sees an urgency to in-person school and has pushed districts to offer that to parents, said spokesman Peter Yazbak.

“His position has been that in-person learning is the way that we best address the educational crisis caused by the closure of schools last spring,” he said. “A lot of people who are not from Connecticut assume that Connecticut is just Greenwich. But we have a lot of urban districts with students who have social and emotional needs as well as academic needs. The best way for them to get the services they need is in school, with counselors and their teachers.”

Even though they bring different perspectives to the table, they both sound pretty good to me, especially considering the misleadership we've had atop the D.O.E. for the past two decades. I wonder if there's a way to combine the two of them in one cabinet post?

New Deal for Education needed if schools are to reopen safely

Chicago daycares and private schools report 495 Covid cases, but numbers don’t tell the whole story: “From April 1 through mid-October, the city has tracked 267 cases in child care centers, 207 in private and charter schools that offer some in-person instruction, and 21 at in-person park district camps. Most of those cases, though, involved adults — 90 cases in daycares, 145 cases in schools, and five at camps involved students,” reports Chalkbeat Chicago’s Mila Koumpilova.

The Illinois Department of Public Health on Tuesday reported 79 new deaths and 12,623 new confirmed and probable cases of the coronavirus disease. That’s a total of 10,289 deaths and 511,183 cases in Illinois. The preliminary seven-day statewide positivity for cases as a percent of total test from Nov. 3 through 9 is 12.0 percent. Chicago’s positivity rate is at 13 percent.

Despite these numbers, it looks like the Chicago School Board is moving ahead with its plan for hybrid-opening. While Mayor Lightfoot and city health commissioner Dr. Allison Arwady haven't set a return date, planning for in-person schooling is clearly underway.

I'm all in favor of planning now for an eventual opening of schools, but strongly opposed to school openings at a time like this, with new Covid cases at record levels. The risks are just too great.

Schools here and around the country, public and private, should open gradually only when outside conditions improve (ie. a vaccine) and only then when their facilities are deemed safe with policies in place to ensure student, teacher, and staff safety. That is certainly not the case now.

Planning for a reopening also needs to transcend the immediate logistical problems and include a total and radical revisioning of equitable and democratic schooling, school and curriculum design on a human scale, and use of technology in the post-pandemic era. 

Reopening can't be done unilaterally. There needs to be a collaborative effort between the school board, communities, and the teachers union. 

I'm still looking for leadership to step forward on that one, given the deep and wide political divisions among city Democrats. But I'm keeping hope alive. 

Hopefully, the Biden administration will make public ed a top priority and move immediately to provide the massive resources needed for all this. That should be our number-one demand on the new ed secretary, no matter who it is. Without those resources -- well over $1 trillion for starters -- no real progress is possible.

A LEGIT CASE FOR REOPENING NOW...I also realize that those favoring reopening now or soon have a legit case. I know, for example, that the Board and the mayor are being pressured by lots of parents who say they can no longer afford to stay home with their children during the day, who risk losing their jobs and possibly their health insurance, or who lack the resources and capacity for viable homeschooling.

For some, keeping kids at home for an extended period may expose them to even greater health and security risks than sending them to school. For others, schools provide a sense of community and mutual support that has been missing during the pandemic.

Some kind of accommodation has to be made available to them. More importantly, Congress needs to immediately pass the stimulus bill to offer relief to families, schools, and small businesses. 

ETHS students and coach try and deal with the shooting death of Ryan Bost while school remains closed.

The case for reopening was powerfully and emotionally made yesterday by Mike Ellis, the basketball coach at Evanston Township High School following the fatal shooting of one of his former players, Ryan Bost.

“It’s challenging right now to try and make sure all the kids are ok,” Ellis said. “If we had in-school learning we’d be meeting and just able to be with one another and talk. We are going to do a Zoom meeting to try to bring everybody together but a Zoom meeting doesn’t have the same influence it would in person.”

The AAP's school guidance principles don't align with Trump/DeVos mandated reopening.

