"Poverty is water in the gas tank of education"

Contextual Accountability
by John Kun

Every school is a microcosm of the community it serves—that is, every school that serves any and all students in the neighborhood. Peaceful schools are nestled in peaceful environs. If there are drugs or violence in the streets, educators will contend with drugs and violence working their way into the school like crickets through unseen cracks. If there are racist or misogynistic attitudes in the homes, they will manifest themselves on campus. And so it goes. If there is materialism, superiority, entitlement, narcissism, coldness, anti-intellectualism, vanity, laziness, or greed ensconced in the hearts of the parents or grandparents or neighbors or pastors or businessmen or family friends who act out their human dialogues in the public space shared with students, then students will bring traces of those attitudes with them into class and the air will hang with secondhand dysfunction.

Educators spend entire careers—some without even realizing it—trying to accentuate and play off of students’ positive outside influences and minimize or at least sidestep their negative ones, just to prepare the groundwork so they can teach their content. Teaching doesn’t happen in a vacuum, an obvious fact which bears repeating only because it’s so common to hear people go on and on about teacher quality as the ultimate driver of student learning. Too many experts spout the mogul-endorsed “no excuses” mantra reflexively when the conversation turns to the context of student lives, and in so doing effectively refuse to talk seriously about the increasingly debilitating conditions of that context.

As though it doesn’t matter. As though it needn’t be tended to. As though a serious education can occur no matter what is going on there. “Poverty isn’t destiny” is trite and meaningless and pretends to honor poor kids for their wide-open potential while actually disrespecting their experiences and neglecting to patch their holes; it posits that there is no such phenomenon as generational need and that neither public policy nor wealth distribution warrants consideration as a contributing factor in the formation of American kids. Poverty is water in the gas tank of education, but its apologists facilely condemn a pit crew of teachers who—not allowed to say the water won’t combust—are pushing sputtering lives, but not fast enough, around a track where youthful suburban rockets whiz by in their mall rat garb.

Meanwhile, high-performing charter schools are portrayed as having cracked the code when it comes to educating poor inner city students. In reality, the quiet secret to their trumpeted success is simply a strategic divorce of cultures. Via lottery-purified enrollment, high-hurdled parent involvement, and hair-trigger expulsions, the highest of the high-performers embrace select children from the neighborhood while flatly rejecting the broad sweep of the neighborhood’s culture, preferring to substitute their own pre-manufactured culture-like products. Culture goes to neighborhood schools; it is there that we see the health or frailties our nation’s policies have wrought in our neediest zip codes. Tragically, creatively-selective charter schools portend national blindness to the suffering our policies foster.

This is, of course, far less inspirational than the heroic charter school packaging we see on Education Nation’s store shelves. Our nation’s model charters haven’t cracked a code for educating inner city students; they have cracked a code for isolating motivated inner city students and parents who see education as a way out of poverty, and filtering out the rest. They do this by implementing exclusionary practices not available to traditional schools. Charters are free to purify their campuses of undesirable test scores, and the media will reliably gloss over attrition rates and highlight academic results that have been fully uprooted from the context that saddles every nearby traditional public school. Ultimately, the hope of the school reformer is tangled up in a knot with non-universal education. When they hold up choice and charters as our nation’s panacea, their sleight of hand may temporarily obstruct our view of the kids left out on the sidewalk, the kids unwelcome in their brave new dynamic, but it doesn’t disappear them from the face of the earth. After charters capitalize on the manipulation of context, that context still exists and it still has a name and a face and a future. The media ulimately asks us to pretend that shuffling ruffians fixes them, that a shell game with troubled kids is something noble, is “the answer.” But context will win out.

Teaching is so complex. People who talk about it but don’t do it every single day—at least from my view—fall into a trap of self-congratulatory oversimplification. On a stage or on Meet the Press, a series of bumper sticker phrases may pass muster. Platitudes assembled just so construct a virtual reality that is convincing to well-meaning onlookers and passionate neophytes. But reform isn’t talk; in actual schoolhouses, those of us doing the work are busy educating rich kids, middle class kids, poor kids, special education kids, gifted kids, and every other kind of kid imaginable; and teachers who take their calling seriously—the majority, I like to think—have never NOT been reforming our practices. (Yes, it’s popular to say schools haven’t changed since our agrarian days because we still have summer break. But to believe in overwhelming educational stasis one has to ignore commonplace modernities like video production classes, students designing their own websites, homework turned in electronically, virtual field trips, all manners of creative scheduling, online courses, dual credit academic and vocational courses, podcasts, and dozens of other things no one ever heard of in the 1950s.)

The conventional pabulum leaves much to be desired for those of us with dry erase marks on our knuckles. Real educators have to discover (through trial and error) the right answers to specific, small-picture questions about curriculum, classroom management, facilities management, extracurricular activities, dress codes, instructional technology, content delivery, test prep, and so many other things. And in traditional schools, we can’t count on the magic “parental academic contract” fairy to wave her magic wand and disappear the students who “aren’t the right fit” (hat tip to Dr. Steve Perry for that euphemism).

Teaching isn’t as easy as it sounds. And neither is reform.

I don’t write to argue that improvement in the education of American minority students isn’t necessary. The reformers are right at the beginning of the conversation—there’s an emergency in our urban schools. But they are consistently wrong about their monolithic, ideology-driven cause, and about how to fix it. They are also wrong to pretend that there isn’t a whole family of non-school emergencies in our urban areas, and to play-act that schools should somehow be immune from the general devastation around them. If an earthquake hits, should the school building’s pictures not move? If a wave of poverty, drugs, and obliterated families inundates a neighborhood, should the school float above the fray?

They are at their most wrong and most disingenuous when they proffer exemplar schools and say, essentially, “Look here. This is what you could all do if you cared enough.” Secretary Duncan was wrong when he told us that Urban Prep Academy in Chicago was showing us the way; President Obama was wrong to single out Bruce Randolph School in Denver as a model of “what good schools can do.”

I believe fervently that Michelle Rhee and an army of like-minded bad-schools philosophizers will one day look around and see piles where their painstakingly-built sandcastles of reform once stood, and they will know the tragic fame of Ozymandias. Billion-dollar data-sorting systems will be mothballed. Value-added algorithms will be tossed in a bin marked History’s Big Dumb Ideas. The mantra “no excuses” will retain all the significance of “Where’s the beef?” And teachers will still be teaching, succeeding, and failing all over the country, much as they would have been if Michelle Rhee had gone into the foreign service and Bill Gates had invested his considerable wealth and commendable humanitarian ambition in improving law enforcement practices or poultry production.

