Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog

IN THE MAILBOX

2010-01-07T22:25:00.004-06:00

From Chicago's Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators (CORE)

Hi Mike,

Thanks for posting this.With the weather against us yet again, we need to really promote this to get the kind of turnout Daley will notice.

Last Winter, The Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators (CORE) asked Chicagoans to attend a community forum and voice their grievances against Renaissance 2010. There was a blizzard and over 500 people still showed up. This year, CORE will be hosting another community forum, where they will unveil their slate of officers who will run against Marilyn Stewart and the UPC Machine in the May 2010 Chicago Teachers Union elections. CORE will also be hosting workshops where they will teach you how to fight and win! 10 AM-1 PM. Malcom X College 1900 W. Van Buren 60612. Parking Available off Jackson. Refreshments and childcare will be provided. $10 suggested donation. CPS is gearing up to announce what schools it intends to close, it's time to gear up the effort to stop them.
Joe Linehan
CORE

One positive turnaround alternative

2010-01-07T14:12:00.005-06:00

The lead story in the Jan. 6 Edweek ("Focus on Instruction Turns Schools Around") examines an alternative to the punitive assaults on low-performing or struggling schools, being pushed under Race To The Top.

Strategic Learning Initiatives is a Chicago-based staff development and support group who's approach includes helping teams of teachers develop sound instructional strategies. SLI is one of many such organizations that grew out of the early Chicago school-reform movement. It's program aims to empower teachers rather than blame them for low student test scores or use test score-based merit pay as a material incentive.

Results have been impressive, especially when compared with the dismal results of school closings and re-opening as privately-managed charter schools under the Mayor's Renaissance 2010 plan.

Writes Edweek's Dakarai Aarons:

What Strategic Learning did with the struggling schools, says its chief executive officer, John Simmons, was “not rocket science.” But it worked, according to an evaluation by the Washington-based American Institutes for Research. And the approach the group took offers some lessons as states and districts confront the need to turn around the nation’s lowest-performing schools.

“The results that SLI has achieved, and that AIR has validated, are very impressive and suggest that well before decisions are made to reconstitute schools under the mandates of [the federal No Child Left Behind Act], school districts would be wise to consider far less drastic, but clearly powerful, interventions such as the Focused Instruction Process,” wrote AIR analysts Steven Leinwand and Sarah Edwards in their July evaluation.

Quotables

2010-01-07T08:17:00.002-06:00

What's happened to N.Y. small schools movement?

“The bureaucratic proliferation of small schools feels more like a management strategy,” said Michelle Fine, a Distinguished Professor of Urban Education at the City University of New York and longtime small schools supporter. (Neighborhood Beat Box)

Failed two classes

"Not only did the Bloomberg/Klein machine fail math, but they fail basic human decency." (Alan Singer at Huffington)

Charter schools--public or private?

A federal appeals court has ruled that an Arizona charter school is not a "state actor" for purposes of federal civil rights law.

"Horizon is a private entity that contracted with the state to provide students with educational services that are funded by the state," Judge Sandra Ikuta explained. "Ultimately, Horizon's actions and personnel decisions were 'made by concededly private parties, and turn[ed] on judgments made by private parties without standards established by the state,'" Ikuta added, citing Supreme Court precedent. (Courthouse News Service)

There, he said it...

2010-01-06T09:48:00.006-06:00

Last week I posed this question: "It's 2010, Mayor Daley. Do you know where your Renaissance 2010 is?" Could it be that my blog post prodded the mayor to finally drag Ren10 out of the closet?

After nearly a year without mentioning the words, "Renaissance 2010", Daley and his Chicago schools manager Ron Huberman informed the media that they will continue the failed school-closing initiative indefinitely.

"We'll always continue," Daley told a group of educators and reporters at a news conference. "I hope there's a chapter two [of Renaissance 2010], a chapter three, a chapter four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10."

This despite several major studies and reports, including one by the Civic Committee--architects of Ren10--showing that the so-called "reform" plan has been an "abysmal failure."

Chicago Teachers Union officials and some parents have complained about children being shuffled from school to school, teachers being displaced, and spikes in violence at schools forced to absorb kids from closed schools. Some call the initiative an attempt to "privatize" the system with outside operators and "gentrify" struggling neighborhoods. (Chicago Sun-Times)

CES seeks new director

2010-01-05T08:51:00.002-06:00

With the departure of Lewis Cohen, the Coalition of Essential Schools is searching for a new executive director.

