Bedfellows

I don't think Bloomberg, Sharpton, and Gingrich are such "strange bedfellows." Do you?

It was the very image of the strange-bedfellow triumvirate standing outside the White House yesterday after an audience with the President - Mayor Bloomberg, Al Sharpton and Newt Gingrich - that dominated most stories. But far more compelling is the nature of the bed the three, and countless others, have made for themselves, in the Education Equality Project. (Daily News)

C'mon. You gotta love Gingrich talking the "civil rights" talk to Obama.

"I think this is an issue that should bring all Americans together," Gingrich said, saying that education should be a civil rights issue for the 21st century.

Hey Newt! You must not have heard. Civil rights was an issue in the 20th century too when you were running for Congress from Georgia as a Dixie-Pub. Now you're attacking bi-lingualism as "ghetto language", calling for an end to multiculturalism in schools, replacing it with "patriotic education." So actually, civil rights is still the civil rights issue of the 21st century.

Note to Arne

Elizabeth Green at Gotham Schools reports that NYC Public Advocate, Betsy Gotbaum, sent a note to Arne Duncan, warning him to take Bloomberg's B.S. with a grain of salt. Green also wonders why only three bedfellows went to the Obama meeting. What happened to Joel Klein, the head of the "no-excuses" faction.

No more "miracles" please

No sooner had the Streets & San guys hauled away anther year's worth of homages from the expressway underpass near my house, where leaky walls had etched an image of the Virgin Mary (if you squinted your eyes) than I read David Brooks piece, "The Harlem Miracle."Now don't get me wrong. I believe in miracles as much as the next guy. For example, there was Kobe Bryant's incredible shot Friday night from near mid-court with one second left on the shot clock. Only not when it comes to public schools and the so-called achievement gap. It's just that I've just seen too many of them debunked recently. First there was the "Texas Miracle" that made the dropout rate supposedly disappear from urban schools and propel Gov. George Bush into the presidency. Then there was the the great "Chicago Miracle" called Renaissance 2010.

Brooks' miracle has the Harlem Children's Zone's Promise Academy, on its own, without any changes in the living conditions of Harlem' children, completely and totally eliminating the achievement gap between wealthy white students and poorer children of color. It must be true, writes Brooks, because a friend of his at Harvard visited the school and had an epiphany.

This is no knock on the Promise Academy. I'm sure that a small school with a good group of teachers and lots of resources can produce a jump in test scores. But let's cool it on the miracle talk please.

Weekend reads

New study shows racism's impact on children's mental health

There is evidence that racial discrimination increases the odds that adolescents and adults will develop mental health problems, but this is the first study to examine a possible link in children of varied races, says Tumaini Coker, the study co-author and a RAND Corp. researcher and UCLA pediatrician. The study, which is published in the May American Journal of Public Health, involved more than 5,000 children in Birmingham, Ala., Houston and Los Angeles. (USA Today).

Question is, will Joel Klein and Co. dismiss this as just another "excuse"?

What schools can learn from the Apple store

• The learning experience is highly personalized and focused on the interests and needs of the individual customer.
• Customers can make mistakes with little risk of failure or embarrassment. Thinking and tinkering with the help of a staff member provide opportunities for deep learning.
• Challenges are real and embedded in the customer's learning and work.
• Assessment is built right into the learning, focusing specifically on what needs to be accomplished. (Elliot Washor at Huffington)
  

More on Gates, global heath investments

The editorial from the Medical Journal has some suggestions for the Gates Foundation that include funding for global health research to health systems in low-income countries, greater transparency, allying with and listening to others, and providing global health research monies that target areas where disease burden is the greatest. (Emax Health)

Quotables

Holding Gates accountable

The Lancet, one of the world's leading medical journals, is critical of the way the Gates Foundation invests in global health care:

As the largest private foundation in the world, the Gates Foundation itself defies precedent in its ability to influence global health. The foundation's spending on global health was nearly equal to the World Health Organization's annual budget in 2007. Yet the Gates Foundation is not held accountable, nor is it open about the way it sets priorities and awards grants, according to the Lancet analysis. "What are the foundation's future plans?" asks an editorial. "It's hard to know for sure." (Seattle Times)

Overheard on Arne Duncan's NCLB "listening tour"

"To have a child taking a test that it is literally impossible for them to pass and having that humiliation, and holding schools accountable for that, that doesn't make sense," Duncan said in an interview with the Associated Press. (Education Week)

Ending Bush's "abstinence only" sex-ed funding

Planned Parenthood's Johnny Wilson on Obama's proposed approach to sex education and teenage pregnancies:

“That the Obama administration is looking at this honestly … gives me huge amounts of confidence. I’m really quite impressed. It’s bold. Pissing off the right wing is something we’ve all learned to be afraid of.” (New Mexico Independent)

Obama's dilemma

Liberal billionaires don't like unions

Whether it's the Republicrat hedge-fund operators pushing their school privatization schemes or Chicago liberal billionaire campaign contributors who make giant profits from sub-minimum-wage, mainly immigrant workers, there are times when President Obama has to stand up and do the right thing regardless of what wealthy supporters want.

