Schools Matter

A Question for Arne's Army

2009-07-09T21:17:00.003-04:00

A couple of charter school gems from Arne's recent speech to the NEA:

"charter schools they need to police themselves or their progress will be stalled"

"charter school operators and authorizers to get much more serious about accountability. They must not protect third-rate charters. Those schools need to close."

So let's see: while public schools are subject to restructuring or shutdown or charter conversion by the Federal government, charter schools, on the other hand, must "police themselves" and "get more serious." The question, then: as Duncan is extremely eager to shut down 5% of the lowest-performing (poorest) public schools, is he as eager, or even willing to entertain the idea, to shut down the 37% of bogus charter schools that are underperforming the public schools that these charter were intended to replace?

Raytheon Enters Education Research Field; Gates Provides Seed Money

2009-07-08T21:51:00.015-04:00

Heard the line about not having enough engineers and scientists available to keep America on top in the global market? Get ready to hear it again. Raytheon - yes, the same Raytheon that is the world's leading producer of missiles - recently donated a sophisticated modeling program to help figure out how to engineer an education system capable of creating more and better STEM graduates. Raytheon makes the "staying competitive in the global economy" argument for reforming education - which they blame for not producing enough STEM workers. Question for Raytheon: are you aware of how painfully boring STEM subjects are for a large chunk of the population, particularly those who had negative experiences with math at the younger grades - like those drilled in many old school math environments seen in test prep academies and authoritarian classrooms that you're pushing in your education engineering project?). Raytheon's brand of fearmongering and bashing of public education for STEM issues is without merit, as explained by Gerald Bracey in this 2008 post.

But Bill Gates is interested. Interested enough to provide seed money for the project. Can you say education-military-industrial complex?

From the Defense News (my bolds):

New Raytheon Program Analyzes 'STEM' Candidates
By ANTONIE BOESSENKOOL
Published: 8 Jul 2009 19:03

Raytheon and the Business-Higher Education Forum unveiled an open-source computer modeling program July 8 focused on math and science education. The program is designed for use by educators, policy makers and researchers to aid education policy and planning decisions.
The defense industry is bracing itself for growing shortages of skilled engineers and scientists as older workers prepare to retire and are not replaced at a full rate. The program, which Raytheon engineers started developing in 2006, looks at roughly 200 variables to judge the likelihood a student will graduate with a degree in one of the "STEM" subjects - science, technology, engineering or math - and enter industry or become a teacher in one of those fields.

"We decided to use the same methods that had been applied to large, complex engineering systems," Swanson said. "These tools help us determine what systems designs will work and be cost-effective and which should be abandoned because they have limited capabilities or high cost or worse yet, just won't work over time." The program is intended to help effective educational methods rise to the top, said Raytheon Chief Executive Bill Swanson. Whereas a lot of ideas have worked locally, there is no "one size" for all educational systems. In looking at how to model the use of effective educational methods, Raytheon used the same systems engineering, modeling and simulation it uses for defense programs, Swanson said.
The model itself looks like a group of spiders, mapping a person's education and career from birth to retirement. It looks at the short- and long-term impacts of changing certain variables and produces a graph showing changes in the number of college graduates in STEM subjects as a result.
The model also looks at variables such as teacher pay, class size, student interest in science and math, teacher attrition rates and gender differences over the course of a person's education from kindergarten to college.
Raytheon gifted the program, called the U.S. STEM Educational Model, to BHEF. BHEF in turn launched the program into open-source use, which means users can suggest changes and research to improve the model. The model is based on research including test scores and localized studies, yet more research is needed, panelists at the unveiling said.
"There are many areas where we need much more research. … to help fill in some of the gaps. In the meantime, we often make assumptions," said Brian Wells, chief system engineer at Raytheon. Raytheon and BHEF are hoping researchers and users of the program will add research. That research, and changes suggested in the open-source environment, will be reviewed by other users, speakers at the unveiling said.
The program can be downloaded for free at www.STEMnetwork.org. Vensim Simulation Software from Ventana Systems is needed to run the software.
The program will be overseen by the STEM Research and Modeling Network, a partnership between Raytheon, BHEF and The Ohio State University. The partnership got some "seed money" from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, but more funding, perhaps a few million a year, will be needed in the future, depending on what other initiatives the network decides to pursue, such as educational awards, said Brian Fitzgerald, executive director of BHEF.
The BHEF is an organization of executives from Fortune 500 companies, university presidents and foundation leaders who focus on educational issues and enhancing U.S. competitiveness.

The Only Education Reform That Matters This Year: Health Care

2009-07-08T08:57:00.003-04:00

While Arne's army of oligarchs continues its multi-billion dollar war against the public schools, and while their insipid ideas rot into lame notions under July's Washington heat (pay per test score plans and cheap charters that make jobs for out of work corporate crooks), the only reform of the year that has a real chance of reducing the achievement gap is being hijacked by the same oligarchs who rail against socialized medicine, while cutting backroom corporate welfare deals with Big Little Man, Rahm Emmanuel.

With 72 percent of the American people are in favor of a public option like Medicare, Tough Man Emmanuel is intent on trading the welfare of the citizenry for the corporate welfare once again. If the President allows this health care plan to become another corporate feeding trough that leaves the poor without quality health care, he will have assured his legacy as the Booker T. of his generation and as the first African-American president to be a one termer. The line is drawn, and this is one that Obama cannot straddle.

Meanwhile, the utter irrelevancy of the U. S. Department of Education remains breathtaking in light of the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to push for policy that will affect academic achievement more than any stupid or smart test that could be choked down the throats of sick children without health care.

From the Times:

WASHINGTON — The deals, trumpeted loudly by the White House, would each help pay for a sweeping overhaul of the health care system.

First, it was a broad consortium of health industry groups — doctors, hospitals, drug makers and insurers, all promising to slow the growth of medical spending by 1.5 percent. Then, it was the big drug makers, promising savings of $80 billion over 10 years, by lowering the cost of medicine for the elderly.

On Wednesday, it will be major hospital associations, pledging to save more than $150 billion over a decade. And a deal with doctors is said to be on tap next.

In each case, the Obama administration hailed the agreements as historic. But what has been little discussed is what the industry groups will be getting in return for their cooperation, whether or not the promised savings ever materialize.

The short-term political benefits are clear. Senior White House officials say the deals are building momentum that will help propel the health care legislation past potential opponents in the private sector and on Capitol Hill.

Rather than running advertisements against the White House, the most influential players in the industry are inside the room negotiating with administration officials and leading lawmakers, like Senator Max Baucus, chairman of the Finance Committee.

“The very groups we have been talking to have been the most vocal opponents of health care reform; they are now becoming the vocal proponents for health care reform,” said Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff.

But some lawmakers said the deals, while seemingly helpful, could raise false expectations by obscuring how much the industry is demanding for its concessions.

“I’m delighted to hear that people are stepping up to help reduce costs,” said Senator Christopher J. Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut, who is leading the Senate health committee, “but I want to know what the ask is, and the ask sometimes can exceed the value of your cost savings.”

Senator Olympia J. Snowe, Republican of Maine, who could provide a critical swing vote, said she had not signed on to any of the White House deals. “It’s one thing for the president to reach that agreement, but it’s another thing for Congress to reach that agreement,” Ms. Snowe said. “We have yet to evaluate what are the specifics and particulars. So it’s uncertain. It could be helpful. I just don’t know.”
As part of their deal with the White House, pharmaceutical companies say they won an agreement from Mr. Baucus to oppose efforts by House Democrats to sharply reduce what the government pays for drugs for some Medicare recipients previously covered by Medicaid. . . .

Connecting the Dots: Standardized Testing and the Charter Chain Movement

2009-07-07T15:25:00.002-04:00

There's a huge push for standards, innovation/entrepreneurship, charter school chains, and taking ideas "to scale." These ideas are tightly connected. To see how they're connected, take a peek at the NewSchools Venture Fund's 2008 annual summit (the entire thing is worth reading; Michelle Rhee and New Leaders for New Schools are both given awards). My bolds:

Audience members asked the panelists what else it would take to create a healthy [entrepreneurial capital] market. Panelists noted that K-12 public education is an enormous, fragmented, market, where ventures often take longer to mature than in other sectors. Kaplan pointed out that more effective capital markets exist in sectors where the demand is aggregated, such as in pre-K or postsecondary education. In these markets, money follows the consumer and 'you can start to build bigger, better, more professionally-run schools' that, in turn, open up access to more capital from interested investors who see the potential of these models. Conversely, K-12 education is subject to local control, which prevents aggregated demand, explained Shelton. Kaplan added that this construct leaves few incentives to invest in K-12. 'In investing, he reminded the audience, 'there are no extra points for degrees of difficulty.'
This pattern raises the question: is there a way to aggregate demand in the K-12 space? Shelton poisted that one way to go about this is to segment K-12 education into separate service markets, but that concept is undermined by the fact that vey little is known about what truly works. As a result, individual entrepreneurs and companies often are prone to building systems and structures that are highly tailored to the immediate needs of their organization and their student population. 'People legitimately believe that this little thing that they're going to do is going to make the difference,' Shelton explained. 'Even if it is not getting funded, people would rather cobble together their own customizable system, perfectly matched to their specific needs.' Cole suspected that this focus on specific details may be the result of competition among this relatively small group of entrepreneurs. 'In so many cases these leaders are seeing each other as competitors,' she said. 'Because there are scarce resources and they're going after many of the same funding sources, they can't figure out how to collaborate.'
This problem may be particularly acute among nonprofit education ventures, which do not experience the same level of competition imposed on for-profits by the market. 'In nonprofits, we don't measure each investment against results,' explained Shelton. Cole pointed out that this allows nonprofits to continue securing grants and to stay afloat even when their results are poor, which deters them from seeking mergers or alternatives business models. Kaplan noted that this is a sharp departure from for-profit space where, in his words, 'if someone knew a cheaper better way to do something, they would grab it.' The nonprofit market also fails to reward the most effective ventures. 'There's a fundamental disconnect between performance and access to capital,' Shelton explained, which means that, 'even a high-performing venture is not ensured that it will receive sufficient dollars in the current market.' What the market needs, Shelton suggested, is general agreement on the metrics and definitions of success, especially student achievement metrics and organization efficiency.

Shelton is now sitting in Duncan's Office of Innovation and Improvement, which is the "nimble, entrepreneurial arm of the U.S. Department of Education" created under President George W. Bush. Shelton's experience in education began as the co-founder and CEO of LearnNow, a for-profit charter chain that managed to be sold to Edison just before Edison's Philadelphia debacle (and the ensuing stock collapse, the Florida public employee pension fund's purchase of the stock, and Jeb Bush tomfoolery). NewSchools Venture Fund was one of LearnNow's biggest supporters, and NSVF walked away from the deal with a cool million in profits (they managed to sell their stock for a net gain around the time of the aforementioned Edison turmoil). From there, Shelton hops on at Edison, works for NSVF as their East Coast leader, jumps over to the Gates Foundation, and now lands in Duncan's DOE. I suppose we should look at what this guy said in the past - he is, after all, a public employee who just happens to be sitting on the $650 million "Race to the Top" fund. The other two panelists certainly give us some insight into how education entrepreneurs think as well.

You'll also notice Shelton's comments on local control of education, which he claims gets in the way of "aggregated demand." In other words, the corporate charter school movement has a more difficult time orchestrating their hostile takeover of public education with pesky local control and democratic forms of control over education. Mayoral control, minimizing the role of school boards, and allowing for more authorizers of charter schools (as described here by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools in a report arguing for the deregulation of charter school authorizers. Notice the number of Education Sector contributors; NewSchools Venture Fund's former CEO and current board member sits on the Ed Sector board) would sure make it easier for these innovators and edupreneurs.

