Showing posts with label Barack Obama. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Barack Obama. Show all posts
3/3/12
The DOE Would Like To Ruin Public Schools: The Proof (Updated)
Your GovernmentSUPPORTING EFFECTIVE TEACHERS IN THE CLASSROOM
THE PROBLEM:
The teacher quality policies under No Child Left Behind (NCLB) were intended to encourage better educators in schools. But in the 10 years since the law’s enactment, the “Highly Qualified Teacher” requirements have placed too much emphasis on a teacher’s credentials and tenure and imposed significant burdens on states and schools, while paying little attention to student learning.
When it comes to getting better teachers in our schools, these “Highly Qualified Teacher” provisions can do more harm than good. As former elementary school teacher Deborah Ball stated at a House Education and the Workforce Committee hearing, “Right now, teachers are considered qualified simply by participating in an approved program or completing an academic major. This means that being qualified does not depend on demonstrating that you can teach.”
THE SOLUTION:
Parents know the best teachers are the ones who keep students motivated and challenged in the classroom. Instead of relying on teacher credential or tenure requirements, which provide little information about teachers’ ability to help students excel in the classroom, the Student Success Act and the Encouraging Innovation and Effective Teachers Act will ensure states and school districts have the tools necessary to effectively measure an educator’s influence on student achievement.
THE STUDENT SUCCESS ACT AND THE ENCOURAGING INNOVATION AND EFFECTIVE TEACHERS ACT
-Repeal federal "Highly Qualified Teacher" requirements.
-Support the development and implementation of teacher evaluation systems to ensure parents have the information they need to make decisions about their child’s education.
-Set broad parameters – including linkages to student achievement data – that must be included in any teacher evaluation system, but allows states and school districts to design their own systems.
-Require states and school districts to seek input from parents, teachers, school leaders, and other staff as they develop the evaluation system.
-Encourage states and school districts to make personnel decisions based on the evaluations, as determined by the school district.
-Consolidate teacher quality programs into a new Teacher and School Leader Flexible Grant, which supports creative approaches to recruit and retain effective educators.
Update: I should not have said this was a DOE document. It's not. It's an Education and the Workforce Committee document, like the banner shows. I got ahead of myself.
Tim Furman (SchoolTechConnect) in the comments gently pointed that out to me. And he also made an interesting point--this came out of a Republican led committee and only Republicans voted for it. Still, it includes many of the things Duncan and Obama want. So why did it get published? Is it for, as Tim put it, a bad cop/worse cop scenario?
I put nothing past the reformers. Arne will love this document. It might as well be a DOE document. I predict, in large part it will become one anyway.
2/13/12
Dump Arne Duncan Petition
Sign here.Dear President Obama,Petition Text
We, the undersigned, a cross section of the nation’s teachers and their supporters, wish to express our extreme displeasure with the policies implemented during your administration by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. Although many of us campaigned enthusiastically for you in 2008, it is unlikely that you will receive continued support unless the following three dimensions of your administration’s education initiatives are changed:
Because of these policies, teachers throughout the nation have become discouraged and demoralized, undermining your own stated goals of improving teacher quality, upgrading the nation’s educational performance, and encouraging creative pedagogy rather than “teaching to the test.”
- The exclusion of teachers from policy discussions in the US Department of Education and from Education Summits called under your leadership.
- The use of rhetoric which blames failing schools on “bad teachers” rather than poverty and neighborhood distress.
- The use of federal funds to compel states and municipalities to use student test scores in the evaluation of teachers and as the basis for closing low performing schools.
We therefore submit the following measures to put your administration’s education policy back on the right track and to bring teachers in as full partners in this effort:
We believe such policies will create an outpouring of good will on the part of teachers, parents and students which will promote creative teaching and educational innovation, leading to far greater improvements in the nation’s schools than policies which encourage a proliferation of student testing could ever hope to do.
- The removal of Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education and his replacement by a lifetime educator who has the confidence of the nation’s teachers.
- The incorporation of parents, teachers, and school administrators in all policy discussion taking place in your administration, inside and outside the Department of Education.
- An immediate end to the use of incentives or penalties to compel states and municipalities to use student test scores as a basis for evaluating teachers, preferring charter schools to existing public schools, and requiring closure of low performing schools.
- Create a National Commission, in which teachers and parent representatives play a primary role, which explores how to best improve the quality of America’s schools.
Sincerely,
The Undersigned
2/12/12
Obama & Duncan Think Teachers Are Just Too Stupid
When the "Best and the Brightest" Don't Have the Answers- President Obama's Approach to School Reform
“The Best And the Brightest”- President Obama’s Approach to School Reform
When Barack Obama ascended to the Presidency, he was fired up with a desire to improve America’s schools, which he felt were falling behind those of other advanced countries. He decided to bring “the best minds in the country” in to help them with this task- CEO’s of successful businesses, heads of major foundations, young executives from management consulting firms- to figure out a strategy to transform America’s schools, especially those in low performing districts. He promised them full support of his Administration when they finally came up with effective strategies including the use of federal funding to persuade, and if necessary, compel local districts to implement them.
