Small Schools: Public School Reform Meets the Ownership Society

A review

Clive Harber is a prof at the University of Birmingham, England. He's written a great review of our book. It's published in the latest issue of Teachers College Record.

The title of the series in which this book is published is “Education, Politics and Culture” which suits the lively and politically committed content very well. Fundamentally, the book is about how a progressive educational movement aimed at facilitating smaller and more democratic urban schools in America became hijacked by the neo-conservative agenda of the Bush administration and its many powerful allies. In so doing it cannot fail to tackle the wider educational and political issues of the last eight years and their antecedents, which it does with admirable clarity and detail... Read the rest of the review, here.

Obama reiterates

"Troops out in 16 months"





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It's Independence Day

And what country can preserve its liberties, if it's rulers are not warned from time to time, that this people preserve the spirit of resistance? --Thomas Jefferson

The gadflies are buzzing about "patriotism" again

The teacher-basher title is up for grabs over at Flypaper blog where they’ve decided that it’s their 4th of July, patriotic duty to attack teachers unions. The Fordham neocons rightly concede the bashing championship to National Review wing-nut Thomas Sowell who blames “unpatriotic” teachers for Hitler’s victory in France. Then superfly Eric Osberg makes it worse, confessing, “I’m not enough of a historian to wade into that issue."

Hey Osberg! Please don’t blame your teachers. Read a damn book once in a while. After all, Sowell’s not much of an historian either. You’ll notice his quote about blaming the teachers union for fascism is not attributable to anyone. It’s actually all part of the neocon’s current ideological campaign starting with Jonah Goldberg’s book, Liberal Fascism, to rewrite history and equate Hitler and fascism with the left.

The French left, for those who don’t read, led the resistance movement against the fascists during WWII—and against France’s own right-wing, “patriotic” Vichy puppet government. That regime was led by Field Marshal Petain, a “patriotic” WWI hero who wound up collaborating with the Nazis and depriving French citizens of all their hard earned democratic rights.

Hmmm.

N.Y. small schools—Can they survive?

This good-news small schools story ran yesterday in the NYT. It raises an interesting question —can success at small schools like the Law & Justice Academy, be sustained?

To hear the tales of the new graduates is to understand the enormous effort and amount of resources it takes to make a school succeed. Teachers and other staff members routinely work 60 hours a week. Millions of extra dollars have been collected in grants and private donations. Parents and students regularly attend workshops until 10 p.m.

Someone's burning out

*****

BTW, who is this Martin Klonsky (must be a relative) and why is the Hillary Clinton Forum saying such terrible things about him?

Education is what survives...

I’m always getting pitches from consulting firms with names like The Something Group, asking me to review a film, book or video for their clients and help get their names into the blogosphere. The latest was Laura from the Rosen Group asking me to watch a video from the Aspen Ideas Festival. What I really wanted to ask Laura is--how come I never get invited to Aspen? It seems to be the place where only the executive wing of education reform hangs out, with some corporate sponsor picking up the heavy tab. Does that answer my previous question? Yes, it does.

Don't get me wrong. I love Aspen and the beautiful Colorado Rockies. The old mining town used to be a place where writers, artists and hippies roamed. Now you're more likely to find Michael Eisner, Victoria Beckham, or Prince Bandar. I wonder what a hotel room in Aspen costs these days? Probably no place for an urban teacher to come and have her/his voice heard at the Ideas Festival. But I digress.

The topic of the video and of Atlantic Magazine’s Aspen panel discussion was intriguing—“Is higher education for everyone?" The three powerhouse panelists were: Dan Mote, President, University of Maryland; Paul Verkuil, Former President, College of William and Mary; and Michael Bennet, Superintendent of the Denver Public School System.

Bennet, the only public school educator on the panel, never even gets one word in during the entire video. Why was he even there? His hair was perfect. But his comments would have been most interesting since he runs a district that sees a small percentage of its students get a 4-year college degree.

Neither of the other two had anything meaningful to contribute. Too bad, because these two guys are in some way really part of the problem. They each run, or ran, big universities—one public and the other private—which have priced themselves out of the market for almost anyone who isn’t a millionaire’s kid or willing to face a lifetime of heavy debt.

