Battle heating up over NCLB

Sam Dillon in Tuesday's NYT, "Education Standards Likely to See Toughening" gives us some clues about the coming battle over NCLB re-authorization. It's clear that the new law will look a lot different from that of the past eight years, belying Diane Ravitch's repeated, but empty claim that Obama=Bush on education.

For one thing, the education stimulus will end years of conscious under-funded, so-called "reform" policies under NCLB, and could help save thousands of teachers jobs and keep many inner-city schools open in the midst of this financial crisis, provided that the money is actually used locally to support schools by cash-strapped states. For another, Obama has been a critic of the past single-minded focus on standardized testing.

The focus on improved teacher quality sounds good, but the devil is in the details. It can't just mean so-called "data-driven merit pay." Standardized testing will still be with us. But how will it be enforced and will the punitive measures such as starving low-scoring schools, punishing schools for teaching low-income kids, transfer policies, etc... be tempered?

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said that her union also had concerns about the president’s enthusiasm for data systems, which she said could be misused, but that she would give the new administration the benefit of the doubt.“They have been consistent,” Ms. Weingarten said. “They’re trying to do reform with teachers, not to them.”

All these and more are questions that are going to heat up the emerging war within the Democratic Party as conservative, pro-voucher, privatization, and union-busting factions like DFER, make their move.

The media campaign against EFCA continues

Wal-Mart "associates" don't need a union, says CEO

A wounded, wimpy Matt Lauer softballs new Wal-Mart CEO Mike Duke on this morning's TODAY show. As they stroll down the aisles of the big-box giant discussing which time of the month customers can afford diapers for their kids, the subject of unions comes up. Striking a similar tone to D.C. Mayor Fenty's call for freeing teachers from "the burden" of collective bargaining, Duke won't even call Wal-Mart's largest workforce in the U.S. "workers."

Lauer: With 1.4 million associate employees who earn an average of $10.83 an hour [managers make as much as $11.89, cashiers make between $6.55 and $8.43--mk] Wal-Mart now faces a threat to it's corporate model. There's proposed legislation on Capitol Hill that would make it easier for unions to organize employees--the Employee Free Choice Act...

Duke: Well of course we're opposed to that. We have a unique relationship with our associates.

Duke, who earns a hefty $13 million annually, including stock options, of course, never tells us what it is that's "unique" about his relationship with his minimum-wage "associates" or why their earning a living wage would, in the words of a Home Depot exec, "destroy the American economy."

The Walton Family Foundation is also the biggest funder of privately-managed, non-union charter schools. Maybe we should start calling teachers, "associates" as well.

The politics of disaster

Memo to Arne Duncan's PR guy and speechwriter, Peter Cunningham. Please tell Arne to stop calling this, possibly the worst global economic crisis ever, "this magical opportunity." It sounds too much like the late free-marketeer Milton Friedman calling Hurricane Katrina, "an opportunity to radically reform the educational system," while the bodies were still being dragged out of the flood waters.

Who's playing with numbers in N.O.?

While Louisiana's laughing-stock Gov. Bobby Jindal continues to say he will refuse to take any stimulus money, New Orleans Recovery District schools boss, Paul Vallas is debating the numbers in hopes of grabbing more federal dollars. Before Katrina, New Orleans had about 65,000 public school students. For the 2007-08 school year, the data used by the Department of Education, enrollment was 32,000, increasing to about 36,000 for the 2008-09 school year. Vallas is claiming the DOE owes the district $39 million while the census count of poor kids in the District has only $673K coming their way. Quite a discrepancy!

Rick Ayers makes the case for small schools at Berkeley H.S.

While Berkeley has a proud tradition of progressive politics and social justice initiatives, our public high school continues to practice tracking, inequity, and an educational experience which is so much less than it could be. The recent spate of attacks hurled at a redesign proposal and at the small schools shows that some elements of our community will go to great lengths to prevent even modest reforms. (Berkeley Daily Planet).

Franklin Rosemont

I ran into old friends Franklin and Penelope Rosemont Saturday at the Heartland Cafe where I was doing the Live From the Heartland Radio Show. The two of them had come to hear a young community activist who followed me on the program, to talk about Franklin's book, The Rise and Fall of The Dil Pickle, the legendary Chicago jazz club and cultural/political hangout of the Jazz Age. Franklin and Penelope both seemed in great spirits seeing their work being taken up by the current generation.

Yesterday I was stunned to hear the sad news that Franklin had died the next day.