Shelton reveals how the standards movement is connected to the charter chain movement when describing the role of test scores: "What the market needs, Shelton suggested, is general agreement on the metrics and definitions of success, especially student achievement metrics and organization efficiency." National standards, like the ones currently being created by Achieve, the College Board, ACT, and the Gates Foundation, would sure make it easy to spread curriculum and materials to the wave of ill-prepared teachers in the various charter chains.

Shelton repeats an iteration of the privatization movement, this time targeting only part of the school system rather than the entire school (Shelton probably learned this during his experiences through LearnNow and Edison): "Shelton poisted that one way to go about this is to segment K-12 education into separate service markets, but that concept is undermined by the fact that vey little is known about what truly works." In other words, we have no idea what works - but we have the backing of various philanthrocapitalists willing to fund our experimentation on urban youth.

For all the talk of competition (between students within a school, schools within a district, and states within the nation), one presenter brings up how bad competition can be for these start-up companies. They're competing for the same resources and just cannot figure out how to work together. Education entrepreneurs consistently gripe about the lack of competition in education, but once they get their foot in the door they start whining about competition: "'Because there are scarce resources and they're going after many of the same funding sources, they can't figure out how to collaborate.'" It seems to me that if this competition for scarce resources makes it difficult for edupreneurs to collaborate (which the presenter notes is a negative), why would we want schools, students, and communities competing against each other? Collaboration is not only a highly desired ability in many areas (personal relationships, work settings, etc), it's an absolute necessity if we're going to deal with global climate change, war, poverty, etc. But we're told we need to compete. Why? Because China and India are pumping out hundreds of thousands of engineers that will be capable of threatening our reign over the rest of the globe (Bracey debunks the numbers here).

The privatization becomes a little more opaque, this time under a President who ran on a platform promising for transparency and a shift away from the policies of the Bush Jr. years. But hey - dontcha think a Palin Presidency would be a hell of a lot worse?

From the Digital Divide to the Digital Diversion

2009-07-07T08:53:00.004-04:00

A second offer showed up in my mailbox this morning for a new book by Terry Moe and John Chubb on the glories of cyber ed, which is viewed by the financiers and lawyers in charge today of education policy as the ultimate solution to education for the poor and working class. From cyber charter elementary to cyber college, a new educational caste system has been devised that will offer two very different types of educational experiences, one grounded in the sterile isolation and alienation of the flat screen, and the other based within the warm incandescent community of other middle class minds and bodies exchanging the breaths of privilege and mutual care.

The poor rural and urban students will avail themselves of the former, and the economically privileged will continue their well-heeled traditions with the best teachers, real campuses, and the best apparatus that money can buy. Meanwhile, the poor will have laptops and modems, we may presume, provided by Gates and Dell, and charged off at an exorbitant rate to the taxpayer as part of the new world of the cyber charter and the cyber college. Think of it: following graduation, the poor will even find minimum wage jobs online, so that they may live their entire lives without having to get dressed! Think of the cost savings.

The selling of this distinctly dystopian future is something else, again. It is wrapped in the threadbare reform rhetoric that no one believes anymore, insulting as it is to the intelligence of anyone able to read. Moe and Chubb have teamed up once more to promote the Oligarchs' solution of corporate-run testing factories, the online variety no less, as the way to achieve what the Finns have achieved by honoring the teaching profession, creating world-class standards, funding their school, nurturing their students, and getting rid of high stakes testing. Finland, for instance, does not use test scores to determine how much to pay teachers.

And even though the "reformers" have wasted the past 25 years with a test-til-you-puke strategy that continues to not work, that reality is lost on these fools, who have their eye on a prize that has nothing to do with student learning or quality schools--but on filling the pockets of the ed industry leeches looking to increase their share of tax money intended for education. In fact, the continuation of the test factory failures of the past 25 years holds open the door to the continuation of another generation of reforms dreamed up by the same ad agencies that sell you all the other modern day remedies you have come to count on not to work.

From the Wall Street Journal:

. . . . In response to "A Nation at Risk," Terry Moe and John Chubb in 1990 published "Politics, Markets and America's Schools," which identified special-interest groups -- mainly teachers unions -- as the culprits in preventing the reforms urged in the report. Now Messrs. Moe and Chubb have returned to the subject with "Liberating Learning," a more optimistic sequel. The authors believe there exists a magic bullet that is capable of shattering the unions' political power and, at last, bringing the sort of reform and excellence to U.S. K-12 education that might make U.S. students competitive with Finnish teenagers. The ammunition? Technology.

Mr. Moe is an academic researcher at the Hoover Institution; Mr. Chubb, an executive with Chris Whittle's for-profit education venture, Edison Learning. They think that technology -- particularly online education -- holds two potentially dramatic benefits. One is simply a general improvement in education as students from "anywhere -- poor inner cities, remote rural areas, even at home" gain access to high-caliber instruction. More important, the authors say, is technology's ability to destroy the political barriers that prevent education reform.

Despite much public rhetoric about the urgent need to improve American education, despite the investment of billions of dollars in schools, little progress has been achieved. Why? Messrs. Moe and Chubb blame the "politics of blocking" -- the thwarting of such simple reforms as paying teachers for performance. Many states prohibit even gathering data that link individual teachers to the test scores of their students.

Technology, the authors say, may enable the circumvention of political blocking. They make their point forcefully, with copious and surprising examples. In 1995, for instance, Midland, Pa., a declining steel town on the Ohio border, launched the Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School. Today the online school serves 8,000 students throughout the state. And the classes aren't just digital correspondence courses -- there are textbooks and live educators, including "synchronous teachers," who work with students through instant messaging, voice and interactive whiteboards while the kids are engaged with their lessons online. Advisers are required to communicate with students' families at least once a week by email and once every two weeks by phone. . . .

There is one thing that may get in the way of this brave new cyber world of education for the disenfranchised, and, as always, it has to do with the greedy over-reaching that has characterized this generation of corporate bottom-feeders. Here is the latest from Pennsylvania, where the lawyers of the Agora Cyber Charter School are using up the money they have taken from the taxpayers to file numerous lawsuits to block the State from bringing a halt to their corrupt gravy train. From the Inquirer:

With the state poised to pull the plug over alleged mismanagement, an online charter school based in Devon is fighting back in not just one court, but three.
One week after the Pennsylvania Department of Education began the process of revoking its operating charter, the Agora Cyber Charter School has filed lawsuits in federal, state, and county courts challenging the action and seeking the return of public money the state had diverted from Agora into an escrow account.
The litigation - filed Monday in U.S. District Court in Philadelphia, Commonwealth Court in Harrisburg, and Chester County Court of Common Pleas - is the latest salvo in a dispute over the school's management contract with a company owned by Agora founder Dorothy June Brown.
Agora, which opened in 2005, enrolls 4,400 students statewide who receive online instruction at home.
The Education Department, which oversees the 11 cyber charters in Pennsylvania, alleges that Agora's board of trustees violated the operating charter by contracting out management services. To make matters worse, state officials say, the company, Cynwyd Group L.L.C., is controlled by Brown.
Cynwyd was to be paid $2.8 million from Agora's $41 million budget this academic year - although, according to the Education Department, most of the management work was performed by another company, K-12 Pennsylvania L.L.C.
On June 11, the state told Agora's board to cancel the Cynwyd contract and to resign in 10 days. When the board did neither, charter-revocation proceedings were begun and a two-day hearing in Harrisburg was scheduled for next month.
The Education Department already had started to divert Agora's local, state, and federal funds into an escrow account, to prevent money from flowing to Cynwyd.
In court documents filed this week, Agora's board contends that education officials had known about the Cynwyd contract since 2006 but raised no objections until April 29.
Joel L. Frank, an Agora attorney, is asking the courts to halt the revocation proceedings and to return the money, which he contends was withheld in violation of state law.
"We will review the complaints and respond in a timely manner," Leah Harris, an Education Department spokeswoman, wrote in an e-mail yesterday.
School districts, she added, have been asked "to place their tuition payments to Agora into an escrow account from which the costs of the students' education will continue to be paid. All federal funds will be paid to Agora. There is no intention on the part of [the department] to withhold federal dollars from Agora."
Despite the revocation proceedings, state officials have said Agora is expected to operate in 2009-10.
Also on Monday, Agora's board sued K-12 in Chester County Court. Although the state maintains the escrow fund, the trustees contend that K-12 has had some access to the money in order to pay bills, and they are seeking an accounting.
Henry E. Hockeimer Jr., the attorney who represents K-12, said that under the escrow procedures, the state must preapprove all Agora bills paid by K-12. Any expenditures, he said, "have been for the educational needs of the students."
K-12 Pennsylvania is a subsidiary of K12 Inc., a for-profit education company in Herndon, Va.
The cyber school's finances also are under scrutiny by the Philadelphia School District inspector general and by federal investigators as part of a general criminal probe of local charter operations.

Clayton Christensen and the Innosight Institute:Fixing Public Education

2009-07-06T16:24:00.035-04:00

Various factions of the education world are abuzz with the ideas proposed by Harvard Professor Clayton Christensen and his colleagues in "Disrupting Class," a relatively new book about education reform. Just to be clear, Christensen's background includes a previous stint in the business world, a position at Harvard's business school, and a position as an elder in the Mormon church. As far as I can tell, Christensen hasn't spent any time with children in an education setting.

Like many education reformers, Christensen is totally out of touch with both reality and good teaching. He and his colleagues believe most teachers simply stand at the front of the class and lecture. This might be the case for ill-prepared teachers, but experienced educators know students need to be involved in lessons instead of acting as spectators in the creation of knowledge. Consistently describing current teaching trends as "monolithic," Christensen believes computer-based learning is the key to education reform. In a bastardized understanding of Howard Gardner's multiple intelligences (and somehow Gardner agrees with him), Christensen believes every child could learn if we used more student-centric teaching methods (sound good, but Christensen really means plopping a child in front of a screen and keyboard in their solo experience of education. Sure, kids might interact with each other in the virtual world, but Christensen's views imply drastically reducing face-to-face interaction). I'm all for child-centered pedagogies and the reasonable use of technology in the classroom, but there is certainly reason to be skeptical of an education system that relies on computers as the primary delivery method. Christensen never addresses the potential social impacts of his take on education reform.

But computer-centric learning will not be willfully adopted by educators. Rather, online and computer-centric learning will gain strength through providing educational opportunities for students who have difficulty in traditional classrooms. Christensen and his pals suggest this new form of learning will eventually overtake traditional public education; half of all high school courses will be taken online by the year 2019 and continue to expand as the online school market thrives. For an added twist, Christensen and his colleagues repeatedly mention Apex Learning, an online learning company started by Paul Allen. Allen, in case you were unaware, co-founded Microsoft with Bill Gates.

Christensen's theory of disruptive innovation suggests that teachers will never implement his concept of "student-centered learning" because it would put the teaching profession at risk. The computer-centric learning Christensen and his colleagues drool over is attractive for reasons having more to do with eliminating teachers and weakening the teachers' union than anything else. While I'm not here to criticize religious beliefs, Christensen's vision fewer teachers and student-centric learning mimics his experience in the Mormon church: there are no paid professional leaders (aka teachers), and Christensen feels sorry for religions that employ paid laborers. Everyone is expected to be both a teacher and student (great idea), but the show is not guided by someone who is specially trained (teachers). You can read more about this in an essay he wrote, "Why I Belong, and Why I Believe." Just to reiterate, I'm not criticizing religion - I'm just noting a comparison that may be relevant to Christensen's beliefs about education reform.