The video offers no debate, no discussion, no new insights into the question it poses. Mote and Verkuil each try and sound clever at times with old-boy ed-chatter. Verkuil, described on the video as former CEO of the American Automobile Association, is actually a pretty progressive guy. He's been an outspoken critic of privatization mania under the Ownership Society and wrote a pretty good book on the topic.

But in the video, he offers none of that. Instead, he uses one of my favorite quotes from behaviorist B.F. Skinner: "Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten,” for no apparent reason, and then he mistakenly attributes it to Albert Einstein, proving Skinner’s quote to be perfectly appropriate.
Thanks, Laura, for wasting 8 minutes and 20 seconds of my life.

Progressive blogger shot in D.C.

TPM reports that Brian Beutler, a well-known progressive blogger, was shot and seriously injured during a mugging last night in Washington, D.C.

One bullet damaged Beutler's spleen, and he had it removed during surgery this morning at the Washington Hospital Center. He's expected to make a "pre-trauma" recovery, which is to say, a completely full recovery.

The shooting was confirmed to us by Tracy Van Slyke, the project director of the Media Consortium, a network of leading progressive news organizations (TPM is a member) for which Beutler is the Washington correspondent.

Read more...

Quotables

This comes from Sun-Times sports columnist Rick Telander re. former Chicago Simeon High School basketball star Derrick Rose, the Bulls number-one draft pick:

In 2007 in Chicago, 32 school-age children were killed by gunfire. This year there have been 28 killed so far, with the youngest being a 7-year-old girl, waiting for an afternoon snack at a fast-food drive-through with her father. Gang killers are pretty bad shots, you know, so in places like Rose's Englewood neighborhood, nobody's really safe from the crossfire, not even on your own porch or in your own bedroom, unless its walls are metal-sheathed. Poverty is at the root of it all, of course. And the ease of getting guns.

'I'm tired of walking into classrooms where there's an empty desk and trying to talk to children and comfort them and make them feel better,'' Arne Duncan, the chief executive of the Chicago Public Schools, recently told the New York Times.

I give Duncan credit for at least taking some responsibility for these CPS students and for speaking out about guns.

*****

"It's all politics..."

From new-McCarthyite and neocon think-tanker (Manhattan Institute) Sol Stern responding to the UFT's Leo Casey, calling the union a shill for Obama and calling me a "good friend of the UFT" (which I am).

I can’t help concluding that the reason you launched this factually unsupported attack on me, is that the union is now shilling for Obama, as it previously shilled for Clinton. You still haven’t explained why you never said a word about the Clinton campaign’s overt efforts to link Obama with Ayers’ terrorist past, but then decided to dredge up an old article of mine which never even came close to making that link. I guess it’s all politics Leo, and politics makes for strange bedfellows. In that regard I see that one of your new boosters in this argument is none other than that good friend of the UFT, Mike Klonsky. Don’t you think Al would be turning over in his grave?

The Al, for the uninitiated, is the late Al Shanker, who probably IS turning over in his grave seeing his old buddy Stern in bed with the worst of the union busters. As far as the racist theorist Charles Murray is concerned (referred to in Stern's response to Leo Casey), he's a fellow, along with Stern, at the Manhattan Institute. I love Stern calling an election campaign, "all politics."

Is the campaign really about ME?

Gee, I bet you thought that this presidential campaign was about issues like the war in Iraq or the devastating economic crisis. Maybe you thought rising fuel prices or education reform were important. Or maybe you even thought electing the country's first black president meant something. Well guess what? You're wrong This campaign is really about ME. That's right, ME--Mike Klonsky and whether or not the candidates know ME (move over Bill Ayers and Rev. Wright).

At least that's the way low-life blogger Steve Diamond and his gaggle of right-wing loony internet acolytes, along with Manhattan Institute's Sol Stern and Fordham's Mike Petrilli, see the race. To the new-McCarthyite witch hunters, it's all about us '60s-era radicals and our undue influence over Barack Obama. Lord, if only it were true. Maybe Barack wouldn't be scrambling towards the center on issues of gun control and immunity for spying communications conglomerates.

To some of the low-life's (he even brings in our families, kids, etc....) charges, I plead guilty. I was indeed a militant young radical leader back then--head of SDS in '68 and then a Marxist revolutionary. We new leftists were indeed looking for answers and alternatives to both Soviet gulag socialism as well as to the Democratic Party's machine politics, war mongering and racial segregationist practices of the times.

