Maddow's follow-up on the killing of Catherine Ferguson Academy in Detroit

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Arne's army kicking in doors of parents to collect on student loans

Back in March of 2010, I responded to a WaPo story about Duncan's DOE purchase  of 27 new military-order, Remington Model, 870 police 12/14P Mod GRWC XS4 KXCS SF. RAMAC #24587 GAUGE: 12 BARREL: 14" - Parkerized choke: modified sights: Ghost ring rear, WILSON COMBAT shotguns.

I mistakenly assumed the Duncan's militia was about to invade Rhode Island to enforce the mass firings of teachers at Central Falls High School. I was wrong. Duncan's troops (I can only assume, with new assault rifles in hand) instead invaded the Stockton, CA home of Kenneth Wright at 6 a.m. Tuesday morning.




According to ABC News10 in Stockton:

Wright came downstairs in his boxer shorts as the officers team barged through his front door. Wright said an officer grabbed him by the neck and led him outside on his front lawn. "He had his knee on my back and I had no idea why they were there," Wright said. 

According to Wright, officers also woke his three young children ages 3, 7, and 11, and put them in a Stockton police patrol car with him. Officers then searched his house. As it turned out, the person law enforcement was looking for was not there - Wright's estranged wife. 

"They put me in handcuffs in that hot patrol car for six hours, traumatizing my kids," Wright said.

Wright said he later went to the mayor and Stockton Police Department, but the city of Stockton had nothing to do with Wright's search warrant.The U.S. Department of Education issued the search and called in S.W.A.T for his wife's defaulted student loans. 

Is the tide really turning?

Thanks to Lady Wonk Dana Goldstein for pulling together a summary of  a glut of new reports raising doubt about current administration ed policies.

Goldstein writes:   

Although much of the Obama administration's education reform agenda promotes test score-based teacher evaluation and pay, the tide seems to be significantly turning against such policies, at least among wonks and academics.

Included in Goldstein's collection is her own excellent piece, The Test Generation in the April, 2011 American Prospect.

Is the tide really turning? Maybe  However, I'm not sure Arne Duncan's crowd pays much attention to the mounds of ed research that have long been building in contradiction to current testing, "merit" pay, and teacher "value-added" evaluation policies.

I'm hoping they will respond more to the growing active opposition from among the nation's 8 million teachers and even more parents, students and community activists as the 2012 election approaches.

See you in D.C., I hope, July 30th.

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Science Teacher

"Getting through another year of AYP successfully is like passing a ridiculously large and hard stool. You do it because you have to, there's a modicum of relief when it's done, and you pray you haven't done too much damage when passing it." -- The Logic of Arne

Kate Spade in Afghanistan???

 As part of his efforts, Brinkley brings in corporate executives on trips to Afghanistan to try to get them to invest. An array of executives, including from Citibank, IBM and even Kate Spade, have accompanied Brinkley on these types of trips. When he's making his pitch, he wants to make it clear this is not a charity opportunity. It's strictly business. "I want them to come in and see that they can make actually make money, that there's a market," Brinkley says, "that there's talent that can be brought to bare for their particular business interests." -- Paul Brinkley, head of a Pentagon group called the Task Force for Business Stability Operations 

Duncan attacks Diane Ravitch

"Diane Ravitch is in denial and she is insulting all of the hardworking teachers, principals and students all across the country who are proving her wrong every day." -- Jonathan Alter at Bloomberg

L.A. teacher responds

"Teachers at schools like mine are concerned that education reform policies are not helping our students, because threats of turnarounds, takeovers, and poor evaluations can’t make us work any harder or make our students any less poor.  Dr. Ravitch understands this reality, and recognizes that the true insult in this debate is the allegation that teachers like me are not working hard enough, or don’t believe enough in the potential of our students, because if we did, our schools would have miracles too."-- Martha Infante at InterAct

 Dr. Cornel West

"There is a price to pay for speaking the truth. There is a bigger price for living a lie." -- Truthout

Duncan's Alter boy spearheads personal assault on Ravitch

Arne Duncan, President Barack Obama’s normally mild- mannered education secretary, has finally had enough. “Diane Ravitch is in denial and she is insulting all of the hardworking teachers, principals and students all across the country who are proving her wrong every day,” he said when I asked about Ravitch this week. -- Jonathan Alter 

Diane Ravitch is right on point with her critique of corporate-style school reform and with her exposes of so-called "turnaround miracles."