In Germany, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and many other countries, SCHOOLS ARE OPEN WITH NO PROBLEMS. The Dems think it would be bad for them politically if U.S. schools open before the November Election, but is important for the children & families. May cut off funding if not open!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 8, 2020

President Trump and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos are threatening to cut federal funding if schools don't fully physically reopen in the fall, regardless of the state of the pandemic and with or without required CDC safety measures being in place.

They may think they think their reckless mandate is supported by the highly respected American Academy of Pediatrics. But it isn't. At least not if I'm reading the AAP's planning recommendations for school reopening correctly.

The AAP, the professional organization of pediatricians, would like to see schools reopen safely in the fall, as would most of us, especially most working families. But the timing of this report left some wondering if these experts on pediatric care were fronting for Trump and the mainly Republican early-openers who have driven up the deadly coronavirus caseload numbers across the country.

The organization “strongly advocates that all policy considerations for the coming school year should start with the goal of having students physically present in school” -- and the reasons are not just about academics.

The importance of in-person learning is well-documented, and there is already evidence of the negative impacts on children because of school closures in the spring of 2020. Lengthy time away from school and associated interruption of supportive services often results in social isolation, making it difficult for schools to identify and address important learning deficits as well as child and adolescent physical or sexual abuse, substance use, depression, and suicidal ideation. This, in turn, places children and adolescents at considerable risk of morbidity and, in some cases, mortality. Beyond the educational impact and social impact of school closures, there has been substantial impact on food security and physical activity for children and families.

But the AAP guidance goes on to present an extensive list of key principles that should be considered in the course of any reopening. The list includes elements like physical distancing requirements, protective equipment, cohort crossovers, school visitors, common and outdoor space (playgrounds and hallways), on-site health and counseling, special education services, block scheduling in high schools, cleaning and disinfection, and virologic testing and screening and much more.

This one is interesting.

The personal impact on educators and other school staff should be recognized. In the same way that students are going to need support to effectively return to school and to be prepared to be ready to process the information they are being taught, teachers cannot be expected to be successful at teaching children without having their mental health needs supported. 

Do you know of any schools or school districts that can have all or any of these in place in the next six to eight weeks, especially with existing budget and personnel constraints? I sure don't.

The list is comprehensive and makes for a great framework or checklist for educators and school planners. A serious review of the guidance should make it clear that its scope and required planning time and the extra resources needed for implementation fly directly in the face of the Trump/DeVos demands for a fall opening with no money or prerequisites attached.

A Dystopian Vision Of American Education

In the wake of the latest wave of politically-driven, mostly white, male supremacist terrorism that left at least 31 dead in El Paso and Dayton, Trump and the Republicans are scrambling to create a narrative that acquits them and their leadership of culpability and collusion in the bloody affair.

In the past few days, the GOP line has shifted blame away from Trump's demagogic violent appeals to his racist supporters, on to the mentally ill, video games, and "fake news".

That was exactly the imagery laid out in the El Paso shooter's "manifesto".

Their narrative portrays America as a holy battlefield in a war in defense of white, christian values and a future of Republican political power.

It now includes a dystopian vision of schools as armed camps with gun-toting teachers, cops and militia surrounding school buildings and waiting for the invading enemy of infidels to make their next move.

This represents a giant-step past their previous neoliberal vision of school "choice".

Their current line was best articulated by Trump adviser Sean Hannity yesterday. The Fox News host is calling for a volunteer army of armed ex-cops and soldiers that would be “everywhere.”

"I'd like to see the perimeter of every school in America surrounded, secured by retired police ... have one armed guard on every floor of every school, all over every mall, the perimeter and inside every hall of every mall."

“Every school,” Hannity said. “Secure the perimeter of those schools. Equip them with retired police and military, they should be on every floor of every school.”

There are close to 100,000 public and 35,000 private K-12 schools in the United States so a force large enough to “surround the perimeter” and be on each floor would require several hundred thousand people, if not more. -- Huffington Post

Aside from the fascist, police state implications, school safety and curricular issues involved in all this, Hannity's plan leaves me wondering how it matches up with veteran cops' view of their own retirement. 