The following is a recent critique of the reform efforts, particularly the stimulus funding. Christensen co-wrote the piece with Michael Horn, co-founder of the Innosight Institute and one of Christensen's co-authors of "Disrupting Class." You'll notice the fawning over TFA and New Leaders for New Schools, two groups on the forefront in the corporate reform of public education. From CNN.com:

Commentary: Don't Prop Up Failing Schools
(CNN) -- Historically the federal government has been a small investor in the nation's education system. With the recent economic stimulus bill, however, this changed virtually overnight.
There is great danger in the sudden and massive amount of funding -- nearly $100 billion -- that the federal government is throwing at the nation's schools. District by district, the budgetary crises into which all schools were plunging created the impetus for long-needed changes.
The most likely result of this stimulus will be to give our schools the luxury of affording not to change. This is borrowed money that we're pumping into our schools, and it comes at a price. Charging education isn't changing it.
That our schools need to change should not be surprising. Just walk into your local school and enter a classroom. Odds are high that it won't look too different from a classroom from a generation or two ago.
Sure, there might be some computers in the back of the room and perhaps an interactive white board instead of a chalkboard, but chances are high that students will still be sitting at desks lined up in neat rows with a teacher at the front delivering the same lesson on the same day to all the students. This might be acceptable if society and the skills many people need to succeed in today's economy hadn't changed either, but they have.
While U.S. schools stand still, the rest of the world is moving forward, and this has a price tag -- not just for individual children, but also for the nation.
We urge the federal government to consider four criteria when creating new programs or grants for states and districts to help transform an outdated education system into one fit for the 21st Century.
First, don't fund technology that simply shoves computers and other technologies into existing classrooms. We've spent well over $60 billion in the last two decades doing just that, and there is now overwhelming evidence that when we do it, the current unsatisfactory system co-opts the technology to sustain itself.
Second, don't fund new school buildings that look like the existing ones. If the architecture of new buildings is the same as that of existing schools -- designed around teachers delivering monolithic, one-size-fits-all lessons to large batches of students -- it will lock students into another century in which the physical infrastructure works against the flexibility needed for student-centric learning.We should instead use technology funding to bolster new learning models and innovations, such as online-learning environments, to level the playing field and allow students from all walks of life -- from small, rural communities to budget-strapped urban schools -- to access the rich variety that is now available only to children in wealthy suburban districts.
Instead, invest in bandwidth as an infrastructure of change. The government has a productive history in investing in infrastructure that creates change and innovation -- from allocating land to those building the transcontinental railroad and the land-grant colleges in 1862 to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency funding the creation of the Internet.
To allow all districts to realize the power of online learning to advance us toward a student-centric system, the federal government should help deliver broadband capabilities necessary not just for today's needs, where schools already lag, but also in anticipation of tomorrow's.
Third, don't fund the institutions that are least likely to change. Our research shows that institutions are good at improving what they are structured to do, but that transformative innovations that fundamentally change the trade-off between cost and quality -- disruptive innovations -- come from start-up institutions.
This means that there is a high probability that spending money on existing schools of education will only result in their doing more of the same, for example. Meanwhile, there are a host of disruptive training organizations that are providing comparable educators at lower cost, such as Teach for America, the American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence, and New Leaders for New Schools.
Alternative certification, including alternative programs from existing schools of education, has grown at a 29 percent compound annual growth rate since 1997. The government must embrace this and back the winners, not defend the old institutions.
Fourth, direct more funds for research and development to create student-centric learning software. Just a fraction of 1 percent of the $600 billion in K-12 spending from all levels currently goes toward R&D.
The federal government should reallocate funds so we can begin to understand not just what learning opportunities work best on average but also what works for whom and under what circumstance. It is vital to fund learning software that captures data about the student and the efficacy of different approaches so we can connect these dots.
Transformation of any existing system isn't an easy process, but ignoring the laws of innovation, although it may be perhaps politically expedient in the short run, will only make it more difficult.
When the federal government directs future funds toward education, having these principles in place will go a long way toward making sure we're not simply charging education, but that we have a fighting chance of changing it.
The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Clayton Christensen and Michael Horn.

Christensen and his colleagues are the type of "educators" that whittle education down to a teacher, textbook, or - in the near future - software companies depositing information into the "empty" minds of students (Freire's critique of what he describes as banking theory; Christensen takes the banking theory digital). Each student, on their own path of customized education, might interact with their peers occasionally, but the majority of the time appears to be spent in solitary education confinement. Formative assessment - a wonderful idea when used properly - becomes nothing more than preprogrammed computer-based feedback loops in this technology-centered classroom (can you see how this would be a heck of a lot easier to take this "to scale" with common standards in all 50 states?). I'm all for technology use in the classroom - let's just keep it reasonable.

Jeb Bush loves Christensen's ideas (read his recent foray into education reform ideas here). So does the Gates Foundation's Education Director Vicki Phillips, NYC's Joel Klein, and Harvard MBA types. The idiots march on, this time to the tune of another questionable drummer.

Imagine, Inc. Charter Schools and Real Estate

2009-07-06T07:01:00.002-04:00

The inherent fetidness of the charter school model is without parallel in the history of American schooling. As the economy continues to sink as a result of capitalist greed, our "leaders" continue to foist on the American people a scheme that epitomizes the corruption and reckless disregard that brought us the current Depression.

By MATTHEW HAAG / The Dallas Morning News
mhaag@dallasnews.com
The Texas Education Agency last week approved the opening of a McKinney charter school run by a company that other states rejected over concern about its tax status.

The Texas board of education allowed the for-profit Imagine International Academy of North Texas to run the school even though state law allows only nonprofit organizations to open state-funded charter schools.

Imagine argued that it would use the nonprofit status of an affiliate charter school in Indiana.

State officials said the Texas attorney general reviewed the arrangement and determined that it was allowable before the school was approved.

But school officials in Florida and Nevada have raised questions about other Imagine schools, saying they have not proved they are nonprofit and that public money should not flow into for-profit hands. The company has opened dozens of schools in 13 states.

Multiple calls to the Imagine Schools Inc. headquarters in Arlington, Va., for comment were not returned.

Florida's reaction
In Florida, Imagine intended to open 15 schools.

But the company met heavy resistance from local and state education officials, and withdrew its applications. Florida education leaders questioned whether Imagine was a certified nonprofit or a business attempting to profit from public education money.

"They cannot prove to us that they are a nonprofit. They do not have a 501c3," said Tina Pinkoson, chairwoman of Florida's Alachua County Public Schools, where Imagine applied to open a charter school this year. "They say they can prove it, but we won't believe it until they show us."

The school district's attorney, Tom Wittmer, voiced similar reservations to the school board.

The structure of the school in McKinney, and another campus approved last week in Georgetown, is similar to that of the proposed schools in Florida. According to paperwork submitted to TEA, the charters will use Imagine Schools Inc. for "the opening and ongoing operation of the Academy."

That means Imagine Schools Inc. would receive 12.5 percent of the per-pupil state funding, which is about $750,000 from each of its Texas schools, according to the TEA.

Monthly allowance
The charters would also pay Imagine Schools Inc. monthly allowances, Julia Brady said. Ms. Brady was a founding parent of the McKinney campus and was later hired as school development director of Imagine International Academy of North Texas.

The amount of the monthly allowances has not been set in Texas, but in Alachua, Fla., Imagine Schools Inc. proposed receiving $3,000 a month for 20 years, plus 1 percent to 3 percent of the charter's revenue for up to 20 years.

In return, Imagine Schools Inc. would provide the two Texas charters everything from teachers to budgeting to human resources, the charter applications state.

Both the Texas charters will lease school space from Schoolhouse, a subsidiary of Imagine Schools Inc., Ms. Brady said.

She said the Imagine charter schools are paying for services they need.

"It's hard to find a vendor to lease something or provide loans to a new charter school," Ms. Brady said. "It's essentially a way for schools to tap into an existing company with a strong credit background."

Ms. Brady said the company is not unjustly siphoning public funds.

"I don't see it that way," she said. "Essentially, the local board has contracted with Imagine Schools to set up and start up the charter, paying them for services rendered."

Ken Berger, CEO of Charity Navigator, a nonprofit watchdog group, said the setup skirts the rules.

"The charter seems like a shell corporation created for the for-profit corporation," he said. "It looks like they found a way around regulations."

According to the Internal Revenue Service, Imagine Schools Inc. is not a certified nonprofit – or 501c3. Ms. Brady said the company is expecting to receive the status soon. The company applied for it in November 2005.

Mr. Berger said the process should take months, not years.

Mr. Berger said it's fine for nonprofits to contract with for-profit corporations. But when most of the contract appears to be made with the same company, the relationship becomes "questionable," he said.

"It seems like they are giving oversight duty to Imagine," he said. "It seems like the tables have turned and Imagine Schools are managing them. But it certainly sounds like a questionable arrangement."

Report Highlights Lack of Diversity on Foundation Boards

2009-07-05T19:50:00.006-04:00

From the Greenlining Institute:

Over the past several years, increasing national attention has been focused on the need for foundations to become more aware of the opportunities presented by our increasingly diverse nation. In this brief, we present figures on the diversity of the nation’s 46 largest foundations. Over 90% of all foundations and 20% of the largest foundations have little or no paid staff (Foundation Center, 2007‐2), which effectively delegates the ultimate decision on which proposals should receive funding to the handful of trustees that make up the board. Since foundations are most often not held accountable to any entity outside themselves for their funding decisions, most trustees will decide which causes or organizations to fund based on their own notions of which causes are worthy of funding, as well as their personal and professional networks. Having a culturally competent board of informed givers is therefore essential to increasing a foundation’s impact on communities of color.

The entire report is available here. You'll notice a number of significant education donors are given the dubious distinction of zero persons of color on their board of directors, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, and the Annenberg Foundation.

Racism Veiled by Testing Wins 5-4, Again

2009-07-04T16:52:00.003-04:00

From the Chronicle:

To Test or Not to Test

A recent Quinnipiac University poll shows that 61% of Americans are against affirmative action for blacks in hiring, promotion, and college admissions. So when the New Haven fire department’s decision to stop using a written test for promoting firefighters because no African American passed the test, the Supreme Court was on firm ground in the popularity contest to overturn a lower court’s approval.

Much of the opposition against affirmative action isn’t about racism or stinginess, but about a charming belief in tests. Certainly, if affirmative action was about giving unqualified people jobs, promotions, or college admissions very few people would or should support it.

Yikes! who would want a black surgeon or, DOUBLE YIKES a female economics blogger?!

If there is a robust metric out there – an indicator that is highly correlated with success in a job or college — then, by all means, let’s use them to separate the competent from the incompetent.

Here is a test:

You are in a burning building. Do you want a firefighter rescuer (choose one:)
a. who passed a written test,
b. who has a sister-in-law on the city council member or is of a certain race,
c. who has proven on-the-job performance and successfully passed simulated fire rescues

Answer class?

The majority chooses c.

Steve Greenhouse of the New York Times reports that there are different ways to assess competency that do far better than written exams. The ability to handle an emergency, lead and motivate a group, and communicate instructions and goals are necessary firefighter captain skills. And down the street from New Haven, in Bridgeport, Conn., the fire department searches for those skills directly by using a battery of labor–intensive simulations and oral exams to promote select rank-and-file to fire lieutenants and captains.

In the labor market employers never really know what the future productivity of their employees will be, so they always search for signs, signals, and indicators to make the best selections. The upside of this Supreme Court decision, and an earlier one on the University of Michigan’s affirmative action admissions practices, could be colleges and employers moving away from test scores and innovating to find better alternatives so we find the best man or woman to do the job and the students who’ll get the most out of college.