President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan announced modifications to the No Child Left Behind program on Thursday at the White House., Pablo Martinez Monsivais / AP Photo
Notably missing in this brain trust were representatives of America’s teachers and school administrators, but their absence was not accidental. Because the President and his chief education adviser, Arne Duncan, believed that a key problem in America’s schools was the low quality of the people working in them, they felt no need to include principals and teachers in the Administrations education planning, especially since those plans involved putting pressure on them to perform and then removing those who couldn’t meet the new standards.
From a management standpoint the reforms developed, which including promoting competition, universalizing teacher evaluation based on student test scores, introducing merit pay, made perfect sense. However, since none of the people developing the reforms had spent much time in a classroom, or were willing to spend a significant part of their lives performing the jobs they were reshaping, they had little idea what their reforms meant “on the ground,” and even less evidence that, when implemented, they would be effective.
Now three years later, after all of these new policies have been put into effect, from New York to Chicago, to Philadelphia to Buffalo, there is no evidence than America’s schools are performing better than when the President entered office, or that the test score gap between wealthy and poor districts is being reduced. But evidence and experience doesn’t seem to matter when you bring “the best minds in the country” together to develop a strategy. Come on, how can Bill Gates, Eli Broad, Michael Bloomberg, and the Ivy League gurus from Teach for America be wrong, and graduates of state teachers colleges and teacher education programs be right?
But reality has a way of intruding even on “the best and the brightest” when the fundamental assumptions that guide policy are wrong. This happened during the Vietnam War, when an indigenous nationalist revolution was treated as an arm of a global Communist conspiracy, and it is happening now when school failures due to poverty and inequality are being blamed on incompetent teachers and administrators.
So as in Vietnam, we will invest hundreds of billions, maybe trillions of dollars in a cause, which, at the end of the day, will turn into a Fool’s Errand, undermining the careers and demeaning the efforts of the nation’s teachers, dividing communities against themselves, while fattening the pockets of consulting form, test companies and on line learning firms.
And ten years down the road, when all the damage is done, policy makers will wake up and call America’s teachers back in to ask “What do you think we should do?” And they will say that teaching has to be a life time calling, and that when dealing with children, there are no miracles- opening minds, and changing lives, requires hard work, persistence, imagination, and a love for the young people you are working with. And those are tasks that cannot be performed by computers or “managed” by people who have never worked with children themselves.
Mark Naison
February 12, 1012
11/19/11
6/16/11
The Erection Of An Alternative National System Of Charter Schools (pun intended)
How the Corporate Right Divided Blacks from Teachers Unions and Each Other
by Glen Ford
Back in the mid-Nineties, devious right-wing activists at the Bradley Foundation, in Milwaukee, hit upon a “wedge” issue designed to wreck the alliance at the core of the Democratic Party’s urban base. Blacks and public employee unions – particularly teachers – were the foundations of Democratic power in the cities. Aware that African Americans revered education but were often in conflict with largely white teachers unions over issues of racism and community control, the Bradley gang, under president Michael Joyce, created out of whole cloth a “movement” for publicly-funded vouchers for private schools. No such Black community “demand” had ever existed, but well-aimed infusions of millions of dollars among opportunistic politicians like Cory Booker, a first term city councilman who aspired to become mayor of Newark, New Jersey, grafted Black faces onto a Hard Right corporate scheme to divide key progressive constituencies: Blacks and unions.
By the turn of the millennium, the Bradley outfit solidified its position as George W. Bush’s “favorite” foundation when it invented “faith-based initiatives” to funnel millions of public dollars to churches to provide social services. Faith-based funding and private school vouchers comprised the totality of Bush’s first term outreach to Black America. Neither program drew masses of Blacks into the Republican Party – even the wealthy social engineers at Bradley can’t perform miracles. But Bradley and its far-right sister funders – the Walton and DeVos Family Foundations, Olin, Scaife, Freidman and other troglodytes – had succeeded in penetrating Black Democratic politics, where the real action would unfold. Cory Booker, Harold Ford, Jr., the 29-year-old who inherited his father’s congressional seat in Memphis, in 1996, and other hustlers were the “new Black leaders” ready to embrace “pro-business” solutions to inner city problems, said corporate media boosters. The Democratic Leadership Council, the party’s corporate money bagmen, launched a frenzied, and quite effective, recruitment campaign among Black office-holders and aspirants.
