Mathews comes back down to earth on KIPP

The Washington Post's Jay Mathews has, by his own admission, gone ga-ga over KIPP charter schools. Even the facts couldn't move him--until now. His past columns have been filled with hyperbole and he has referred to KIPP as "a miracle" and the "best schools in America." But researcher Jeff Henig has finally brought Mathews down to earth. Henig seems to have convinced Mathews that KIPP's high attrition rates artificially boosted the schools' test scores by eliminating low-scoring kids and those with behavioral problems.

Mathews carefully concedes:

Thank goodness then for the cautious, balanced analysis provided by Henig, an expert on urban education reform and charter schools at Columbia's Teachers College. He agrees with KIPP officials that they have not been selecting just an upper crust of higher-scoring and better motivated kids for their schools, despite suggestions to the contrary. But he also points to a possible flaw that leads some students to return to their regular public schools before completing the KIPP middle school program, perhaps because they find the work too hard and the days too long. Their departure may distort reports of KIPP gains. Turnover of KIPP teachers, he says, is also high and creates doubt about whether gains can be sustained.

The funny thing is, Henig wasn't telling Mathews anything he didn't already know. KIPP's push-out of low-scoring kids is old news. Mathews even read the same critique of KIPP last May when he reviewed the book, Keeping the Promise: The Debate Over Charter Schools.

Henig must have an antedote for Kool-Aid.

At the Fall Forum

I'm down here in DEMOCRATIC North Carolina (can you believe it?), in Charlotte, to be exact, at the annual Coalition of Essential Schools Fall Forum. I try to come to the Fall Forum every year, to touch base with old friends and hear some good speeches and presentations. But this is the smallest turnout ever--under 1,000 it looks like.

Why? Look no further than the growing economic crisis, making it impossible for many teachers to travel to professional meetings or professional development sights. Budget cuts have led to travel bans on teachers, students and administrators. Progressive school reform organizations like CES, will have to find new ways to get their message out, raise funds, and organize themselves and their base.

Many will close shop and/or go to work directly for the power philanthropists--Gates, Broad, Walton, etc... Others will restrict themselves to local work, leaving the national field to the few large, well-capitalized, professional development companies who turn teachers into delivery clerks.

******

Nice opening event last night with a student choral group from a local high school doing classical pieces in Italian and then closing with a moving gospel rendition of "I've been in the storm so long." Seeing this diverse group of singers brought me back in time to 1968, the last time I visited Charlotte, when the very idea of black and white North Carolina students attending high school and singing together would have been dangerous and subversive.

The keynote was delivered by the great Chicano writer/poet/community activist Luis Rodriguez ("Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A.") who held himself up as a living example of why we cannot write off any kids.

I led a discussion this morning on "Public school reform meets the ownership society" and did a book signing. I'll be on another panel tomorrow morning with Deb Meier and Ann Cook, discussing the impact of mayoral control of big city school districts.

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On the plane from Detroit, I'm reading my complimentary copy of the Financial Times. The headline on the election story gets me all teary-eyed: "Death knell for 'Southern Strategy.'"

Known as the “southern strategy”, the covert racial appeal to alienated working-class whites helped to deliver seven out of the last 10 presidential elections to Republicans. On Tuesday night, Barack Obama’s emphatic victory brought the southern strategy to a close – and with it may also have ended his party’s torturous 40-year struggle to win back the loyalty of the US mainstream.

McCarthy blames profs for the Obama youth vote

Andrew ("The Other McCarthy") McCarthy blames the "tenured radicals" in the academy for Tuesday's massive youth vote. It seems we teachers indoctrinated millions of kids with notions of participatory democracy. Gee, thanks McCarthy. We tried our best. But I think you give far to0 little credit to Bush/Cheney, their eternal-war, end-of-hope policies and Bush-onomics which collapses the future of every young person in America. Oh, and you get some credit as well for being one of McCain's attack-dog bloggers who tried to keep the kids home on election day with your Swiftboating tactics but despite yourself, only gave them more energy to drive the Obama landslide.