Franklin, 65, came from a working class family. He was a surrealist/poet/artist/revolutionary and a big part of the '60s Chicago cultural and political scene. I first met both of them in Chicago in '68 where they were SDS activists.

Inspired by Jack Kerouac's On the Road, Franklin had hitchhiked 20,000 miles around the USA and Mexico and wound up in San Francisco in 1960, the heyday of the beat generation poetry renaissance.

Franklin and Penelope went on to create the Chicago Surrealist Group in 1966 after traveling to Paris in 1965 to meet André Breton and attend meetings of the Paris Surrealist Group. The group played a major role in organizing the 1976 World Surrealist Exhibition in Chicago, and has published socially active newspapers and materials through the years. Franklin and Penelope also took over the old Kerr Publishing House and brought it back to life, reviving many classic works of labor history.

Many of their experiences together are documented in Penelope's wonderful book, Dreams & Everyday Life : Andre Breton, Surrealism, the IWW, Rebel Worker, Students for a Democratic Society and the Seven Cities of Cibola in Chicago, Paris & London.

For more on Franklin Rosemont: Encyclopedia of Road Culture, Bibliography

Jerks convention at Morning Joe

"Freeing teachers" from their collective bargaining rights...

It was D.C. Mayor Fenty exchanging banter and giggles with education "reformers" Joe Scarborough and Pat Buchanan .

Scarborough: "Is Congress standing in the way of some reform by getting in the way of charter schools?
Fenty: "Not yet...What we're hoping is that they will...incentivize public schools to do what charter schools have done. That is, to use privatization more. To free teachers from the burden of contracts."
Buchanan: "What you're saying in effect, we've got to bust the union."
Fenty: "You've got to do things differently."
Buchanan (laughing): "But why not be honest about it and just say, you can't have a union any more?"

Weekend Quotables

Fallout from the Ownership Society

In the bubble decade, making money as an end in itself boomed as a calling among students at elite universities like Harvard, siphoning off gifted undergraduates who might otherwise have been scientists, teachers, doctors, entrepreneurs, artists or inventors. (NYT columnist Frank Rich)

Then again...

“Community organizing has become cool,” said Marshall Ganz, who dropped out of Harvard in 1964 to join the civil rights movement in Mississippi and spent 16 years with Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers. Of course, a tough economy helps attract people to professions they might not have otherwise considered, as does a crusading time when Wall Street has become a symbol of greed, arrogance and irresponsibility. (NYT)

Afghanistan--the new quagmire

The danger for Mr. Obama is that a chorus of criticism could stir new public unease with the U.S.-led wars. A public backlash could be particularly problematic for Afghanistan. Mr. Obama's strategy envisions that the U.S. military could be engaged there for years to come... Rep. Jim McGovern (D., Mass.) said he fears Afghanistan could become a quagmire. "I just have this sinking feeling that we're getting deeper and deeper into a war that has no end," he said.

Rep. John Conyers (D., Mich.) dismissed Mr. Obama's plans as "embarrassingly naive," and suggested that the president is being led astray by those around him. "He's the smartest man in American politics today," Rep. Conyers said. "But he occasionally gets bad advice and makes mistakes. This is one of those instances." (Wall street Journal)

'It's all about symbolism'--Rotherham

Ed Sector's Andrew Rotherham is frustrated. He likes conservative-style, top-down, anti-teacher reforms including school vouchers, but is upset at the way they've been packaged. The symbolism of his favorite "reformer," D.C.'s Michelle Rhee, on the cover of Time Magazine with boom in hand, has him pulling his hair out. Writing in U.S. News, Rotherham decries the use of poorly chosen symbols projected in the media.

He blames reform movement leaders for allowing themselves, "to be defined as a cloistered group of white dilettantes from Ivy League schools—counterproductive symbolism and off the mark."

He's right of course. Not ALL of them are Ivy Leaguers. I think Rotherham went to the Univ. of Virgina.

######

What Kids Can Do: Speech Contest 2009

As Graduation Day approaches, What Kids Can Do invites students to raise their voice and let others know what matters most to them in this moment and in the years ahead. This year's theme: "Crisis and Hope in These Trying Times." Maximum award: $100 gift certificate from amazon.com. Eligibility: anyone from age 12 to 19, writing in English. Deadline: May 18, 2009.
http://www.wkcd.org/featurestories/2009/03_WKCD%20speech%20contest/index.html

Blowing smoke on school reform

This NYT editorial "Hold the line on school reform," harks back to the days when they were calling for the invasion of Iraq to get rid of those "weapons of mass destruction." In other words, the Times board has a history of blowing smoke out of their rear end.