How do I know she's hitting the mark? Arne Duncan is using the full power of  the DOE's overstaffed and over-budgeted PR department to launch personal attacks on Diane.  Even during the Bush administration, when hack journalists like Armstrong Williams were paid big bucks to promote No Child Left Behind, I can't recall former secretaries of ed using willing writers to launch such vicious personal vendettas against individual critical educators.

Duncan's version of Williams (paid or unpaid) is know-nothing edu-hack writer Jonathan Alter, blogging for Bloomberg (how perfect!). Alter has proven himself the perfect lap dog for Duncan and Bill Gates. If either of them farts, Alter is right behind them, sniffing the air and writing joyously about the sweet aroma filling the room.

In this latest diatribe, Alter calls critics of Race To The Top and corporate reform "obstructionists" (ooh sizz, if only it were true). Digging deep for some profound historical reference, Alter compares Ravitch to Whittaker Chambers, the alleged communist turned anti-communist back in the 1940s. Could you stoop any lower or be any more obscure?

Alter claims that Ravitch "moved the other way, from right to left." I suppose that's a terrible thing now that the administration, and Duncan in particular, are moving so quickly to the right. Remember Duncan's April "salute" to Indiana T-Party Gov. Daniels' school reform initiative, which produced the nation's most far-reaching voucher program?

Alter also claims that Ravitch "now uses phony empiricism to rationalize almost every tired argument offered by teachers unions."  Phony empiricism? How can empiricism be phony? And what makes the current arguments of the nation's unions "tired"?  Their arguments sure resonated in Wisconsin.

Empiricism as a theory of knowledge demands that we provide evidence to back up our claims. Diane Ravitch has been out front with her criticism of reformers' claims of "miracle" successes made with little or no evidence to back them up. She has hit particularly hard at claims that schools alone can close the so-called "achievement gap," without regard to problems of poverty and racism and other out-of-school conditions. In her NYT op-ed piece, Ravitch takes apart with precision, a number of those claims and exposes lots of data-fudging. She remembers all too well, the way the Bush administration touted the so-called Texas Miracle as a way of spinning its own reform agenda. Alter and Duncan try to counter, claiming such exposes amount to "insulting teachers, principals and students." They're wrong,  Educators don't need mythology to validate their work and don't appreciate being used for political spins.

What an upside-down picture of the ed-world Duncan and his apparatchiks have created, a world where liberals and pro-union activists are the enemy and teacher-bashing T-baggers like Daniels are warmly embraced. With the 2012 elections coming up, I would suggest that President Obama press his ear closely to the education ground and quickly figure out whose message is resonating with the nation's nearly 8 million teachers, and who they feel is insulting them and their profession -- Diane Ravitch or Arne Duncan.

Remember, Mr. President. Teachers vote. We'll see you in D.C. July 30th and make sure our voices are heard.

 ^^^^^^

Here's some of the comments following Alter's piece:

"This is perhaps the most mendacious essay I've ever seen." -- Robert D. Skeels 

" Speaking of straw men, Jonathan Alter, you have just provided a textbook case in media manipulation:."--Nancy Flannagan

"Your opinions are everything that working people have fought against for years." -- J-soh K-ritz

"I wish Jonathan Alter would take a job for a single semester at an urban middle school." -- Anthony Cody

And more...

'Make my school a prison' pleads Michigan superintendent

The school-to-prison pipeline

Nathan Bootz, Superintendent of Ithaca Public Schools asks Michigan's Tea Party Gov. Snyder to make his school a prison so it can be adequately funded.

The State of Michigan spends annually somewhere between $30,000 and $40,000 per prisoner, yet we are struggling to provide schools with $7,000 per student. I guess we need to treat our students like they are prisoners, with equal funding. Please give my students three meals a day. Please give my children access to free health care. Please provide my school district Internet access and computers. Please put books in my library. Please give my students a weight room so we can be big and strong. We provide all of these things to prisoners because they have constitutional rights. What about the rights of youth, our future?! -- Gratiot County Herald

Bootz' letter to the editor was also picked up by Campaign for America's Future  blogger Jeff Bryant, who posts a scathing attack on current education budget cuts and misplaced priorities that favor incarceration over education.  

Accountability mandates from the so-called reform movement have also done much to feed the School to Prison Pipeline. As this recent report from a collaborative effort involving research, education, civil rights and juvenile justice organizations concluded, academic "get tough" policies such as the current emphasis on high-stakes standardized tests that originated with No Child Left Behind "have led to more students being left even further behind." 

