Robert Reich Chimes In On RTTT

Bail Out Our Schools
MONDAY, MARCH 8, 2010

Any day now, the Obama administration will announce $4.35 billion in extra federal funds for under-performing public schools. That’s fine, but relative to the financial squeeze all the nation’s public schools now face it’s a cruel joke.

The recession has ravaged state and local budgets, most of which aren’t allowed to run deficits. That’s meant major cuts in public schools and universities, and a giant future deficit in the education of our people.

Across America, schools are laying off thousands of teachers. Classrooms that had contained 20 to 25 students are now crammed with 30 or more. School years have been shortened. Some school districts are moving to four-day school weeks. After-school programs have been canceled; music and art classes, terminated. Even history is being chucked.

Pre-K programs have been shut down. Community colleges are reducing their course offerings and admitting fewer students. Public universities, like the one I teach at, have raised tuitions and fees. That means many qualified students won’t be attending.

Last year the nation committed $700 billion to bail out Wall Street banks, the engines of America’s financial capital, because we were told we’d face economic Armageddon if we didn’t.

We’ve got our priorities backwards. Our schools are the engines of our human capital, and if we don’t bail out public education we face a bigger economic Armageddon years from now.

Financial capital moves instantly around the globe to wherever it can earn the best return. Human capital – the skills and insights of our people – is the one resource that’s uniquely American, on which our future living standards uniquely depend.

Starting immediately, the federal government should give states and local governments interest-free loans to make up for all school and university budget shortfalls. The loans can be repaid when the recession is over and local and state tax revenues revive.

Over the longer term we must shift incentives away from financial capital toward human capital. A tiny one half of one percent tax on all financial transactions would generate about $200 billion a year, according to the Economic Policy Institute. That might put a crimp on Wall Street bonuses but it’s enough to fund early childhood education, smaller K-12 classes, and lower tuitions and fees for public higher education. [emphasis mine]

The Street’s financial capital is important to the American economy, but over the long term the classroom’s human capital is absolutely crucial.

SOTU & Education & Poverty

President Obama:

This year, we have broken through the stalemate between left and right by launching a national competition to improve our schools. The idea here is simple: instead of rewarding failure, we only reward success. Instead of funding the status quo, we only invest in reform -- reform that raises student achievement, inspires students to excel in math and science, and turns around failing schools that steal the future of too many young Americans, from rural communities to inner-cities. In the 21st century, one of the best anti-poverty programs is a world-class education. In this country, the success of our children cannot depend more on where they live than their potential.

The notion of competition, very present in the SOTU, is so very American and Capitalist. Look where it has gotten us, though--financial meltdown due to greed and competition, political gridlock due to greed and competition, RTTT based on greed and competition, and on and on. Some things need not be a competition, like who gets to eat and who gets a roof and who gets medicine and who gets a fully funded school.

In the SOTU last night President Obama made it clear that in order to get an education in America, your school/district/state has to compete. That seems, on its face, to be a negative; it's like competing for food or water--stuff we all need and deserve. Governments exist to provide that stuff for all, not for the "winners."

Then there is the notion that "one of the best anti-poverty programs is a world-class education." I suppose that's pretty hard to argue with unless you realize that it is not necessarily true in our case. Students today, in America at least, are pretty connected and savvy. They don't lack an education, nor do they lack the promise of one; they lack the means and motivation, in large part due to poverty, to get a "proper" one. Obama has it backwards, IMHO.

Poverty keeps many kids from performing well in the public schools America funds so abysmally. Lack of a world-class education is not keeping these kids impoverished or from graduating--racism and poverty are the culprits. And now we have charters sucking all the energy and money, leaving even less for the impoverished.

Impoverished families are focused on their day-to-day survival. Imagine if they did not have to worry about health care. I think a world-class health care system would do more for the kids Obama and Duncan are targeting than a competition to see who can write a better proposal to win desperately needed money for severely underfunded public schools.

We need to fund schools and pay teachers more. About teacher salaries, I have said it before: double the pay and see who shows up. It's not rocket science.

Klonsky: For The Sake Of Clarity...

Mike Klonsky clears thing up:

For the sake of clarity, I don't think the current regime is worse than the neo-cons or that Sec. Duncan is worse than Paige or Spellings. The fact that teachers and their union leadership is even at the table, represents a step up from the previous 8 years.

My point was that there are some things, some policies, which are even more destructive and more of a threat to the public aspect of public schooling. What is worse about current policies is the cynical way Duncan has used his power and the threat of withholding desperately-needed federal dollars in the midst of the current economic crisis, to coerce states and school districts into accepting his failed approach to reform (there's now important and overwhelming evidence of this failure coming out in the Chicago media). [emphasis mine]

Californucation: Parents Know It All

More proof that folks who don't know nuthin' 'bout nuthin' are in charge...