That's me on the far right in '69. 

Quite naturally we looked to other '60s-era radicals (Che, Mao, Mandela, Ho Chi Minh, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King) for answers. Found some. Didn't find others. History and lots of hard debate and experience have moved me far from my politics of 30-40 years ago. But there is also much I've tried to hang on to--opposition to the war, support for union rights, involvement in the Civil Rights Movement and the struggle social justice and democratic education, to name a few.

It's that part of my history that led me to my last 30 years of work as an educator and school reform activist (yes, low-life Diamond, I actually was a cab driver--a damned good one). You'll have to read our book for more on that topic.

Most of the rest of the low-lifer stuff is crap, either badly researched or just fabricated--a throwback to the old '50 McCarthyite, guilt-by-association campaigns. Much of it doesn't even get my name right. They call me Martin.

I haven't had the time nor the inclination to google Diamond or look into his past. Don't know what his politics were 30 years ago. But I'll leave that to others.

In case you haven't noticed, this type of fear-based politics is a sign of the times. It even has Barack Obama putting on flag pins and vowing that he is truly patriotic over and over and over again. I really don't blame him, especially after hearing Matt Lauer accidentally referring to him, once again, as "Osama" yesterday morning.

Among the crap is the claim that Obama threw me "under the bus" by censoring my educators blog on the Obama campaign website. The fact is, I have great difficulty managing even one blog, hadn't posted on the Obama site for weeks and then found the site filled with racist comments and even threats of violence, posted by the low-lifes. So I closed it down. Actually, I and anyone, can post on that blog site. There is no screening. No controls. That, to the campaign's credit. Doing the SmallTalk blog with its 30,000 readers each month, is more than enough for a small-time blogger like me.

The rest of his "evidence" of the Klonsky/Ayers/Hayden/Rudd/Davidson/Obama conspiracy is really too silly to deserve a response (Obama gave me $175,000--I wish. Must be mixing me up with Hillary).

But anyway, there it is. This election is all about ME. So remember, when you go to the polls in November, a vote for Obama is a vote for ME (and you). Now watch ME (us) kick McCain's butt.

*****

Darn that Leo Casey at Edwize. He spoils everything by taking on Diamond's claim that the election is all about ME. Casey first makes sure that no one thinks him a weatherman terrorist nor a Maoist. Hey, does this imply that Casey and the UFT are supporting Obama? He's yet to say so, but this post hints at it. Kudos to you for that Leo. But Casey's blog also has provided a platform for low-life Diamond and he never even criticizes him directly. Even as Diamond takes him to task for being a naive conciliator.

Instead Leo writes:

A sure sign that the 2008 election is shaping up to be a realigning election, decisively ending three decades of conservative dominance of American politics, is the declining quality of argument put forward by the Right. This is particularly true in the field of education, where right-wing education pundits are reduced to complaining about the long-dead political pasts of two Chicago-based Obama education supporters.

How right you are Mr. Casey.

Leo then argues the right also has its own '60s radical, Howard Fuller, in its ranks. So there. Take that you Republicans.

I'm still trying to figure out how one's past can be described as "long-dead." I like to think of it as prologue.

The New Orleans model

The privateers' feeding frenzy is on in post-Katrina New Orleans. Chief privateer Paul Vallas, with KIPP as his model, is trashing experienced teachers and replacing them with KIPPies—young, uncertified, low-paid, inexperienced TFAers who will work 16-hour days with no collective bargaining rights—that is, until they leave the profession in 3 years. According to Sunday's Times-Picayune:

The Recovery School District in New Orleans will slash about 17 percent of its teaching force by terminating close to 180 teachers, librarians, math coaches and other staff members by Tuesday…About 260 other staff members fall into a "surplus" pool that principals can tap. Those in the surplus pool could stay at their schools or move into other positions. About three-quarters of that batch include certified teachers, math coaches, in-house substitutes, clerical staff and others whose positions were eliminated through school closings, elementary grade reconfigurations and principals' requests.