See how they run

According to the Washington Times, McCain’s people are now blaming Palin for the failed Bill Ayers strategy. “She went rogue,” they claim. Like rats from a sinking ship they are denying culpability. Are they afraid of an Ayers suit, a reader asks? You betcha.

They're blaming stock drop on Obama

The market took yet another dive today. So who’s to blame this time? He won’t take office for a couple of months, but the latest dip is all the fault of President-elect Obama, says Business Week's Sara Lepro. It seems that Wall Street would have felt more bullish with a white guy in the White House. If the market yo-yos up tomorrow, let’s see if Obama gets the credit.

No more radio silence

Teacher educator and small-schools advocate Bill Ayers is particularly glad this campaign is over. He never dreamed he would play a central role in it or be used as a foil in McCain’s guilt-by-association Swiftboating assault on Obama. But until yesterday’s elections, Bill admirably chose to keep radio silence. Now that he's no longer a campaign issue, he’s speaking out and has plenty to say. Check out this thoughtful and somewhat contrite New Yorker interview and this piece in the Washington Post where Bill says of his Weatherman days:

"I wish I'd been wiser," he said. "I wish I'd been more effective. I wish I'd been more unifying. I wish I'd been more principled."

Words for all of us to live by.

Obama’s first 100 days

Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, Andrew McCarthy and a host of wing-nut bloggers all claim that I’ve been palin’ around with Barack Obama. Now, I wish it were true. If it were, here are a couple of things I would put on his radar screen for his first 100 days in office.

Hey Barack, my friend--stop this

Catherine Gewertz at Edweek, “Urban Districts Urged to Prepare for Immigration Raids,” reports that horrible damage is being done to immigrant students as more and more of their parents are swept up in raids by the INS.

Rosa Maria Castañeda, a research associate at the Urban Institute, a Washington-based think tank that co-authored a report last year detailing the impact on children of three large-scale workplace raids, said that when such arrests occur, children often find themselves at school or day care with no one to pick them up, or alone at home with no adult supervision.

And this...

Colleen Shaddox, writing for Miller-McCune, “Juvenile Justice and the Theater of the Absurd,” makes a strong case against trying kids as adults:

About 200,000 minors enter the adult criminal justice system each year. Research on minors sent to the adult system says that they are more likely to re-offend and escalate into violent behavior than their peers who go to the juvenile system, where rehabilitative services are far more extensive. We also know that youths in adult prisons are at high risk for suicide and for victimization by adult inmates.

More agenda points to follow.

Grant Park hangover

Still to numb to blog this morning. We (the whole family, neighbors, friends from all over Chicago) were watching the incredible numbers come in on the jumbo screen, then dancing with the Obamas, shedding tears of joy, hugging friends and complete strangers. It's been a long time coming...

Good riddance McCain/Bush/Neocons

100,000 in Virginia

So long Studs

Nice morning at the Old Town School

A few dozen of us stayed after class for what's called Second Session. We strummed, fiddled and sang the Woodie Guthrie dust bowl anthem, So Long, It's Been Good To Know You, to honor the passing of Studs Terkel.

This dusty old dust is a-gettin' my home, And I got to be driftin' along."

We followed that up with Green Day's Good Riddance, sung to Bush in advance of the big celebration tomorrow. Somehow the party won't be as good without Studs.

It's something unpredictable, but in the end it's right.
I hope you had the time of your life.

From my old friend Najee

Najee Ali and I grew up together on the streets of North Philly back in the 50s. His name was Melvin back then and he was the only kid who could beat me in a race on the schoolyard at McIntyre Elementary. We reconnected after 50 years.

Today he sent me this video.

Thanks Najee. I'll raise a glass to you Tuesday night.

'My own voting experience'

James Forman, Jr. writes:

I went to vote today, in person absentee because I'll be knocking on doors in VA on election day. Washington DC, with our 3 electoral votes, is hardly in doubt, but still I couldn't miss it.