THREE CLASSROOM TEACHERS ASK YOU TO SPEAK OUT

2010-01-04T16:35:00.010-06:00

Please forward--M.K.

AN OPEN LETTER

TO THE ADMINISTRATION & FACULTY

OF THE HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION

- JANUARY 4, 2010 -

The Harvard Graduate School of Education pursues the goal of training leaders in the field, and will soon offer a new degree in educational leadership. The school's website mission statement reads as follows:

Mission

To prepare leaders in education and to generate knowledge to improve student opportunity, achievement, and success.

Overview

Education touches every aspect of human activity. At the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE), we believe studying and improving the enterprise of education are central to the health and future of society.

Since its founding in 1920, the Ed School has been training leaders to transform education in the United States and around the globe. Today, our faculty, students, and alumni are studying and solving the most critical challenges facing education: student assessment, the achievement gap, urban education, and teacher shortages, to name just a few. Our work is shaping how people teach, learn, and lead in schools and colleges as well as in after-school programs, high-tech companies, and international organizations. The HGSE community is pushing the frontiers
of education, and the effects of our entrepreneurship are improving the world.

As veteran public school teachers, we are disappointed that the HGSE has not shown the leadership it professes by speaking out against the unprecedented attack on public education. To be sure, there have been courageous voices on your faculty who have defended public schools and the endangered idea of educating the whole child. We know that a thoughtful faculty does not think with one mind, and that there will always be differences about what constitutes the most effective pedagogies or curricula. But we have not heard the HGSE as an institution speak out on issues fundamental to the educational well-being of children and their schools.

These issues include:

. The over-testing of students, beginning as early as 3rd grade, and the misuse of single, imperfect high-stakes standardized assessment instruments like MCAS;

. The expansion of charters through funding formulas that divert resources from those urban and rural public schools charged with educating our most challenged children;

. The stripping away of art, music, critical thinking, creativity, experiential learning, trips, and play periods-of joy itself-from schools so that they might become more effective test preparation centers;

. The use of state curriculum frameworks-and soon, possibly, national standards to narrow and standardize our schools, an effort that only encourages increasing numbers of affluent middle class parents to seek out for their children the same private schools that so many "reformers" have already chosen for theirs;

. The cynical insistence that all schools be equal in a society whose social and economic policies make us increasingly unequal;

. Merit pay proposals that deny and undermine the essentially collaborative nature of teaching;

. And finally, the sustained media vilification of hard-working, dedicated public school teachers.

These depressing developments have intensified over the past fifteen years. They violate the first principles of humane and progressive education, as we understand them.

We are proud to have served as teachers in the commonwealth where public education began a century before the country itself was founded and where Horace Mann reinvented it a century and a half ago. We have many wonderful public schools in Massachusetts that can serve as models for all schools. No child in our state deserves any less. Certainly all deserve more than a parched vision of standardization and incessant testing. A global economy demands more than multiple-choice thinking. Most importantly, human beings require more.

. HGSE administration and faculty, we need you to speak out in defense of our public system of education and against abuses that have been allowed to pass silently as reforms. We need you to remind our leaders, administrators, parents and students-all of us-what it means to be educated.

As young teachers, we were inspired by the words of John Holt, Herbert Kohl, Joseph Featherstone, A.S. Neill, and Paulo Friere. Later, we would read the works of Deborah Meier, Diane Ravitch, Ted Sizer, and Jonathan Kozol. These were powerful voices to encounter. Now we need to hear your voice.

The time for Veritas is now.

Thank you.

