'More losers than winners'

Forbes interviews the Sec. of Ed. on Race-To-The-Top

It's a free-market-style competition, and Duncan warns in an interview with Forbes that when the results are announced in April, there will be "more losers than winners." (Obama's Classroom Fixer)

Will "V.D." finally do the time?

They called him "Fast Eddie" back in the day, when he led the Democratic machine's racist assault on Chicago's first black mayor, Harold Washington. But we just called him, "V.D." Ed Vrdolyak was finally convicted last February after he collected illegal kickbacks in a crooked $1.5 million school construction land deal. But a crony U.S. District Judge, Milton Shadur, let V.D. walk free.

Today's Sun-Times reports that Vrdolyak’s probation-only sentence for fraud has been overturned by an appellate panel, meaning he could face prison time when he is re-sentenced. We're still waiting.

What passes for reform in Illinois

More RTTT testing madness

The most provocative reforms will replace the elementary school ISAT with a tougher exam, mandate testing at every grade and rate teachers and principals based on students' test results. (Tribune)

Bloomberg/Klein closing NYC schools but...

Replacing them with what?

Juan Gonzalez, in today's Daily News,

Hours after rebuffing parents and voting to shut 19 public schools, education officials announced plans to end most programs at Alfred E. Smith High in the Bronx and replace them with a charter school. That charter school, however, has its own troubled history. Read the rest here.

The DN carried another Gonzalez story on Wednesday, "Public sentiment has turned against Mayor Bloomberg's dictatorial school reforms" following the all-night protest against the mayor's school closing.

Daley appoints another fixer as board president

Daley said he does not "condone any misuse of taxpayers' money by anyone, no matter who it is."--Clout Street

Mayor Daley has appointed another of his trusted political manager/fixers to become the next president of the the Board of Education. Mary Richardson-Lowry, a corporate lawyer from the power-house Mayer Brown Rowe & Maw law firm, served as a City Hall counsel and Daley-appointed building commissioner. She also led the transition team for then-incoming County Board President Todd Stroger. She brings with her, no background in public education except for the fact that (like Arne Duncan) her mother was a teacher.

According to Catalyst,

Richardson-Lowry left the building commissioner post days after an accident at the John Hancock Center, where scaffolding plunged more than 40 floors to the ground during a wind storm and killed three women. But a city spokesperson said Richardson-Lowry’s departure had nothing to do with the accident.

Richardson-Lowry comes to a school board in the midst of a major scandal and her appointment will do little to change CPS image as an annex of City Hall, rife with corruption and patronage. The last two board presidents, Michael Scott (who committed suicide in November) and Rufus Williams, are the subject of investigations surrounding the misuse of funds. Daley's appointed schools CEO Ron Huberman recently revoked credit cards from 89 CPS bureaucrats. As one would expect, the current investigation is being carefully run by another Daley-appointed lawyer.

Richardson-Lowry's appointment should help keep a lid on the investigation and make sure that there's a firewall between it and the 5th floor of City Hall.

Blogs & Tweets, where do they go?

Yesterday, I was sending around a provocative piece by WaPo ed beat writer, Bill Turque, on the whole Michelle Rhee fiasco, when suddenly, about 7:30 p.m., his story disappeared. When friends went to the link, they were greeted with some kind of "no longer available" sign. I tweeted around, asking, "what happened to Turque?" Nobody seemed to know.

Had the Post editorial board censored him for revealing the disparity between street reporting and editorial decisions re. Rhee? Did Mayor Fenty and Rhee's big-money supporters demand Turque's head? Paranoia runs deep these days.

But as the sun comes up this morning, (everywhere except here in Chicago, I suppose) I see Turque's D.C. Schools Insider column is back on line. Must have been some kind of technical problem, right? But wait a minute. Something has been changed. In the last paragraph of Turque's original piece, he asks:

Are Fenty and Rhee gaming the system by using the editorial page this way? Of course. Is this a healthy thing for readers of The Post? Probably not. Is it going to keep me from doing my job effectively? Nope.