After about 15 minutes of waiting in line I got up to the desk and gave my form. "James Forman," said the clerk reading my paper. Any relation to "Dr. James Forman?" Um . . . "do you mean a medical doctor," I asked, not wanting to be presumptuous. "No, the civil rights leader," he responded. After I told him that was my dad he broke into a big smile and told me that they had worked together for DC statehood. Then he went back to his computer and plugged my name in. "Do you live on Harvard Street," he asked. I paused. That was where my dad had lived, and it never occured to me that he might still be in their database. My heart held for a second as I heard my dad's old address, the apt I had been to so many times. I finally responded, "no, that's where my dad lived." He hesistated when I said "lived," and I realized that he must not have known that my dad died a few years ago. When I told him, he shook his head and said he was sorry. I started to choke up, and trying to hold it together, I told him "I'm sorry too, he would have given anything to be standing next to me right now getting ready to vote in this election." He looked me in the eye and said, "but you are voting for him."

Then I got home and saw this video sent by my friend Yodit, and it made me think of my dad, and others like him around the country:

So many stories like this. Share yours. Love, James

Studs dead at 96

Author-radio host-actor-activist and Chicago symbol Louis "Studs" Terkel died today at his Chicago home at age 96. At his bedside was a copy of his latest book, "P.S. Further Thoughts From a Lifetime of Listening," scheduled for a November release.

Here is a piece Studs wrote The Kappan in April, 2006. I re-published it on my old SmallTalk blog:

A Small Space of Sanity

By Studs Terkel

Schoolchildren should learn all they can about the people who stood up for humanity against the war-makers and the powerful. I’m talking about the abolitionists and the suffragettes, the Wobblies and labor organizers, the freedom riders and civil rights marchers, and the antiwar activists. Students should learn about Burr Tillstrom, one of the geniuses of early television, who created the Kuklapolitans and the show “Kukla, Fran, and Ollie.” They were puppets, little rags that came to life in Burr’s hands: Ollie was the one-toothed dragon; Buelah Witch, the outspoken and independent feminist who always refused to ride her broom sidesaddle; and Kukla, the round-headed enigma. And they became the inspiration for Jim Henson’s Muppets. The Kuklapolitans lived in our world, but they created a small space of sanity within it — humane, tender, gentle, filled with humor and good will.

Burr Tillstrom graduated from Senn High School in Chicago, a place the current mayor wants to transform into a military academy, the exact opposite of the world Burr Tillstrom imagined. There’s a lot to do to realize Tillstrom’s vision, and opposing the militarization of our schools is a part of it. If there’s one thing students need to know about patriotism, it’s that the only way to love our country is to care about the humanity of the people who live in it.

My other blog...

Under the bus

McCain/Palin’s bevy of wing-nut bloggers are going absolutely wing-nuts over my blog. Not this one so much, although they have wildly increased SmallTalk's readership (a shout-out to All-American Blogger, Maggie’s Notebook, someone named Steve Diamond, and all my new wing-nut readers). Rather they're all chattering about the one I ran for a while on BarackObama.org. I guess they don't have all that much to talk about these days and not much of an audience.

They call it, “Obama’s official campaign website” but actually anyone can blog on it. You don’t need official permission and there is no monitoring or censoring. Wow, what a democratic idea! I enjoyed it. But the problem I had, was running two blogs at once. And since I had way more readers here on SmallTalk, I moved all my blogging over here.

The wing-nuts went postal, claiming that Obama had "censored" me and thrown me “under the bus” to hide our long, close relationship and the fact that Obama is a secret socialist, terrorist, muslim, Annenberg/Klonsky money funneler. This bogus story is now repeated on every wing-nut blog site across the U.S.--over and over again. With each posting, a little more is added.

Hey, did you know? Klonsky and Obama shared the same office? Yes, and President Obama is going to appoint him Secretary of Social Justice.

As you can tell from the polls, this bogus campaign strategy isn't really working. But at least the nut jobs are persistent.

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Runnin' on empty...

Headline, not from The Onion, but from today’s Sun-Times:

Obama would fill courts with ACLU zombies

Ah, perfect for Halloween.

Or how about this From UPI:

Poll: 1 in 4 Texans say Obama is Muslim

My mind has just slipped into the gutter thinking, what else do 1 in 4 Texans do?