 "By focusing accountability almost exclusively on test scores and attaching high stakes to them," explains George Wood of the Forum for Education and Democracy, "NCLB has given schools a perverse incentive to allow or even encourage students to leave.” Adds FairTest's, Monty Neil, "NCLB has led to the dramatic narrowing and weakening of curriculum. Because so much of the school day is focused on test preparation instead of well-rounded instruction, more students become alienated, making the jobs of teachers even harder.” -- School Cuts And 'Reforms' Feed The Prison Pipeline

In Chicago it's called a "win-win"

Big losers are social services and schools

That's right. This week, former mayor Daley landed his pay-back job with the very firm that negotiated his notorious sell-off of the city's parking meters.

Daley will be "of counsel" to Katten Muchin Rosenman LLP, the law firm announced Wednesday morning. The former mayor "will draw on his vast knowledge, experience and relationships globally to contribute to the continued growth of the firm." -- Ward Room

New Mayor Rahm Emanuel , who came over in a three-way deal, giving up his White House post to Daley's brother (V.P. at J.P. Morgan), got his casinos.

Our elected governor, Pat Quinn, opposed a major expansion of gambling in Illinois. But Emanuel had a hand full of aces, and Quinn was left holding the joker. Thus, Chicago is on track to get a big, new casino of its own, along with four more casinos around the state. Add to all that slot machines at racetracks and at Midway and O’Hare airports. -- Carol Marin

As for the schools? Bupkis.

 "The major cuts are in areas which before we've never cut, social services and the education funds," said Democratic Rep. Frank Mautino, a budget point man from Spring Valley. -- Tribune

Yes, a win-win indeed.

Ravitch does her homework, explodes "miracle" myths

School turnaround "miracle" myth makers, including Jeb Bush, Arne Duncan and Pres. Obama, are no match for Diane Ravitch. In a NYT op-ed piece, "Waiting for a School Miracle," Diane shows she has done her homework as she debunks several of the  claims of miraculous quick school fixes in Chicago, Miami, Denver and N.Y., all of which ignored the impact of poverty on measurable learning outcomes.

Families are children’s most important educators. Our society must invest in parental education, prenatal care and preschool. Of course, schools must improve; every one should have a stable, experienced staff, adequate resources and a balanced curriculum including the arts, foreign languages, history and science. If every child arrived in school well-nourished, healthy and ready to learn, from a family with a stable home and a steady income, many of our educational problems would be solved. And that would be a miracle.

Diane will be a keynoter at the  Save Our Schools March and National Call to Action in D.C. July 28-31.  I hope to see you all there. 

Teacher pension grab bill killed -- for now

How do we know? Ty Fahner told us so

Fahner

Under pressure from hundreds of thousands of people (including me) who made phone calls and sent emails, IL legislators pulled the plug on a bill that would have increased the amount current public employees would have to pay for their pensions. The great lesson in all this is that if you don't hit it, it won't fall. This was a victory for the grass roots forces inside and outside the teacher and public employee unions against a vicious assault on teachers and public schools.

I am glad that the forces of darkness revealed themselves this time, in a statement announcing the withdrawal of SB 512 signed by none other than House Speaker Michael Madigan, House Minority Leader Tom Cross, and Ty Fahner, the president of the anti-union Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago, saying the issue is dead until the legislature’s fall veto session.Why would Ty Fahner be signed on to such a statement, you may ask? Who elected Ty Fahner and the Civic Committee to speak for the state legislature, you may ask? Exactly!

As things turned out, even some self-respecting Republican legislators were put off by Civic Committee bullying.

Rep. Jim Watson, R-Jacksonville, a member of the House Republican leadership, said some GOP members were told by leaders in the Civic Committee, a group of chief executives from Chicago’s largest corporations, that they would face primary challenges for re-election, if they didn’t vote for the bill. 

"Hopefully they learned something from this, that if you do want help implement change, top down may not be the best model,” Watson said. “Calling caucus members and threatening them — that doesn’t play well -- Springfield State Journal

We almost lost Detroit in '66

But now we're losing Motown's public education system

Gil Scott Heron died Friday. I've been listening to his music and poetry all week and still have the words to his anti-nuke anthem, We almost lost Detroit, spinning around my brain. Gil's song was based on a book by the same title, written two years earlier by John Fuller about the partial meltdown in Michigan of Fermi 1, America's first breeder reactor, in 1966.