That is the glass half full version.

The glass half empty version is that this is a sign that five members of the Supreme Court want to weaken civil rights protections, especially at the work place.

Justice Ginsburg has an opinion about that: “the Court pretends that “[t]he City rejected the test results solely because the higher scoring candidates were white.” Ante, at 20. That pretension, essential to the Court’s disposition, ignores substantial evidence of multiple flaws in the tests New Haven used. The Court similarly fails to acknowledge the better tests used in other cities, which have yielded less racially skewed outcomes.. “

Losing Ground in the Pursuit of Happiness

2009-07-04T13:53:00.002-04:00

What does really matter? Aristotle's answer, happiness, and his road to getting there by the steady exercise of intellectual and moral virtue--has been replaced by a detour that would seem to have us decidedly lost. From The Guardian:

Costa Rica is the greenest and happiest country in the world, according to a new list that ranks nations by combining measures of their ecological footprint with the happiness of their citizens.

Britain is only halfway up the Happy Planet Index (HPI), calculated by the New Economics Foundation (NEF), in 74th place of 143 nations surveyed. The United States features in the 114th slot in the table. The top 10 is dominated by countries from Latin America, while African countries bulk out the bottom of the table.

The HPI measures how much of the Earth's resources nations use and how long and happy a life their citizens enjoy as a result. First calculated in 2006, the second edition adds data on almost all the world's countries and now covers 99% of the world's population.

NEF says the HPI is a much better way of looking the success of countries than through standard measures of economic growth. The HPI shows, for example, that fast-growing economies such as the US, China and India were all greener and happier 20 years ago than they are today.

"The HPI suggests that the path we have been following is, without exception, unable to deliver all three goals: high life satisfaction, high life expectancy and 'one-planet living'," says Saamah Abdallah, NEF researcher and the report's lead author. "Instead we need a new development model that delivers good lives that don't cost the Earth for all."

Costa Ricans top the list because they report the highest life satisfaction in the world, they live slightly longer than Americans, yet have an ecological footprint that is less than a quarter the size. The country only narrowly fails to achieve the goal of what NEF calls "one-planet living": consuming its fair share of the Earth's natural resources.

The report says the differences between nations show that it is possible to live long, happy lives with much smaller ecological footprints than the highest-consuming nations.

The new HPI also provides the first ever analysis of trends over time for what are supposedly the world's most developed nations, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

OECD nations' HPI scores plummeted between 1960 and the late 1970s. Although there have been some gains since then, HPI scores were still higher in 1961 than in 2005.

Life satisfaction and life expectancy combined have increased 15% over the 45-year period for those living in the rich nations, but it has come at the cost of a 72% rise in their ecological footprint. And the three largest countries in the world – China, India and the US, which are aggressively pursuing growth-based development models – have all seen their HPI scores drop in that time.

The highest placed western nation is the Netherlands. People there live on average over a year longer than people in the US, and have similar levels of life satisfaction – yet their per capita ecological footprint is less than half the size. The Netherlands is therefore over twice as environmentally efficient at achieving good lives as the US, Nef says.

The report sets out a "Happy Planet Charter" calling for an unprecedented collective global effort to develop a "new narrative" of human progress, encourage good lives that don't cost the earth, and to reduce consumption in the highest-consuming nations – which it says is the biggest barrier to sustainable wellbeing.

Little Mike Bloomberg and the Riots That Never Came

2009-07-03T06:44:00.002-04:00

It is done! As Albany continued to wallow on Tuesday without a decision on renewing Bloomberg's choke hold on NYC Schools, the Little Dictator declared that if his reign were to end, parents would be in the streets with torches. The rantings of another Billion Dollar Bubble Boy:

. . . .The effect of the inaction on school governance is harder to predict. For the past few months, Bloomberg has sought to portray the expiration of mayoral control of the school system in its most apocalyptic terms: riots in the streets, a return to the Soviet Union and so on. But in a press briefing yesterday, Bloomberg said his administration "will work hard to shield New York's children and their parents from the chaos." Schools, he said, "will not be padlocked" and summer school will open as scheduled today.

Instead of invoking images of angry mobs on the Grand Concourse, Bloomberg said the confusion over how to run the system would bring in lawyers -- and litigation. "Every decision -- from personnel decisions to policy decisions -- will be subject to litigation and uncertainty," Bloomberg continued.

That confusion arises partly because, as Philissa Cramer observed in Gotham Schools, the school governance law passed in 2002 calls for the law to sunset after seven years but "doesn’t include instructions for reconstituting the old school board or dismantling the current system."

The mayor foresees "a nightmare flashback to the days when politics ruled the schools." But some experts believe he may be overstating the effects of the current law's expiration. While the city would have to reconstitute a Board of Education, they say, that board could decide to continue most school policies and practices while waiting for the legislature to pass a school governance bill.

"If the mayor acts... at least changing the structure on top, then I think it's wrong to foresee any potential litigation," Udi Ofer, the policy director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, has said.

David Bloomfield, an expert on education law who teaches at Brooklyn College, has said the state education law provides for clear lines of authority. Bloomfield sees only two credible circumstances that could lead to litigation: The mayor could file suit against a Board of Education or suits could be filed against the administration if he decides to ignore the resurrected board. . . .

Teachers Reject Grant from Exxon-, Gates-backed Nonprofit

2009-07-02T18:00:00.001-04:00

The Leominster Teachers Association voted 305-47 to reject a grant from the National Math and Science Initiative (NMSI) intended to improve AP classes. A number of ed reformers have used this as an example of unions putting adults before kids, but they consistently refuse to show the union's point of view nor do they investigate the funding sources or motivations for so-called improvement programs.

The NMSI is a relatively young nonprofit. They were started after a report from the National Academies came out in 2005. The report, "Rising Above the Gathering Storm," was critiqued by Gerald Bracey in the Washington Post, a must-read article about the statistics cited by the authors. The so-called "gathering storm," which Bracey reminds us is an allusion to Churchill's recount of the events leading up to WWII, is the tremendous number of engineers and scientists produced by Indian and Chinese colleges (sound familiar?) combined with a more competitive global economy. Outsourcing and liberalization, according to the authors, is merely a logical consequence of globalization: multinationals will relocate for cheap labor, no apologies made. The new global world will require a top-notch military establishment, technological innovators, and an army of scientists. America's dominance in the global economy can only be achieved through more tax breaks for corporations (the "race to the bottom" for cheap labor, tax breaks, and lax regulation - i.e. the fundamental tenants of NAFTA and the WTO), a more rigorous math and science curriculum for our students, and various other neoliberal reforms (patent law, eliminating trade barriers, privatization). Remarkably absent from the document looking at the future of America - which focuses explicitly on competition rather than cooperation - is any mention of global climate change aside from a few miniscule footnotes.

The NMSI is funded primarily by ExxonMobil, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation. Exxon made a record $125 million donation to get the organization started before Gates ($10 million) and Dell ($5 million) chipped in (Exxon also provided seed money for TFA in the early 1990s). NMSI distributes funds in a variety of ways to further teaching in math and science. Here was the proposal rejected by the Leominster Teachers Association:

The grant would have offered financial rewards for teachers (up to $3000), students ($100), and administrators (up to $3,000) for high AP test scores. Most of the grant money would have gone to teachers who could teach AP classes - which excludes anyone teaching elementary or middle school. Bernadette Marso, president of the union, said they were open to the additional funding if it contributed to the general fund and could be used to enhance extracurricular activities for a variety of K-12 students (jazz band camp instead of - as Duncan and NMSI would want - more test prep during the summer). The union also objected to the grant because it would have involved signing contracts with outside organizations, running against the strength of collective bargaining. In other words, teachers are saying putting all kids first, not just the AP kids and teachers. That's what a union is about.

For Urban Children, Says Duncan, "It is not about the building."

2009-07-02T08:20:00.003-04:00

Since the emergence of the new Democratic majority, "liberals" like Miller and Kennedy no longer have the Republicans to blame for an education policy that is not about the children, but about the health of the education industrial complex and the oligarchical control of the work force. So that now with total control of the urban school agenda, there is nowhere to hide for those who previously found cover behind good-ole-girl, Margaret Spellings. Thus, we find Dunc's Department of lawyers and financiers and spin doctors trying to put a Democratic face on an education policy aimed to protect and advance the agendas of corporations intent upon control of the schools, from K thru college.

The latest blathering idiocy came this week as Duncan added "the building" to the long list of what good urban schools are NOT about (he is not talking about the leafy suburbs, of course--just the urban centers that house the disposable children of the poor). For these poor children, the oligarchs have a solution that is 25-30% cheaper than public schools. So now, urban education is

NOT about qualified teachers, for the new corporate charters can hire unqualified "teachers" for much less, and hire and fire them at will;

NOT about elected school boards to provide oversight by the community;

NOT about special education, libraries, drama, or sports fields;

NOT about climate control, comfort, food services or transportation.

So logically, it follows that it is NOT, as Dunc just proclaimed, about "the building." Any boarded up pizza joint in a strip mall will do as a base of operations for the new corporate charters, or any corrugated metal shed that can be thrown up overnight. But then, when you are dealing with the Civil Rights issue of this generation, as Duncan has proclaimed the urban ed reform agenda to be, there should be no limit to cost savings involved, because we all know that it is not about money and ALL about the children.

Well, someone is listening to the fool-speak by the Secretary! Many people are listening, and those who are, don't believe you, Mr. Duncan. A clip from HuffPo by Cameron Sinclair:

. . . .I felt the most exciting aspect of this far-reaching plan was the $5B being set up to encourage and reward states that are proactively pushing reform. Additionally while I can write about the many, many positive things said what worried me, as someone involved in improving school environments, was his comment that 'it is not about the building'. Sorry Arne, while I agree it is about the children and while teacher performance is important - it is ALSO about the building.
Many schools in this country are in utter disrepair and the outdated portable classrooms that dot the landscape of the American school system are harmful to the health of our children. (Just a few hundred miles south of Aspen we know schools built with cancer causing chemicals and rodent infestation issues). The simple fact is when you ask those who are affected by their surroundings - environments do matter. In the 1940s teacher Loris Malaguzzi showed that children learn first through the interaction with the adults in their lives, then with their peers and finally with the environment around them. The environment is, as coined by Malaguzzi, the third teacher. Fifty years on most educators can attest to the fact that when you have a classroom that inspires children learn.

At the 2007 Aspen Ideas Festival having just spoken on a session on rebuilding after Hurricane Katrina I was walking with colleagues from Architecture for Humanity when the issue about the state of school facilities came up. Getting all worked up about the increased risks of cancer for children in older portable classrooms, we started talking about an idea of actually involving students and teachers in the design of the classroom of the future. Not willing to wait to get the green light to innovate a coalition of the willing came together to launch the Open Architecture Challenge: Classroom - An international design competition with one caveat, design teams had to include the end users of the classroom as equal partners in the design process. The goal of this initiative is to serve as a catalyst to build safe, sustainable and smart educational facilities around the world.

This initiative also included an curriculum to bring design and architecture into K-12 schools and hundreds of architects and design firms went into schools around the world to teach the impact of architecture. Additionally a series of webcasts connecting students with architects (from Ghana, Pakistan, UK and US) to talk about the different aspects of how to design. All of this done on a voluntary basis with an aim to design the classroom of the future.