Larry Aaronson, Cambridge Rindge & Latin School, 37 years (retired) Teacher of the Year (Class of 2007) Recipient, Key to the City of Cambridge for "Outstanding Service" (Mayor) Recipient, Special Cambridge City Council Citation Mentor, Student teachers from the HGSE, 1985-2005

Ann O'Halloran, Boston & Newton Public Schools, 30 years (retired) Massachusetts History Teacher of the Year, 2007 (DOE) Finalist, National History Teacher of Year, 2007 Honorable Mention, Massachusetts History Teacher of the Year, 2006 (DOE) Friend of Education, 2009 (Newton Teachers Association)

Bill Schechter, Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School, 35 years (retired) METCO Recognition Awards, 2001-2005 (L-S METCO Program) "Outstanding Educator" Award, 2002 (Cornell University) Faculty Recognition Award (Class of 1992) Finalist, Lucretia Mott Award, 1986 (DOE) Horace Mann Grant, 1984 (DOE)

larindge@aol. com ohalloran.ann@ verizon.net schech@rcn.com

Rethinking education as the practice of freedom

2010-01-04T12:57:00.000-06:00

Henry Giroux on Paulo Freire

Freire understood quite keenly that democracy was threatened by a powerful military-industrial complex and the increased power of the warfare state, but he also recognized the pedagogical force of a corporate and militarized culture that eroded the moral and civic capacities of citizens to think beyond the common sense of official power and its legitimating ideologies... At a time when education has become one of the official sites of conformity, disempowerment and uncompromising modes of punishment, the legacy of Paulo Freire's work is more important than ever before. (Truthout)

TFA--Not like "Freedom Summer"

2010-01-04T10:49:00.003-06:00

Freedom Summer 1964

A new study, suggested by Teach For America's Wendy Kopp herself, shows TFA grads exhausted, burned out, disillusioned with TFA on issues of ed equity. Kopp, of course, doesn't like the study's findings.

“Back in the ’60s, if you signed up for Freedom Summer, it was perceived to be countercultural,” said Professor Reich, who taught sixth grade in Houston as a member of the Teach for America corps. “But unlike doing Freedom Summer, joining Teach for America is part of climbing up the elite ladder — it’s part of joining the system, the meritocracy.”

NEW YEAR QUOTABLES

2010-01-04T06:17:00.002-06:00

Tilson on Meier--'She should visit a charter school'

In his latest diatribe, hedge-fund billionaire and educational no-nothing, Whitney Tilson goes off on Deborah Meier, Diane Ravitch, and, Jonathan Kozol, calling their writings, "idiotic" and "moronic." Lines like the one below would be mildly amusing were it not for Tilson's influence in the Bloomberg administration and in Arne Duncan's DOE:

In short, Meier is so ignorant about charters that it boggles my mind. Has she ever visited a high-performing charter school?! I can only assume not.

What Tom VanderArk liked most about the Bush years

1. NCLB--"...marked a consensus that 1) measurement matters, 2) all students deserve good life options, 3) we should rely on average achievement to measure a schools success..." 2. Private control of public schools--"There was a massive increase in education entrepreneurship—school developers, human capital initiatives, and learning platforms—funded by massive new money foundations...Democrats for Education Reform and Education Equality Project joined the fray" 3. The Recession--"brought a new wave of talent into the sector that will make a difference for a generation."

Me: He left out the tsunami, which taught people how to run for higher ground.

What Chicago machine politician, Dan Burke, likes most about the Daley machine

"Yeah, there is a machine. A machine is created to do a job more efficiently."

His opponent, community activist, Rudy Lozano, Jr.

"It's like therapy," he said. "It's the closest true way for me to understand what my father was doing 26 years ago. I missed most of that. This experience has given me the opportunity to walk in those footsteps."

Putting down the insurrection

Rotherham and the boys at Eduwonk worry about the growing resistance movement:

In both counterinsurgency and education reform don’t assume that because the statues in the capital come down the resistance is over.

Me: I think Andrew is badly needed in Kabul.

Florida schools--Parallels to depression era

2009-12-31T10:45:00.006-06:00

Good story from Lake Wales, Fl.

The economic challenges that followed the Florida real estate bust in 1926 and the devastating hurricanes of 1926 and 1928 (called the Forgotten Storm--M.K.) reveal state and national parallels with the Great Depression and the Great Recession of 2007-08.

In 1931, Florida ranked 43rd in average teacher pay and 39th in money spent annually per student. With a reduced state budget, the school year was shortened to six months and many small schools closed. The average teacher salary by the mid-1930s was only $1,039 per white teacher – about $16,000 in today’s purchasing power. Black teachers were at half that pay. In the late ’30s at our Miami Beach school, it was not unusual to have an out-of-date textbook with four or five names scratched through of students from earlier years. (Lake Wales News )

It's 2010, Mayor Daley

2009-12-31T05:00:00.003-06:00

Do you know where your Renaissance is?

