The Blame Game

. . . .WHEN we don’t get the results we want in our military endeavors, we don’t blame the soldiers. We don’t say, “It’s these lazy soldiers and their bloated benefits plans! That’s why we haven’t done better in Afghanistan!” No, if the results aren’t there, we blame the planners. We blame the generals, the secretary of defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff. No one contemplates blaming the men and women fighting every day in the trenches for little pay and scant recognition.

And yet in education we do just that. When we don’t like the way our students score on international standardized tests, we blame the teachers. When we don’t like the way particular schools perform, we blame the teachers and restrict their resources.

Schools Matter

Waiting For Superman: As Important As Rosa Parks (Bad Analogy?)

Arne Duncan is an amazing guy. He graduated Harvard saying things like "incent" and thinks he taught school because his mom had a study-room in her basement. Now Arne is comparing the propagandizing movie "Waiting For Superman" with civil rights hero Rosa Parks. Jim Horn explains why the analogy doesn't work:

Calling it a "Rosa Parks moment," U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan put a momentous stamp on the upcoming release of Davis Guggenheim's education-reform documentary "Waiting for Superman."

I can think of a couple of ways that this feature-length marketing tool for Eli Broad is not a Rosa Parks moment. First, the person taking the big risk of defying the racist policy that would put black people at the back of the bus was a black person--Rosa Parks. Who is risking what in this present charade crusade? Well, some philanthro-capitalists are risking many millions of dollars, some would say, even though 33 cents on every dollar invested is given back in tax credits. The payoffs could be astronomical, too, if the charterites prevail and end up replacing public schools in urban areas. But Bill Gates or Eli Broad will never go to jail for their efforts or have their livelihoods or lives put in jeopardy.

Another difference between Rosa Parks and the Walton Foundation (it's too absurd a juxtaposition to even be funny) is that Rosa Parks actually had the support of the civil rights community behind her. In the present instance that Arne thinks is a "Rosa Parks moment," the following organizations have offered withering criticism of Arne's Blueprint:

Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights under Law
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)
NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc.
National Council for Educating Black Children
National Urban League
Rainbow PUSH Coalition
Schott Foundation for Public Education

From Jim Horn

Quote Of The Day: Civil Rights = Oppression

If Arne Duncan’s views on equality are evidenced in his actions, it leaves us with a troubling realization. For to understand that for Mr. Duncan to be right in saying that “education is the civil rights issue of this generation,” we must stand shamefaced in admitting that civil rights now demands from equality what we previously could expect only from oppression.

Jim Horn

Jim Horn Resurrects Gerald Bracey

Jim Horn reminds us how completely vacuous the reformers are:

[Gerald Bracey said in 2007:]

All those august organizations have rejected the NAEP achievement levels because the process is confusing to the people who try to set the levels and because the results are inconsistent: Children can't answer questions they should be able to and can answer questions they shouldn't be able to. The levels also give what the National Academy of Sciences called "unreasonable" results, including the fact that only 29 percent of U.S. fourth-graders were considered proficient or better by NAEP, yet America ranked third among 26 participating nations.

Other evidence is easy to come by. In 2000, 2.7 percent of American high school seniors scored 3 or better -- the score at which colleges begin to grant credit for the course -- on Advanced Placement calculus. Almost 8 percent of seniors (including those who did not take the test) scored above 600 on the math SAT; nearly a quarter (24 percent) of those who took it scored over 600. Yet NAEP said that only 1.5 percent of the nation's seniors reached its "advanced" level.

So why does the government continue to report such misleading information? The "Leaders and Laggards" report illustrates why: The numbers are useful as scare techniques. If you can batter people into believing the schools are in awful shape, you can make them anxious about their future -- and you can control them.

Apparently Test Scores No Longer Matter. WTF?

From Jim Horn:

...Which is what happened on May 5, as the New York Times published an op-ed by racialist charter advocate and co-author of The Bell Curve, Charles Murray, who now declares that the real reason that parents should advocate for charters and vouchers should have nothing to do with test scores anymore, test scores that are made irrelevant by the facts based on factors beyond the school—and, no, he’s not talking about poverty:

Cognitive ability, personality and motivation come mostly from home. What happens in the classroom can have some effect, but smart and motivated children will tend to learn to read and do math even with poor instruction, while not-so-smart or unmotivated children will often have trouble with those subjects despite excellent instruction. If test scores in reading and math are the measure, a good school just doesn’t have that much room to prove it is better than a lesser school.