To our surprise more than 1,000 design teams from 65 countries registered. The competition generated hundreds of ideas for building better classrooms around the world--from upgrading overcrowded urban schools in India to re-imagining smarter, more sustainable portable classrooms here in the United States. The stories from each of these teams are simply amazing. Today, less than 100m where Secretary Duncan spoke, an interdisciplinary jury will select finalists from a pool of the top fifty entries.

Once a winner has been announced (the school receives $50K, the design team $5K) all school designs will be available for viewing and download via the Open Architecture Network. All design are under a creative commons license allowing school districts and non-profits to replicate some of the best ideas and shape the classroom of the future. In the fall an exhibition of the best entries will travel the globe and hopefully a number of classrooms will be built from this initiative.

Arne Duncan repeated a number of times in his talk that is role is to listen and to discover some of the most innovative ideas out there. Within in this initiative there were thousands of individuals that not only have something to say about the future of schools, they already designed it.

As Economic Gap Widens - So Goes the Achievement Gap

2009-07-02T08:04:00.003-04:00

Summer school is out for the summer.

It's the front page story today in the New York Times. Arne, what was that you were saying about extending the school year? And we thought Brownie was clueless.

Facing Deficits, Some States Cut Summer School

Here's an excerpt:

Since the 1970s, however, the value of rigorous summer school has gained increasing recognition because of research by a Johns Hopkins professor, Karl Alexander, and other sociologists showing that the academic achievement gap widens during summer vacations.
Low-income students who hold summer jobs or are idle, the research has demonstrated, forget more math and reading skills over the summer than their affluent classmates, who often receive intellectual stimulation in the summer from canoe trips, language camps or ballet lessons.

Good Working Conditions and Respect for Teachers - A Foreign Concept

2009-07-01T06:19:00.007-04:00

You would never know it, but there was an important meeting yesterday at the National Press Club in Washington DC about education. The title of the meeting was Top-Scoring Nations Share Strategies on Teachers (Ed Week carried the article) featuring speakers from Finland and Singapore, two very different approaches but models of high performance.

The story will never be covered by the corporate owned media in this country because the business leaders and politicians who sat through the meeting have their own agenda - and despite what they might have heard at the meeting, like making working conditions for teachers better or respecting the profession of teaching - there's just no money in that.

Meanwhile, Jeb Bush is busy pushing "technology" as the new panacea for transforming education and propelling the U.S. to its rightful place in the global race to the top. There's lots of money to be made and it's the gift that keeps on giving. Teachers stormed the Hill this week looking for more money for technology - perhaps they should focus more on trying to gain some basic RESPECT.

Here's a clip from the Ed Week story:

Yet in some respects, those two nations have risen to the top in very different ways.

That was one of the lessons that emerged yesterday at what was billed as the Global Education Competitiveness Summit, which brought state officials and business leaders together here to discuss lessons from high-achieving countries that could be applied to U.S. school systems—an omnipresent theme in American education circles these days.

Two of the speakers whose nations are perched at or near the top of recent international test results offered insights on their home countries’ educational models: Low Khah Gek, the director of curriculum, planning, and development for the Singapore Ministry of Education, and Timo Lankinen, the director general of the Finnish National Board of Education.

The forum was organized by the Education Commission of the States, a Denver-based policy and research group; the International Society for Technology in Education, or ISTE, in Eugene, Ore.; and the Microsoft Corp., in Redmond, Wash.

Attendees seemed especially keen on learning how the two countries recruit and train teachers, and the speakers gave them two distinct perspectives.

In Singapore, the selection of teachers is heavily directed by the central government, specifically the Ministry of Education, and the candidates are elite: The government recruits from the top third of graduating classes, Ms. Gek said.

Teacher-candidates attend one year of preservice training, but they are also given continuous retraining throughout the school year and their careers, she added, receiving at least 100 hours of professional development annually. In addition, the Singaporean government actively works to establish career “tracks” for teachers, according to Ms. Gek. It encourages young educators to become master teachers or subject specialists, and one day, school administrators.

“We feel that is the pinnacle of education service,” Ms. Gek said of the jobs of administrators, because of their influence over instruction and the school environment.

Singapore also has a thorough system for grading and evaluating teacher performance, she told the audience, and it awards bonuses for effective instruction that can equal between one and three months’ pay.

An Elusive Formula

The Finnish approach to cultivating and retaining teachers, as described by Mr. Lankinen, is in some ways strikingly different.

Like the United States, Finland has only “very limited” performance pay for teachers, he said. A far more pressing concern, he said, is “how to maintain good working conditions in schools”; national leaders believe such conditions are essential to luring talented people into classrooms and keeping them there.

While Finland, like Singapore, has a national curriculum, Finnish teachers are given broad authority to shape lessons and use strategies they believe will help students meet standards.

At one point Mr. Lankinen was asked by an audience member about Finnish leaders’ overall impressions of the U.S. education system. He remarked that the broad American emphasis on testing, and on measuring student and school performance, was “striking” and a source of curiosity in his home country. Mr. Lankinen said American school officials routinely ask him about how his high-performing country uses high-stakes tests—only to have him explain that those exams are largely absent from the Finnish system.

Finland tests representative samples of students primarily as a way to gauge trends in school performance, and teachers routinely assess students’ progress in class, in order to improve instruction, he said.

Although he and other Finnish education leaders have had general discussions about adding high-stakes tests to the mix, that idea has not taken hold because “it’s difficult to say if it’s helping educators to do their job better,” Mr. Lankinen explained, after his presentation. Finns regard having “well-trained, educated teachers” as more essential to raising student achievement, he added.

It follows that Finnish teachers, like their Singaporean counterparts, are an elite group. All Finnish teachers must have master’s degrees, and admission to teacher education programs is highly competitive. Mr. Lankinen estimated that fewer than 15 percent of applicants are accepted.

Perhaps not surprisingly, one common feature of the Singaporean and Finnish education systems—like those of some other high-achieving nations—is the respect that their societies have for educators, and the general view of teaching as a top-tier profession.

In Finland, Mr. Lankinen said, “people dream to be teachers.”

Obama vs. Ohio Public Schools

2009-06-30T07:54:00.002-04:00

The sooner the Obamaites figure out that their generous gift to the Oligarchs will cost them Ohio in the next election, the sooner this charter school insanity will be reigned in. Governor Strickland's campaign in Ohio to finally end public school funding inequities clearly puts his Democratic position in stark contrast to the Business Roundball agenda of Team Obama, which has choseen to use public education as a bargaining chip in their high stakes power game. From Counterpunch, ht to Brian LeCloux:

By GEOFF BERNE

On May 1, 2009, Michigan's Board of Education, like boards in most of the other states across the U.S., issued a resolution "recognizing that teachers are vital to the very fabric of our society" and declaring the week of May 4-8 Teacher Appreciation Week.

Three days later, on May 4, President Obama, in what could only have been intended as a face slap to the week's traditional teacher-centered theme, issued a proclamation designating May 3 through May 9, 2009, as National Charter Schools Week. Rather than honor the contributions to our society of American teachers in our 95,000-plus public schools, and teaching as a profession, as has become customary, he chose to salute only the personnel of the 3,500 charter schools that though publicly financed have been allowed to exist like private businesses, independent from and competitive with the public system.

Here are his exact words of selective praise:

"I commend our Nation's successful public charter schools, teachers, and administrators, and I call on States and communities to support public charter schools and the students they serve."

How ironical, then, that in the very state that gave birth to publicly funded private education, Ohio, with the establishment of a pilot program in Cleveland of giving vouchers to parents to use for private schools in 1992—the state that has the greatest number of privately run charter schools, 330—a growing backlash against the privatization concept is being led by none other than the state's governor, Ted Strickland.

Strickland rode into office in 2006 on a platform pledging to remove the exemptions from government oversight and academic accountability requirements that have given the private schools an unfair advantage in the marketing of their undocumented and unproven "product," enabling a myth to grow of charters' academic superiority that, in Ohio anyway, as my co-author Todd Price will show in his interview in Part II with Ohio Federation of Teachers president Sue Taylor, couldn't be further from the truth. Strickland vowed in his campaign to shut down rogue schools that had proliferated to siphon public funds under the pretense of educating kids—and he won in 2006 with a landslide majority. In the two years since his win he has made no bones about his determination to honor his crackdown pledge.

As if to hammer home how unswerving Strickland looks to be in his mission to uphold government's obligation to public over private education, the governor chose the very same week that President Obama was placing the imprimatur of his administration on America's charter schools, to hold a rally in Ohio's capitol, Columbus, to call for the strengthening, rather than abandonment and replacement, of the public system and inviting none other than the president's famously pro-charter Secretary of Education Arne Duncan to participate, which he did with something falling slightly short of avidity, as the day's featured guest!

On May 8, 2009, against a backdrop of the majestic Schottenstein Arena at Ohio State University, the largest public university in the United States, Governor Strickland hosted a Rally for Education that capped the sixteen month-long "listening tour" he has been conducting to promote his plan to restore Ohio to its once-top place among state economies through education. His plan, widely criticized by Republicans for its reliance on federal stimulus money that, they predict, will require replacement with taxation when it runs out at the end of two years, calls for greater monetary investment, expanding programs connecting education to work, supporting creativity and curricular innovation, and ending the open door policy that has allowed charter schools to obtain state funding without oversight or accountability, by shutting down those found to be mismanaged and academically substandard.

There was a certain poetic justice, which one suspects Gov. Strickland may have intended to bring out in extending his invitation for the secretary to be the headline speaker at the event, in the spectacle of Sec. Duncan, a man whose name has become synonymous with advocacy of privatized education, addressing an assemblage of public education celebrants including union leaders, teachers, parents, students, legislators, and administrators.

As the final speaker, Secretary Duncan found himself obliged to wait patiently on the speakers platform through a succession of speeches resolutely supporting public education before delivering the speech he had himself come to give, the highlight of which would be an offer to bestow five billion dollars in federal money on states (hint to Gov. Strickland: this could be YOUR state) exhibiting the greatest commitment to education "reform." Given that Duncan's own record as head of Chicago public schools for seven years prior to his 2008 cabinet appointment consisted of shutting down rather than rebuilding the public schools, and replacing them with new academies that, though ostensibly within the public system, were privately run, when Sec. Duncan uses the words "education reform" what he specifically means by them is in the words of the Associated Press’s Libby Quaid, closing public schools, firing their staffs and principals, and “turning the school over to a charter operator.”

The speaker directly preceding Duncan was the man who had invited him to speak and who was there to introduce him, none other than Governor Strickland. What Strickland did first off, prior to delivering his own remarks, was to yield the stage to two figures who wound up overshadowing all other speakers on the program including Secretary Duncan and (as was surely his intention) the governor himself, namely Dale and Nathan (“Nate”) DeRolph, the father and son who have come to symbolize the struggle for educational improvement in Ohio through eighteen years and four challenges in the Ohio Supreme Court to Ohio's abysmally unequal educational system.

Unlisted in prior publicity for the program, the DeRolphs were artfully brought there by the governor to tell the story of a challenge in 1991 to the primitive conditions in their home area of southeastern Perry County that became a crusade to overturn the state's neglect of schools in low income areas, a crusade that resulted in four judgments in the Ohio Supreme Court since 1997 that were in their favor, pronounced the Ohio funding of schools with local tax levies unconstitutional, and culminated in the election victory of Ted Strickland for governor in 2006.

Dale DeRolph, the quiet-spoken hero of the crusade, spoke of discovering his son taking a final history examination cross-legged on the Sheraton High School gymnasium floor, and resolving that while his son found nothing out of the ordinary or wrong in doing so, he, as a father, found it wrong and would seek legal help to do something about it. He described conditions in the county schools at the time:

“. . . split classes in elementary, reusable textbooks, labs without equipment or working equipment, and buildings that were under constant repair, . . . teachers (who were often) our third and fourth choices of teacher applicants.”