"We don't have a library, we don't have a school, so Mayor Daley, what do you want us to do? We don't want to rob, we don't want to steal, and we are tired of seeing teens get killed." (Chicago Tribune)

QUOTABLES

2009-12-30T15:11:00.000-06:00

'It's about relationships...'

Jay Steele, Nashville's high school superintendent, believes that smaller learning communities are the key to high school reform.

It's about relationships. Being a band teacher, you form relationships with kids that go beyond the classroom. You form relationships with the community — you're working with large groups of kids and parents, and you're providing experiences that will last a lifetime for a group of kids. It's the same concept in redesigning high schools. High school redesign is about creating positive experiences for kids that enrich their lives and establish relationships with nurturing adults. Once you have that in place, attendance increases; discipline problems decrease. The kids see relevance in why they're going to school. Then it's easy to raise the rigor of what's being taught. (Tennessean.com)

The Zero-Tolerance gap

The causes of over-disciplining reside at the intersection of family poverty, under-funded schools, inadequate teacher training and deeply-rooted cultural biases in the way administrators and students of color respond to each other. It explains why some students get a slap on the wrist for fighting while others get a ride to the police station (David Thigpen, "Rethinking School Discipline" at Huffington).

View from right field

Conservative Mike Petrilli has some valid points to make in his critique of "anti-intellectualism" embedded in Arne Duncan's Race To The Top reforms and a curriculum that focuses almost exclusively on easily testable reading and math. Of course all this didn't begin with the Obama regime and Petrilli's alternative seems just as bad to me--E.D. Hirsch's list of what every smart person should know. When you've run through the list, voila! You're smart.

Democratic reformers had better be careful. An obsessive focus on nothing but basic skills in reading and math, which can be chopped into little bits of data with which we can make all manner of decisions, will result in a generation of students who will make Palin sound like Socrates. (The Gadfly)

WaPo unwraps Duncan's Chicago legacy

2009-12-29T10:09:00.005-06:00

"We're proud to have made significant progress . . . and to really be a model of national reform."--Arne Duncan at his January confirmation hearing

First we had the so-called "Texas Miracle" back in 2000 when Texas Gov. George Bush and then-Houston Supt. Rod Paige rode the myth of zero high school dropouts all the way to the White House. A decade later Chicago Democrats followed suit and created the "Chicago Miracle," the myth of Arne Duncan's 7-year tenure as Mayor Daley's appointed school chief in Chicago. This myth has now been turned into an imposed top-down model for the whole country, including widespread school closings, staff firings, the expansion of privately-managed charter schools, back-to-basics curriculum, heavy reliance on standardized test scores, and mayoral control of the schools.

It took a better-late-than-never New York Times report in 2003 to tear the cover off of the miracle in Texas. Now, a year too late perhaps, Washington Post's Nick Anderson has taken a closer look at Duncan's tenure in Chicago.

Anderson's review of NAEP scores measuring Chicago students' progress over the past 6 years,"signal that Chicago is nowhere near the head of the pack in urban school improvement, even though Duncan often cites the successes of his tenure as he crusades to fix public education."

Anderson goes on to cite studies by the Civic Committee and the Consortium on Chicago School Research which show the Daley/Duncan reform to be "an abysmal failure" and "yielding little or no academic benefits."

Duncan's record is of more than historical interest. He wields considerable power through the combination of his Chicago connections, shared with President Obama, and his oversight of billions of dollars in reform funding.

Huberman's goofy plan

2009-12-29T08:35:00.004-06:00

Yesterday Chicago Tonight ran this interview with Chicago schools CEO Huberman from October, where he explains his goofy $30-million violence prevention scheme. Predicting kids most likely to be shot. Give them part-time jobs. Huh?

It's the end of the year now and still no real violence prevention programs. Parents are irate. Storming the school board meetings. They want safe neighborhood schools--not Renaissance 2010 school closings, more elite selective-enrollment military schools or privately-managed charters for a few kids.

What would Paulo Freire do?