In this morning's mail, Fair Test's Monty Neill offers a good critique:

This Times editorial is vitriolic and often bizarre. It blames states for mis-assigning teachers - is there a state in the country in charge of teacher assignment? It calls for testing in-service teachers, a program that has been tried briefly in a few states and failed abysmally. There is no evidence of any sort that a standardized test can sort out great from good from adequate from marginal from bad teachers.

It moans that the stimulus funds are being dispersed too quickly to enforce "reform" -- better, I guess, to lay off even more teachers than will be even with the stimulus - then the Times can complain that the wrong teachers were laid off.

We will leave aside the fact that the evidence is that test-and-punish "reform" lacks evidence of success beyond inflated state test scores.

Duncan watching, a non-participatory sport

Stares say it all

From AP wire story:

"Go ahead and boo me," Duncan told about 400 middle and high school students at a public school in northeast Denver. "I fundamentally think that our school day is too short, our school week is too short and our school year is too short.""You're competing for jobs with kids from India and China. I think schools should be open six, seven days a week; eleven, twelve months a year," he said. Instead of boos, Duncan's remark drew an unsurprising response from the teenage assembly: bored stares.

No more fun and games

Chicago Reader's Ben Joravsky tells the I.O.C. why Chicago is not their kind of town.

Here’s the fundamental problem: We can’t afford the games. We’re broke—and I mean damn near destitute. The public school system is about $475 million in the red and the city’s facing its own deficit of at least $200 million. Just a few months ago Mayor Daley said he’d balanced the budget by raising fees and fines and slashing the city payroll, but already expenses have risen and revenues have dropped faster than anticipated. His aides have warned that more cuts could be on the way.

The Beachwood Reporter has more.

D.O.E. culture

The Post explains why it's taken so long to staff the new DOE? I'm more concerned with the kind of culture being created there.

At the Department of Education, spokesman John McGrath said only a small number of young people have been hired, because higher-ranking slots have yet to be filled. "Those senior people will want to be involved in the hiring decisions" for the lower jobs, McGrath said. "Most of the young people hired so far are people either from the campaign or Capitol Hill. We're giving special attention to people who have an education background -- we've had a lot from Teach for America."

Questions: By "lower jobs" does McGrath mean staff working more with school districts? By "education background," does McGrath mean mainly TFA types? Uh oh!

******

While the Limbaugh Party continues to call Obama's ed policies "socialist," Diane Ravitch, from her perch at the Fordham Institute, comes at them from behind, still feeding her Obama=Bush nonsense to Edweek ("Obama echoes Bush on education ideas") and making it seem as though charter schools had somehow become the biggest dividing issue in education.

There's no doubt plenty of voucher/privatization/testing/DFER types gathered around Duncan's DOE. Some are even worse than Spellings' crew in their hunger to cash in on DOE contracts. But Ravitch intentionally ignores Obama's openly critical view of Bush testing policies. Why? And at a time when Bush economic policies threaten the very existence of public education, Obama's school funding looks a lot different than the previous administration's and could be the only thing that saves hundreds of schools and thousands of teaching positions in the most depressed communities.

The struggle continues.

Poverty's fallout

New study confirms damaging effects on brain development

Yesterday's WaPo reports on the latest research showing the damaging effects of poverty on childrens' cognitive development and especially on "working memory." The new studies provide more and deeper understanding of why poor kids tend to lag behind on standardized tests and why conditions in the community may have a greater impact on measurable learning outcomes than anything that happens in the classroom.

The findings indicate that education standards and other government policies that aim to improve poor children's performance in school should consider the stress they are experiencing at home, Evans said. "It's not just 'Read to our kids and take them to the library,' " he said. "We need to take into account that chronic stress takes a toll not only on their health, but it may take a toll on their cognitive functioning."

American Prospect and Matt Yglesias picked up the story. Dana Goldstein at Prospect writes:

All this suggests that the coalition of education experts that calls itself the Broader, Bolder Approach was barking up the right tree during election season, when it formed to discuss how poverty and inequality deplete student academic achievement. It was another education reform effort, however -- the Education Equality Project -- that created the bigger media splash.

But Goldstein doesn't quite get why BBA and EEP just can't get along.

There is no reason, of course, why a societal approach to alleviating poverty can't go hand in hand with support for charter schools and greater innovation in how to recruit, train, and pay teachers.

That systhesis between school improvement and improving the lives of children at home is exactly what BBA's Richard Rothstein, Pedro Noguera and others have been arguing for. But EEP leaders continue to play the one-note of testing madness begun under NCLB and won't move from their "no excuses" "work harder" arguments.