Nate DeRolph, in whose name the court challenges had been waged, and who had been fifteen years old and a high school freshman at the time of the initial filing, spoke next.

"Once my dad and I got involved," he said, "we traveled to some of the wealthier districts in Ohio and some of the poorest. I think I can speak for both of us when I say we were shocked. The wealthier schools had every college prep class you could imagine and extracurricular activities I thought only colleges offered. They had facilities and learning materials rivaled by none, then we visited some of the poorest schools and it was like being in a third world country. Buildings falling down, textbooks from the 60s and 70s, and minimal college prep courses, if any.”

Confessing amazement at the failure of even four Supreme Court decisions to budge the all-Republican state legislatures of the 1990s and early 00s toward making a more equitable school funding system, the younger DeRolph speculated, "I hate to think what would happen if you or I ignored the Supreme Court. I thought with each ruling that they would have to fix school funding. How could they say no to the children of Ohio? But with each ruling came more backlash and more politics. More people saying that school funding couldn't be fixed and that there was no good solution. The DeRolph suit was originally filed 18 years ago. The graduating class of 2009 was born when the lawsuit started. I'm now 33, married, with two kids of my own."

So here is Ohio with its first governor to target a top-to-bottom housecleaning in Ohio's prehistoric education funding system, and already the traditional Ohio attitude that "school funding can't be fixed and that there is no good solution" is coming back and threatening to take ascendancy over the governor's unprecedented pro-public education campaign.

Cox Newspapers, a national newsgroup of 43 newspapers including The Dayton Daily News, Hamilton Journal-News, and six other papers in Southwestern Ohio, pronounced the Republican majority in the state Senate an opposition too formidable to overcome. In addition the governor faces opposition from Ohio newspapers themselves, whose failure to hold the entrenched Republicans' feet to the fire on education has been no small part of the state's festering educational inertia, going back so many decades.

"Governor Ted Strickland is not going to get his way on changing how Ohio pays for schools. Nor should he," Cox proclaimed in its syndicated editorials, rebuking Strickland for placing education above other equally compelling funding needs of the state, such as prisons. Acknowledging that Strickland has won backing from Ohio business as well as labor, they turn thumbs down on Strickland's formula for arriving at a per-student funding number, requirements that may fit some schools in need of improvement but not others who are already here, and . . . Strickland's philosophical stance that pits him against what (in the Cox papers' publishers' eyes, at any rate) is the direction a good part of the state, for whom Ohio Republicans speak, wants to go, namely toward charter rather than public schools.

The Republicans will give no quarter toward Strickland on education reform because in making Ohio the nation's leader in creation of charter schools, it's their party's fifteen years in Ohio's political majority that have defined how to improve public schools . . . by opening up competition from an alternative system. "They think that if anybody should be credited with changing the rules in a profound way that fosters genuine reform, they have had -- and still have -- the better changes."

In Ohio, there’s a line in the sand that divides the education bashing of the past decade and a half of Republican rule from the determination to build on the good elements in the public system that has come in since the Democratic victories in the 2006 election. The pre-2006 mindset is predicated on the idea that the public education system is in an incurable crisis and needs to be replaced by schools run as private business, and by private businesses themselves. Since the 2006 Democratic victory in the General Assembly (lower house) and governorship, a steadfastly opposing pro-public school philosophy has come in to take center-stage. To the astonishment, and discomfiture, of the makers of opinion who have helped condition the public’s mind for the demise of public education in recent decades, the championing of public education over charter education by the irrepressible Governor Strickland has been heard in every corner, and every newspaper, in the state. His message, that performance of the state's charter schools has been a scandalous failure compared to that of the publics has stopped the piling on of the public schools in its tracks and for the first time put the Ohio charter movement on the defensive. His proposed program of rehabilitating the public schools with proper funding rather than junking them and “outsourcing” their students to privately chartered institutions, has held out the tantalizing, and prior to now long-lost, hope that Ohio schooling would turn the state into a paragon of learning and achievement. In the two short years since his election, Strickland has made the debate over Ohio’s educational future two-sided rather than one-sided and brought hope of a reprieve for a public system that had prior to his arrival seemed on Death Row.

When Ted Strickland took office as governor in 2006, Ohio was 11th in mass layoffs, 48th in new companies, (was and is) 3rd in home foreclosures, 2nd in bankruptcies, 50th in job growth, and 44th in Real Gross State Product. In education, the state was 46th in equity of school resources, 50th in students per computer, 42nd in schools with unsatisfactory heating, and tuition at public universities was 46 percent higher than the national average. From 1999 through 2008, the legislature, embarrassed by the Supreme Court's rulings exposing the state's grossly deficient school environments, increased their investment in schools, and new school structures, by 47 percent. The Strickland plan calls for increase in funding by an additional 45 percent in the decade ahead.

The Strickland plan of increasing still further the money given to public education is based not on willful denial of the charter alternative's professed superior educational results, but on the ample evidence that for all their hype charter schools' actual record has been one of student failure, financial and academic mismanagement, and lack of oversight and control. In 2006, when he took office pledging to put charter schools under the microscope and to require that those performing significantly worse than the public schools lose their public funding, Strickland was riding a tide of realism in reporting the results of America's charter school experiment. A May 10, 2006, New York Times editorial, “Reining in charter schools,” cited a study showing that states with charter programs dominated by for-profit education companies have poorer results for those schools in terms of performance and accountability.

A July 15, 2006, Times article by Dianne Schemo reported an Education Department study documenting that children in public schools generally performed "as well or better in reading and mathematics than comparable children in private schools."

Revelations of misreporting of student academic performance and of school financial records by a significant percentage of Ohio charter schools have fueled the Strickland pro-public education fire, but they have not altered the fact that already 43 percent of the students in the Dayton school district attend private or charter schools, nor has Strickland made a dent in the Ohio choice movement's single-minded goal of breakup of the public school system and privatization of the entirety of the state's schools.

The problem with a charter system putting choice of schools in the hands of parents is that the market theory it’s based on assumes that the parents, viewed economically as “consumers,” will make choices that are rationally based and that therefore the best schools, as in Darwin’s natural order, will survive and bring overall quality and improvement to the system. But what if parental choice is based on the schools’ advertising packaging rather than academic factors. A 2007 study by Christopher Lubienski showed that “the information made available to families through commercial-style materials challenges the notion of parents making reasoned choices based on institutional effectiveness. Instead, more emotional themes and images dominate school marketing strategies.” In other words, the system as a whole can wallow in chronic mediocrity with slickly packaged lemon schools “out-selling” ones that are academically superior.

It's interesting to note that supporters of privatized education also lament the failure of parents to make enlightened choices of schools when allowed to do so. Instead, it's been shown that they tend to stick with their customary public schools against all evidence of their inferiority.

Inasmuch as schooling is the single largest employer in the United States, once education is looked at as an industry, and one of America's biggest industries at that, then its product becomes viewed as a manufactured one, and education degenerates into an economic competition to establish which system (the government-run “public” system or the privately run charters system) will do a better job of selling the population of “consumers” (formerly known as “parents”) on their product.

Despite concerns like this—expressed increasingly even by friends of charterization—that charter schools may fail to fully get off the ground for want of parent support and/or willingness to change schools, and only a few months prior to release of the Stanford University study, indicating that 37 percent of charter schools offer education that's inferior to that of the public schools . . .

. . .the long-standing infatuation with the idea of choice and "free-market"-based education, education that allows the wonderful sink or swim anarchy of American business to reign in the previously state-controlled sphere of education, finally found itself seated at the very head of the table in Washington with the advent of Barack Obama to the Presidency and the installation of his Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.

With his only professional pedagogical experience having been as a tutor helping minority children with their homework in his mother's tutoring program in Chicago and an A.B. in Sociology that numerous information requests to see by charter school critics have failed to produce, Duncan has cut a swath through public education as “C.E.O.” (formerly known as “Superintendent”) of Chicago Public Schools, where since 2001 he closed over 20 elementary schools, most privatized into charter schools, and six high schools, while showing his commitment to school reform by forcing a legion of career teachers and principals out on the job market.

In a recent essay by Henry Giroux and Kenneth Saltman, former Chicago top school official Duncan was taken to task for identifying closely with blatant privatization efforts associated with Chicago's Renaissance 2010 plan:

“The Commercial Club hired corporate consulting firm A.T. Kearney to write Ren2010, which called for the closing of 100 public schools and the reopening of privatized charter schools, contract schools (more charters to circumvent state limits) and “performance” schools.”

Replacement of 100 of Chicago “underachieving” (i.e. underfunded) public schools, 15 percent of the city's total, with new experimental schools “in areas slated for gentrification” was the goal of the Renaissance 2010 education plan created by these Chicago businessmen for Mayor Daley.

In point of fact, Charter education has become the idée fixe of the U.S. Department of Education under Secretary Arne Duncan who, building on what he started in Chicago on the national level in Washington without missing a beat, gives every appearance of credence to the idea that if business does it, it’s good and children will excel; if unions are involved, mediocrity and child failure will befall.

In Chicago, the schools closed under Duncan were replaced with new institutions that were non-union. The idea of replacing “union” schools with schools put in the hands of business was put in motion by Duncan in conformance with the previously mentioned Chicago Renaissance 2010 study. A.T. Kearney, the author of the Chicago study, hailed by Duncan as a national role model for school reform, is unapologetic about its business-oriented notion of leadership. Kearney’s website cites this importation of the business model as Renaissance 2010’s key achievement:

“Drawing on our program-management skills and our knowledge of best practices used across industries, we provided a private-sector perspective on how to address many of the complex issues that challenge other large urban education transformations.”

We recently asked John Duffy, a longtime Chicago area teacher and observer of education interviewed by Todd Price for the article “Bailing Out The Foes of Public Education,” what he sees as having been the true motivation of Renaissance 2010. In reply, he zeroed in on the classic business goal of disenfranchisement of union labor, in this case teacher union labor:

“Renaissance 2010 is the most visible of the Chicago corporate elite’s authoritarian plan to close neighborhood schools, undermine and dismantle teacher unionism, and further aggravate the inequitable allocation of school resources away from schools that disproportionately serve impoverished communities.”

According to Duffy, out of the ashes of what he called the “undemocratic, centrally orchestrated closing of arbitrarily determined ‘under-performing’ local schools” would arise both charter schools and “centrally controlled re-organized schools” where, stripped of union protections, “teachers (and teachers’ programs and curriculums) are directed and constrained in ways that would never be imagined or tolerated in middle class and upper socio-economic communities.”

On May 11, 2009, as predicted by those who have watched him in Chicago, Duncan wasted no time in announcing in an Associated Press interview the intention of the Obama administration to close 1,000 so-called “underperforming” schools in each of the next five years, 5,000 schools in all. The “war” against public education that many have seen coming for more than two decades has now been declared and is out in the open.

Introducing the market model into education at, you’d think, an unpropitious time, when the market model has brought down the house on people’s heads worldwide and, most especially, in this country, Messrs. Obama and Duncan cannot be assured of smooth sailing.

First they face a growing consensus in Ohio, amongst the public who, unfazed by the negativity about him being spread by the pro-charter Republican Senate and the state’s charter-friendly newspaper editorial boards, support Gov. Strickland and his message of fixing the state’s stagnating economy by finally fixing the state’s unconstitutionally unequal funding of schools. Win or lose in his effort to push his plan through the recalcitrant Republican State Senate, Ted Strickland has become a symbolical leader, in Ohio and increasingly on the national stage, of resistance to the charter movement for which Duncan speaks.