They are building castles out of sand because they are deliberately ignoring the humanity of both student and teacher. What they are calling “excuses” are really “lives.” They are really saying, “No lives.” Lessons, yes. Teacher evaluation systems, certainly. Data, of course. But lives—real human idiosyncrasies and foibles and challenges that exist neither inside nor outside the schoolhouse but rather transcend both—those are left out of the reform equation.

If numbers-and-labels accountability is the way it’s going to be for schools then the only appropriate accountability possible will be contextual. A simple look at test scores—or even the slightly more granular value-added look at test score improvement—is grossly insufficient when one considers the vast differences between schools and the communities they serve. Socioeconomic differences, for example, but also school-to-school funding differences, student-selection differences, and attrition rates cannot be ignored. These are left out of the formulas, but not because they don’t make a difference in outcomes. Of course they do.

So we must ask the psychometricians to do much, much more; or we must ask them to quit. We must not allow them to burn up our fuel and funding and popular will on moonshots taken with half-right calculations that leave out inconvenient variables.

My nephew is studying to be an engineer. He talks about a course in fluid dynamics and leaves me with the impression that engineers use formulas that are accurate to a degree very near perfect. When we build towers and dams and bridges in our country, we rely on measures that don’t really allow for error. An engineer can tell you with absolute precision how much water can flow through a pipe of a given size buried at a given angle and pushed by a pump of a given capacity. Not with sixty percent accuracy, but with stunning exactitude. Construction is too important a task to leave variables out of the formulas. With big projects, failure can be catastrophic.

The formation of our children, of course, is even more important than that of our bridges. Formulas whose inaccuracies result in the annual arbitrary firing of several great teachers and the blanket terrorization of many, many more will undoubtedly be as devastating for our society as an erroneous building code. If the people who teach our kids are going to live and die by a value-added measure, it must be a comprehensive, context-honoring value-added measure. Per-pupil funding distinctions must be incorporated. Outside-of-school factors positive and negative must be figured in.

Until policy mavens give them contextual accountability, the ever-bitterer voices of teachers and their supporters will condemn the flawed formulas, along with heavy-handed tactics, profitable privatization schemes, and cheesy Hollywood anti-teacher porn. Educators whose livelihoods and reputations are being tossed around by pundits and policymakers deserve accurate labels and honest weights and measures; anything less is careless at best and reckless at worst. And until the psychometricians can come up with formulas that accurately reflect the reality of this amazing thing called education, they won’t truly be measuring what they claim to measure, and many of us will insist that they add nothing of value to the conversation.

Facebook Is Lettting Some Idiot Steal My Identity

As The Frustrated Teacher I made a Facebook Profile (you can't see it anymore--hence this post).

As The Frustrated Teacher I made some Facebook Pages as well: It's The Poverty Stupid, Miseducation Nation, TFTRadio, and $tudent$Fir$t. I cannot post to them now. Read on.

Miseducation Nation (MN) was created by me way back in 2009 when NBC created Education Nation and then started deleting comments and banning people from their corporate reform Facebook Page. I blogged about it a few times. They sort of fixed it. Good for them, sort of.

Some time last year, I think, Facebook decided Miseducation Nation wasn't a Page, or whatever it was, and disabled it. We were up to nearly 10,000 likes. Once Facebook gave it back, we were at zero again, but well known enough that our purpose --to share the horrors of reform-- was being fulfilled.

As Facebook fucked with everything and everyone by making them re-categorize pages as communities or groups and demanding real names and the rest, my TFT profile came under scrutiny. I had begun TFT anonymously, so attaching my real name to the profile was less than desirable. I finally came out and subsequently added my real name, Richard Sugerman, to the profile as an AKA. Fine. No more trouble.

Things were going great. All of my blog posts were being syndicated via Networked blogs and things were super.

Earlier this year my Miseducation Nation co-admin, Sahila Changebringer, chose to leave due to circumstances that were totally cool. She worked harder than anyone keeping that MN page going and rebuilding it after FB screwed with it. Sahila is a hero, and the page was her doing--I basically gave it to her. But, she had to leave, so I had to take over again. Sahila deserved and got my deepest thanks. She still has it.

Once Sahila left I wanted help so I made a couple people co-admins. Thanks, folks.

A month or so ago some guy named Eric Morgan complained that the Teachers Rock Facebook page was deleting comments and banning people, just like NBC did with its Education Nation FB page. Eric was now a kindred spirit and a warrior for truth, like Sahila and me. I made him an admin of MN.

Eric Morgan was a bad admin. He started fights. He made MN look bad. I got complaints. I took away his admin rights. He didn't like that. He started making stupid comments that were divisive, so I finally banned him. Basically I learned that this idiot was a vindictive jerk.

Then, a few days ago I find another Miseducation Nation page with all my art and the MN name and logo which belong to me. The fucker  Eric Morgan had stolen my shit and was now posing as Miseducation Nation, but with a hyphen: Miseducation-Nation (notice his url -- IndoctrinationNation).

I wrote on his new, stolen page that he had stolen it and to please make the changes necessary to make clear his page in NOT actually Miseducation Nation, and he deleted the comment and banned me.

When I try to log in a day later as TFT, I can't. I am sure he reported me for something and Facebook has chosen to believe him, or Facebook has only bots so no human within Facebook management has any idea what is going on within their platform. Total fucking fail.

I have been searching Facebook for a remedy. I have reported this idiot. I have explained in forms to be submitted the story of his theft and how my TFT profile DOES have my real identity right there for all to see, and that my page and art have been stolen and my account frozen and deemed a Page, not a Profile.

Can't do what Facebook suggests

Once you click 'submit' on one of those FB official complaint forms you get a confirmation that says, "You will receive a reply shortly." Well, nothing has come. I still have no access to my TFT profile. They demand I turn it into a page. I will lose some stuff, but don't know what will be lost. FB says to download a copy of the profile before converting, but I can't because they demand I convert before I can have any access back. Once I convert to a page, the stuff I want to download will be gone. Conundrum.

Facebook and Eric Morgan have effectively silenced The Frustrated Teacher on Facebook. Why? Because Eric stole my shit. No, it's not fair, or right, or good. Fuck them both.

Moral: Get co-admins.

Woody Allen On Education

I have been trying to write this for a while, but just didn't know how. Now I do.

I watched a documentary about Woody Allen a couple days ago. I always liked Woody Allen movies. I learned about his work ethic (strong--writes every day and puts out a movie a year, good or bad) and how he is able to get such great performances out of actors.