This is the national stage onto which Barack Obama stepped with his U.S. Senate campaign, in 2003-2004, as the very embodiment of the “new” Black politician, full of phrases like “public-private partnerships” and other codes for corporate penetration of the public sphere. By this time, the wealthy foundations were directing much of their money and attention to hawking charter schools as the cure for what ails education in the inner cities. Not that the Waltons and Friedmans and Scaifes give a damn about ghetto kids, but because they understood that Black parents were desperate for anything that might save their children, and would be receptive when fellow Blacks made the pitch. From its inception, the purpose of the project was to drive a wedge between teachers unions and Black constituencies. In addition to being unencumbered by sticky constitutional considerations, charter schools are technically public schools, and African Americans remain broadly committed to the concept of public education. Most importantly, from the rich man’s point of view, charter schools are the gateway to corporate access to the public education purse, a “market” worth hundreds of billions a year in which the public takes all the risk – a capitalist’s paradise! Obama and his Education Secretary, Arne Duncan – a veteran Chicago union buster and corporatist – have labored mightily to erect an alternative national system of charter schools.
The Hard Right foundations now had even bigger company as boosters of charter schools: the institutional weight of Wall Street, huge hedge funds, and individual billionaires, all out to make a financial killing, knock off teachers unions, and mold the world views of new generations. After more than a decade of corporate cultivation of ambitious “new Black leaders,” a large cadre of business-friendly African American politicians was in place – including, by 2008, in the highest place of all.
President Obama is the guy that Michael Joyce, at the Bradley Foundation, was dreaming about when he launched his campaign to split Blacks from unions, 15 years ago. Obama and his Education Secretary, Arne Duncan – a veteran Chicago union buster and corporatist – have labored mightily to erect an alternative national system of charter schools, plugged into a private financial and educational services sector, that in some cities is as large or larger than the traditional public schools. Obama, because of his race and his party affiliation, is a far more effective foe of public education and teachers unions than his white Republican predecessor.
Michael Joyce was right; he knew that the crucial battle over school privatization would have to occur in Black Democratic circles, if it were to work as a fractious wedge issue. Last month, the NAACP and the United Federations of Teachers filed a lawsuit to halt the closing of 20 public schools and to stop giving preferential treatment to charter schools that often share the same buildings. The differences in learning conditions, schedules and equipment are so striking, says the NAACP, as to reduce public students to second-class citizens. Charter schools, which President Obama fawns over like his own legacy, are blatantly favored by school systems and corporate sponsors. The NAACP is seeking to prove – in a different age and racial context – that separate is not equal, in New York City and other sites of breakneck charterization.
The inequalities are by design. From President Obama on down, charter school strategists hope to expand their privatized systems by deliberately making charters relatively more attractive than traditional classrooms, in order to create a political constituency for more charters. At root, it is a kind of bait-and-switch that is not sustainable, and will come to a halt once the public school “competition” is marginalized or eliminated. By then, the political forces necessary to revive public schooling will have been exhausted in fratricidal battles, and the corporations will have established a system to suit their own purposes– as Michael Joyce foresaw.
When the NAACP joined in the teachers union’s suit, charter school advocates declared war on the civil rights group. Two thousand people attended a May 26 rally in Harlem, accusing the NAACP of dividing the community. Of course, Michael Joyce knows who did the dividing – he and his right-wing schemers and billionaires wrote the script.
5/16/11
25% Decline In Enrollment At School Where Obama Will Give Commencement Speech
Booker T. Washington High School won, and Barack Obama will give the commencement speech there. Of course there are questions as to the graduation rates at the school.
...
The Answer Sheet
...
Rubinstein, a Teach for America alumnus and author of two books on teaching -- “Reluctant Disciplinarian” and “Beyond Survival” -- wrote on his blog that he looked at demographic figures for Booker T. Washington and found this:...
I found that there was a lot of attrition over that four year period. The school enrollment was 760 in 2007, 732 in 2008, 649 in 2009, and then in the ‘miracle’ year 2010, down to 566. So the school had lost nearly 25% of its students in that time period, which is also the exact percent that the graduation rate climbed by.
The Answer Sheet
4/2/11
Some Truth About The Difference Between Us And Them
"We don't tie teacher pay to test scores because we don't believe them to be a reliable indicator of teacher effectiveness." (Sidwell Friends faculty member, April 1, 2011)Schools Matter
2/4/11
Obama Sees Education As "a path out of poverty."
A White House Spokesman, @pfeiffer44, said he would answer questions about the SOTU speech Obama gave.
I aked him why poverty was left out of the speech, as poverty is the strongest correlate to academic success. After a week of waiting, I got a response. This is an official White House response, remember.
Weak sauce, IMHO.
I aked him why poverty was left out of the speech, as poverty is the strongest correlate to academic success. After a week of waiting, I got a response. This is an official White House response, remember.
Weak sauce, IMHO.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