In Part II of this series, Todd Alan Price reports on his interviews with key players in the battle to which Ted Strickland has dedicated his governorship, to rebuild Ohio public education and stave off the charter phenomenon.

$35 Million for Corporate Lobbyists is Safe

2009-06-29T08:45:00.005-04:00

As goes Virginia - so goes the nation. Where are the teachers' unions? Where are the parents?

Third graders in Virginia will be getting a new standardized history test. Despite a recommendation from the State Superintendent of Instruction (what does she know about educating third graders?) to scrap the test and public opinion against the tests, Board members decided to spend more money on tests.

From the Richmond Times Dispatch:

Board members yesterday gave the state education department the go-ahead to begin developing a new third-grade history and social-science assessment and to administer the current test until the new one is ready. They also approved weaving content from other SOL subject areas into the third-grade reading test.

The board followed the recommendation of State Superintendent of Instruction Patricia I. Wright. She originally proposed eliminating the third-grade history exam, which covers material in kindergarten to third grade, but withdrew the proposal after bipartisan outcry.

Wright said doing away with the test would save about $380,000 annually and eliminate a test that is not federally mandated.

It cost the state about $35 million to develop, administer, score and report the SOL and alternative tests for the 2007-2008 school year, according to Department of Education spokeswoman Julie Grimes. That does not include state education department personnel costs or any costs incurred by the local school systems.

Here's the reason the Washington Post cited for the Board's decision to keep the tests for third graders in history and social sciences despite the huge cost:

The decision Thursday came about a week after state Superintendent of Public Instruction Patricia I. Wright withdrew a controversial proposal to scrap the exams. Wright reversed her position after heated criticism from history advocates and state legislators who said cutting the tests would allow elementary schools to devalue history and social-studies education

Who are these history advocates? Oh, yes, they probably work for Kaplan or McGraw Hill - you know, the ones who write the tests. Wouldn't want to jeopardize the learning of history and social studies for third graders so let's test it so it looks like and important subject. In fact, let's test every student every year in history and social studies -- why not start in first grade and go all the way to 12th grade? Just think how $ valuable $$$ that would be.

Broad Foundation, Center for Reform of School Systems Leave Antioch Unified School District

2009-06-28T14:24:00.037-04:00

From the Contra Costa Times(CA):

Foundation cuts ties with Antioch schools
By Hilary Costa
East County Times
Posted: 06/24/2009 02:42:28 PM PDT
Updated: 06/25/2009 06:01:50 AM PDT

The Antioch school district's three-year affiliation with an education reform foundation aimed at improving schools through better governance has been severed.
In a letter dated June 1, the Center for Reform of School Systems, which is supported financially by the philanthropic Broad Foundation, announced that it was ending the Antioch school district's participation in its Reform Governance in Action program.
The reason given: The May resignation of Superintendent Deborah Sims, an alumnus of a Broad training program.
In the sharply worded letter that praised Sims' leadership and criticized the school board, CRSS founder Donald McAdams said the foundation was not interested in continuing the relationship in the wake of the superintendent's departure.
"Your governance team has changed — Dr. Sims is no longer your superintendent — and the board in recent months has not had a sharp focus on student achievement," he wrote.

In other words, McAdams and the Broad Foundation have little interest in dealing with school districts that do not implement their top-down model without asking questions. The departure of Superintendent Deborah Sims - who was trained by the Broad Foundation - meant the McAdams/Broad model of corporate schooling could no longer continue. Teachers had objected to the various reforms multiple times during Sims' tenure:

While acknowledging that there is room for improvement in the district, Deer Valley High School teacher J Myers said he thought the reform training's top-down approach of trying to fit every district and every school into one model for achievement actually hurt some Antioch schools where unique programs were getting results.
"We were doing a tear-down when we needed a remodel, which I think is what got people upset," Myers said.

Other teachers agreed with Myers assessment - a full 86% of AUSD teachers cast a vote of no-confidence in Sims back in the fall of 2008. Union President Gary Hack elaborates (also from Contra Costa Times reporter Hilary Costa):

Sims’ tenure has been marred by several controversies in the past year: contract negotiations with the teachers union that dragged on for 17 months before finally reaching a settlement; failure to notify police in a timely manner about a Carmen Dragon teacher searching for child pornography on a school computer, preventing a possible prosecution; announcing that Antioch High would go to a co-principalship, then, when it faced a backlash, citing the board for the decision and rescinding it.

Sims, who earns $182,712 per year, has also been criticized for not sufficiently engaging district employees in decision-making, for allowing student discipline to slip and for not making sufficient progress in raising student test scores in a district in which nearly a third of students drop out before graduation.

“The resignation of Dr. Sims … reflects her approach to leadership: her absolute lack of personal communications with employees and the board; her flawed decision-making process from a totally top-down leadership style,” said Gary Hack, president of the teachers union. “That reflected in everything from bargaining to discipline to curriculum to morale. This year it became more obvious and public, based on the issues the union brought forward, but also the awareness of what was happening in the district – or not happening.”

The AUSD school board, which attended a number of retreat-style training sessions put on by McAdams and his crew of education privatizers, called the resignation and severed ties a "blessing in disguise." The real disguise is the one Broad and McAdams continue to wear as they parade around the country peddling their reform agenda, masking their clear desire to dismantle public education. McAdams, if you remember, was on the HISD board that helped spawn Rod Paige and created the so-called "Houston Miracle" that Bush used to justify No Child Left Behind. McAdams calls for vouchers, charter schools, high-stakes testing, privatization of school functions (labeled as "outsourcing"), and decentralization - a term he uses synonymously with privatization (see his book, "Fighting to Save our Urban Schools...And Winning!"). It shouldn't come as a surprise that Broad loves this guy. But fortunately, Broad and McAdams have lost their grip on one school board; this is a little bit progress we can measure.

The Truth About School Funding and Reform

2009-06-28T09:25:00.003-04:00

Stimulus Funds Used to Close Achievement Gap in Conn. Schools

Date: 06-26-2009

John Tulenko reports on how one school district in Connecticut is weathering the recession, and how the state is using stimulus funds to patch the budget.

On Friday evening, one of the few remaining news programs with any journalistic integrity, The MacNeil Lehrer Newshour, aired the real story on education stimulus and the potential for any type of meaningful reform.

The bottom line, there is no money for education. States across the country reeling from the economic depression are struggling to maintain the current level of education services and programs OR they are actually cutting teachers, programs, services and increasing class sizes.

The stimulus money is basically plugging up holes in what is a sinking ship especially in the poorest communities like Hartford Connecticut where any real progress that has been made is in serious danger.

Meanwhile, Arne Duncan and the education industrial complex is busy trying to find ways to increase the shareholder value of technology companies. That's who will benefit from dollars for data gathering along with the testing companies who will benefit from creating "better" more standardized tests.

All this taxpayer money being wasted to make the rich richer while a little basic common sense would go along way to improve the lives of children. Hypocrisy is obviously not limited to the personal lives of politicians.

Watch this video to see how the image and the reality has become intolerably wide.

DC Charters' Selective Admissions: Special Ed Students Need Not Apply

2009-06-27T18:58:00.005-04:00

Several years ago historian James Anderson suggested that if charters and vouchers continued to eat away at the public schools that we would likely see a remaining public system of children that no one wants, from low performers to handicapped to the mentally impaired. It would seem that the rush toward corporate charters is creating just such a reality, even though the most reliable research available shows charters doing more harm than good, even when it comes to academic achievement. As Jerry Bracey noted in a HuffPo post the other day:

. . . . if the CREDO results are true, Arne, why are you blackmailing states with threats to withhold stimulus money unless they permit charters or lift charter caps? The logic here is astonishing. Suppose I invent a medicine and find it helps 17% of people, doesn't do anything for 46% and hurts 37%. Would the FDA approve and tout my medicine? CREDO is a Stanford University-based think tank and its findings were that kids in charters did better than matched peers in publics in 17% of the cases, worse in 37% and neither better nor worse 46% of the time. As I closed my chapter on charters in Setting the Record Straight (second edition), "Charter schools were born of perceived failures in public schools. So, if the charters are doing worse than the publics, where is the outrage about them?" Where indeed, Arne?

Now WaPo, in its Saturday edition that most people don't read, has the story on a new report showing a continuation of Rhee's corporate charter school creaming of the most able students:

Some D.C. public charter schools continue selective admissions practices that discourage special-needs students from enrolling, and students citywide with possible disabilities still face delays in special education evaluations, a federal court monitor said this week.

"Charter schools . . . generally have not enrolled students with significant disabilities who required extensive hours of special services or education," the monitor, Amy Totenberg, wrote in a report prepared for a court hearing yesterday.

The report casts a somewhat harsh light on a fast-growing sector of public education in the city. Charter schools, which receive public funding but are independently operated, have siphoned many students from the city's troubled public school system and have posted somewhat higher test scores than regular schools in recent years.. . .

But Totenberg said some charter schools explicitly limit the number of hours of special education they will provide and counsel parents to enroll their children at regular public schools or at private or other public charter schools that focus on students with disabilities. D.C. law prohibits charter schools from asking about learning disabilities or emotional problems during the admission process.

KIPP: Bill Luckett's Sledgehammer for the Delta

2009-06-27T08:02:00.004-04:00

There's a brand of politicians who will believe anything if there is enough money attached to the argument, and there is another variety, the ones who will tell the public anything if there is enough money attached to the argument. We don't know where Mississsippi gubernatorial candidate, Bill Luckett, fits in this dyad, but we do know that he is waving high the KIPP banner as the solution to being 50th out of 50 in state educational attainment. Luckett is just back from a KIPP visit in Helena, Arkansas:

"What I heard, I couldn't believe to start out with, but it turned out to be true," he said. "A group of dedicated teachers and across-the-board fifth grade students got together and started a school effort about five or six years ago. Those same students who were testing in the bottom one-fifth percentile were now testing in the top one-fifth percentile."

Helena and the Arkansas Delta are demographically almost identical to the Mississippi Delta, and parts of Mississippi are very similar to Helena, Luckett said.

If Mr. Luckett is in neither of the above categories of politicians, surely he won't hesitate to look at the SRI study done last year in five Bay Area KIPP schools, where researchers found that 40 to 60 percent of KIPPsters in the five schools "chose" to leave KIPP between grades 5 and 8, and that most of the students who were ridden out were the low scorers who could have damaged the KIPP brand if they had stayed. Or Mr. Luckett may be interested to know that the five schools from the Bay Area lost 65 percent of their teachers over 3 years. From the SRI study:

Since 2003-04, the five Bay Area KIPP school leaders have hired a total of 121 teachers. Of these, 43 remained in the classroom at the start of the 2007-08 school year. Among teachers who left the classroom, at four of the schools they spent a median of 1 year in the classroom before leaving; at one school, the typical teacher spent 2 years in the classroom before leaving (32).

Mr. Luckett, I hope you have some plans to build some TFA teacher barracks along the Delta because without a constant re-supply of Ivy League missionaries you will never keep your KIPP chain gangs staffed.

"It points out that you can make a difference with the right set of dedicated teachers and students," Luckett explained. "With a will to learn, you raise the bar and raise the expectations and they've done a tremendous job at the KIPP school. That really sold me on charter schools."

He said that charter schools would only be necessary in regions where the existing public schools have repetitively exhibited underperformance.

"There are great schools in Mississippi, like right here in DeSoto County," he said. "It's not to say that the public school administrations (of underperforming schools) aren't trying to do something, it's to what degree sometimes. I see them attacking the problem and chipping away, but I think it's time for a sledgehammer now. We've got to do something a little more significantly."