The thing he does first is cast well. He meets an actor for a minute or 2 (or 10 seconds) and decides if they are right for the part. If they get the job but don't work out, he blames himself for poor casting, fires them and hires someone else. No big deal, not a value judgement. It's not about worth, it's about fit. And he tells his actors the script is just an outline and they can change lines all they want as long as the meaning isn't lost; he's going for realism, and when actors can use their own words, it's just more realistic, ergo better.

Actors rave about Woody's direction -- which is minimal to non-existent, unless an actor asks for more direction. When an actor needs direction, Woody gives only positive comments and tries to make the actor comfortable so the actor can then give the best performance she is capable of. No pressure. Woody has a belief in the actor's ability to act and expects they will. They are professionals. A few Best Actor/Actress nominations and Oscars later, his method appears sound.

Again, actors love being directed by Woody because he believes in them and leaves them alone to do what they do--act.

What does this have to do with education reform? Well, reformers like Arne Duncan, Bill Gates and the rest of them seem to operate in the opposite fashion; the anti-Woody.

Reformers have no trust in the actors (teachers). They make us follow a script we cannot alter. They tell us to do certain prescribed things in certain prescribed ways for certain prescribed purposes, none of which help children or allow teachers --gifted or not-- to reach their potential (earn a nomination or get an Oscar). Woody creates conditions where actors not only are responsible for their performance, but are free to do their best; Woody does not know how to get them to give their best. He trusts they will with enough freedom and positive support. The public love his movies and the Academy awards his movies and actors Oscars.

Woody doesn't read reviews and doesn't care for the Oscars. He thinks the awards are arbitrary. I agree.

The point, if you haven't got it sussed yet, is to leave teachers alone. Let them do what they do. Give them the support they need. Then they will be awesome.

(This probably true of every profession)

New Paper Exposes Stifling Effects Of Poverty On Young Students

Dr. Stephen Krashen forwarded this paper by Dr. David Berliner (AZ State U) to me last night after our #SOSChat Radio show.

It explains, in excruciating detail, the stifling effects poverty has on young children, and how the money spent on testing could be much better spent ameliorating the effects poverty has on students.

It's an important read, and an exclusive preview of the yet-to-be published paper. Nichols Final 1

Microsoft Sucks Because Of Bill Gates' Love Of 'Stack Ranking'

...

Gates has been advocating for the adoption of a ranking policy for teachers and schools that has been in use at Microsoft for years. Essentially, it assumes that in any team of ten, there would be two that would get great reviews, seven would get mediocre reviews and one would get a poor/terrible review. Are you sensing the inherent issue with these preconceived rankings? The employees at Microsoft can tell you:

Eichenwald’s conversations reveal that a management system known as “stack ranking”—a program that forces every unit to declare a certain percentage of employees as top performers, good performers, average, and poor—effectively crippled Microsoft’s ability to innovate. “Every current and former Microsoft employee I interviewed—every one—cited stack ranking as the most destructive process inside of Microsoft, something that drove out untold numbers of employees,” Eichenwald writes. “If you were on a team of 10 people, you walked in the first day knowing that, no matter how good everyone was, 2 people were going to get a great review, 7 were going to get mediocre reviews, and 1 was going to get a terrible review,” says a former software developer. “It leads to employees focusing on competing with each other rather than competing with other companies.”

That's right. The very policy being pushed to "fix" education is the exact same one that has damaged Microsoft's ability to innovate and lead.

...
h/t C&L

TFT Interviews Jersey Jazzman Sunday!

These Are Your Kids....On Books

Michigan Boots 40 Teachers -- Occupy!!

Mid-year teacher layoffs in Pontiac shock

hundreds of elementary students

Join educators, parents at press conference Friday afternoon while laid-off teachers pack up their classrooms

PONTIAC, Mich., April 13, 2012 — On Wednesday, nearly 40 teachers in the Pontiac School District were informed they were being laid off.

Effective today.

Set aside the fact that this ignores contract language the district previously agreed to with its employees.

Set aside the fact that this move is happening in light of gross mismanagement of the Pontiac School District by administrators who are under criminal investigation for financial malfeasance.

Set aside the fact that the lives of educators – those laid off and those left behind – are being turned upside down with 48 hours of notice.

Look only at Pontiac’s students and the effect this is going to have on the final 45 days of their school year.

Elementary students – from kindergarten through 6th grade – having to move classrooms, leave classmates, and adjust to new teachers…all with just weeks to go in the school year.  Instantly skyrocketing class sizes – up to 32 in kindergarten and up to 39 in grades 1 through 6.

The Pontiac Education Association invites the media to a press conference at one of the Pontiac Elementary schools affected by these layoffs.  Please, come to see firsthand the impact these mid-year cuts will have on students, parents, educators and the community, as laid-off teachers pack up their classrooms and leave after just two days notice.

PRESS CONFERENCE

Friday, April 13 at 3:45 p.m.

(immediately after school dismissal)

In front of Owen Elementary School

1700 Baldwin Ave., Pontiac, Mich. 48340

(just south of Great Lakes Crossing Mall)

“The mission of the MEA is to ensure that the education of our students

and the working environments of our members are of the highest quality.”

Students Need Parenting To Succeed

Watch this short video of a grandmother's dedication to the education of her grandchild, then tell me how anyone can put the onus of "educating our kids" solely on teachers. Please.

Occupy NEA Run By Jerks, Updated

Occupy NEA is a newish Facebook Community Group asking for NEA folks to tell the leadership how to better serve their members.

They are doing this by banning people; they banned Sahila Changebringer and me, in a heartbeat.

They suck. If you "Liked" them you may have made a mistake.

The admin is a guy named Tommy Flanagan, and he's a hypocrite. Please lay it on thick and heavy over there and get this guy to open up his page, or we will try to shut it down.

Jerk.

Update: You can join the Actual Occupy NEA if you would rather.

A Teacher Poem

The New Ideal Teacher - A Poem

The New Ideal Teacher
By David Lee Finkle

The new ideal teacher
Is driven by data,
And kids become points
On her test-score schemata.
Winnie is a "1" and must be forced to make a gain.
Theo is a "3" and that's a score he must maintain.
Freddy is a "5"; there's no more room inside his brain.
The new ideal teacher
Wants things she can measure;
If it fits on a chart,
Then it's something to treasure.