I may be wrong, but I can't imagine that hundreds of thousands of veteran 1st-responders are dreaming about spending their golden years guarding the perimeters of schools and shopping malls for no pay, instead of fishing or hanging out with the grand kids. 

Deplorables are jumping for joy at the reports that the Dayton shooter wasn't a Trump-supporting white supremacist. But I don't see why they're so happy. Here's an early report on what motivated this 2nd-Amendment gun freak.

High school classmates of the gunman who killed nine people early Sunday in Dayton, Ohio, say he was suspended for compiling a "hit list" of those he wanted to kill and a "rape list" of girls he wanted to sexually assault. https://t.co/lEAGcCTOwW

— KTLA (@KTLA) August 5, 2019

Arm this guy with a military-style assault weapon? Great say Republicans.

We need a radical change in the way we rate our schools

You know, buy a house near a Level 1 school and pay $20K more for not much of a house. 

"Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself." -- John Dewey

Watching my 2-year-old granddaughter, Izzy, learn is one of the great pleasures in my life. Whether she's helping her grandma cook up some eggs, finding a worm while digging on the lawn, pedaling a trike, or stomping around with a tap dancer at a recent birthday party, it's a joy to actually watch her grow and develop physically and intellectually at the moment it's happening.

It's authentic learning. No standardized testing required.

I bring this up once more after reading about another CPS plan to tweak the way the system rates its schools; i.e., Level 1, Level 2, Level 3, etc...  in a high-stakes competition where the loser may have their school closed. I always thought these ratings were more for the benefit of realtors than educators. You know, buy a house near a Level 1 school and pay $20K more for not much of a house.

The new tweaked plan will be presented at Wednesday's first meeting of the mayor's newly-appointed school board.

According to Chalkbeat:

Chicago Public Schools has proposed tweaking its school rating policy to reflect how well elementary schools prepare students for high school and how well high schools help students plan life after graduation — and the district also will finally grade dozens of specialty high schools that had lacked rating systems.

CPS says its School Quality Rating Policy (SQRP) is "a five-tiered performance system based on a broad range of indicators of success, including, but not limited to, student test score performance, student academic growth, closing of achievement gaps, school culture and climate, attendance, graduation, and preparation for post-graduation success."

To tell you the truth, I don't care that much whether or not the board tweaks or doesn't tweak. Neither do I care what indicators they add or take away behind student test scores -- the only ones that really count in the current system.

I certainly don't know what is meant by "post-graduation success." Success at what? Do schools even track their former students to find out if they have been successful (as good, productive citizens, small-d democrats, parents, lovers, artists, poets, scientists, athletes...)?

This whole approach to rating schools and pitting them against one another should be dumped as it does great harm to children and educators and hits especially hard at communities of color which have been devastated by mass school closings.

But there is one part of the current policy I especially take issue with. I don't like the language of preparation and how it's used in its narrowest form. The purpose of current schooling, it seems, is to prepare the student for the next grade, the next school, college, job training and then life. What that language misses is the value of authentic learning ("education is life") and the relationship between school, teacher, student, parent and society. Children learn best when they are engaged with other children and adults in important, meaningful, enjoyable work. Adults do as well.

If by preparation we mean preparing students to be good citizens and active participants in a democratic society, then I am down with it. If it's simply job training for prep for the next round of testing, then I'm not.

Yes, schools do it differently and some do it better than others. But current standards and tests don't seem to get at that. What the scores do reflect much more, is poverty.

I wish the new school board the best of luck in their effort to save and transform CPS. The mayor couldn't have picked a better group to take on this enormous task. I hope the board includes in its agenda, plans for a radical change in the way we evaluate schools.

Are schools really 'too small' to succeed?

Blaming school closings on small size is like shooting someone and then claiming they died from a lack of blood.

We started the Small Schools Workshop back in 1991 based on an abundance of research showing that smaller, more personalized learning environments served children and their families better and were generally safer than large mega-schools. Then we worked with teachers, schools and school districts across the country who wanted to rethink school design, curriculum, assessment, and issues of democracy and equity to create small learning environments as a critical force within the public school system.