So, then, if the good voucher schools of Milwaukee or the good charter schools of the U.S. are made bad by “cognitive ability, personality, and motivation [that] come mostly from home,” then it is not the fault of the good voucher and charter schools, which remain good, according to Murray, even as we stock them with urban students of defective cognitive ability, personality, and motivation. Apparently it is not the fault of perfectly good medicine that the unresponsive patients remain ill. (Note that the terms “poor” or “poverty” are unmentioned in the Murray op-ed).

The real reason for parents to choose charter schools, Murray argues, is that they offer a choice of “highly traditional curriculum long on history, science, foreign languages, classic literature, mathematics and English composition, taught with structure and discipline.” Aside from the total compliance “structure and discipline” that would make the “best” urban charters entirely unacceptable to middle class parents in the leafy suburbs, the kind of curriculum-rich charter school that Murray describes is even harder to find in poor neighborhoods than the 17 percent of charters that simply do a better job at raising student test scores...

Read the whole thing at the link.

Bill (Microsoft) Gates Lies And Gets Away With It

Jim Horn catches Bill Gates in a common lie the oligarchs like to spread about KIPP and graduation rates. Is there any reason to listen to Gates? Not that I can tell.

So Gates has upped the ante on the lie that Jonathan Alter wrote in Newsweek in 2008 about 80 percent of 16,000 KIPP students going to college. What Caroline Grannan found out from KIPP, Inc.'s home office at that time is that only 447 KIPPsters had entered college when Alter wrote that lie. And now Gates's figure of 95% going to college. Pure fabrication. Does the Harvard Gazette bother to fact check public education's greatest philanthropic enemy? With such a wad of money stolen from the American treasury ready to shape the world in a perfectly white dweeby image, who can doubt him?

More at the link.

Crist Vetoes SB 6

Governor Charlie Crist has vetoed SB 6.  Jim Horn has the details.

Harvard Educated Educators On Harvard's Education Of Educators

No link to the letter, so I posted Jim Horn's entire post.

Calling Out Harvard's Graduate School of Education
Below is an open letter from three classroom teachers to the Harvard Graduate School of Education, which has justly earned its current reputation as institutionally allied with the anti-democratic, corporate deformation of public schools and the continued undermining of public education in general. (ht to Monty Neill)

AN OPEN LETTER

TO THE ADMINISTRATION FACULTY

OF THE HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION

- JANUARY 4, 2010 -

THREE CLASSROOM TEACHERS ASK YOU TO SPEAK OUT

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

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

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

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

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

These issues include:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The time for Veritas is now.

Thank you.

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

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

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

larindge@aol.com

ohalloran.ann@verizon.net

schech@rcn.com

The Re-Segregation Is Almost Complete; Viva Revolution!!

Jim Horn over at Schools Matter is concerned about the re-segregation the charter movement (and by extension, due to the inability of the press to report anything real, the great, unwashed masses and our elected officials) seems to embrace.  We They are sowing the seeds of revolution--a revolution that they will be on the losing end of; the Have-nots have more people now than ever.

This new corporate system of penal pedagogy, enabled by spineless and corrupt pols who don't [give] a shit about the poor, or the children of the poor, represents the squalid end of the path of least resistance for a society blinded by greed, the culmination of a generational malignant neglect of the principles of justice and social justice, thus assuring the acquiescence to a policy of segregation, containment, and constant surveillance that is worse than segregation during Jim Crow. At least then the black teachers in the apartheid schools were professionals who had the children's best interest in mind, rather than the de-certified ragtime corps of white female corporate missionaries intent upon a few years of do-gooderism before law school or breeding.

Unless this corporatization of American urban education is turned back by a society that now seems intent upon ignoring it, we will have successfully planted the certain seeds of violent revolution, or worse, the kind of terrorism that, heretofore, we have had to look abroad to war against. Any economic system that, in the end, must feed upon its own children to survive, is doomed, as it should be. Just as any political system that enables such atrocities to occur surely deserves the same end.

Michelle Rhee: Worse Than The Pope?

Sex scandals are common. Here we have one involving the mayor of Sacramento, Kevin "KJ" Johnson, a teenage girl, and Michelle Rhee doing damage control for her beau, KJ. Where are the grown-ups?