For the new ideal teacher,
It's shame or it's merit.
She's caught in between...
Well, a stick and a carrot.
The scores control her destiny, for better or for worse.
If scores are high, then there could be more money in her purse.
If low she might discover her career is in a hearse.
The ideal teacher's wallet
Is empty or padded
Depending on value
Deducted or added.

The new ideal teacher
Does not plan her lessons.
Her classes are all pre-
Fab learning-gains sessions.
Today is lesson thirty-seven; tomorrow's thirty-eight.
Page by page the pacing guide ensures she won't run late,
Just like the teacher down the hall and in some other state.
Original thought
She's been taught
To self-censor.
She pops lessons out like big Pez dispenser.

The new ideal teacher
Doesn't question or query.
She does as she's told;
She's compliant and cheery.
When someone says, "It's best for kids!" she'll never even blink.
When she is told her pay's been cut, her spirits never sink.
When buried under new reforms, she'll never raise a stink.
She'll teach critical thinking
From a book off the shelf,
But she never would think
She might think for herself.

The new ideal teacher
Can prioritize:
She puts first things first,
And she won't compromise.
Good test scores are number one; they lead to higher pay,
Which, of course, is number two-- more money makes her day.
Fidelity is third: give her a script; she'll never stray.
The new ideal teacher
Is stalwart and steadfast.
The system comes first,
So her students come dead last.

The Real Mr. Fitz

Tonight At 7pm(PST) TFT Interviews Michael Butz

Tonight at 7pm (pst) is the big show. This has been in the works a loooong time.

Getting Mike to do the show took nearly a year. Why? He didn't like me, at first. I was mean.

But after sharing some killer music with him after finding out we had similar tastes, he softened and acquiesced.

There a number of us who seem to dominate Students First's Facebook page, and this show is really an opportunity for all of us to hear each others voices. My hope is that a few of them will call in and participate. Folks like Eileen, Jane, Diane, Sahila, Jon, Neil, Stu, Bronx, Michelle, Mafara, Hari and a few I am forgetting.

Charter Schools As Answer Misses The Question

Charter Schools Not the Answer, Especially if We Fail to Identify the Question

One pattern of failure in education reform is that political leadership and the public focus attention and resources on solutions while rarely asking what problems we are addressing or how those solutions address identified problems. The current and possibly increasing advocacy of charter schools is a perfect example of that flawed approach to improving our schools across the U.S.

Let’s start with two clarifications.

First, the overwhelming problems contributing to school quality are pockets of poverty across the country and school policies and practices mirroring and increasing social inequities for children once they enter many schools.

Children who live under the weight of poverty attend buildings in disrepair, sit in classrooms with inexperienced and un-/under-qualified teachers, and suffer through endless scripted instruction designed to raise their test scores. Citizens of a democracy share the responsibility for eradicating both the out-of-school and in-school failures often reflected in data associated with our public schools.

Then, what is a charter school and should any state increase resources allocated to charter schools, and in effect, away from public schools?

Staring with Problems, not Solutions

Charter schools are public schools that function under agreements, charters, that allow those schools to function in some ways without the constraints placed on public schools.

Here, we must acknowledge that if charter schools are a viable solution to the serious problems I have identified above, a much more direct approach would be simply to allow all public schools to function without the restraints we know to be impacting negatively their ability to produce strong educational outcomes.

If innovation and autonomy are valuable for educational reform, then all public schools deserve those opportunities.

Powerful evidence that committing to charter schools is inefficient rests in the research that shows charter schools, private schools, and public schools have essentially the same academic outcomes when the populations of students served are held constant.

In his ongoing analysis of educational research, Matthew DiCarlo explains:

“[T]here is a fairly well-developed body of evidence showing that charter and regular public schools vary widely in their impacts on achievement growth. This research finds that, on the whole, there is usually not much of a difference between them, and when there are differences, they tend to be very modest. In other words, there is nothing about ‘charterness’ that leads to strong results.”

In other words, when schools succeed—which many public, private, and charter schools do—the success appears to have little to do with the type of school. The practices in any of these models can be replicated in any of the other models, but even then, scaling up or replicating what works in Public School A may not come to fruition in Charter School B.

The evidence, then, suggests that all states should avoid investing time and allocating tax dollars to charter schools, particularly when those commitments detract from addressing known problems in our public schools.

But there are additional red flags that should be considered about the charter school movement, cautions that are even more alarming:

• While charter schools across the U.S. are serving high-poverty and minority populations, charter schools tend to under-serve English language learners and students with special needs—two of the most challenging populations facing public schools. If our experiments with charter schools include ignoring populations at the heart of public school challenges, then the experiments are a failure from the start.

• The charter school movement is re-segregating public schools. This is the most disturbing fact of the charter school movement. Children of color and children living in poverty are disproportionately being isolated in charter schools that are without racial or socioeconomic diversity.

• Since charter schools create some degree of open enrollment, they create transient populations of students, thus producing data that are less valuable for mining policies and practices to address the problems facing neighborhood public schools.

• Charter schools have the power to manipulate the population of students served only because public schools must serve the students once they leave those charter schools. Public schools never have, and shouldn’t have, the power to reject students beyond expulsion.

Many states appear committed, then, to contradictory policies: Increasing charter schools and thus their autonomy while decreasing public school autonomy within an accountability system that prescribes curriculum and expands the testing regime.

Charter schools in theory represent a belief in innovation, experimentation, and school autonomy. If these qualities are valuable and if they can address the out-of-school and in-school causes of educational outcomes, then we simply need to allocate funding and policies to insure that our public schools are afforded the same, while also admitting that we have no evidence that a school type—pubic, charter, or private—insures the outcomes we seek.

Recommended Resources

Baker, B.D. & Ferris, R. (2011). Adding up the spending: Fiscal disparities and philanthropy among New York City charter schools. Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center. Retrieved from http://nepc.colorado.edu/...

One contradiction of charter school advocacy is the claim that funding doesn't matter or is excessive at the public school level, but that many charter schools benefit from private donations or funding in addition to accepting tax dollars for running those charter schools. This study raises cautions about the wide variety of funding found in New York city charter schools. The authors warn about making careless comparisons and assuming that any charter schools are scalable as reform templates for public education reform.

Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO). (2009, June). Multiple choice: Charter school performance in 16 states. Stanford, CA: Center for Research on Education Outcomes. Retrieved from http://credo.stanford.edu/...

This comprehensive study of charter schools, though not without controversy, presents a solid picture of the range of quality found in any education format. Charter schools appear to have about 17% high achieving, 46% average, and 37% low achieving characteristics when compared to public schools. This data help place in context claims of “high flying” charter schools as all or even most charter schools, but the study does not address key issues such as the ideology and practices of those schools.