Yesterday I read this headline in the Detroit Free Press --IS DETROIT PUBLIC SCHOOLS WORTH SAVING?

The Detroit Public Schools, as we know it, could disappear in a few years. A DPS action plan would charter up to 45 schools, close 20 and leave about 70 that include the best-performing schools, some newly constructed and a handful of special-education schools that are expensive to run... With such a concerted effort to shrink DPS, local leaders, educators, politicians and taxpayers are debating a question: Is DPS worth saving?

Neither Fuller nor Heron could have predicted that the death of this great American city and its school system would come, not from a nuclear meltdown, but rather from an economic meltdown and meltdown of civil society caused in large part by the greed and rapaciousness of Wall Street and Motown's own disaster capitalists.

Detroit has become New Orleans without Katrina.

Christie, GOP want to eliminate Supreme Court's power to rule on school funding

Gov. Christie toasts Arne Duncan.

New Jersey has become the model for national corporate reform assaults on teachers and public education in general. It's the state where the T-Party types like Gov. Christie, Obama Democrats, including Arne Duncan, and Billionaire Boys Club members like Mark Zuckerberg, have joined hands to support the right-wing agenda.

Now look where Christie's "reform" agenda is heading. Christie and state Republicans are hatching a plot to take away the power of the Supreme Court over matters of school funding. 

A Republican strategy memo laid out Friday in an e-mail from Senate Minority Leader Tom Kean Jr. to his caucus asked fellow GOP senators for feedback on a three-pronged education plan after Tuesday's Supreme Court order requiring the state to invest $500 million more in 31 poor school districts. 

The plan includes supporting a constitutional amendment that would end judicial involvement in school-funding decisions and give the state wiggle room to reduce funding in lean budget years. The resolution, sponsored by Sen. Steven Oroho (R., Sussex) and cosponsored by the other 15 members of the GOP caucus, was introduced in January but hasn't gained traction. It would require voter approval.-- AP Wire

Yes, they want to elliminate the Supreme Court in school funding matters. A segregationist's dream. The only question now is, will state and national Dems (Duncan) reach across the aisle on this one? Probably not, but nothing surprises me these days

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Darling-Hammond wins UFT's Dewey Award

“Teacher unions are the only ones now standing up for public education funding and for real education that goes beyond data and test prep." -- Linda Darling-Hammond

Prison funding sucks resources from schools

The United States spends $70 billion a year on incarceration, $50 billion of which comes from state governments. This matters because $9 out of every $10 in state prison funding comes out of state general funds, the same accounts that fund higher education. So it should be of no surprise that in the last two decades, state spending on prisons grew at six times the rate of spending on higher education. --Lindsay McCluskey,  President, United States Student Association

A question many of my students are asking

By all indications I’m an effective teacher. But I am not good enough to overcome the barriers some of my students face. I don’t know who is. But I know if next year I have 10 students who face the barriers of my lowest five then you’ll see a drop in my students’ performance. For this I’ll be held accountable. If this is the case what is the incentive to teach at a school which serves our community’s neediest families?  -- Teacher, Charles Duerr

In my mailbox

From Javier Lacayo

Hi Mike,

 

I wanted to send some information your way on our ‘Parent Day of Action’ which kicked off at 7am this morning. By 9am, our volunteers and organizers had already collected over 1,000 petition signatures of New Yorkers opposing Bloomberg's plan to fire 4,100 teachers. Throughout the day, more than 100 volunteers have been talking to parents at schools and subway stops across the City (press release here: http://bit.ly/lqAFvM).

 

In addition to gathering petitions, we have also been collecting audio and video testimonials from public school parents.  You can find them all, uploaded in real time, at parentsforteachers.com

 

We want to make all of this information and these resources available to local bloggers like you. So we have decided to launch, what we call, the Public Advocate’s Blog Toolkit.

 

Here’s a link to the toolkit: www.advocate.nyc.gov/blogs. We've pulled together videos, documents, widgets, and a bunch of other media that we think may be helpful in creating informed discussion on local blogs. The site will provide already embedded examples of the resources, along with the specific codes to post on your own site. For example, if you like one of our banners or videos, you can see how they would look on the site, and then just copy and paste the code we provide to embed it on your own site.

 

Also, we’ve added you to the site’s blog roll - if there are other blogs that you think we should be in touch with, please let us know. We hope you find all of this useful, and if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to reach me or Jeff Merritt  (cc'ed here)  Jeff can also be reached on his cell at             917-664-1590      .