From Jim Horn:

And somewhere between misappropriation of federal funds and the sadistic boot camps and the improper sexual physical conduct, Kevin [Johnson] and Michelle [Rhee] fell in love, so much so that Michelle became chair of damage control for Kevin, even as the plan to bring St. Hope to DC went off the rails. Kevin ended up paying back $400,000, no criminal charges were filed, Keven became mayor of Sacramento, and the Obama Administration fired Walpin, the IG who wrote the criminal referral on Kevin, who, by the way, is a round ball bud of the President. Cozy.

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.

From The Mouth Of A Test Scorer...

From Schools Matter comes this from an experienced scorer:

We'd have to score enough student essays accurately during a training session to prove we could do the job in a standardized way, a process that allowed the testing company that hired us to claim just how capable, consistent, and qualified its employees were.

It was a nerve-racking experience to know our jobs hinged on those "qualifying" tests, but in the end we part-timers needn't have worried so much.

After two days of training, nearly half the 100 people applying for the job failed the tests and were fired. Our unemployment lasted only about 12 hours. The next morning nearly every one of us flunkies was hired right back, an employment rebirth that occurred just as soon as the testing company realized it was short on personnel.

I asked the HR representative about the 70 percent accuracy on the qualifying test we were required to get in order to keep the job. To which she informed me that they had decided 60 percent was good enough after all.

Go read the rest at the link.

UC Against Privatization Of Public Education, Plan Walkout

UC Faculty Walkout - September 24
In solidarity with students and staff
In defense of public education in California

Under the cover of the summer months, UC administration has pushed through a program of tuition hikes, enrollment cuts, layoffs, furloughs, and increased class sizes that harms students and jeopardizes the livelihoods of the most vulnerable university employees. These decisions fundamentally compromise the mission of the University of California. They are complicit with the privatization of public education, and they have been made in a manner that flouts the principle of shared governance at the core of the UC faculty's capacity to guide the future of the University in accordance with its mission.

On September 24, in solidarity with UC staff and students, faculty throughout the University of California system will walk out in defense of public education.

Please indicate your support using the signature form at the top of this page.

Organizational questions: ucfacultywalkout@gmail.com

Join the Facebook group.

Follow updates on our blog.

Teachers next? Yes we can?

h/t Schools Matter

Arne Duncan Gets An "F"

As long as those in charge keep taking on what they cannot (like ending poverty, which is the ONLY way to FIX public education), schools, students, parents and teachers will continue to be forced to act as guinea pigs for educapitalists in service of their desire to make lots of money off of the impoverished.

As Chicago's Urban Children Are Shot and Killed, Duncan Gives Himself and F and Calls for More School Hours

In a video clip from the Chicago Sun-Times, Arne Duncan shows why the "F" he gives himself for not protecting schoolchildren must stand for "Fool." As reporters probe for what ED might do stem the child murder epidemic in impoversished inner cities, Duncan cannot, does not, even mention the conditions of life with which these urban poverty victims must contend as they dodge bullets (or take them) on their way to school, where they are expected by Mr. Duncan and Obama (No Excuses!) to function like children in the leafy suburbs who have routes to school that don't include special markers where children have been shot down coming and going to their crumbling classrooms.

As you watch the video clip, please note the sad idiot calling for schools to remain open more days and hours, as if more trips to school would somehow reduce, instead of increase, the likelihood of being shot down in the rotting neighborhoods that these children must traverse in order to attend school. Here is the link to the Sun-Times story.

Corporate Culture At School

Jim Horn exposes the corporate mindset of charters like KIPP, programs like TFA, and also every staff meeting I've ever attended:

. . . . The driving ideology of corporate culture is a blind faith in the power and virtue of the corporate collective. All quotas can be met. All things are possible. Profits can always be raised. It is only a question of the right attitude. The highest form of personal happiness, we are told, is when the corporation thrives. Corporate retreats are built around this idea of merging the self with the corporate collective. They often have the feel of a religious revival. They are designed to whip up emotions. Office managers and sales staffs are given inspirational talks by sports stars, retired military commanders, billionaires and self-help specialists like Tony Robbins who tell them, in essence, the impossible is always possible. And when this proves not to be true it is we who are the problem. We simply have to try harder.