Parents and educators created hundreds of new, highly-autonomous small, many of them teacher-led schools and restructured large high schools into smaller learning communities. This was back before the power philanthropists like Gates, Broad and Walton entered the picture and leveraged billions of dollars in grants to turn small-by-design schools into privately-run charters where unions were banned and teachers disempowered.

The Small Schools Movement, was just that -- a movement of teachers -- with close connection to parents and communities. It was the antithesis of today's so-called "choice" movement, where schools choose kids and test-scores rule the roost.

Smallering urban schools...From the beginning, we made it clear that these new schools and learning communities needed to be small by design, not by attrition. So I once again got that bizarro-world feeling when I read this headline in Sunday's Chicago Tribune:

SHRINKING HIGH SCHOOLS TOO SMALL TO SUCCEED?

The article barely scratches the surface of the historical issues facing Chicago's racially segregated and inequitable school system and is basically a defense of the Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and his hand-picked school board for their latest round of school closings. Like the 50 closings in 2013, these latest are all in the black community and are being carried out under the banner of "under-utilization". Like their predecessors, the closed schools will leave thousands of students in limbo and neighborhoods blighted. They will also serve as an addition to the long list of reasons black families are leaving Chicago by the thousands.

According to the Trib:

In Chicago, where funding follows students, Tilden is one of more than a dozen shrinking neighborhood high schools that has been starved of resources, leaving students like Averett to prepare for their futures in largely empty buildings that can make dreaming big a daily struggle.

 Nearly all of these 17 high schools are deeply segregated, serving impoverished African-American and Latino students who already struggle to attend and graduate from college at comparable rates to their white or Asian peers. Yet many of these schools cannot offer what are considered basic classes elsewhere, including the bare trio of science courses that will soon be part of a new district graduation requirement.

Now, as many of these schools continue to shrink and Chicago approaches the end of a five-year school closing moratorium, civic and community leaders must weigh whether some of these buildings are too small to succeed.

The writers place the onus on the schools for being "too small to succeed" as if someone consciously chose 250 as the optimal capacity size for these high schools. Like this just happened and without even an attempt to question what "success" means under current conditions. It's as if surrounding these schools with privately-run, better-resourced charters and selective-enrollment schools had nothing to do with their decreasing populations.

And all that begs the deeper question of how these same schools went from being too big in the 1980s and '90s, to too small in just a couple of decades? Of course, they didn't just become small but were the product of planned isolation, disinvestment, and disempowerment of Chicago's black  communities.

There are many other reasons, including the out-migration of more than quarter-million African-Americans from Chicago in the past few decades. But none of them occurred just naturally. Most of the reasons are systemic and the result of policies of disinvestment, ie. closings of plants, factories and surrounding business, cuts in social services, closing of medical clinics and mental health facilities, and now schools.

The same monumental demographic shifts are happening in every major city in the country and are impacting investments and therefore measurable outcomes, often in dramatic ways.

So the question isn't whether some schools in disintegrating neighborhoods are now smaller. Of course they are. It's like shooting someone and then claiming they died from a lack of blood. Wealthy families pay a small fortune to get their kids into smaller, more personalized schools. Rather, it's about adequate and equitable funding and support for public schools and their communities during these times of rapid change.

No, don't leave minimum wage, testing, or school deseg to the states

Just got a robocall from CTU organizer Brandon Johnson reminding me to call my state senator (Iris Martinez) and push for passage of HB557, the elected school board bill. So I did. Thanks Brandon.

Donald Trump now says, he supports a raise in the minimum wage. Good thing I'm wearing my flood pants. The campaign bullshit is already ankle-deep.

On NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday, Trump told Chuck Todd, “I don’t know how people make it on $7.25.” Soon after, on ABC’s “This Week,” the Republican added, “I haven’t decided in terms of numbers, but I think people have to get more.”

 TODD: Right. You want the fed– but should the federal government set a floor, and then you let the states– 

TRUMP: No, I’d rather have the states go out and do what they have to do. And the states compete with each other, not only other countries, but they compete with each other, Chuck. So I like the idea of let the states decide. But I think people should get more. I think they’re out there. They’re working. It is a very low number. You know, with what’s happened to the economy, with what’s happened to the cost. I mean, it’s just– I don’t know how you live on $7.25 an hour. But I would say let the states decide.