Vallas said he is comfortable with the new model -- which mostly mirrors the framework of the charter school operator Knowledge is Power Program…

Inside Chicago's Renaissance

In Vallas' previous haunt, Chicago, the Daley/Duncan regime is being lauded by the Sun-Times for improving the quality of the CPS teaching force and for recruiting a "higher caliber of new hires."

Over six years, CPS dramatically improved the quality of its teaching force, driven by higher caliber new hires, according to a study by the Illinois Education Research Council at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville.

I'm not sure what "higher caliber" means exactly. I hope it doesn't mean more young, white suburbanites. Let's look into that one.

Yes, let's give credit where credit is due. The number of candidates per available Chicago teaching job has greatly increased. But this may also be due to a worsening economy and thousands of teachers having their positions cut and neighborhood schools being replaced by privately-managed charters hiring younger, mainly uncertified teachers. Economic uncertainty and hard times in suburban districts also means that city teachers think twice before giving up their Chicago teaching job for greener suburban pastures.

Still, as the editorial points out:

Teachers with the best credentials are among the most likely to leave the neediest schools, research shows. Anywhere from 74 percent to 79 percent of those teachers are gone after five years, according to a report that tracked Illinois teachers though 2006, also by IERC.

As for raising teacher quality through merit pay and mentorship, the Chicago New Teachers Center is trying to provide every new teacher with a mentor. But, is there really money in the budget to do that in a meaningful way?

A University of Chicago report found that less than 13 percent of novice teachers in 2005 reported getting intensive support -- the kind of help that dramatically increases the odds of them staying in education and at their particular school.

That's 13 percent—a decade after the Mayor took over the school system. And the S-T editorial offers no evidence that merit pay has produced anything except more emphasis on test-prep. Maybe it's too soon for the communications dept. to start dropping these celebration stories in editorial board meetings.

A new look at urban schools

Urban public schools are always getting a bad rap. So why are so many middle-class families with school-age children leaving the suburbs and moving back into the city? Others even giving phony addresses to sneak their kids into inner-city schools tax-free. Sunday’s Chicago Tribune (“An Urban Education”) lists other reasons offered for raising kids in the city, including short commutes and diversity.

“But none of this would matter if it weren’t for a grassroots movement to improve schools,” writes the Trib’s Virginia Groak.

Couldn’t have said it better myself. Thanks Virginia

Champ change

When I was out in L.A. earlier this year, I got to visit the Oscar De La Hoya Animo Charter School, part of the Green Dot group of schools. Pretty impressive. I guess the champ agrees. He just cut them a check for $3.5 million.

"It's the system..."

Weekend's best quote comes from Thomas "Flat Earth" Friedman, who must be reading my stuff:

Our political system seems incapable of producing long-range answers to big problems or big opportunities. We are the ones who need a better-functioning democracy — more than the Iraqis and Afghans. We are the ones in need of nation-building. It is our political system that is not working.

Uh, oh. Does Obama know this guy? Have they ever met? Is he going to have to renounce him?

Exorcising Jindal

Although he faces a recall petition in his home state, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal is not only on John McCain's VP shortlist, he is also the darling of New Orleans' school privateers and even keynoted the recent national charter school conference. He's a believer in exorcism, teaching creationism in public schools, and vouchers. What a perfect match for McCain.

Living for the city

That's me, reflected in Stevie's glasses

I love Chicago in the summer.

Highlight of the weekend was Saturday night's Stevie Wonder concert in Grant Park. Seemed like a million people in the park, a really diverse crowd, white, black, kids and old-schoolers, all up on their feet for most of 3 hours—singing along with Stevie and knowing every lyric.

They want us to join their fighting
But our answer today
Is to let all our worries
Like the breeze through our fingers slip away

Brother Fred's already got the YouTube video.

Cutting through D.C. double talk

"The grants being announced today are not
related to those (Michelle Rhee's) efforts."--Washington Post

Anytime I see the words Gates, World Bank, Fannie Mae and community engagement in the same sentence, I do a double-take. But there's something about Phillip Rucker's story ("Grants Will Aid Groups Working for Education Reform"), in Friday's WaPo that made me scratch my chin and go, "hmmm."

It wasn't just that Gates, Fannie Mae, and the World Bank, of all people, are putting up (a measly) $725,000 in grant money to support a "community engagement" piece in D.C. school reform initiative. I'm glad the five District non-profits are getting a little operating money and I'm sure they will find good ways to spend it regardless of what the givers' intentions may be.