That's the dilemma he currently faces around the proposed Employee Free Choice Act. The latter group, including Penny Pritzker, Obama’s campaign finance chairwoman and a director of Global Hyatt Corp., along with hotel magnates Neil Bluhm and Lester Crown, are leveraging their clout to try and turn Obama against EFCA.

According to Bloomberg.com:

Workers at the Pritzkers’ Hyatt Regency in Santa Clara, California, initiated an organizing drive last year. Managers called meetings and told employees that joining a union could cost wages and benefits, said Rigoberto Gutierrez, 55, who has worked in room service there for 12 years. “They tried to scare us,” he said. “They told us we could lose everything.”

So far the president is standing firm behind the bill and the workers' right to organize.

Exclusive--Jose Rico goes to Washington

President Obama greets Jose Rico at White House Cinco de Mayo celebration

Chicago educator, community activist Jose Rico, has been named Senior Advisor to the Deputy Secretary of Elementary and Secondary Education. Rico, who spent several years toiling in the vineyards at the Small Schools Workshop, currently serves as principal of the Multicultural Arts School at Little Village Lawndale High School Campus.

Thanks Alex

Special thanks to journalist, author and great story-teller, Alex Kotlowitz for his guest appearance in my Sociology of Ed class last night. Alex talked about some of his experiences, researching and telling the story, There Are No Children Here, of kids growing up in Chicago's housing projects. His main concern, the epidemic of violence in our society and the toll it is taking on young people as well as on the entire community.

More on a world gone mad

Road Trip in the Plague Years

Since 9/11, irrational fear and toxic bigotry have imposed an informal blockade on Baja California's non-maquiladora economy. Now nativists in San Diego are clamoring for the complete closure of the border. It would be a catastrophe. A Siamese twin might as well saw away the flesh connecting himself to his brother. Both would die in the end. (Mike Davis at Tomgram)

The union's new Innovation Fund

I like Weingarten's new pro-active policy initiative, so long as she brings her base of classroom teachers along with her. Why shouldn't the union be leaders of reform instead of targets? Why shouldn't charter school teachers have collective-bargaining rights? With a new regime in the White House, it appears that the days of reform simply being done TO teachers, rather than WITH them, may be over.

WaPo's Jay Matthews is freaked out. That can't be bad. He's still ga-ga over schools like KIPP where teachers have no voice, no rights, and work 16-hour days. He just can't imagine teachers acting powerfully in the world of policy.

"I struggle to understand union strategy and politics, usually too far from the classroom to interest me."

Conservative think-tankers and DFER Republicrats are going nuts. Anti-reform dogmatists may also be freaked-out. Especially when they see good folk like Linda Darling-Hammond and Adam Urbanski on the board of the AFT's reform initiative, funded by the power-philanthropists. I think that's fine.

You're more likely to be eaten by a shark

A World Gone Mad

Each year an estimated 36,000 Americans , mostly the very old and very young, die from the regular flu--more a testimony to the lack of universal health care than anything else. But the great swine flu pandemic of 2009 mostly resembles the great shark scare of 2001 (4 humans killed by sharks each year in the world). So far there's been about 800 reported cases of swine flu world-wide and one (1) reported death from the swine flu outside of Mexico.

Yet, the politics of fear and social-isolation are running rampant and have panicked millions. Hundreds of schools in the U.S. have been closed even though for many inner-city and rural children, the school provides their only access to a nurse and front line medical treatment. Meanwhile, school nurse positions are being eliminated in hundreds of schools in low-income neighborhoods.

More madness

Mexico has been driven to the edge of economic ruin because of the U.S. de-facto economic blockade. There's been a run on useless face masks (hand-washing is the best prevention). Racism has gone viral, and the Limbaugh Party is the carrier of the disease.

Olympic Week in America

Join the Mayor's Olympics crusade...or else

Michael Scott is the Mayor Daley's latest hand-picked president of Mayor Daley's hand-picked school board. Scott also doubles as a real-estate developer and entrepreneurial hustler. He offers little in the way of support for teaching/learning in the classroom. In fact, his biggest hustle at present is the push to bring the 2016 Olympic games to Chicago. Daley has gone all out, at great expense to the taxpayer in hopes that his corporate friends and the city can turn a profit through increased tourism, seven years from now. The whole proposition however, is questionable.

So President Scott is putting the hammer down on public schools teachers and principals and counting noses to see who's naughty and nice, pushing them to become soldiers in the Mayor's Olympic games army. He wants to enlist even those teachers in schools slated for closing to make room for Olympics "development." That's chutzpah. Kind of like being made to dig your own grave and then jump in it.