The belief that by thinking about things, by visualizing them, by wanting them, we can make them happen is magical thinking. The purpose, structure and goals of the corporation can never be questioned. To question, to engage in criticism of the corporate collective, is to be obstructive and negative. We can always make more money, meet new quotas and advance our career if we have enough faith. This magical thinking is largely responsible for our economic collapse since any Cassandra who saw it coming was dismissed as "negative." This childish belief discredits legitimate concerns and anxieties. It exacerbates despair and passivity. It fosters a state of self-delusion. And it has perverted the way we think about the nation and ourselves...

Now go read the rest at Schools Matter.

Apartheid Schooling: Education Reform's Goal Reached!

Editorial: The Reagan Legacy and the Obama Agenda, or A Race at Risk
Jim Horn - July 28, 2009

Soon after Ronald Reagan came to Washington, he began wondering aloud in prepared speeches if the push for civil rights had damaged American institutions such as schools during the previous two decades. In 1983, the year of A Nation at Risk, came this: “The schools were charged by the federal courts in the correcting of long-standing injustices in our society—racial segregation, sex discrimination, lack of opportunity for the handicapped. Perhaps there was just too much to do in too little time.” As William Raspberry noted in 2004, it was not a coincidence that Reagan chose, in 1980, to announce his presidential campaign embracing “states rights” in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964. The symbolism could not have been mistaken.

A year after Reagan’s 1983 speech and the accompanying doom and gloom projections of A Nation at Risk came the Supreme Court decision in Milliken v Bradley, which struck down the inter-district busing plan that was put in place to achieve desegregation of Detroit schools. By 1986 school integration had peaked in the
U. S. and resegregation of schools had begun, with school integration from that point forward on a steady march backwards—a march that remains unchecked today, as resegregation and apartheid schooling have become the silent, unquestioned norms across America. And so the push for equality in education that the Civil Rights Movement spawned became displaced by the reemergence of market-based cult of efficiency in education. Inspired by white racism and corporatism, the new get-tough reform agenda introduced a sea change that overnight made the prospect of “educationally excellent and economically poor” even more of a statistical oddity than it had ever been before.

And so it was that the accountability through high stakes testing that took hold in the Reagan Era helped solidify the return to apartheid schooling, since test scores then and now were and are as predictable, as Alfie Kohn has pointed out, as the sizes of the houses in the neighborhoods where the tested children live.

With no one wanting to buy a home in a neighborhood with low-scoring schools and the constant threat of school closure now under NCLB, the segregation of the poor has taken on new urgency as schools and communities seek to shed the poor who bring test failure with them to any school they attend.

Ostensibly to raise test scores in these resegregated schools for the urban poor, there has emerged a curriculum caste system based predictably, once more, on family income and wealth. In most of the poor, the brown, and the black schools of America, children are targeted victims of an anti-cultural, low-level regimen of test prep and regurgitation of facts—the bulimic curriculum, if you will.

In the middle class leafy suburbs, however, children are engaged as they always have been in minds-on and hands-on projects that stimulate creativity and problem solving. It is a higher-order thinking curriculum, as opposed to an anti-thinking one, with those who have always been at the top of the race now deciding once more the rules for the new “Race to the Top.”

We might have expected something to be done about these crimes against poor children when a young African-American President came to Washington. Though it is still early in the Obama Administration for sure, it is not too early to see clearly and tragically that the policies that Mr. Obama and Mr. Duncan are embracing will only accelerate the resegregation of American schools, while deepening of divisions within the curriculum caste system that high stakes testing enables and encourages. And while Mr. Duncan is to be credited for his tireless PR tour aimed at generating excitement about the $4.35 billion in lubrication for the various state vehicles in the new “Race to the Top,” those willing to say already know who is going to win that race.

The winners will not be urban poor children, who will be further segregated now in the corporate charter schools that will be seeded and nurtured from the $4.35 billion. Where poor parents heretofore at least could attend a public meeting and have their voices heard in a public forum, these new non-profit charters that often hire for-profit outfits to run them, operate under the unregulated thumbs of CEOs whose unquestioned authority is not to be, well, questioned.