Here's my favorite bit of anti-Obama educational paranoia:

From Sara Lester at Intense Debate:

“If Barack Obama becomes president, he and his cohorts have every intention of forcing our children into public schools to be taught "social justice," i.e. that because God created them with light skin, they are inherently evil murderers.”

Yes you little light-skinned devils. Go to the board and write the words social-justice 100 times, or no pizza for you.

Another reason McCain is losing Florida

Parent protests rocked Miami's Edison High this year

If you’re watching the news, you will see images of long, long early-voting lines in the key state of Florida. By all accounts, this is a good sign for Obama who was trailing badly in this state but now has pulled slightly ahead in the polls. If McCain loses Florida, there's little hope for him of winning this election.

Why has the momentum shifted?

The NYT and Boston Globe get some of the reasons right: 1) Obama has put boots on the ground, some 600 paid organizers to manage 160,000 volunteers. This is a state in which Obama didn’t even campaign during the primaries and where the Democratic Party traditionally has had a weak organization compared to Republicans. It’s also one which the McCain organization took for granted; 2) the housing crisis which has mangled Florida’s economy under the watch of two Republican governors, including Bush brother Jeb; 3) McCain and Gov. Christ are at each other’s throat over McCain’s choice of Palin over the more moderate Christ; and 4) the state’s once-powerful coalition of right-wing Cubans and Jewish retirees, which heavily supported Bush in 2000 and 2004, is in disarray. For many in the Cuban community, the economic crisis is trumping U.S. policy towards Cuba, as a voting issue, according to the Miami Herald.

But from my own work in the Sunshine State during the past seven years, I can tell you another reason for the growing grassroots support building for Obama . It’s a reason the national press hasn’t yet picked up on. It’s in large measure a response to the dismal failure of Republican education policies, especially NCLB and its testing madness which has hit here especially hard and caused havoc in many Florida districts.

Schools that have been deemed failures under NCLB’s grading system have been getting A or B grades under the former governor Jeb Bush’s grading system. The life-or-death FCAT exam has resulted in tens of thousands of kids, especially in heavily-populated Dade and Broward counties, being held back, unable to graduate on time and ultimately dropping out.

Florida has some of the largest high schools in the nation, many holding as many as 3,000 to 5,000 students. The state also has the nation’s highest dropout rate. No coincidence there.

Education privateers run wild down here and charter schools are handed out to patronage clients like Halloween candy. Then there's Neil Bush’s great Florida schools software swindle using his family connections and political clout to push his Ignite Company, which bilked schools out of millions of dollars.

Parents are upset and are taking it out on the Republicans. There is also widespread anger in Miami’s black community over the pushing-out of Rudy Crew as schools superintendent.

In the final analysis, it may be that these smoldering education issues are what push Obama over the top in a close race.

Thanks, Joe Williams

Damn, I guess I can't call DFER's Joe Williams a Republicrat twit any more. Joe shows some real heart and courage and comes to my defense against the latest wave of red-baiting-Obama attacks, in his latest blog post, "In defense of a Klonsky."

Thanks, Joe.

It wasn't so long ago that Joe was threatening to open a can of whoop-ass on both me and my brother. He probably backed off so he wouldn't scuff his wing-tips. Now I owe him a beer.

It’s not a crisis for everybody

The Bush/Cheney boys at Exxon Mobil post the biggest quarterly profit ever.

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Charters’ right-wing threatens Obama

Yes, there is a wing-nut faction within the charter school movement and they are among the most rabid of the anti-Obama attack dogs. They’re called the Center for Educational ReformJeanne Allen. The CER board is a collection of school profiteers, including Edison’s Chris Whittle, headed by John Danielson from Chartwell (Rod Paige’s consulting group), educational free-marketeer John Chubb and Kevin Chavous from the D.C. lobbying group of Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal LLP (also a charter school operator in Chicago).

CER started out as a pro-voucher group, but like many on the right, once they saw that vouchers were a dead issue, they shifted their focus over to charter schools as a way to attack teacher unions and to promote privatized school management.

Obama supports charter schools. But he opposes vouchers and doesn’t make a fetish out of charters. He’s an advocate for strong charter school accountability and supports teacher unions and collective bargaining rights for teachers. That's enough to make him a target for the CER.