According to the Trib:

In an e-mail sent April 22 to principals, Board President Michael Scott said: "I am requesting that you register your school for Olympic Week in America. Please take a few minutes to identify a staff person who can register your school. ... You must sign up by Monday, April 27." Olympic Week in America is a promotional effort to raise the profile of Chicago's bid starting Monday. Scott's e-mail stated that each school's participation would be graded as "gold, silver or bronze," with the lowest level including developing an "Olympic week proclamation," raising the Chicago 2016 flag at the school and including Olympic-themed activities in the classrooms. The e-mail also said that a person from Scott's office would be following up by phone with the principals.

Sam Ackerman 1934-2009

I'm saddened by the loss of friend and long-time Chicago civil-rights activist Sam Ackerman. He helped organize for the 1963 March on Washington and was an important part of the movement that elected Harold Washington, the city's first black mayor. Sam was also a schools activist and was elected to the Local School Council at Kenwood High School.

"My memories are going to protest marches with him for every cause imaginable," said his daughter Valerie, 52. "From being in a stroller to walking with picket signs to watching him being involved in Democratic convention stuff. He inspired people to be activists." (Chicago Tribune)

Weekend reads

Testing in kindergarten?

Instead of digging in sandboxes, today’s kindergartners prepare for a life of multiple-choice boxes by plowing through standardized tests with cuddly names like Dibels (pronounced “dibbles”), a series of early-literacy measures administered to millions of kids; or toiling over reading curricula like Open Court — which features assessments every six weeks. (NYT).

Huberman's "anti-violence" strategy

Former cop, now public schools CEO Ron Huberman, thinks he has a "series of solutions" for violence prevention at Chicago's Sullivan High. Problem is, they're all about pushing and keeping kids out of school and back on to the streets:

One calls for the school to use multiple exits at dismissal time, which allows students to disperse more quickly. The school has also started requiring suspended students to sign an agreement saying that if they come within 1000 feet of the campus, they can be arrested for trespassing (Chi-Town Daily News).

Charters--Public or Private?

After learning that a majority of its teachers had submitted union cards to the state labor board in April, lawyers for Civitas petitioned the National Labor Relations Board to hear the case instead. They argued that Civitas teachers are technically private employees, working for a nonprofit, and are not subject to the state labor board’s jurisdiction...Teachers at Civitas schools want a recognized voice in school decision making. They say teacher turnover spiked in the wake of increased class loads. (Catalyst)

The latest study on Baltimore charter schools shows that...

it's foolish to talk about charters as if they are all one thing. It also shows that charter schools in Baltimore can't be fairly compared with traditional neighborhood schools. Why not?

The city's charter schools serve fewer special education students, over-age students who have repeated a grade, and students eligible for federally subsidized meals because of family poverty (Baltimore Sun).

A letter to the president of the IEA

Any legislator or union leader who does not stand firm fighting for equality in the way the state funds our schools and on the defense of our teacher pensions should know that our membership will hold them accountable. (Fred Klonsky)

May Day thoughts

Testing the economy

At a time when the Big Boys have devastated our economy, in ways that affect us all, but are hardest—of course—on the most vulnerable, they are upping their propaganda: "It’s not our fault?” Poverty has been redefined: it’s the side effect of poor schooling! All those side effects would be cured—cheaply—if we required schools to perform properly. Schools are suffering from attracting the wrong people to teaching—“sub-par” people, in Chancellor Klein’s words—and too much allowed leeway in the practice of their mission. (Deb Meier, Bridging Differences).

L.A. teachers vote for a 1-day strike

The union representing Los Angeles teachers is organizing for a possible one-day strike next month to protest looming layoffs. The work stoppage would have to be approved by a majority of teachers, who will be able to vote over a several-day period, starting today. Last week, the Los Angeles Board of Education, by a 4-3 vote, approved a budget package that could result in more than 5,300 job losses, including about 3,500 teachers who lack tenure protection. (L.A. Times)

Facing South

May Day, a day historically used to celebrate the the contributions of working people around the globe, has become an important movement-building day for immigrant rights activists over the past couple of years in the United States. Over 1.5 million people took to the streets throughout the country (and across the South) on May Day 2006, culminating in the largest immigrant rights protest in U.S. history. (Facing South)

Marching in L.A.

Despite the nationwide furor over swine flu, thousands of people are expected to gather on Friday and march through downtown Los Angeles and MacArthur Park in support of immigrants' rights. (City News Service)

Smaller class size?

Prof. Herbert Gans from Columbia Teachers College, makes a good case for a federal smaller-class-size initiative. There's plenty of good research backing him up. Or you can ask any classroom teacher and they will tell you how important it is. As expected, Gans has the wing-nuts' shorts in a twist.

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

Brother Fred tells the "well respected" Petrilli...