Frankenberg, E., Siegel-Hawley, G., & Wang, J. (2011) Choice without equity: Charter school segregation. Educational Policy Analysis Archives, 19(1). Retrieved from http://epaa.asu.edu/...

We often fail to recognize the negative consequences of choice, but the charter school movement is exposing those consequences. This study concludes that charter schools "currently isolate students by race and class" and that charter schools may tend to under-serve English language learners and the extreme low end of poverty.

Fuller, E. (2011, April 25). Characteristics of students enrolling in high-performing charter high schools. A "Fuller" Look at Education Issues [blog]. Retrieved from http://fullerlook.wordpress.com/...

The choice dynamic of charter schools necessarily creates a student population unlike the community-based traditional public schools. In order to understand if and how charter schools in fact provide some evidence for reforming public schools, the populations of charters schools must be fully examined and understood. Fuller begins to examine the characteristics of students in charter schools labelled "high-performing" and identifies many disparities including special education students served, achievement characteristics among high-poverty students in both charter and public schools, and at-risk students, concluding: "This suggests that HP charter high schools do not serve the same types of students as the regular neighborhood schools. Now, granted, the HP charter high schools do enroll a greater percentage of students participating in the free- and reduced-price lunch program and in the free lunch program, but these economically disadvantaged students are not the same as the economically disadvantaged students in the regular neighborhood schools!"

Garcia, D. (2011). Review of “Going Exponential: Growing the Charter School Sector’s Best.” Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center. Retrieved from http://nepc.colorado.edu/....

Garcia debunks think tank advocacy for expanding rapidly charter schools. This review is important for remaining skeptical about charter schools and for continuing to be vigilant about distinguishing between advocacy dressed as research and credible conclusions drawn from scholarship and research.

Miron, G. (2011). Review of “Charter Schools: A Report on Rethinking the Federal Role in Education.” Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center. Retrieved from http://nepc.colorado.edu/....

Miron presents a mixed view of a report from the Brown Center on Education Policy of the Brookings Institution. The Brown Center report represents a growing endorsement of a federal role in promoting the expansion of charter schools. Miron argues for a tempered position on expanding charter schools and for using this report as just one initial piece of evidence in forming policy.

Miron, G. & Urschel, J.L. (2010). Equal or fair? A study of revenues and expenditure in American charter schools. Boulder and Tempe: Education and the Public Interest Center & Education Policy Research Unit. Retrieved from http://epicpolicy.org/...

Funding and how funding is distributed lie at the center of much of the charter school and public school reform debates. This study details the complexity of how charter schools are funding and how that compares to public school funding. Key in this study is a call for more research on charter funding along with greater and fuller disclosure of charter funding, since charter schools tend to receive less per-pupil funding that public school but additional private funding that is not disclosed. As well, public schools remain likely to offer services that charters do not provide, distorting further any comparisons of funding equity.

Miron, G., Urschel, J. L., Mathis, W, J., & Tornquist, E. (2010). Schools without Diversity: Education management organizations, charter schools and the demographic stratification of the American school system. Boulder and Tempe: Education and the Public Interest Center & Education Policy Research Unit. Retrieved from http://epicpolicy.org/...

This study draws a disturbing pattern being uncovered about the charter school movement: "The analysis found that, as compared with the public school district in which the charter school resided, the charter schools were substantially more segregated by race, wealth, disabling condition, and language."

Miron, G., Urschel, J. L., & Saxton, N. (2011, March). What makes KIPP work?: A study of student characteristics, attrition, and school finance. Teachers College, Columbia University. National Center for the Study of Privatization in Education. Retrieved from http://www.ncspe.org/...

Focusing on inputs instead of student outcomes, this study examines KIPP schools and finds that KIPP schools do enroll high-poverty student but under-serve special needs students and English language learners. The study also raises questions about student attrition and about the apparent inequity in funding that KIPP schools receive when all funding is examined, totaling about $6500 more per pupil than public schools in the area. Combined, this evidence challenges the KIPP model as scalable.

Ravtich, D. (2010, November 11). The myth of charter schools. The New York Review of Books. Retrieved from http://www.nybooks.com/...

Ravitch's scholarly commentary is important because of her credibility as a scholar and historian along with her recent shift in positions concerning accountability/testing and school choice. This detailed discussion confronts the media-driven claims of "miracle" charter schools.

Schools Matter

Education Reform - or "The Kudzu That Is Eating Congress"

Kudzu, noun: a plant with a weak stem that derives support from climbing over trees or shrubs and grows so rapidly that it kills them by heavy shading.

Two years ago StudentsFirst didn't exist. I chose to start my conversation with that event because, in my mind, it is the watershed moment that marks the roll out of the newest phase in a long running plan for the hostile corporate takeover and privatization of public schools. In those two short years, the framers of the "reform movement," like the kudzu infestations, have accomplished much.

For example, reformers have effectively enraged the public sensibilities to the point of a near riot about the need for reform. In the process reformers have shaded and blocked out the voice of opposition from most all venues of public forum. Reformers have been most effective in vilifying their imaginary but enormously huge fantasy cabal of "bad teachers" as being the sole cause for every problem in education (really?). And no sooner did the reformers have their mob chanting "Bad Teachers, Bad Teachers" loud enough and were satisfied that phase one of the takeover was complete (teachers were now accepted in the court of public opinion as being "the problem,") it was time to begin phase two.

In phase two, the "reformers" were quick at the ready to offer their best (and only) solution. Their argument went something like this: "To insure every precious, innocent, defenseless child in America won't be 'left behind,' to wallow under the horrific and daemonic influence of the huge cabal of "bad teachers," we need the power to combat their overseer evil unions and remove the accounting practice of 'Last In - First Out' (LIFO) and, while we are at it, let's also eliminate teachers protections from arbitrary or capricious dismissal by eliminating the due process protections afforded by tenure (really?).

Naturally, a lot of folks looked at these proposals and thought they were a little bit wonky. How would removing LIFO and tenure help any child read better or understand mathematics more proficiently? From the reform camp, the counter to that question was this; “in removing all the legally negotiated and mutually accepted protections of LIFO and tenure, we can fire as much as the bottom 15% of teachers we want to every year and replace them with "great" teachers.” Oh, I see it now (kind of…).