California set to pass education overhaul plan

Marisa Lagos, Chronicle Staff Writer

Tuesday, January 5, 2010

The California Legislature is poised to pass an education plan today that makes far-reaching changes to how public schools are governed, giving parents the power to transfer their kids out of failing schools and to force districts to overhaul bad schools.

The dramatic changes to California's education policies have been debated for months. They are intended to make the state competitive for up to $700 million in federal dollars under President Obama's $4.3 billion Race to the Top program, which promises funding to states that embrace education policies outlined by the president by a Jan. 19 application deadline. Millions more dollars may also be at stake for the financially struggling state, as the Obama administration is expected to tie future education funding to some of his Race to the Top provisions.

The most controversial elements of the plan being voted on today by both houses of the Legislature include the so-called open enrollment and parent trigger provisions, which were championed by a number of parents groups and charter school advocates but opposed by many in the education establishment, including the state's powerful teachers' union.

Under current state law, students must attend a school in the district where they live, with some exceptions. The open enrollment legislation would allow students in the 1,000 worst schools in California - as defined by their Academic Performance Index ranking - to apply to a better school anywhere in the state, including in the same district. School districts must adopt standards for accepting or rejecting transfers under this new open enrollment policy.

The parent trigger provision would allow parents to force school districts to deal with chronically failing schools by adopting one of several "reform" plans put forth by the Obama administration, including closing the school, firing the principal and up to half of the teachers, or turning the school into a charter school. At least 50 percent of parents would have to petition for the change.

'Paradigm shift'

"We think the parent trigger especially is critically important - it's not just a new policy, it's a paradigm shift, a different way of thinking about education reform," said Ben Austin, who founded the Los Angeles-based parent advocacy group Parent Revolution. "This is not about anything other than giving parents power and trusting them to do right by their kids. The system is failing ... because it's not designed to serve kids, it's designed to serve grown-ups."

Parents aren't the only ones who would be able to force a change: Under the legislation, the state's worst schools would have to embrace one of those strategies as well. State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell said Monday that about 800 of the state's nearly 1,700 local districts and charter schools have indicated their intent to participate in Race to the Top.

Districts that participate agree to open up all their schools to the rules; districts that choose not to participate are still subject to the rules for their low-performing schools.

The new legislation would also make a number of other changes to help bring California in line with the federal goals. The state would create a system to track students from elementary school through college to determine what is working, make a new program for credentialing math and science teachers, and allow local school districts to use test scores and other data to evaluate teachers and principals.

Delayed by politics

"These and other reforms clearly set the stage for the governor to submit a competitive application for California to bring home a coveted Race to the Top grant," Assembly Speaker Karen Bass, D-Baldwin Vista (Los Angeles County), said Monday.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger called a special session of the Legislature in August to bring California in line with the requirements outlined by the Race to the Top. But the changes have been mired in politics, with Assembly Democrats supporting limited changes backed by the teacher's union and others. The governor threatened to veto an earlier bill by the Assembly that he said omitted the open-enrollment rule, and negotiations dragged on through December. This week, officials ultimately decided to break the open enrollment and parent trigger provisions into a separate bill from the rest of the proposed changes, though both bills are expected to pass today.

E-mail Marisa Lagos at mlagos@sfchronicle.com.

h/t JH

Oregon's Race To The Top Recommendations

I don't know what feelings well up inside you when you read this kind of thing, but for me it's feelings of dread and futility.

Just read some of the nonsense that schools now have to concern themselves with if they want money to buy books and pencils. It's a disgusting commentary on what Americans either find important or are unable to understand.

School is not rocket science. Never was. Shouldn't be. But we are creating an atmosphere where every education policy is driven by "data" which are erroneous or forced at best, as well as inconclusive in the main.

Enough already. Let teachers teach, inspire, entertain, enliven, and care for their students as human beings first, workers for "the man" second, instead of the other way around.

Stand Assmt and Data Oregon

h/t KL

Sentence Of The Day

From Jim Horn:

The KIPP dropout factories have become the sustaining illusion and delusion for the positive psychology hypesters like Broad and Gates and the glassy-eyed drones of Martin Seligman, whose entire urban reform system is built on a house of cards that continues to ignore the grinding poverty that sustains the achievement gaps for the bottom quartile of American children whom we have deemed disposable, all the while turning over their containment and permanent segregation, er, education to the corporate plunderers and leeches who are destroying our Republic.