Limbaugh: Obama's a 'Maoist'

Republican Party boss says ed plan is "Bolshevik, Maoist, Klonsky-ist, Ayers-ist"

For those of you are concerned that Obama's education policies may be drifting rightward, Limbaugh will straighten you out.

A March 12 entry (subscription required) on Limbaugh's website, he stated that Obama's policies are "about 'social justice.' " It continued: "His education plan is Maoist (no surprise given the Ayers/Klonsky influence), and he is otherwise a Bolshevik. I'm also quite sure, given his character traits, that he would be a Stalinist if he thought he could get away with it ... and he's working on that, too. I wonder what the country will look like in his 10th or 15th year as president?" (Media Matters)

High school seniors won't cross picket line

Prom committee does the right thing

After school at Chicago’s Northside College Preparatory High, senior Sam Hamer leads his Jewish student club in a song for Passover.

HAMER: OK, ready? Dayenu. Dayenu. Dayenu....

Hamer says his faith came to mind when he saw a notice for his senior prom in June. The dance’s location was the Congress Plaza Hotel. Workers there have been striking almost six years for wages on par with what other downtown hotels pay. Hamer says he found out about the strike from a Jewish social-justice group that’s helped picket the hotel. He points to Torah and Talmud teachings against defrauding workers. (Chicago Public Radio)

Detroit or Destroit?

It was a great victory for Michigan State over UConn in the Final 4 in front of a huge hometown Detroit crowd and the game's heroes were two Motown kids. Hopefully, they'll beat the Tarheels tonight.

Detroit can use a lift now that their new state-appointed emergency financial manager, Robert Bobb, facing a huge deficit and falling enrollment, wants to close 50 more schools and lay-off thousands more teachers. Public education in the Motor City could well go the way of the auto industry. Seeing the writing on the wall, some teachers want the union to support a group of Green Dot-type, in-district charter schools, staffed with union teachers. The DFT, which has always opposed charters, now has plans to organize some existing charter schools. But can (will) they really do it? Something's got to change.

******

George Bush had his Ownership Society bumper-sticker slogan. But count on GM, with their bottom falling out, to launch a new ad campaign titled, Reinventing the Ownership Experience.

Weekend quotables

Obama: "That's not the world we live in..."

“If there’s just Roosevelt and Churchill sitting in a room with a brandy, that’s an easier negotiation. But that’s not the world we live in, and it shouldn’t be the world that we live in.” (ANI)

Al Sharpton at the National Action Project conference

"We formed this group before mayoral control was even on the landscape," Sharpton said. "I'm not for mayoral control." (Joanna Malloy, Daily News).

Do you believe in magic?

“We have this magical opportunity to invest significantly in these best practices and scale up what works,” says Arne Duncan of aid under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. (Edweek)

AFT prez Randi Weingarten at UFT breakfast

What binds all AFT affiliates, she said, is "a dedication to the belief that we make a difference in the lives of people who need us most. "That includes confronting the lie that teacher unions block needed reform - a lie proclaimed by those "more interested in making educators and [their] unions … pariahs, not partners," she said. (NYSUT)

Review of Naomi Klein's "Shock Doctrine"

Next “right-wing think tanks descended like a storm” and Bush “backed up their plans with tens of millions of dollars to convert (its) schools into ‘charter schools,’ publicly funded institutions run by private entities according to their own rules.” (Sylvia Mayuga, PhilStar.com)

Typo, or Freudian slip?

The wing-nuts at Olbermann Watch report that in 2006, "Rumsfeld was replaced by Bill Gates who continues to serve in the cabinet of the new administration." At first, I laughed--Robert Gates, you idiots. But on second thought...

More big news

Soto's bill passes unanimously (Updated)

A watered-down version of a House bill calling for a one-year moratorium of school closings and transformations in Chicago Public Schools passed yesterday with a unanimous 118-0 vote. Championed by Rep. Cynthia Soto and numerous Chicago-area educators, parents and organizations, the Chicago School Facilities bill, better known as House Bill 363, will move on to the State Senate...For some the bill's passing is a huge victory in the on-going battle against Renaissance 2010, an initiative started by Major Daley in 2004 to increase the number of high-quality schools in Chicago by 2010 through a process of turn-arounds, closings and phase outs.

Soto had to remove some of the stronger components of the bill to get it passed, including a one-year moratorium on school closings that would have voided the school board's February 25 decision to close 16 schools. Valencia Rias, a spokeswoman for Designs for Change, said in a February press release they would fight to reintroduce those protections in the Senate.