Damn! That was the very line I had pulled out and tweeted about yesterday. But when the column reappeared this morning, the entire last paragraph was missing--except for, "Is it going to keep me from doing my job effectively? Nope." Luckily, I had made a copy of Turque's original column.

Now that last question looms large. As the old saying goes, just because you're paranoid, doesn't mean they're not trying to get you.

Another disappearing Act

This one, not nearly as significant, although still Rhee-related.

On Tuesday, I had a little, not-so-friendly exchange with ed gadfly blogger, Alexander Russo. Russo, in his TWIE blog, had launched a broadside against Rhee's critics, charging them with opportunism for jumping all over the D.C. superintendent for saying:

"I got rid of teachers who had hit children, who had had sex with children, who had missed 78 days of school."

Russo continued his Tweet assault, with the lead-in "I'm no Rhee apologist, but..."

When I responded, Russo took me to task for criticizing Rhee's stupid remarks claiming, I was "defending bad teachers."

But by Wednesday, all of Russo's blog posts about Rhee's statement had vanished along with all of Russo's Tuesday tweets about Rhee. When I and several other bloggers asked him if he had removed them, Russo simply tweeted, "Nope. They're still there."

They aren't. Russo made them go away. Why? Was he embarrassed? If you go to his blog now, you will find a dateline from Sept. 3 instead of his apologies for Rhee's remarks. Strange!

My campaign is over before it has even begun

Betti Cadmus and her book-banning board members in Menifee Union School Dist. undercut my campaign by putting Webster's Dictionary back on the shelves. I didn't even have a chance to send her our list of dirty words culled from Webster's soiled pages. But don't fret wing-nuts. Betti and the gang are allowing parents to have their kids read another version of the dictionary (presumably cleaner). Maybe we should start looking through the Oxford Dictionary. Yes! there it is: ORAL SEX.

I hope my blogs on this topic weren't responsible for Menifee's retreat. I was hoping a banning of the dictionary would increase readership and boost student test scores. Fortunately for them, board members aren't tested.

Duncan's donuts

Did he say it? We're never quite sure

Arne Duncan, who has called for the closing of 5,000 schools, is interviewed by Politico's Mike Allen

DUNCAN: And then finally, having the courage to challenge the status quo, and what we're calling the bottom 1 percent of schools each year; not the 99 percent that are either world-class or they're improving each year, but those schools where the status quo is frankly unacceptable. And when we fail to do our job, when we're not educating, we--we perpetuate poverty.

ALLEN: 99 percent of schools in the country are acceptable?

DUNCAN: I didn't say that.

The BATTLE IN BROOKLYN

By night's end, all the testimony by the community meant nothing to Bloomberg/Klein's Panel. They were going to close 19 city schools no matter what evidence was presented. Here's the last on-the-scene report from Anna & Maura at Gotham Schools.

4 a.m. After a two-hour protest that closed the streets in Fort Greene; nearly nine hours of testimony by concerned elected officials, parents, teachers, and students; and a series of votes that underscored the divide between Mayor Bloomberg and everyone else on school politics, the Panel for Educational Policy determined early this morning that 20 city schools, both young and old, small and large, will begin to close this fall. We’ll have more about the implications of the panel’s decisions starting sometime tomorrow afternoon.

QUOTABLES

Timothy Knowles is director of the University of Chicago’s Urban Education Institute. Here he responds on WBEZ to parents who are trying to save their neighborhood school from being closed.

This is deeper than bad data on standardized test scores. This is about an institution being taken away that my child goes to, I went to, maybe my mother went to. Frankly, it’s about communities, it’s about neighborhoods, it’s about relationships. Data doesn’t tip those things. And the district doesn’t factor those things in to its school closings. Most of Chicago’s closings and turnarounds have taken place in neighborhoods ravaged by poverty.

Knowles says it’s hard to measure the cost of eliminating one of the last remaining institutions in a disinvested neighborhood. If we could measure that, it might make closing schools more of a dilemma.

Alfie Kohn on Edweek's Live Chat

"Assessment systems must be aligned with [national] expectations (standards)." Now there's a sentence that should strike fear in the heart of all good teachers."