Here, they threaten to cut Obama off, for what they say is his unwillingness, if elected, to “punish” state governors who favor strict accountability of charter schools. If he won't do it, CER calls on the Democratic Party to cut off funds for Obama’s campaign:

He'll also have to show us that he's willing to punish Governors like Ohio's Ted Strickland who has worked hard to stop charters in their tracks in his state. If the standard bearer for a party allows their own party leaders in states to take a pathetic stand on reform, their access to the party's benefits should be cut off.

Maybe that demand won't pan out so well.

Hunting down 'social-justice' teachers

For me, the ideal of teaching social-justice goes back some 45 years to the Civil Rights Movement and the Freedom Schools created by great educators like Ella Baker, Septima Clark, and Myles Horton. Their tradition of educating to empower the disenfranchised, to teach students to think critically, to participate in a democratic society, and challenge an unjust, racially segregated school system, has been carried on in recent times by educators like Deborah Meier, Bob Moses, Asa Hilliard, Pedro Noguera, William Ayers, Jonathan Kozol and Gloria Ladson-Billings, to name but a few. Furthermore, dozens of small and charter schools are now using social-justice teaching as a focus, to engage otherwise disinterested students and connect them with literature, mathematics and science curriculum.

But Education Week’s Kathleen Kennedy Manzo (“Election Renews Controversy Over Social-Justice Teaching”) reports moves afoot by right-wing think tankers like Sol Stern, to discredit and even ban social-justice teaching. Stern, Berkeley new-leftist turned professional ultra-rightist, has piled on to the McCain/Palin guilt-by-association bandwagon to link Ayers and Obama. In a City Journal piece, Stern even equates S-J teacher Ayers with Joseph Stalin.

Ayers, says Stern, “is not a school reformer. He is a school destroyer.” Stern, whose job at the Institute includes hunting down and “exposing” teachers like those who attended this N.Y. mathematics conference, never specifies exactly which schools S-J teachers have "destroyed." Instead he accuses these math teachers with “trashing the American system.”

Stern is not alone in the war on social justice. Recently-appointed asst. sec. of education, Williamson Evers, rode into Bush’s D.O.E. on his anti-S-J credentials.

Manzo writes:

Social-justice lessons are rarely taken from textbooks. They generally reflect multiple perspectives, particularly those of disadvantaged groups; question government policies and actions; and incorporate content and activities that encourage students to share their own experiences and participate actively.

I’ll leave it to folks like Stern and Evers to explain how this is “Stalinism” or the “trashing America.” It just sounds like great teaching to me.

Now me and Barack are part of a “coven of change-agents.”

'Ne'er-do-wells & pick-pockets'

That’s the latest from the other McCarthy, writing for the gullible at National Review. McCarthy is once again warning his shrinking flock that Obama is out to “socialize” America through the “redistribution of the wealth” (no, he doesn’t mean by taking $850 billion from the taxpayers and giving it to Wall Street bankers). Now that the soon-to-be-prez and I (“communist educator”) have launched our new “coven of change-agents,” our first agenda point, according to the other McCarthy, is to champion the “right of society’s ne’er-do-wells to pick the pockets of its achievers through the coercive power of government.” Ne’er-do-wells, of course, is McCarthy’s term for the poor, the unemployed and the homeless.

Even worse, our coven advocates for “social justice.” Can you believe it?

If any of you are interested in joining our new coven, you can contact me here at SmallTalk, or more importantly go out and vote by Nov. 4th.

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Julie at PURE writes:

Two of my favorite writer-colleagues take complementary but stylistically rather distinct approaches to advising the next president on education reform. In a Sun-Times essay, John Simmons, of Strategic Learning Initiatives, reminds our soon-to-be new leader of the strong body of school reform research in Chicago: “There is no better place than Chicago to find the best ideas for how to improve this nation's school.” Read the rest…

Was the Annenberg Challenge a “total failure”?

Campaign of fear impacts school research

Here’s how badly the Ownership Society types have politicized school research and evaluation. Check out Andrew J. Coulson’s, “The Wreck of the Annenberg” at National Review. Coulson is a honcho at the Cato Institute. They’re the ones who invented the term Ownership Society and sold it to Bush to use as the banner hanging over his current global economic collapse. Too bad, he can’t pin that TOTAL FAILURE on me or Bill Ayers.