2009-12-28T06:36:00.004-06:00

In the current issue of Rethinking Schools, Bob Peterson raises the question: "Big City Superintendents: Dictatorship or Democracy?"and draws on the experience and wisdom of social-justice educator and former school supt. himself, Paulo Freire for answers.

Popular participation in the creation of culture and education breaks with the tradition that only the elite is competent and knows what the needs and interests of the society are. The school should also be a center for the [illumination] of popular culture, at the service of the community, not to consume it but to create it.

Holiday quotables

2009-12-28T06:17:00.002-06:00

The language of schooling

We seem trapped in a language of schooling that stresses economics, accountability and compliance. (Mike Rose, Why School?)

Harlem Children's Zone in Chicago?

"We've been programmed out, and we still have the same problems. We need a communitywide effort that includes the schools, the police, the hospitals, the politicians, the universities all working together."Bishop Arthur Brazier, longtime head of The Woodlawn Organization, is working with University of Chicago officials to craft a plan for the neighborhood. The city's education and crime woes call for a bold, comprehensive strategy, he said. (Chicago Tribune feature on Harlem Children's Zone)

More HCZ

President Barack Obama is so impressed with the early successes of the Harlem program that he's set aside $10 million for 20 communities to replicate it. Cities will compete next year for seed money to launch similar "Promise Neighborhoods" in low-income and crime-plagued areas. (Trib)

Me: $10 million? For the entire coutry? That's impressed? HCZ's budget alone in $48 million.

The "reconstitution" of L.A. Fremont High

L.A. Unified did so little to improve Fremont High School that eight years ago, the state took on decision-making authority over the school and nine others in L.A. Unified. Students were reading primary-grade picture books; dropout rates were legendary. The state was supposed to provide an improvement plan that would show results within 18 months; if that failed, it would take over the school entirely or impose other sanctions. But no sanctions were imposed, and here's where Fremont is now: 12% or so of students are proficient in reading and writing. About 2,000 students start out as freshmen; by senior year, there are proficient less than 600. (L.A. Times editorial)

Dennis Brutus, anti-apartheid poet

2009-12-26T10:35:00.004-06:00

Renowned South African poet and activist Dennis Brutus died in his sleep on December 26th in Cape Town. He was 85 years old.

Brutus was a leading opponent of the apartheid state. He helped secure South Africa’s suspension from the Olympics, eventually forcing the country to be expelled from the Games in 1970. Arrested in 1963, he was sentenced to eighteen months of hard labor on Robben Island, off Cape Town, with Nelson Mandela (Democracy Now).

With the opening of the film Invictus, it should be noted that Brutus was instrumental in liberating South African sports from the culture of apartheid. His writings and teachings were banned in the old South Africa.

Chicago can at least partially claim Dennis from his days as a political refugee and activist professor here at Northwestern University. R.I.P. Dennis

Bush's think-tank is making movies

2009-12-23T05:34:00.003-06:00

Break out the popcorn

The new George W. Bush Institute describes itself as an "action-oriented think-tank." It's first action will be the production of a series of films. The first one (I guessed it. Did you?) is about "merit" pay for teachers.

"Fix, don't close, 'failing' schools"

2009-12-22T15:07:00.004-06:00

UFT Prez Mulgrew slams Bloomberg/Klein policies

Instead of pursuing this misguided policy, we should learn from other cities - where such aggressive school-closing strategies have failed. The Chicago school system used a similar approach between 2001 and 2006, closing 38 schools. A study by the University of Chicago showed that the majority of students displaced by this process ended up in schools that were no better - and in some cases worse - than the schools that they had left. (Daily News)

h/t Edwize & JD2718

What ever happened to Renaissance 2010?

2009-12-22T11:42:00.006-06:00

I thought it was the "model"

Arne Duncan rode the myth of Chicago's school "Renaissance" all the way to Washington. Designed in the office of the Civic Committee and embedded into Daley's last mayoral campaign, Renaissance 2010 was touted as the reform model for the whole country.

But now that Duncan departed for D.C., there seems to have been a deRenaissance-ing campaign in Chicago and the phrase Ren10 is hardly ever mentioned--shades of No Child Left Behind. A string of research reports (some initially suppressed), including one from the Civic Committee itself, found the Duncan/Daley reform initiative to be "an abysmal failure."