Yes, yes, the old sledgehammer. One may wonder what Mr. Luckett has in mind for those children who can't make it in the KIPP mines, the ones who can't carry the tune of "Sixteen Tons," those children of low-production value who are likely to damage the output numbers if they hang around. But, then, Mississippi has another chain gang for those youngsters, one that has been perfected over the past 150 years.

Chicago, Duncan, tests

2009-06-26T09:46:00.005-04:00

this is being posted near simultaneously at Education Policy Blog, School Matters, and Edurati

I recently received an email from Wade Tillett, a teacher, parent and activist in Chicago Public Schools, about a 2-minute statement he made he made June 24th, and included an additional statement he made at a public hearing at Arne Duncan's last Board meeting in December. He informed me that

I spoke about how CPS is using test scores to fail individual students (the data I sent you and which you posted earlier), and to fail entire schools.

CPS uses standardized test to override teachers, students, parents and the community to fail entire schools. The policy the board voted on today will further “raise the bar” (4), which means they will put more schools on “probation” - as if they are criminals (5). This sets the stage for further school closings and privatization. If CPS really believes that this policy is a fair measure of a school, why doesn't it apply to charter schools (6)?

With his permission, I am posting below his complete statement as delivered, with associated footnotes. I will offer a few comments of my own at the end.

Statement by Wade Tillett, Chicago Public School Parent and Teacher.
Chicago School Board Meeting
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
125 S. Clark St., Chicago

Hello. I'm Wade Tillett. I am a Chicago Public School Parent and Teacher.

In 2000, The Cato Institute published "Edupreneurs": A Survey of For-Profit Education which talks about how 90 percent of the “$740 billion education market” is not yet used for profit. Further they stated:

“The failure of government-run schools to prepare students for the rigors of the modern economy is a pressing policy problem, but it is also an opportunity for the private sector. ”

Let's read that again.

“The failure of government-run schools to prepare students for the rigors of the modern economy is a pressing policy problem, but it is also an opportunity for the private sector. ” (1)

Wouldn't this opportunity be even greater then, if there were greater failure?

Susan Neuman seems to think so. She should know because she was there when they were drafting NCLB. She served “as Assistant Secretary for Elementary and Secondary Education during George W. Bush's first term, .... she says... there were others in the department...who saw
NCLB as a Trojan horse for the choice agenda — a way to expose the failure of public education and "blow it up a bit.” "There were a number of people pushing hard for market forces and privatization."” (2)

(In other words, the wolves are circling.)

The point of NCLB, to some involved in its creation, was not to fix public schools, but to destroy them. Constantly rising scores inevitably force many schools to be labeled as failing.

And once these forces are set in motion, they sort of perpetuate themselves.

Selective enrollment, magnet schools and charter schools often accept only students with a certain score on the bubble tests. (“Diamonds in the rough” as Mr. Duncan just called them.) Thus, neighborhood schools are left with more students with lower scores, while other schools start out with more students with higher scores. A vicious cycle is set in motion.

This, of course, does not matter to CPS or NCLB. In fact, that's how some people wanted it to work. You know, to blow it up a bit.

Mr. Duncan and the school board here continue to pretend that blowing up schools is the way to save them. Let's remember that the real reason people wanted to blow up schools was to get at that $700 billion dollars.

And wasn't that the same amount we spent to bail out the financial industry? Is this the right time to implement the business model for education? Look around us!

When all the dust settles, we're going to be left with what others regard as the crumbs of a public education system.

If you don't believe me, perhaps you'll believe two former assistant,secretaries of education, Chester Finn and Diane Ravitch, once prominent NCLB advocates, who now write:.

“[If NCLB continues,] rich kids will study philosophy and art, music and history, while their poor peers fill in bubbles on test sheets. The lucky few will spawn the next generation of tycoons, political leaders, inventors, authors, artists and entrepreneurs. The less lucky masses will see narrower opportunities.” (3)

Stop destroying neighborhood schools.

Notes:

1. "Edupreneurs": A Survey of For-Profit Education, Carrie Lips, November 20, 2000, Cato Policy Analysis No. 386. http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa-386es.html

2. No Child Left Behind: Doomed to Fail?, Claudia Wallis, Jun. 08, 2008, Time. http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1812758,00.html

3. Leaving "No Child Left Behind" Behind, Richard Rothstein, December 17, 2007, The American Prospect. http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=leaving_nclb_behind

Notes from today's meeting:

4. Monique Bond, CPS spokeswoman. http://www.chitowndailynews.org/Chicago_news/New_performance_policy_would_raise_bar_for_CPS_schools,29028

5. A CPS representative explaining the proposed policy stated that approximately 40% of CPS elementary schools and 60% of high schools are now on “probation” or level 3.

6. Proposed school performance, remediation and probation policy for the 2009-2010 school year. http://bubbleover.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/schoolclose.pdf

Now for a few words of my own:

First, it is worth reminding people of the previous role played by Susan Neuman given her visibility in the new Bolder, Broader approach which is currently getting so much attention. And is critically important to remind people that at least some of those who advocated for No Child Left Behind did so because they saw it either as a means of decreasing legitimization of public schools and/or they wanted access to the public funds being spent on education in order to profit therefrom.

Second, the impact of NCLB in narrowing educational opportunities in arts, music,philophy, etc., for those schools with high poverty - when those schools are often the only access these students have to such things - is already ongoing. Similar impacts are now beginning to creep into middle class schools because of the financial crisis and the impact it has on school funding, which we should remember at the local level is heavily dependent upon real estate values that have plummeted as a result of the series of financial blows, including but not limited to the impact of subprime mortgages and securitizing of mortgage-backed assets. Tillett rightly points out how much we seem willing to bail out financial institutions that largely created the crisis - with the great assistance of those in government of both parties who abdicated responsibility for ensuring oversight and financial stability - while too many seem unwilling to cushion the blows affected on others, whether homeowners in trouble or local governments in crisis. Yes, ARRA helps some, but merely in holding part of the status quo ante, and not in addressing the damage already being done by NCLB.

It is important that voices that speak clearly - as parents and teachers - be included in the ongoing discussions about our schools and their future. And remember, the longer we delay addressing the critical issues before us, the more our future in the form of those students currently being deprived of a quality and complete education will suffer, now and in the future.

DFER Takes Aim at Teachers

2009-06-26T09:10:00.049-04:00

DFER's latest policy brief, "A Great Teacher For Every Child," begins with this bold statement:

Studies have shown that teacher quality is the single most correlate of student achievement; at the same time, it is the primary factor driving the achievement gap between rich and poor students, minority and non-minority students, and native English speakers and English language learners.

While teacher quality is certainly important for public education, to suggest teachers are "the primary factor driving the achievement gap" blames teachers for various problems associated with poverty and other out of school factors (see Berliner, 2009).

"Data-driven reform," a favorite phrase of Duncan, is one of DFER's primary tools for improving the teaching profession. States must also eliminate any "firewall" that prevents student testing scores from being tied to their teacher - and Duncan mentions the very same "firewall" at this Advance Illinois speech just a few days ago. Of course, the data used is almost exclusively standardized test scores - which DFER would like tied to school evaluations, teacher evaluations, merit pay, and pay-for-performance. DFER also calls for "[c]lassroom observations and other 'process' evaluations of teacher effectiveness," but these observations only supplement the evaluations that rely on student test scores. Worse yet, the observations "should be absolutely free of bias, utilizing outside, objective evaluators rather than a teacher's co-workers or principal." In other words, teachers are not allowed to be tried by a jury of their peers (or even their principal) but rather by some external force.

I'll give DFER a little credit where credit is due: they call for professional development that includes a "broad, rich, and integrated curricula rather than 'drill and kill' or test-prep." Unfortunately, I doubt DFER realizes that most of the "scientifically-based" reading and math programs are little more than thinly-veiled test-prep materials. And, while DFER wants to move away from "'drill and kill' or test prep," they're still convinced that the only professional development worth the time and money is "informed by, and evaluated based on, real-time data on the achievement of the students in each teacher's classroom(s)."

Particularly when viewed in combination with their push for national standards, DFER's take on improving the teaching profession limits teacher evaluations to standardized test scores and the outside observations. DFER pays lip service to moving past the test prep regimen common in American schools but appear to trade the old paper and pencil method for a more computer-based edition through "real-time data" ("real-time data" means the data is available as soon as the student finishes the project - which implies the use of computers or other technology). "Data-driven" is just the latest incarnation of those looking to "teacher-proof" the profession by creating a narrowly-defined education for our children. The ideal teacher in this framework simply uses "scientifically-based" programs and "real-time data" to guide classroom activities.

"The development of the so-called teacher-proof materials is a continuation of experts' authoritarianism, of their total lack of fain the possibility that teachers can know and can also create," said Freire in Teachers as Cultural Workers. Sadly - both for our children and the future of public education - DFER and many leading education reformers view teacher creativity as a dangerous unknown, a challenge to the corporate-driven reform movement, and an unmeasurable quantity.

Victory in Pennsylvania on High School Testing

2009-06-25T22:33:00.003-04:00

Many people worked very hard to halt the further spread of the tabulation orgy in Pennsylvania high schools. Congratulations, Penn. citizens. From the Inquirer:

HARRISBURG, Pa. - The Rendell administration Monday temporarily shelved plans to develop graduation competency exams for Pennsylvania high school students in hopes of making peace with legislative critics who felt the administration was moving too fast.

"Under the current circumstance and to allow the emerging consensus to develop, we will not spend funds for state-mandated graduation test development" under a seven-year contract signed last month, Education Secretary Gerald Zahorchak said in a letter to ranking members of the House and Senate education committees.

Some lawmakers were upset last month when the department signed a contract with the Minnesota-based Data Recognition Corporation to develop the proposed Keystone Exams before they approved a testing method.

In last year's state budget, the Legislature included a provision barring the state Education Board from developing regulations to implement the exams through the June 30 end of the fiscal year.

Efforts to reach a compromise on the politically touchy subject were in progress when administration officials signed the contract, said Rep. James R. Roebuck, chairman of the House Education Committee.

"It served really to disrupt that entire process," the Philadelphia Democrat said. "It was as if they were in another world."

The proposed exams would be administered in grades nine through 12 to gauge students' progress in specific subjects and, pending federal approval, would replace the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment tests currently given in the 11th grade. School districts could continue to substitute their own tests, but they would require advance approval by the state, said department spokesman Michael Race . . . .

Russian Students Protest Testing, American Style

2009-06-24T17:16:00.004-04:00

Will American students follow suit.? One can hope. Will Duncan's Central Committee note the irony in the fact the children in the land of Stalin are now protesting America's brand of oligarch-inspired testing nonsense?

June 24, 2009

By Kevin O'Flynn
MOSCOW -- "Exams Are Over, The Problem Remains."

That was the message as a dozen teachers and high-school students braved cold, wet weather to gather in central Moscow last week to protest a recent initiative by Russian education officials.

The source of their discontent is the Unified State Exam, or yediny gosudarstvenny ekzamen (EGE), a new standardized test introduced in Russia for the first time this year.

Critics say the EGE is a poor measure of academic aptitude, and is already having a detrimental effect on learning in schools.

"Study in 11th class in any Russian school has become a mass preparation for the EGE," said Ilya, a high school history teacher who was leading last week's protests. "There is no education in 11th class anymore. All that the students think about is how they have to take the EGE. And all the teachers think about is how to ensure that the school gets good results."

The test, which is administered to students before they can graduate from high school, also ostensibly aids their placement in higher education institutes -- much like the SAT, formerly known as the Scholastic Aptitude Test, in the United States. . . .