I haven't heard so much states-rights pandering since the Supreme Court ruled on Brown vs. Board of Ed in '54,  when the big scare in Dixie was that the federal gov't was going to force school desegregation at gun-point upon the states. That sure as hell didn't happen. Did it?

Ironically, it was Pres. Obama's right-hand man in education, Arne Duncan, who undercut the Justice Dept's own move against Louisiana's use of vouchers and charter schools to promote re-segregation. Duncan's argument against "forced integration" echoed those of AR Gov. Orville Faubus and AL police chief "Bull" Conner in the '50s.

Trump says, let the states compete over minimum wage with corporate-tool govs like Bobby Jindal in LA, Bruce Rauner in IL, Scott Walker in WI, or John Kasich in OH leading the charge. Great plan, Trumpf. Isn't that what we have now? MW will be down to a dollar a day.

As a direct result of the Fight For 15 Movement, several cities have already passed $15/hr. minimum-wage ordinances on their own. And guess what? The Golden Gate Bridge hasn't fallen into the bay. In fact, biz is booming wherever the MW is the highest. Companies are not fleeing San Francisco, Pittsburgh, L.A., or N.Y.  A federal minimum-wage floor would ensure that they can't.

But Trump isn't the only one raising up the new states-rights banner. After all, isn't that the gist of the new national education law that even the teacher unions are raving about?

Pres. Obama signs new ESSA law. 

ESSA supposedly ends the years of testing madness imposed by the DOE (good) and greatly limits the federal government’s control of education policy that began in 1965 when the original Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) passed as part of President Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty.

I guess the war is over. Poverty won.

But there's no indication that leaving testing (or poverty) in the hands of the states will eliminate or reduce testing madness or improve learning outcomes.

Arguments for or against federal power mean little without content. Yes, keep big gov't (state and federal) hands off our cell phones, churches and out of our bed rooms. Cut the Pentagon war machine, yes.

But on things like environmental protection, federal lands and national parks, enforcement of civil rights law, gun control, and protection of our drinking water (Flint, MI) -- hands on.

As for unrestricted states power over education, take a look at what's going on in IL.

Chicago Public Schools are now 10 months without a budget. Gov. Rauner continues to hold the budget hostage, hoping for a pro-business, "grand bargain" with Boss Madigan that includes draconian cuts to social services and the neutering of the state's teacher unions. State colleges universities like Chicago State, are on the brink of collapse and corrupt charter school networks like UNO are laughing all the way to the bank.

Where are you feds?

L.A.'s mega-high school

$578 million, 4,200 kids

I guess the small-schools movement is dead in my old home town, where 3,000 teachers have been laid off and where class size in many city high schools is up to over 50 students.

With an eye-popping price tag of $578 million, it will mark the inauguration of the nation's most expensive public school ever. The K-12 complex to house 4,200 students has raised eyebrows across the country as the creme de la creme of "Taj Mahal" schools, $100 million-plus campuses boasting both architectural panache and deluxe amenities. (AP)

From the name, Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools (what community?) I assume that they will divide the monster into smaller learning communities of some sort. But still...

Don't get me wrong. I like the "panache" and "deluxe amenities." But L.A. continues it's huge school tradition with disastrous results--high dropout rates & school violence. Let's just hope the new Kennedy Complex isn't being built on a toxic site or earthquake fault, like L.A.'s last mega school, the Belmont Learning Center--now the Roybal Learning Center. .

Whose idea was this, Donald Trump? No. The Donald wanted to build the world's tallest building on the sight.

NYT editorial got it wrong on small schools

The Times lauds the reported success of NY small schools as shown in a recent MDRC study. The benefits of small schools and smaller learning communities are well known and have been documented in study after study (including my own) for many years. But the editorial, puts its own spin on the research and credits that success to Bloomberg's school closing policies and top-down reform strategy.

The study validates the small school policies of the Bloomberg administration, which has shut down 20 large, failing high schools and replaced them with more than 200 small schools, about half of which were the focus of this study. 