No, what made me scratch was this :

The grants come as Rhee and Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) are trying to raise $75 million a year from businesses and private philanthropies to fund their education restructuring efforts. The grants being announced today are not
related to those efforts.

If these community-engagement grants have been consciously distanced from the pot of business dollars controlled by Supt. Rhee and Mayor Fenty, why then, this next quote from the World Bank's Vicki Betancourt?

Viki Betancourt, community outreach manager at the World Bank, said the grants will help build "community will" around Rhee's efforts. "It doesn't immediately influence the reforms directly," Betancourt said. "What it does is gets parents and community members engaged in talking about these reforms and becoming active."

It will take a lot more than $750K and more than just getting folks talking, to build community will for the Rhee/Fenty school-privatization program, especially when they admit up front that the funded programs will have no influence over the reforms.

So, maybe someone from D.C. can write in and cut through all this double talk?

This is all so 1950s

More Politics of Fear

Check out my brother Fred's PREAPrez blog for recent posts here, here & here, about the witch hunting Ms. McDonald over at the Justice Dept., who Googles all prospective employees to see if they are now or ever have been a member of…

********

Sing, sing a song…

When the American Legion says, "sing" you sing. At least that's how it is at a fearful Fenton High School in Bensenville, Il. where the Legionaires demanded that the school choir perform the National Anthem at the start of every concert.

On Monday, members of a local American Legion Post and the American Legion Riders spoke out at the Fenton High School District 100 board meeting, saying the school had a civic duty and social responsibility to educate students to be civilly responsible. They also said singing the song would honor all of the school's graduates who went on to serve in the military.

Quote of the week from the PEN Weekly Newsblast


Baldwin

"The paradox of education is precisely this -- that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated." - James A. Baldwin (author)

The politics of fear

As Obama starts to pull away in the polls, a desperate new McCarthyism is rearing its ugly head once again. This time around, it's the network of Swiftboat bloggers that are leading the attack on Barack, using their reliable arsenal (especially in tough economic times) of anti-communism (now fear of terrorism) and racism to spread fear and disunity. The new witch-hunters are combing the Obama campaign especially for '60s radicals (yes, there are some of us left, especially in the field of education).

How to respond? Ignore them? Take them head on? Tough choices for Obama campaigners and for those of us who are targeted orwho are collateral damage.

*****

Brings back memories of similar dark times in the '50s. This new film about blacklisted screenwriter and '60's friend, the late Dalton Trumbo, may shed some light.

This from reviewer Andrew O'hehir in Salon.Com:

The real target of the Red Scare was not the handful of prominent lefties like Trumbo who had their livelihoods destroyed and their reputations ruined but rather the rest of society, which proved by and large to be craven, suggestible, and downright eager to hew to a new standard of patriotic conformity.

Charter teacher: 'Union is a good thing"

I didn't go to the big national charter school conference currently taking place in New Orleans. Couldn't afford the trip. But I would have liked to been in on some of the discussions. I could have easily done without listening to the privatizers, like Nelson Smith hold forth. But I would have loved to hear Danny Glover speak. Gov. Jindal speaks today.

I certainly would have liked to watch the expressions on some of the private operators' faces when teacher Mike Meehan of the Construction Careers Center in St. Louis, said he had come to spread the word that "the union is a good thing." I imagine at least several cups of spilled coffee.

This from the Times-Picayune:

Though most charters shun teachers' unions -- which typically lobby against charters -- Meehan said his colleagues recently unionized despite opposition from the school's board. He said their desires -- job security, a pay scale and books for all students -- fell on deaf ears. "The teachers and even the parents at our school have been left out of the loop. That's why we wanted to unionize," Meehan said.

Other good charter issues at the conference catching my eye included teacher recruitment and the lack of diversity on charter school boards:

The influx of rookie teachers, who come bearing vigor, nonetheless concerns some veterans, who question their effectiveness without enough support.

...New Schools have not been able to systematically draw enough African-Americans to boards. Efforts to diversify the boards at some schools, however, have already produced productive dialogue.