Many protest the initiative's tactics, claiming it displaces children without fairly evaluating the school. (Chicagoist)

Also see: PURE Catalyst Chicago Public Radio Community Media Workshop

Big News

Chicago Sun-Times

Charter school teachers OK 1st union

April 4, 2009

Teachers at three charter schools operated by Chicago International Charter School on Friday moved to become the first unionized charter school teachers in the city.

Three-quarters of the teaching staffs at the Northtown Academy, Wrightwood and Ralph Ellison campuses have signed union authorization cards, saying they want to be represented by the Chicago Alliance of Charter Teachers and Staff, teachers told Chicago International officials Friday.

The union would be an affiliate of the Illinois Federation of Teachers and the American Federation of Teachers.

One Northtown teacher said teachers there start out at about the same pay as that of Chicago's unionized teachers but have to put in a longer school year and longer school day to get it.

The Illinois Educational Labor Relations Board has 30 days to certify the union results. Chicago International is "reviewing the petition and studying the next steps with our counsel,'' a spokeswoman said.

Rosalind Rossi

Also see Edwize

Quotables

A "Calming influence"...

Seven months before the election, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s campaign is mounting an all-out push to win over New York City’s black elected leaders, clergy members and voters, seeking to land an early, and potentially crippling, blow against the mayor’s chief rival, City Comptroller William C. Thompson Jr.... Meanwhile, Mayor Bloomberg heaped praise on the Rev. Al Sharpton on Thursday, calling him a “calming influence on the city,” as The Daily News reports. The mayor made his remarks before speaking at Mr. Sharpton’s annual National Action Network Convention. (Sewell Chan, NYT City Room blog)

Critics locked out...

Another News columnist, Juan Gonzalez, examined this week the peculiar alliance between Sharpton and NYC Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, revealing a half-million-dollar donation to NAN from a hedge fund tied to a former chancellor. The big check was funneled through a pro-Bloomberg nonprofit. Klein and a top aide will appear on Sharpton panels so skewed in favor of the Bloomberg school reforms that minority critics have just about been locked out. (Wayne Barrett, Village Voice)

Did someone yell at Maisie?

Now Klein and the Rev have rounded up Education Secretary Arne Duncan, several big-city mayors and former Clinton nemesis Newt Gingrich to appear with them at a convention this week at the Sheraton in NYC, where they will surely move to create a national presence for themselves as the defenders of children against, oh, say, the teachers’ unions. (Maisie at Edwize, April 1st)

But Sharpton’s National Action Network conference this morning was a lesson in unity. And to clarify, UFT President Randi Weingarten has worked with Sharpton on educational equity and other issues for a long time. On Edwize, I speak for myself, not Randi or the union. (Thanks to her, Edwize is a space for diverse views.) (Maisie at Edwize, April 2nd)

Power & Influence...

We are witnessing a consolidation of power and influence that is rooted in new alliances among philanthropies, school leaders, and the business community. School leaders, starved for public resources, have allowed philanthropies such as the Gates Foundation to dictate school reform strategies in exchange for new private monies. (Aaron "Skoolboy" Pallas at Gotham Schools)

Ivy Leaguers run it

This headline in the current issue of Forbes says a lot about the current state of American democracy: "Ivy Leaders: Members of America's ruling class get their start at eight elite schools."

'More than just performance pay...'

The current issue of Edweek has another planted "research" piece, this time promoting billionaire businessman Lowell Milken's latest performance-pay model being pawned off on schools and teachers. According to Forbes, Lowell avoided fraud charges when his brother Michael Milken, the "junk-bond king," pled guilty to securities fraud in 1990.

This one is called TAP or Teacher Advancement Program, and if you read Stephen Sawchuck's, "TAP: More Than Performance Pay," you will learn that TAP is the new panacea. It's kind of the Democrats' version of Reading First.

According to Sawchuck, TAP does everything from aligning systems for managing schools’ "human capital" (that what they call teachers nowadays) to shaping "new approaches to on-the-job training, career advancement, and evaluation in ways that yield insights about how such features can be arranged so teachers embrace them."

Trying to keep from laughing out loud halfway down the article, since I've been in schools using TAP, I already knew what I would find at the bottom of the page-- a note saying that this article was sponsored by the Joyce Foundation. As you might have guessed, TAP is also one of the Joyce Foundation's funded projects.

Of course Edweek is only underming its own credibility by running sponsored program evaluation pieces underwritten by the very agency sponsoring the program.