Nothing could be further from the truth. The Times confuses authentic small schools with Bloomberg/Klein's chains of privately-managed charter schools which were imposed on protesting communities and implanted in neighborhood school facilities. Several recent studies has found those charters to be no better and often worse than the closed neighborhood schools they replaced.

Of course there is some overlap between charter schools and small schools, a point not taken into account in the recent study, paid for by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (isn't everything these days?) hardly a disinterested party when it comes to proving the efficacy of its own investments. Most charters are small and they have benefited from the positives that small size brings, including stronger relationships be tween teachers and students and opt-in by parents and students. But those benefits, when gained Bloomberg-style, often come at the expense of the majority of neighborhood schools, students, parents and teachers. They have become part of the mayor's reconfigured two-tier school system.

The city's authentic small schools, teacher-led charters, and Smaller Learning Communities (SLC) where teachers have lots of autonomy and collective-bargaining rights, largely preceded Bloomberg's administration and have managed to survive the privatization assaults and still shine as models of socially-just, community-based alternatives. Many were created through a genuine reform process taken on by teachers themselves. These schools were largely abandoned by Gates and other mega-foundations on the grounds that their test scores weren't high enough, fast enough.

What's interesting about the MDRC study is that it doesn't focus on standardized test scores, but rather on graduation rates and course-passing rates. Bloomberg would never allow this kind of evaluation for neighborhood schools.

Small schools' success has come despite Bloomberg/Klein's policies, not because of them.

The Times got it wrong again.

Rethinking school design

The Third Teacher

A new push to change schools and education is coming from an unlikely source. It’s not teachers, parents, or students. It’s coming from architects and designers. They hope to start a movement to rethink the design of schools and schoolyards, to improve teaching and learning. (Interview at City Room)

Report: 'Schools are safer without metal detectors'

The NYCLU, the Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University, and Make the Road New York have released a report arguing that schools can create a safer environment without metal detectors and harsh discipline. (Gothamist)

Included in the report, this factoid:

The police force in New York City schools is now the fifth largest police force in the country—there are more police in New York City schools than there are on the streets of cities such as Baltimore, Las Vegas, Boston and Washington D.C.

******

PURE does some good reporting on the "turnarounds" in Chicago including this on turnaround "model" AUSL. It also turns out that Julie at PURE had beaten me to the punch on the suppression of the SRI report. She noted back in May that the critical report on Renaissance 2010 had been "purposely delayed."

******

Minneapolis charter advocate Joe Nathan doesn't like the "false choice" between charters and district schools. He says research shows both district and charter schools vary enormously in their effectiveness. So lumping them together makes little sense, and doesn't help improve any classrooms.

******

This week's stupid headline award goes to Chicago Public Radio (WBEZ). Since when is firing every teacher in a school, a "radical school reform?" What's next, firing all the surgeons in a hospital for some radical health care reform?

Weekend Reads

More bad news for Klein's Leadership Academy

...An analysis by The New York Times of the city’s signature report-card system shows that schools run by graduates of the celebrated New York City Leadership Academy — which the mayor created and helped raise more than $80 million for — have not done as well as those led by experienced principals or new principals who came through traditional routes.

But...

Mr. Turay, who is 57 and has worked in city schools for 24 years, prefers the new system, or at least the small-school environment. “I didn’t know kids, I didn’t know parents,” he said of his days at Evander Childs. “I couldn’t tell if I helped anyone, really.”

Transparency is "too seductive"

Rotherham wants the education stimulus money to be used to push more top-down "reform"on districts by threatening to withhold funding. Transparency, he claims, "offers the seductive promise of an easy way out for policymakers." (U.S. News & World Report)

Grants for new school designs

KnowledgeWorks Foundation and the American Architectural Foundation seek submissions for the Richard Riley Award, which recognizes design and educational excellence in "schools as centers of community" -- schools that provide an array of social, civic, recreational, and artistic opportunities to the broader community and to students, often clustering educational and municipal buildings together. Maximum award: $10,000. Eligibility: all existing elementary and secondary public schools. Deadline: July 1, 2009. http://www.nationalschoolsearch.org/en/Index.html