Supt. Michelle Rhee referring to 266 laid-off D.C. teachers

"I got rid of teachers who had hit children, who had had sex with children, who had missed 78 days of school. Why wouldn't we take those things into consideration?" (Fast Company)

Rhee, yesterday

"'It was never our intention, nor did I ever say, it was all of the teachers who fell into these categories...Our intention was not to paint all teachers with a broad brushstroke." (Edweek)

Rhee apologists

"Michelle Rhee's great virtue is that she's been willing to say what others have not been willing to say, and to take on fights others are not willing to take on," said Andy Smarick of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. (Washington Examiner)

Fire Rhee before she speaks again

"I didn't mean all of them..."

This morning, some ed reporters told me that they were still waiting by the phone for a return call from Michelle Rhee in hopes that the D.C. supt. would explain her vicious teacher-bashing comments from a week ago. The call never came.

Rhee, supposedly laying out the rationale for her firing 266 teachers had told a business magazine:

"I got rid of teachers who had hit children, who had had sex with children, who had missed 78 days of school. Why wouldn't we take those things into consideration?"

Dakarai Aarons at Edweek writes:

Questions immediately arose. If these teachers had been physically and sexually abusing children, why were they allowed to remain until a budget crunch required dismissing teachers? How many of the 266 teachers had been abusing students?

After days of embarrassed silence, Rhee and her PR team finally figured out what to say. The response came in a letter to D.C. Council Chairman Vincent C. Gray and members Kwame Brown and Marion Barry that was released to the press today. She probably would have been smarter exercising her right to remain silent. The letter contained not a hint of self-criticism for defaming hundreds of teaching professionals. Rhee still insists that there was one and only one teacher among those fired, who was accused of having sex with a student months ago and was no longer a classroom teacher.

"'It was never our intention, nor did I ever say, it was all of the teachers who fell into these categories...Our intention was not to paint all teachers with a broad brushstroke."

It's now time to fire Rhee and bring someone in with some leadership experience and self-control. Rhee's so-called reform has done nothing to improve schooling for most of the District's children. She has become an embarrassment, even for her most avid supporters/apologists like those at the Washington Post, who have been forced into damage-control mode.

Book burning dilemmas

It's not easy being a book burner. For one thing, as a Menifee, Calif. school board member, Betti Cadmus, discovered when she tried to ban Webster's Dictionary from district schools. "It's hard to sit and read the dictionary" to see if there's any graphic sex words contained therein.

For another, you've got to try and avoid embarrassment by making sure you are banning the right author. In Texas, for example, the State Board of Education banned children's author Bill Martin, who died in 2004, after board member Pat Hardy cited a book he had supposedly written for adults which contained "very strong critiques of capitalism and the American system."

"She said that that was what he wrote, and I said: ' ... It's a good enough reason for me to get rid of someone,' " said Hardy

Problem is--she mixed up DePaul University prof, Bill Martin, Jr. author of Ethical Marxism: The Categorical Imperative of Liberation with Bill Martin, author of Brown Bear, Brown Bear. What do you see?

I highly recommend reading both with a critical eye. For example, while Martin Jr.'s book has an explicitly Marxist bent, the kid's author Martin is potentially even more subversive.

Brown Bear, Brown Bear, what do you see? I see a red bird looking at me.

RED bird, get it?

So now I'm starting a new campaign to send board member, Hardy examples of other books by authors with Martin in their name, to add to her to-burn list.

Let's start with another juvenile fiction writer Ann Martin, paper back writer, George R.R. Martin. Then there's Martin Amis, philosopher Martin Heidegger. Oh, and let's not forget that well-know subversive, Martin Luther King.