OK. But how do we know who are good teachers and who are bad teachers? Always at the ready, reformers were quick to point out that “because the high stakes standardized test scores measure student learning, the high stakes standardized test scores must also measure teacher effectiveness.” “But,” folks countered, “research repeatedly demonstrates how high stakes standardized test scores vary wildly, are fraught with statistical anomalies and are widely understood to be unreliable metrics of teacher effectiveness.” "OK," said the reformers, "then we will look at individual student growth over time to discern teacher effectiveness." And so was born the reformers’ reliance on the model known as Value Added Measures, or VAM.

It must be pointed out at this point that the algorithm for VAM was developed by a geneticist to predict the percent outcome of a desired trait based on the influence of multiple factors such as environment or genetics. In other words, to reformers, learning is like the desired trait; kind of like plant height, and kids are like Soy Beans.

Hence, the crusade was on. Reformers trumpeted the value of VAM as being sound and, as many proclaimed, “Better than nothing” and the idea was soon attached to the reformers agenda as a rock-solid tool of wisdom. But, it must be said that nobody, especially politicians who LOVE VAM, can explain any of the factors that make up the equation or what it measures. Try it yourself by looking at the equation found in Michael Winerp's article in the New York Times. Personally I wonder which factor accounts for the influence of the ever growing student’s free will point decision of “I don’t give a rat’s ass about you or your flippin’ test.” I personally didn’t see any compensation for that in the equation.

But today’s modern reform movement is proving itself not to be about understanding what works and what doesn't work when educating kids. Modern education reform is not about looking at and championing all the influences that merge to create a successful learning experience for every child in every classroom every day. Modern education reform is about propagating an agenda whose end result is to grow over and dominate the educational landscape; to create an environment shaded from light and creativity where every teacher is at risk of being fired from every school every day; to become the dominant authority thereby choking out the very fertile and positive effective domain needed by teachers to imagine the best and create a safe and encouraging crucible so needed by kids to discover the very real joy of learning. Modern education reform is about legislating this agenda into law.

Don't believe me? Take a moment to follow the link and look at the latest piece of Federal Legislation to emerge from our Washington politicians. Read the following synopsis of the bill very carefully to see how much of the reformers agenda is reflected in the proposed legislation:

The DOE Would Like To Ruin Public Schools: The Proof (Updated)

This document, from your government, basically enshrines the notion that teachers should be evaluated based on the scores of their students, that teacher certification is for fools (hire TFA instead), and unions and job security are bad ideas. Thank your President, Barack Obama for hiring the idiot Arne Duncan whose work we see below. The definition of "douche-bag" is "Arne Duncan."

SUPPORTING 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.

Your Government

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.

The Truth About Arne, Rahm & Chicago

A Black Agenda Radio commentary by Glen Ford

Educational policy in the Obama era isn't about education at all. It's about replacing skilled, experienced teachers with rootless temps better suited to serve in the privatized holding tanks they wish to turn public schools in poor neighborhoods into, for a population on its way to low wage jobs and prisons.

...BlackAgendaReport 

 

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

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

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.

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

Teaching Is An Art (So Is Lawyering). VAM Can't Work: Updated

I came across a quote today from Sandra Day O'Connor:

"Attorney errors come in an infinite variety and are as likely to be
utterly harmless in a particular case as they are to be prejudicial. They
cannot be classified according to likelihood of causing prejudice. Nor can
they be defined with sufficient precision to inform defense attorneys
correctly just what conduct to avoid. Representation is an art, and an act
or omission that is unprofessional in one case may be sound or even
brilliant in another."

Yeah, teaching too. VAM can't work. It just can't.

Update: So I admit a friend and I are having an email exchange about this science vs. art thing. Here is why I say teaching --and lawyering and doctoring-- is more art than science:

Lawyers, doctors, teachers all have basic knowledge without which they
could not practice the art. These professions are art in the same way
jazz is art--it requires knowledge of music, but then you get to be
creative.

When 2 or 3 different people could perform the job differently and still
end up with a good expected outcome, that implies there is more than
science to it, there must be art.

My surgery required dumping my guts onto the table. I am sure there are
a few ways to do that and a few outcomes depending on the different
ways. I assume there is more than one good or bad way to do that.

Same with trying a case, or teaching a concept, or sewing up my gut.

Update II: Here is the rest of the email exchange. My friend, referred to below as "The Law" is a lawyer. I have summarized her emails to just the pertinent questions I am responding to.


TFT:

The science part of teaching is understanding how kids learn, not the subject matter (though in upper grades the subject matter knowledge is clearly crucial, but still it's not the sole science part). And, how kids learn varies, and science has a hard time pinning much down in this domain, leaving it to art and situational awareness that comes with practice.

Aren't the best trial lawyers performance artists as well as highly knowledgeable about precedents, torts, and whatever else you lawyers have to know about that you learn in law school and then promptly realize it wasn't all that helpful and the only way to get good at trial lawyering is to do it? And we measure trial lawyers by wins and losses, right? Not by their actual performance in the courtroom. Right? And surgeons are rated on survival rates, not on procedure, unless the outcome was bad, then procedures are looked at, right? All this sounds like teaching--we look at outcomes. Except that for teaching, like the family doctor, much of what they do is dependent on things they don't control--diet, homework, and the rest.

You can't measure art, really, can you? I mean, perhaps in the most rudimentary way--painters should use paint and understand something about form, shadow, line, and all that stuff (the science of the art), but one person's art is another person's garbage, right?

Art certainly isn't VAMable, I don't think.

Can we measure my progress by looking at (name redacted) [a middle class, white, gifted student who loved my class and was challenged, and who was tender to the Hispanic student. Sweet.]? Or should we look at (name redacted) [a Hispanic student whose father was in jail and was homeless off and on during the year and scored poorly but whose attitude towards life seemed to improve in my class], whose life was basically devastated from birth? [Middle class student] would have advanced without me. [Hispanic student] didn't advance much, but his sense of self I think got better in my class. Can we measure [Hispanic student]'s sense of self? I don't think so.

I think teaching is a lot like the 1984 case you write about--it's a judgement call reserved for those in charge--professional judgement. There is no standard we can measure against, so we have to measure against what the professionals have gleaned over their years as professionals practicing their art.

Perhaps my use of Art and Science are too broad, but I don't know how else to separate the 2 domains. I also think that there are fewer rules for teachers than other professions. It's more like a therapist than a doctor or lawyer. There are standards of care, policies about privacy and pedagogy (therapy) but each patient (class) is different and will be taught (therapized) differently. In both cases the professional is steeped in the science underpinning their profession, but the actual doing of it seems more like art--the thing the science-knowledge frees you to do.

How's that?