 

Best,

Javier

 

Office of the Public Advocate

1 Centre Street, 15 fl. | New York, N.Y. 10007

(212) 669-2115 | http://advocate.nyc.gov

Follow us on twitter @billdeblasio

http://www.facebook.com/PAbilldeblasio

Friday morning TYs

Now that I've turned another year older, I'm trying to act my age, a little more mature if you will. So I've dropped my Friday morning FUs in exchange for Friday morning TYs (thanks) in order to get back on a positive footing and class-up the blog a bit. You see, some of my readers, including the sisters over at Our Lady Of Mercy (who follow me on Twitter) were complaining that they felt limited when it came to forwarding my profanity-riddled SmallTalk posts. I hope my FU fans will forgive me.

This morning's TY goes out to Judge Maryann Sumi of Dane County Circuit Court in Wisconsin for her ruling granting a permanent injunction that voided Gov. Walker's law banning collective bargaining rights for many state and local employees.

Another TY goes out to my favorite faux-research and think-tank debunkers, NEPC, for including my post on the new Social-Darwinism in their list of best ed blogs.

Finally, TY to IL congressional candidate Ilya Sheyman for creating a petition to The Illinois State House, The Illinois State Senate and Governor Pat Quinn, which says:

"We stand with workers across Illinois in calling on our legislators in Springfield to honor their commitments to public employees and vote "No" on SB 512."

You can sign the petition here.

Hentoff -- 'Bloomberg's Schools: Is this America?'

Nat Hentoff, writing in The Village Voice, has nothing but praise for the inside-of-school reportage coming from Meredith Kolodner at the Daily News. And rightfully so.

From her “Sacrificed for Charters” (March 31, 2010), did you know: “Special Education students are falling victim to the fierce battle to find space for charter schools inside city school buildings. . . . At eight of the 15 buildings making room next year (2011), at least a quarter of the students are special education or seriously disabled. . . . For these vulnerable kids, the space crunch may mean less one-on-one instruction, therapy sessions in the back of the classroom, and cramped conditions for wheelchair-bound students, nearly two dozen parents said in interviews. What say you, Chancellor Walcott? -- "Bloomberg's Schools: Is This America?"

You can follow Kolodner here.

The new Social-Darwinism

Charter schools for those with "highest potential"

Robert Schwartz's post today on Huffington, "Why Charters and College Access Programs Should Cream," is but the latest incarnation of Social-Darwinism applied to current public education policy. Such theories were popular in the late Victorian era in England, America, and elsewhere.

The basic notion was--and still is--that the strongest or fittest should survive and flourish in society, while the rest --- not.  The theory was chiefly expounded by Herbert Spencer, whose ethical philosophies were grounded in an elitist worldview and received a boost from the application of Darwinian ideas such as adaptation and natural selection. In its most extreme form, Social-Darwinism was used to justify eugenics programs aimed at weeding "undesirable" genes from the population. While we usually associate such theories with Nazi Germany, we have always had our home-grown versions within U.S. academia and politics.

President Obama, while on the campaign trail in 2007, was a vocal critic of Social-Darwinism as practiced by the Bush administration in their economic and tax policies. But you don't hear much on that topic from him these days, especially when it comes to school reform policies. After all, what is Race To The Top except a refined form of survival of the fittest?

Schwartz calls on corporate America to further bankroll charter schools like KIPP, ICEF, Yes Prep, and Aspire as elite schools for those students with "high potential," while relegating public schools to "focus on what they've already been doing for the past decade"-- moving those with lesser potential "from below basic to proficiency."

"You see," writes Schwartz, "our urban and rural schools have been doing better at educating lower achieving African American and Latino students in their attempt to close the achievement gap."

Schwartz, a Teach For America (TFA) alum -- no shock there-- directs the so-called Level Playing Field Institute. He actually performs a service by articulating the anti-democratic social theory behind many current corporate reform policies. However, his plea to U.S. corporations to increase their support for school re-segregation and creaming via charter schools is redundant. The corporate world, including power philanthropists like Gates, Broad, Walton and Bradley, is way ahead of him in this regard. It was the Bradley Foundation, in fact, that underwrote the publication of The Bell Curve, by Charles Murray which was based on the Social-Darwinist theory that black and Latino students lacked the academic potential held by white and Asian students and therefore should be tracked away from college preparatory programs.

