Thanksgiving turkeys

Turkey # 1-- TFA leaders lobbying for Joel Klein

Teach For America thinks their bread is buttered on the Klein side. The liked doing business with Bush's DOE and are worried about Linda Darling-Hammond changing the way that business is done. She's been critical of the way TFA has dumped young, often ill-prepared teachers into poor urban schools.

Turkey # 2-- Faux Obama supporter Terry Moe

Andy Rotherham catches school privatizer and teacher-basher Moe in a lie. Moe, like so many trying to push new regime ed policies to the right, claims to be a long-time Obama supporter. Rotherham, who himself appears to be job hunting in the new administration, asks Moe a good question: "whether Rudi Giuliani knew this and when did he know it?"

h/t to Leo Casey on this one, since I hardly ever read Rotherham's Eduwonk any more. Too boring.

Turkey # 3-- The state of Nebraska

Nebraska made a sorry name for itself when its governor pushed its state university to ban Bill Ayers from speaking at an education conference.

Now the state becomes one of the few to pass a misnamed Civil Rights Initiative which outlaws race-based affirmative action in its hiring practices. Currently 97% of Nebraska’s teachers are white.

Turkey # 4-- Paul Vallas

New Orleans post-Katrina schools are still the lowest scoring in the state. But schools chief Paul Vallas is still “very pleased” at the latest test score results. He’s elated because 10 of his charter schools and two of his Recovery School District schools had a score of 60 or higher on a scale of 180—enough to shed the label of “academically unacceptable.”

Problem is, even this slight bump in scores is misleading. The improvement comes mainly in a handful of selective enrolment schools, says Edweek. Plus many of those black students who have been able to return to N.O. are still living in horrible conditions and attending decrepit schools.

Foundation pipeline drying up

The Wall Street Journal warns:

The pipeline from corporate America to the nation's charities is starting to dry up, as losses in the stock market mount and the U.S. recession deepens. With many large organizations depending on corporate largesse, their futures are suddenly uncertain. In a related piece, WSJ predicts big cuts in Gates funding. Among the beneficiaries feeling the pinch are Harlem Children's Zone Inc.

"I'm spending a lot of time now thinking about how we could replace the kind of support we've received from Wall Street," says Geoffrey Canada, president of the organization, which provides parenting classes and charter schools for poor families. Mr. Canada says he is cutting 10% of his staff of 1,400.

A post-campaign look at Bill Ayers and ‘The Crucible’

Bostonian Dan Kennedy, writing for the British Guardian, (“Paying for McCain’s Dishonor”) reviews Terry Gross’ Fresh Air interview with Chicago educator Bill Ayers.

Sarah Palin's accusation that Obama had been "palling around with terrorists" was an offensive lie, which is to say it was business as usual for the most negative, dishonest campaign in several decades. As for Ayers himself, though, who cared? Ayers made me care. He came across as intelligent, sympathetic, multi-dimensional and reflective - in other words, like an actual human being.

Needed--a New Deal for the schools

'Bail out the schools' says Miami schools' Alberto Carvalho

''The most commonly heard solution out of Washington these days is a bailout where the federal government intervenes to safeguard key industries and in the process, the quality of American life,'' he said. ``If that's the rationale, than I cannot think of a more strategic investment than safeguarding the quality of public education.''

Duncan number 1 on the right

Arne Duncan ranks #1 on this right-wing website poll. That might be his kiss of death. I’m still sticking with my original Kathleen Sebelius prediction even though I’m partial to Linda Darling-Hammond.

Klein attacks multiple assessments

NY Chancellor Joel Klein spoke at a forum in Australia where he rejected all notions of using multiple measures to assess how students are progressing. For Klein, every student and every school should rise or fall on the basis of a single standardized test score. Another reason why Klein would be the worse pick ever for Secretary of Ed.

From the Australian:

Mr Klein received a mixed response from the 100-strong group of educators and policymakers at the Melbourne forum. While teachers generally supported boosting accountability and empowering parents, president of the Australian Secondary Principals Association Andrew Blair was concerned that tests for ranking schools were simplistic. Mr Blair said measurements of performance should cover multiple methodologies, beyond "raw grabs" of test data. Mr Klein said multiple measurements risked covering up underperformance. "The more we have multiple measures the risk is we dilute the power of accountability," he said.

The politics of disaster -- loot & burn

Bush leaving the cupboard bare

But make no mistake: the goal is the same as it was for the defeated Portuguese--a final frantic looting of the public wealth before they hand over the keys to the safe. –Naomi Klein, author of Shock Doctrine.

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Bush/Cheney and the neocons saw 9/11 and an opportunity to invade Iraq. Right-wing economist and godfather of school vouchers, Milton Friedman referred to Hurricane Katrina as, “an opportunity to radically reform the educational system.“ For New Orleans schools boss Paul (“Now no one can tell me what to do”) Vallas, Katrina was a godsend, allowing him to privatize the system and bust the teachers union.

For the disciples of the ownership society, disasters, no matter how devastating, are always “opportunities” to loot & burn, erode public space and democratic decision making and to impose draconian top-down “reforms” on the public.

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One current shock-doctrine disciple is Tom VanderArk. You should remember VanderArk from his days at the Gates Foundation where he shifted the fund’s agenda from trying for fix broken schools to one of “closing 1,000 schools.”

Now VanderArk wants to use the current economic crisis to punish schools, eliminate public school boards, whack education budgets, and tear up union contracts. He’s Michelle Rhee squared. It’s a model, he says was pioneered by the Brit’s Tony Blair.

While far from easy, states with courageous governors could use this crisis to make a radical change: cut the budget by 10% and send the money directly to schools. Every school would get a three year performance contract (i.e., charter) and would be required to join a support network (which could include what used to be a school district, a university, a non-profit like New Tech Foundation, a charter management organization like Green Dot, a for-profit like Edison Learning, or a self-organized coop).

The short list

The word I get is that Time Magazine has it all wrong. Obama’s Sec. of Ed shortlist is down to these five:

Colin Powell, Democratic Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, Chicago schools chief executive officer Arne Duncan, former South Carolina schools superintendent Inez Tenenbaum and Stanford University education professor Linda Darling-Hammond.

Looks like New Yorkers are stuck with Joel Klein for a while. Sorry about that.

More bad news for the Gates Fund

Billionaire investor Warren Buffet has committed more that $30 billion to the Gates Foundation, making it by far, the largest of the new class of power foundations in the world. But huge losses in the market for Buffet’s company, Hathaway, could mean big cuts for Gates school reform grantees over the next few years.

Quotables

Newsweek continues the sham of equating reform with privatization and anti-unionism. Their main target, of all people—Linda Darling-Hammond.

Reformers view Darling-Hammond as "anti-accountability" because she is a critic of standardized testing and teachers' performance pay being linked to test scores. She has been very critical of Teach for America, the organization that sends thousands of recent college grads into inner-city schools each year. Darling-Hammond has argued that the answer is not to bring young, eager and untrained teachers into classrooms, but rather to better train the teachers already there.

But at least one reformer—me-- thinks LDH would make a great Sec. of Ed precisely for the reasons above.

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S.F. Chronicle says Darling-Hammond's job now, is to head the team that will gather ideas about how to turn Obama’s education ideas into legislation. She dismissed the idea that such plans are pipe dreams in the current economy.

"This is decimal dust in the federal budget," she said. The $29 billion Obama wants to add for education "is less than 10 percent of the weapons cost-overrun announced last summer," she said. "It's less than 1 percent of what the bailout is anticipated to cost."