But Coulson does write off the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC) as a “total failure” making Ayers and Obama the main culprits. He cites no evidence, no evaluations, no experts—nothing to confirm his “total failure” summary. While it’s true that Annenberg didn’t markedly raise Chicago’s test scores—no single reform effort ever does-- the very evaluation from the highly-respected Consortium on Chicago School Research, which Coulson refers to in his hatchet job on Annenberg, shows several positive gains for the CAC. Coulson chooses to ignore this side of the report for political expediency and ideological reasons. He writes:

It failed not just in Chicago, but around the country. The first problem was that many of the “model” schools and districts lacked results worthy of replication. The final report of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, for instance, noted that, overall, students in its model schools had learned no more than students in regular public schools.

To Coulson and the neocons, reform of any public institution is always a failed proposition. Why? Because they don’t believe public anything is reform-able. Secondly, as long as you don’t have to cite any real research, take into account any real goals or standards for the reform, or document anything you say, you can call anything a total failure and no one can really argue with you.

Coulson never explains exactly how Ayers/Obama caused this global total failure of Republican Walter Annenberg’s pet project, stuck as they both were, in Chicago. But that’s another matter.

For one thing, the CAC to its credit, never even called for replicating their “model schools.” That’s not what the initiative was about. The Chicago project was originally aimed at seeing how time, size and teacher isolation factored into school improvement. There was a small group of so-called Breakthrough Schools which were given extra resources and tried more focused and intensive reform efforts. But they were hardly models—more like experiments- and only a small part of the CAC initiative. And while this small group of Breakthrough Schools (not replicable models) didn’t immediately (in the one year they were measured) boost test scores, they did, according to the Consortium study, improve the “student learning climate” and lay the foundation for “subsequent development of instruction…” in those schools.

So how could Coulson read the very same study and conclude that Annenberg was a “total failure?” Answer? He couldn’t. He’s making the shit up.

Besides, Coulson isn’t really concerned with program evaluation. His case is ideological. Bill Ayers, ‘60s radical, was somehow involved with Annenberg. So was his terrorist-pal Obama. Ergo, the program was not only destined to become a “total failure” but was an omen of things to come when socialist Obama becomes president. His entire program for K-12 education will supposedly become a replication of this old, totally-failed Annenberg Challenge where the kids won’t learn any more stuff than they do in regular schools.

Isn’t this the same kind of counterfeit program evaluation we’ve been seeing for the past eight years coming out of the DOE, whether it be of the ideologically-bound Reading First program or of NCLB’s testing madness? The whole purpose of program evaluation is to help us draw lessons from various efforts to improve teaching and public education. But if you enter the process with the mindset that there’s really nothing to be learned and when you’re only goal is to discredit a political candidate, this is what you end up with.

Finally, why the deafening silence from CAC leaders themselves and from the researchers at the Consortium in the face of this assault on their own research? Is the fear campaign working?

Next secretary of education

While wing-nut Phyllis Schlafly predicts that Bill Ayers will be the next secretary of education under President Obama, other nut-bags say no—it’s Homeland Security for Bill. The DFER hedge-fund Democrats are praying for a pro-voucher type like Michelle Rhee. New Mexico Senator Jeff Bingaman would be a good pick. He’s one of the architects and main backers of the Smaller Learning Communities Initiative. The entire Chicago school reform and charter school crowd already has their bags packed, ready to take staff jobs in D.C. when homey and fellow Harvard alum Arne Duncan is chosen. But I hope they haven’t plopped down the security deposits on their apartments yet.

My prediction is Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius, a middle-of-the-road Democrat who’s made education funding her biggest priority as governor. Sebelius was recently appointed to a four-year term on the National Assessment Governing Board by Sec. Spellings and is a strong public school advocate. She led the battle against her own state school board (called them “an embarrassment”) over their support for teaching creationism in the state's public schools.

I guess I’ll have to write her in on the PREAPrez poll.