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Duncan's critics

Duncan must contend with critics on the right who don’t accept the federal government’s active role in education, and ones on the left who see him as a neoliberal enforcer, exploiting Obama’s Democratic bona fides to impose the free-market reform agenda on the unions. (New Yorker)

Quoting me

Small schools expert Mike Klonsky has written about the controversy on his blog, asking his readers to help school officials comb through the dictionary and find the offending words. "The problem for the book-banning officials is, they have to be able to read through the dictionary themselves in order to find more sex-related words," he writes. (Edweek)

CPS resists "at-risk" kids

In spite of Chicago Public Schools chief Ron Huberman's pledge to help at-risk teenagers, in some instances school officials are undermining that effort, making it difficult for such troubled youths to return to school after they have been incarcerated, according to judges, attorneys, probation officials and others in the juvenile justice system. (Tribune)

Banning the dictionary

Thanks to Edweek's Dakarai Aarons for taking note of my campaign to help Menifee Union School Dist. officials find dirty words in Webster's Dictionary. I figure, if board member Betti Cadmus and her crew of book burners succeed in banning the dictionary, more kids will start reading it. Test scores should improve.

Teacher miseducation at ASU

Is McCain the new dean?

ASU is "reforming" its teacher education program by putting less emphasis on pedagogy and more on subject matter. Is John McCain the new dean of ASU's College of Ed, or what?

A new curriculum will be tougher and will consist of more content courses, especially in mathematics. Education students must specialize in a content area, even if they are teaching in elementary school. "We're talking about having a course in probability and statistics that elementary teachers will have to have because that's what they use in elementary school," [the real dean, Mari] Koerner said. "So you can't be a teacher if you're math-phobic." (Arizona Republic).

More elementary teachers with a background in statistics and little knowledge about child development and learning theory. Isn't that special?

Another indication of ASU going with the conservative flow in teacher ed is their $18 million contract to study and model Teach for America's approach. Sounds like a win-win for both.

I actually like the ideas of teachers having a specialty and of placing students in classrooms while they are doing course work. But are these something new at ASU? How sad.

Tweets Ken Libby: "I bet David Berliner has some choice words for these upcoming changes to ASU's teacher program." ASU Regents Professor of Education, Berliner is co-author of The Manufactured Crisis and one of the biggest critics of the neo-conservative/privatization trends in public ed reform.

Punching a marshmallow

I just listened to the most incredible discussion on KCRW Public Radio. It was ostensibly a debate about Race-To-The-Top between Arne Duncan's PR guy, Peter Cunningham and former NYT ed writer and current leader of the Broader, Bolder Approach (BBA) Richard Rothstein.

But there was no debate. The articulate Rothstein did a great job in exposing RTTT's use of testing; its narrowing of the curriculum to a focus on math and reading to the exclusion of everything else; its forcing states to allow more charter schools while ignoring the research giving no credence to that approach. RTTT is in many ways worse than NCLB. And on it went.

When it came Cunningham's chance to respond, he could do little but agree with each and every one of Rothstein's points. Not even a minimal defense of RTTT on principle. Yes, he said, Rothstein is right. Our testing mania is doing all the negative things Rothstein claims. But since testing is the name of the game unfortunately, we are going to continue to rely on standardized testing and in fact do more of it, and with national standards to boot. Yes, Rothstein is right about charters. We know there are lots of bad charters, no better than the schools they were supposed to replace. But we are going to mandate more anyway. Yes, Rothstein is right about our narrowing of the curriculum. Maybe we can undo it in the future. And so it went.

Like trying to punch a marshmallow.

California dist. bans Webster's Dictionary

It's too dirty

After a parent complained about an elementary school student stumbling across "oral sex" in a classroom dictionary, Menifee Union School District officials decided to pull Merriam Webster's 10th edition from all school shelves earlier this week. School officials will review the dictionary to decide if it should be permanently banned because of the "sexually graphic" entry, said district spokeswoman Betti Cadmus. (Press Enterprise)

The problem for the book-banning officials is, they have to be able to read through the dictionary themselves in order to find more sex-related words.

"It's hard to sit and read the dictionary, but we'll be looking to find other things of a graphic nature," Cadmus said. She explained that other dictionary entries defining human anatomy would probably not be cause for alarm.

To help Betti and the other officials build their case against the dictionary, I'm asking readers to comb through their copies of Webster's and send in any words, via the comments section, that might be considered inappropriate for school age children to read. Then I will forward them on to the good people at Meniffee.