In the past few months, Ren10's school-closing policies have been met with sharp resistance from parents, especially in reaction to the surge in violence at schools like Fenger High School, that occurred as a result. In November, CEO Ron Huberman promised fewer new charter schools for Chicago and at last week's board meeting, Huberman backed away from several other Ren10 policies, even promising angry parents that no more high schools would be closed in the coming year. It doesn't appear that Huberman has even uttered the words "Renaissance 2010" in more than six months.

Who can blame him?

Looking back

It was one year ago this week that Duncan was named by president-elect Obama to be his Secretary of Education. Fox News ran this story, calling Duncan a "bona fide reformer" and then recounted this exchange between Duncan, Bill Ayers and myself, about Renaissance 2010:

Duncan is also a fervent supporter of "Renaissance 2010," a plan started by Daley in 2004 to close 500 failing schools permanently or to reopen them as reformed schools within six years. In 2006, Duncan went on the offensive about the plan, accusing former domestic terrorist Williams Ayers -- now an education professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and an Obama supporter -- for "failing to embrace" the program.

Ayers and his co-author Michael Klonsky responded to Duncan in an article published in Phi Delta Kappan -- a professional journal for education -- describing him as "the brightest and most dedicated schools leader Chicago has had in memory," but one who began his article by "admonishing us for failing to 'embrace' the board's Renaissance 2010 policy and instructs us on our responsibility to be 'impartial.'"
"People in power desire nothing more than obedience and easy agreement, but this is not the proper role for either reformers or scholars," they wrote.
Duncan then responded to Ayers and Klonsky in a rebuttal article, writing, "Rather than embrace Chicago's ambitious Renaissance 2010 program as a vehicle to advance school reform and the small schools movement while integrating greater accountability into the system, William Ayers and Michael Klonsky, pioneers in small school development, attack the initiative with inaccurate, misleading statements.

As it turns out, everything we said about Ren10 back in 2006 turned out to be true, if anything, understated, and Duncan's model is no longer taken seriously, even by its authors, the Civic Committee, or Duncan successor.

Politics of disaster in Destroit

2009-12-22T09:36:00.010-06:00

Teachers have to donate $10K/year to district

The new contract in Motown, engineered by district takeover chief, Robert Bobb, balances the school budget entirely on the backs of city teachers and school staff. Under the deal, teachers, school counselors and other staff had little choice but to defer $10,000 each in pay over the next two years to help the district pay its bills. (WSJ)

Without a major relief plan--better and bigger than the one in New Orleans--Detroit schools are headed the way of the auto industry. The city's unemployment rate is now up over 50%. The tax base for public education has withered. Administrators, politicians and the press feign shock at falling student test scores. This has made the city ripe for privately managed charters, school closings, union-busting and selling off public assets for quick cash.

Disaster Capitalism

"Most New orleans schools are in ruins as are the homes of the children who attended them. The children are now scattered all over the country. This is a tragedy. It is also an opportunity to radically reform the educational system."--Milton Friedman, "The Promise of Vouchers" Wall Street Journal, 12/5/2005.

Naomi Klein, in her book, Shock Doctrine, documents the imposition of top-down "reforms" including the erosion of public space and decision making, in times of crisis. The post 9/11 "war on terror" and New Orleans, post-Katrina school privatization were prime examples. The reorganization of post-industrial Detroit is another. Klein quotes the late free-market economist Milton Friedman who saw Katrina, not as a horrible disaster, but as an "opportunity."

Back in 1982, Friedman wrote: "Ideas are alternatives waiting on a crisis to serve as the catalyst for change." His model for eliminating public space and decision-making, according to Klein, was "to legitimize ideas, to make them bearable, and worth trying when the opportunity comes."

Now Edweek quotes Ed. Sec. Arne Duncan:

"When times are tough, you often have the kind of fundamental breakthroughs you need...You’ve seen some folks do some unbelievably creative things and really using the crisis as an opportunity."