The Law:

Your first sentence answers one of my original questions, I wanted to know whether there was a science to the teaching, as opposed to the subject matter.

TFT:

VAM can't control for family attributes (SES). Of factors that impact a child's ability to learn (do well on a test, more accurately, which is NOT an accurate measure of the child's true ability), most knowledgeable folks say that between 10 and 30% of factors come from school, the rest come from home, as [made obvious] by [Hsp student] and [MC student], among others.

The test--the high stakes test at the end of the year--is what VAM uses. That fact alone makes VAM useless, as one test on one day does not accurately reflect much of anything about the teacher or the student. I suppose that if the whole class did incredibly well, or badly, one could generalize about the teacher. But that's obvious. It's when VAM is used to differentiate between teachers who, on the whole, are relatively similar. VAM does not have the power to do it--it's too prone to error. It is not a measure that can be used, as the variables can't be controlled like they can in industry by controlling inputs (materials/students).

Reformers would have you believe that there is a science to teaching (pedagogy) and charters have figured it out. And that's bullshit. Charters have figured out how to control inputs. There is no science of pedagogy, really. That's my argument--pedagogy is an art. Teaching is an art. Sure, it has some science behind it--brain development, motor development, some stable psychological concepts, but for the most part, it's art.

So, the reformers abuse science's power by giving it more than it deserves in this domain, and they belittle the art of teaching by scripting teachers with curricula that claim to be research based (science) when they aren't cuz there ain't no science they can actually point to, and the research is usually not actual research but a working paper from the publisher or a CMO funded meta-review. Remember, Everyday Math is "research based" but most mathematicians pillory it for its stupidity. It was pushed through after packing the board of the What Works Clearinghouse.

The actual research performed over the past 70 years shows, unequivocally, that home factors make or break a kid. Not teachers. Not schools. Not curricula. Home is where the issues are. And that is where poverty lives.

The reform movement uses bullshit disguised as science (the NYT article on that latest "study" being a perfect example). They can't acknowledge poverty because that would undercut their scheme that claims they know how to save kids with their new pedagogy that is in evidence in their charters that do well. Except few of them do, and the ones that do well control their inputs. Ask KIPP, Aspire, HCZ, HSA and the rest. They've all been in trouble for scheming the inputs.

How's that?

The Law:

Or is good teaching like pornography -- I know it when I see it?

TFT:

Yes. It's exactly like pornography--you know it when you see it. Seriously. Like your lawyer scenario. Porn, teaching, lawyering--non-VAMable.

Activists, educators and academics you should be aware of include:

Dr. Diane Ravitch
Dr. Deborah Meier
Dr. Stephen Krashen
Dr. Shaun Johnson
Anthony Cody
Leoni Haimson
Matt Damon
Jon Stewart
P.L. Thomas



Here are some links to experts. Some are a bit long, but you can and should do it!

--Richard Rothstein looks at An overemphasis on teachers

--and Rothstein again, with others:

Narrowing the Achievement Gap for Low-Income Children: A 19-Year Life Cycle Approach

By Richard Rothstein, Tamara Wilder and Whitney C. Allgood | 2008

--One and another by Jim Horn (of Cambridge College) on VAM.

This Is My Last Straw - Is It Yours Too?

By Dave Russell

As a teacher, I have sat and watched our children increasingly suffer needlessly as the life of the of the school day has been systematically suffocated to the pallor of a deathly grey. The gauntlet of NCLB has morphed into the scourge of the corporate take-over model which spawned a full on attack warrior in the form of Michelle Rhee and her "resistance is futile" lobby group, StudentsFirst. My blood boils every time she rolls out a new Madison Avenue savvy propaganda smear or full court press media blitz designed to further the Oligarch's planned agenda for education takeover, uh...I mean "reform."

As my anger and frustration has grown, nothing has enraged me to the boiling point more than the recent publicity buzz flying around the paper authored by Economists Raj Chetty and John N. Friedman of Harvard and Jonah E. Rockoff of Columbia. In this 92 page report, these economic experts claim to have tracked 2.5 million students over 20 years concluding that the kids with improving test scores had lower teen-pregnancy rates and higher college-enrollment rates than their peers. They also had higher earnings, lived in better neighborhoods, and even saved more for retirement. In a front page article about the paper, The New York Times concludes “test scores help you get more education, and that more education has an earnings effect" (how's that again...test sores do what now?).

It's not too surprising that nobody was quicker to pick up on this paper and trumpet the message from this cherry bit of propaganda than Michelle Rhee and the merry Jesters at StudentsFirst! The ballyhoo from StudentsFirst is as predictable as clockwork! Some kluged report jukes the data to develop erroneous conclusions that dance right into the laps of the Rhee/Duncan/Gates Cabal of reformists and BAM! it happens; you place the stick in their hand, they will bang the drum.

This report is hogwash and StudentsFirst should be ashamed for publicizing it. The authors admit that their conclusions are extrapolated from stale data that was gathered in bulk (not for individuals as the summary leaves readers to believe), run through an analysis tool that is so fraught with statistical noise (individual and often conflicting point-source influence on outcome) that their only conclusion --there is far too much noise to disaggregate (take apart) the most reasonable conclusion-- is that teacher quality HAS to be the driving force for the very gains that they couldn't actually track because it was stale and gathered, after all, in bulk. WTF?

But honesty and integrity are not the norm, nor are they qualities valued by this Reformers' Cabal. Instead, truth is denied, facts are skewed, research (real research - not this 5 and dime tinker-toy variety) is overlooked, and professionals at all levels across the nation are ignored and besmirched.

The agenda of StudentsFirst is to use well crafted rhetoric, propaganda and deceptive practices to create false hysteria, create mythic villains in teachers and unions, project horrific consequences should the fabricated travesty be allowed to continue unchecked, and then (wait for it!) charge in like the Knights in Shining Armor they believe themselves to be, carrying their Shield of Righteous Purpose, picture perfect, jiffy-tailored solution that not only sounds good and gives that ever so needed cozy-snugly feel of good satisfaction, but is hawked and carnival barked as the only effective, critical, and urgent fix, and to not support it dooms he world as we know it to inevitable implosion. By God! reading their agenda you would think StudentsFirst is single-handedly saving every child in every classroom every day from a hideous ordeal in the slash & burn world of the indifferent, self-important, selfish, ineffective teacher!

All StudentsFirst is interested in is changing the game so the new power brokers can continue to coerce states and districts into adopting unproven agendas such that expensive teachers can be arbitrarily, capriciously, and summarily tossed onto the curb like so much rubbish only to be replaced by unproven, untrained, two-year commit-me-not ivy-league Slam-Bam-Thank You Ma'amers.