Nell Noddings makes sense of national standards

"Differentiate, don't standardize"

Educator and ed philosopher Nell Noddings says that national standards have been tried many times before, under different and have never worked to improve teaching/learning.

We do not need to standardize. We need to differentiate—to offer a greater variety of courses—and we should work on the quality of these courses. They should not be shabby, dead-end courses for those thought to be incapable of the long-favored academic courses. Rather, they should represent a genuine democratic respect for all the interests and talents required in the contemporary work world. (Edweek)

IN THE MAILBOX

Dear Mr. Klonsky,

I am a high school senior planning to attend Northwestern next fall. I have been considering pursuing studies related to education and it is through this interest that I landed on your blog site. I am trying to understand your differences with Secretary of Education Arne Duncan on the subject of charter schools and how they differ from the small school approach (other than on the issue of public vs. private). I'll continue looking at your blog. Possibly you can recommend other resources. Thank you for your time, June

Hi June.

Thanks for reading my blog and for asking such a good and provocative question. Since this is a blog, I'll try and be brief.

The early movement for smaller schools and teacher-led charters, was about empowering teachers to have more autonomy over their teaching. It was about creating pockets of innovation that could spread successful ideas and practices across the system. It was also about creating more choices for communities that had few, and engaging those communities in democratic decision-making about their schools and neighborhoods.

It was never about taking away teachers' rights to collective bargaining. It was never about excluding kids with special needs or English language learners. It was never about breaking small schools away from public systems and turning them over to chains of charter management companies. And it certainly was never about standardized testing and schools that turn teachers back into delivery clerks for a pre-packaged curriculum.

These aberrations began to take hold during the Bush years under No Child Left Behind and here in Chicago under Daley/Duncan's Renaissance 2010 plan. Unfortunately, they continue to be carried over under the current administration's Race To The Top.

Susan Klonsky & I lay it all out in our book, Small Schools: Public School Reform Meets the Ownership Society. I hope you get a chance to read it.

Best of luck at Northwestern and hopefully in your teaching career.

Another "turnaround" set for Marshall High

Chicago's legacy of failed top-down reform

They're "turning around" Marshall again. In case you're not up on school reform lingo, turnaround (depending on what day it is) means either replacing current students with more middle-class, high test scorers, or more recently, firing entire faculties and staff. Oh, all except for the Commandos' (yes, that's really their team name) renowned basketball coach Dorothy Gaters. Gaters, who has led the Lady Commandos to 8, count 'em, 8 state titles, will be retained while all her colleagues get pink-slipped because she is "part of the fabric'' of Marshall, Schools says CEO Ron Huberman.

Excuse me, but didn't you say that it was this very "fabric" that turnaround was trying to shred?

Sound confusing? It's all part of the latest version of Daley/Duncan's failed Renaissance 2010 initiative, a plan focused on school closings rather than school improvement; on top-down coercion and compliance, rather than community engagement. It's the plan that was hailed as the Chicago Miracle and is now being exported nationally through Arne Duncan's Race-To-The-Top.

The Sun-Times story gives us a clue as to what the likely outcome of Marshall's latest top-down turnaround might be.

Marshall's test scores have continued to dip, despite being "re-engineered" in 2000 and receiving a highly-paid principal-mentor in 2006. "Haven't they tried this before?" Marshall parent Laticia Fields asked of the latest overhaul.

"CPS doesn't know what it's doing, and that's the only reason our kids aren't learning." Past fixes weren't deep or widespread enough, Huberman insisted. The largely black, low-income school has languished on academic probation for 14 years. "This is the biggest dosage [of change] you can get,'' Huberman said.

That says it all, doesn't it. Huberman's metaphor for change is another dose of meds being tested on an ailing patient. If one pill doesn't work, ie. a new super-star principal, give 'em reconstitution or re-engineering. If that won't fix things, fire all the teachers (except the coach).

My favorite Chicago headline on all this--FIXED SCHOOLS FAIL