Schwartz knows from where he speaks. Until recently, he was Chief Academic Officer for Inner City Education Foundation Public Schools (ICEF)  in South Los Angeles. He claims to have led "the strategic expansion of the academic program from three schools with 500 students to 15 schools with almost 4,000 students."

I couldn't help but notice this story about ICEF, which is the embodiment of Schwartz's social-Darwinian theory. It seems that after years of financial mismanagement, ICEF went bankrupt, leading to yesterday's lock-out of hundreds of  students at their Lou Dantzler Preparatory Charter Middle School. According to ABC News, "The Inner City Education Foundation (ICEF) that runs the charter school and leases space from the Boys and Girls Club was having problems paying its bills."

Clipped from: abclocal.go.com (share this clip)

So it seems that even for the chosen few with "high potential," Social-Darwinian theories don't necessarily deliver the goods and their promised "level playing field" is not so level after all. Buyer beware!

Aside: Schwartz, being a TFA grad and all, should really learn how to spell the word Institute in the title of his own organization. I hope it's corrected by the time my readers read this.

Remembering the Creepinator's idiotic "girly men" remarks

Looking back and remembering Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's 2004 speech to the GOP Convention. He ridiculed those who lacked optimism about the state of the economy, calling them "economic girly men" which brought the conventioneers to their feet with giddy applause. He had previously used this line to attack Democrats for being soft on unions.



As it turned out, of course, it was Arnold and the Republicans who were leading the country into the economic abyss, and the so-called "girly men" who were right. The Republicans' call for economic optimism as the country stood on the brink of total global economic collapse borders on criminality. Seven years later, this creep has led his state into economic basket-case status. He's been run out of the governor's mansion, has destroyed the state's university system, has used his position of power to sexually abuse and molest his immigrant housekeeper, resulting in her giving birth to the creep's so-called "love child" and he's wrecked his marriage and family in the process.

Yes, Arnold. You're a real manly man.

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Obama's commencement speech in Memphis

"We need to encourage this kind of change [small academies] all across America. We need to reward the reforms that are driven not by Washington, but by principals and teachers and parents. That's how we'll make progress in education - not from the top down, but from the bottom up." -- Seattle Times

One-sided class warfare

This week, Representative Paul Ryan, a Republican of Wisconsin, suggested to the Economic Club of Chicago that the president’s attempt to raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans amounted to “class warfare” and promoted “class envy.”  -- Charles Blow, NYT

 Gates paid millions for teachers to advocate against unions, for "merit-pay" 

 “We’ve learned that school-level investments aren’t enough to drive systemic changes, The importance of advocacy has gotten clearer and clearer.” -- Gates Foundation spokesman Allan C. Golston

Late Friday FU goes out to Mayor Bloomberg



The Problem's We All Share -- Norman Rockwell

 A middle finger salute goes out to N.Y. Mayor Bloomberg for his recent ignorant, racist and arrogant assault on parents, civil rights groups and unions. Who does he think he is, Donald Trump?

In response to the massive pushback being organized against his plan to close 22 more neighborhood schools, including lawsuits filed by the NAACP and the teachers union, Bloomberg was transparent in his attitude towards parents.

“Unfortunately there are some parents who just come from — they never had a formal education, and they don’t understand the value of education,” -- NYT City Room

He went on to observe: “The old Norman Rockwell family is gone.” I can only imagine what it is about the Rockwell era that Bloomberg longs for.

No research to back up Rahm's push for longer school day

Chicago mayor and school boss, Rahm Emanuel thinks he's found the magic bullet of school reform.He's been touting the longer school day and school year as solutions for Chicago's "failing schools." Using Houston, Texas as his model, the mayor claims that lengthening the school day can add "three years" of instructional time for each student. He never mentions where the money is going to come from to pay teachers, or heat and cool buildings. Measurable learning outcomes in Houston, btw, are nothing to write home about.

Now comes word from several authoritative folks at the recent Wallace Foundation forum on "Reimagining the School Day," that more of the same is not necessarily better.

Elena Silva, a senior policy analyst at the education think tank Education Sector, cautioned, implementing extended-learning programs in these schools will not necessarily mean improved academic outcomes if students aren’t currently receiving high-quality instruction during normal school hours. "You have to be careful with low-performing schools—you can’t just add more time if it’s just going to be more of the same thing that they get during the school day," said Silva. -- Edweek