And all this hinges on some snake oil smoke & mirrors algorithm called Value Added Analysis, which in and of itself hinges on students passing a test nobody has ever seen, nobody has ever ensured is aligned to the hundreds of varied curricula and texts, and not fact checked for accuracy or cognitive appropriateness. It is taken on faith by StudentsFirst and the rest of the Rhee/Duncan/Gates Cabal of reformists that the ENTIRE machine that sets the standards, writes the curriculum, formulates the textbooks, writes the tests, scores the tests is SO seamlessly perfect that all children, regardless of socioeconomic status, family (dis)function, language abilities, learning difficulties, or desire to participate, will excel if it weren't for the incredible prevalence of those damned ineffective teachers.

The most aggravating aspect of the agenda water-boarding perpetrated by the whole Rhee/Duncan/Gates Cabal of reformists is that the American public is either too drunk on their cool-aid, too stupid to understand the realities, or too apathetic to do anything but allow their children to be willingly led to the intellectual slaughter.

Too harsh you say? Ask any child in Florida or anywhere else in America how excited they are to come to school. Ask them how relevant the curriculum is to their lives. Ask them when the last time it was that they engaged in test prep - and for how long. Ask them why they even take the test. Ask them if they feel like the institution is encouraging them to live, learn, and grow according to their (student centric) needs as 21st century learners. You want harsh? Listen to these kids rail on the Bull Shit that is the result of decade of reforms designed by a Cabal of reformists who think that the best way to solve our problems is to use a white-hot blowtorch approach to intensifying the same thinking that created the problems in the first place.

To all the members of the Rhee/Duncan/Gates Cabal of reformists and to Race to the Top as well, you can kiss my ass and the collective asses of kids all across America!

Why Does The Public Have So Little Faith In Teachers?

This is a comment by Dave Russell over at the SF FB page:

Michael - with all due respect, I have been following Rhee and her commentary from the launch and seeing first hand how her rhetoric and propaganda has been delivered to and received by the public. I have had scores of people talk to me about their perceptions of teachers and education. Soon after Rhee launched StudentsFirst, the flavor of the discussions changed with people I know becoming more embittered to teachers and naming them as the sole reason why American students are 20-whatever in the world. Nearly overnight I became a part of this ambiguous "status quo" and someone who has wrecked budgets and damaged kids because I am a member of a union. Nearly to the person, I heard word for word the same rhetoric and propaganda, nearly word for word, Rhee spouted on her national TV talk media launch blitz.

I wrote the following: " The reason why STEM teachers aren't jumping the broom is because (as we predicted) the smear campaign of StudentsFirst and other reformers against teachers and the institution as a whole has left a PR image of education as a cesspool of angry ineffective cronies who dance at the strings of unions and care nothing about kids or their learning or well being."

I believe if you objectively read the following posts from the standpoint of someone trying to evaluate the profession and determining a career choice/change, the following passages from Rhee blogs reinforce my point that StudentsFirst and other reformers have left a PR image of education as a cesspool and that the tone of these posts is not flattering, inviting and effectively paints the institution in a totally negative light fraught with insurmountable problems that only Rhee can champion and fix:

"Still, I could have done a better job of communicating. I did a particularly bad job letting the many good teachers know that I considered them to be the most important part of the equation. I totally fell down on doing that. As a result, my comments about ineffective teachers were often perceived as an attack on all teachers." "Some people believed I had disdain for the public. It’s not that I wasn’t listening; I just didn’t agree and went in a different direction. There’s no way you can please everyone." "The U.S. is currently 21st, 23rd, and 25th among 30 developed nations in science, reading, and math, respectively. The public-employee unions in D.C., including the teachers’ union, spent huge sums of money to defeat Fenty. The focus remains on what jobs, contracts, and departments are getting which cuts, additions, or changes. The rationale for the decisions mostly rests on which grown-ups will be affected, instead of what will benefit or harm children. The purpose of the teachers’ union is to protect the privileges, priorities, and pay of their members. And they’re doing a great job of that. Conflict was necessary in order to move the agenda forward. There are some fundamental disagreements that exist right now about what kind of progress is possible and what strategies will be most effective. Right now, what we need to do is fight." 12/6/10 Newsweek.

"Ultimately, a great teacher is someone who gets results. If two students with similar backgrounds go to similar schools and take similar classes, and one of those students outperforms the other, it might seem fair to say that that student had a better teacher."

"We will fight to get rid of these bad policies and practices so that every child has an excellent teacher in his or her classroom."

"Challenge the status quo to always push for the right priorities, "

"I’m sure you hate it when your child gets an ineffective teacher, and you probably wonder why that teacher is still in the classroom. Often your school leaders feel the same way, but they usually don’t have full power to choose their workers. Second, some of the silent issues that never get talked about are eating away at your schools’ ability to be effective, like a trend toward central district bureaucracy."

"In the book version of Waiting for “Superman”, Michelle describes one overcrowded high school class where kids not even enrolled showed up every day because they felt this teacher offered them the best opportunity to learn, even though some of them would get no credit for the course."

"If we were to grade the academic performance of the world’s industrialized economies, Singapore, South Korea, and now Shanghai would get an A — the United States would get a C, at best, and in math we'd get an F.Background or socioeconomic status, while influential, is not the determining factor in how well a student can perform. And as I discussed in a blog post yesterday, great teaching can overcome the circumstances that put our kids behind those of other world powers.The bottom line: We need to fight to transform our underperforming education system, overcome the vested interests that stand in the way of progress, and work to ensure that our kids have the best schools in the world."
--------The clear implication and takeaway by the public is that the poor performance on the PISA is because of a lack of "great teachers."

"This week Mayor Villaraigosa called the LA Teachers’ Union to task for obstructing reform by defending an unacceptable status quo in the Los Angeles Public Schools. I’ve never been of the mind that unions shouldn’t exist. I was in one when I was a teacher, and I believe they can play a role in reform by compromising with the newly backed interests (like StudentsFirst) who are representing children. "

"Michelle gets to the heart of how the needs of teachers’ unions and students don't always align, and why America needs a strong counterweight to the special interest groups that have long dictated education policy."

"StudentsFirst scored its first Newsmaker interview to help explain the new study that finds a link between good teachers and good student test scores. Why should you care? StudentsFirst and other reform groups believe a significant part of a teacher’s evaluation should be based on how his or her students demonstrate progress on tests and this study seems to support that practice."