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

2009-12-21T05:06:00.005-06:00

Chasing Ayn Rand

"In K-12 education, we submit, greed can be good, albeit ugly." (Fordham's Finn and Hess)

9 good arguments against "merit" pay, including:

The best teachers are already working incredibly long hours, and there’s no evidence that extra pay will make them work harder or smarter—or that it will motivate mediocre teachers to improve. Quite the contrary: Merit pay will steer all too many teachers toward low-level test preparation. (Kim Marshall at Edweek)

Closing small Jersey schools

"I commute 1 1/2 hours one way every day, just to live in Fieldon where our son will one day be able to attend a small school," Braundmeier said.

"Not once have we said we were closing the schools," board member Angie Cory said. "It's very difficult for us to see you in tears or hear your children have come home crying because they heard their school was going to be closed. Looking at closing the schools was just one of the options under consideration." (Jerseyville Telegraph)

Rifts in the Ownership Society

2009-12-18T04:33:00.012-06:00

"Greed is good" at Fordham, but...

Why are Checker Finn, Rick Hess and the right-wing "greedheads" over at Fordham Institute suddenly railing against "self-promoters" and "snake-oil salesmen" out to make a buck off of Duncan's Race To The Top?

After all, admit the duo:

We're veteran champions of entrepreneurs, for-hyphen profits, out-sourcing, competition, deregulation, and kindred efforts to open public education to providers other than government and operators other than bureaucrats.We've served on boards on some of these organizations, advised them and generally supported them.

In short, according to the pair, "in K-12 education, we submit, greed can be good, albeit ugly."

But now, say the two Fordham think-tankers,
...the whole "Race To The Top" enterprise has become a red light district for lusty charlatans and randy peddlers. Big firms full of wealthy MBA types--people who earn in a quarter what teachers make in a year--have gobbled up the $250,000 per state that the Gates Foundation offered as part of its own generous consultant stimulus act," along with additional dollars that states have tossed into the kitty. In return, they're readying cool power points, nifty white papers, and jargon-littered plans, all geared to helping states persuade Secretary Duncan that yes, they are ready and eager to do his bidding.
Could it be that the conservative ed hustlers who made a killing at Bush's Reading First feeding trough are now being frozen out by this new group of politically aligned "greedheads?"

The mercy of the court

2009-12-17T01:52:00.009-06:00

CPS under Daley/Duncan, fought the courts for years to nullify the deseg agreement that held the district accountable for ending racial segregation. Now that they've won that battle, claiming they've done all they can do, current CEO Huberman tells the community that he's bound by the same courts from talking about race.

All this reminds me of the guy who murdered his parents and then threw himself on the mercy of the court claiming he was an orphan.

The worst part of Huberman's current retreat from school desegregation is his new admissions policies to the city's elite magnet schools, schools which were established with federal deseg funding specifically for deseg purposes. But angry community protests may force him to back away from his new plan.

Don Moore from the reform group Designs for Change, sums it up in a recent press release:

"The proposed policy will turn most of Chicago's magnet schools into neighborhood schools that are segregated by race and by income. Most schools
located in predominantly white neighborhoods are now racially diverse. They will become almost entirely white."

Reform metaphors

2009-12-16T16:08:00.015-06:00

On vacation this week but still blogging occasionally

Lying on a beach somewhere, thinking of course about metaphors for school reform. Doesn't everyone?

Bush used the best one, No Child Left Behind, coopting the Children's Defense Fund slogan of Leave No Child Behind, and turning it into its opposite with a near decade of punitive testing madness. Now Arne Duncan comes along with a far worse Race to the Top metaphor--the very opposite of leaving no child behind. A race metaphor, after all, clearly envisions (necessitates) educational winners and losers.

It's like Duncan's people met one day and said, let's continue NCLB only without all that nonsense about not leaving kids behind. Here's Diane Ravitch at her best, dropping the hammer on what she calls the Race to Nowhere:

Public hearings are pro forma; no decision is ever reversed. Parents and teachers may protest 'til the cows come home, and they can't change a thing. Their school will be closed, the low-performing students will be dispersed, and either new small schools or charter schools will take over their building. Some of the schools that will close are, funnily enough, small schools that were opened by Bloomberg and Klein only a few years ago. Does anyone believe that this sorry game of musical chairs will improve education? Does anyone in Washington or at central headquarters grasp the pointlessness of the disruption needlessly inflicted on students, families, teachers, principals, and communities in the name of "reform"? Do these people have no shame?