Mike Klonsky

Bell Curve resurrection

It amazes me how easily the right-wing think tanks, like AEI, Fordham, and the Manhattan Institute, have been able to restore the once-discredited racist, Charles Murray, back to respectability. Fourteen years after The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure drew wide condemnation for its racist projections of black children as being intellectually inferior to whites, the author’s latest book, Real Education, is making the rounds in conservative academic circles and is even being treated as serious research by some ed reformers.

Murray cynically uses the "not every student should go to college" argument, to now claim a high degree of predictability from birth about which class of children will be capable of college success and higher-order thinking. "It's idiotic," he tells Edweek, to have high expectations for these kids.

Fortunately, Pedro Noguera is given a sentence or two in the Edweek story, to counter Murray's claims.

Funny man Bush

Headline from today's Chicago Sun-Times: 'FEMA doing heckuva job this time'

The story, of course, is about flooded Iowa and FEMA's on-the-spot response to the crisis. It was President Bush who
used that same language to praise his hand-picked, horse-trainer croney, FEMA chief Michael Brown (pointing), who sat on his hands as thousands of mainly-black people in Mississippi and Louisiana died or were forced to flee New Orleans during the horrors of Katrina. 'Brownie, you're doing a heckuva job!'' became a dark joke at the time. We still remember the language and aren't surprised that the response in Iowa is world's apart from New Orleans.

We also remember the other joke Bush played on the world five years ago last month, when he stood on the deck of the aircraft carrier Lincoln and declared "final victory" in Iraq.

Funny guy, that Bush.

Why are they painting LDH as a hater?

Stanford prof and Obama education advisor, Linda Darling-Hammond is the country’s strongest voice for teacher excellence and preparation for the profession. She has also been a critic of Teach for America’s obvious weak points. Does this make her a hater of TFA? Yes says Ed (Private) Sector’s Kevin Carey who will tolerate no criticism when it comes to private ventures in education. Not so, says blogger Sherman Dorn. He’s right, of course.

Rebuilding New Orleans on the cheap

12.10.07

Where did all the money go?

First they fired every union teacher in New Orleans and turned the city into a mecca for privately-managed charter schools doing education on the cheap with many low-paid and unqualified teachers and rookie principals. Now come the reports that the city is being rebuilt by exploiting low-wage, immigrant, non-union labor brought in from Mexico and Central America. These undocumented workers have no rights and are paying the ultimate price. They are suffering from a range of respiratory diseases and other potentially deadly ailments from Katrina's toxic residue with no access to medical care or treatment. The main problem?—fear of being deported if they seek care or drugs.

"The majority (of us) have had breathing problems," says one worker, nodding toward the men milling around behind him. They don't give their names because they are all undocumented immigrants from Mexico, Honduras or Guatemala. "We work in demolition, construction," he says. "But many times, the bosses don't give us masks or gloves or glasses or filters."

Philly a black majority city with little equity

In response to the official release yesterday of the Urban League's 2007 "State of Black Philadelphia" report, a couple of hundred Philadelphians packed a meeting room at the Loews Hotel to listen to a panel discuss the report and its bleak findings. The report found that the quality of life for black Philadelphians, configured as a "Philadelphia Equality Index," measures up to only 72 percent of that of whites.

Wharton School economics professor Bernard Anderson says he believes African-Americans actually represent nearly 50 percent of the population. "You can't have half of the population groveling in poverty and still be a vibrant, growing city," he said.

‘Motown may soon be notown’

In Chicago, journalist extraordinaire, Danny Schecter writes over at Pacific Free Press about his visit to Jesse Jackson’s Operation Push. Danny is here to show his 2006 film, In Debt We Trust.

(Nearby Detroit is harder hit. Yesterday, residents of the Detroit area who opened their paper were greeted with 122 pages of the 2008 Tax Foreclosure list for Wayne County. The current figure for Wayne county reports that a staggering 1/4 homeowners are in default on their mortgage.) This is worse than Katrina, a disaster in the making. Motown may soon be notown.

Danny, sitting in Rev. Jackson's church, makes the right connection:

I flashed back to the churches I visited during the civil rights movement back in the South in the 60's where politics and religion became one in a blend of inspiration and resistance. It seemed like that movement may be on the verge of being reignited, This will be a movement for economic justice, not just civil rights.