And even though Mr. Obama assured the readers of the Washington Post last week that decisions for funding the Race to the Top “will be based on what works,” a study released by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University last month found that only 17 percent of charter schools nationwide produce better results than the public schools they would replace. Not only that, but minority children are suffering the most in the charter schools that are worse (37%) or no better than (42%) the public schools. Yet, in Mr. Duncan’s words, states that refuse to lift charter caps will be “at a competitive disadvantage.”

The winners of the Race to the Top will not be teachers, who will be further humiliated by having meager pay raises to their embarrassingly low salaries now dependent upon test score production work. Again, in Mr. Duncan’s words, “states that explicitly prohibit linking data on achievement or student growth to principal and teacher evaluations will be ineligible for reform dollars.” It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what effect this will have on which teachers will end up with the lowest test performing students.

Among the winners will not be the embattled teaching profession, since Mr. Duncan prefers the marginally-prepared and the alternatively-certified teachers to those with real credentials based on both content and pedagogy expertise. Mr. Duncan and his philanthro-capitalist patrons (Gates, Broad, Waltons, Dells, Fishers, etc.) prefer those semi-skilled, disposable, historically-blank, and pedagogically-ignorant recruits who must depend upon the teacher-proofed parrot learning models promoted as Direct Instruction in the urban schools.

The winners will not be poor parents who would like schools for their children just like the schools attended by children in the leafy suburbs, schools with school libraries, sports facilities, drama clubs, music and band, art rooms, high tech shops. Mr. Duncan and the Oligarchs in charge of crafting federal education policy believe in the expansion of that crusading entrepreneurial spirit that can turn a shutdown pizza joint in a strip mall into a thriving school grounded by the philosophy of “no excuses.” No library? No excuse. No supper when you get home from a ten hour school day? No excuse. No health care? Same.

The winners will not be those who believe that local education decisions should be made locally by elected school boards. Mr. Duncan has come out publicly in favor of one-man mayoral rule of urban “public” school systems. No nosy parents, please, and no school board members to provide oversight or to impose those burdensome regulations.

The winners will not be those who cherish the notion of state and local curriculums that can be adjusted to the needs of local communities: Mr. Duncan has $350 million to get the ball rolling on national testing, which is the centerpiece for an impending third generation of doing more of the same failed reforms and calling it something different.

The winners will not be those who express reservations about the development of a K-20 student and instructor data surveillance system that may or may not be used ethically by CEO wannabes in the administrative offices of the new corporate welfare schools.

On the US DOE website, the final sentence in the press release for the “Race to the Top” states that “it represents a historic opportunity to restore America's global leadership in education.” The truth is that America’s “leadership in education” has never been in jeopardy in the leafy suburbs. As Gerald Bracey has pointed out for the past twenty years, take out the high-poverty school children from the comparisons, and America ranks right up there with the top high flyers on international test scores in math and science, or any other testing criterion. So the new version of more of the same with the added benefit of corporate control of public schools is once again masked in the fear-mongering rhetoric that has driven the eugenicists and efficiency zealots for the past hundred years.

It should come as no surprise, then, that Republicans are lined up in support of the continuation of the Reagan legacy of dumping equity and equality agendas for more corporate-controlled back-to-basics anti-education policies for the poor, which are built upon behavioral interventions that seek to re-engineer the minds of urban school children. In fact, global warming and skyrocketing energy costs could set off a race to the top of a very altered global economy that may require our own homegrown versions of the Chinese and Indian workers whose schooling methods we are keen to emulate for the lower classes of our own disposable children whose race for the foreseeable future will be to support the “Race to the Top” by the race at the top.

Competition And The Uneven Playing Field

This is how we are going to reform education: make schools compete for money.

The Race to the Top program marks a new federal partnership in education reform with states, districts and unions to accelerate change and boost achievement. Yet the program is also a competition through which states can increase or decrease their odds of winning federal support. For example, states that limit alternative routes to certification for teachers and principals, or cap the number of charter schools, will be at a competitive disadvantage. And states that explicitly prohibit linking data on achievement or student growth to principal and teacher evaluations will be ineligible for reform dollars until they change their laws.

Bill Gates And His Numbers

Bill Gates Among Top Quartile of Aspiring Wizards

One of Obama's bosses on education is making news noise again, with his corporate-spun notions on how to make the next generation of children the servants of Microsoft. Among his favorite ideas is turning urban education over to the KIPP-inspired brainwashers and prison guards trained in the happy talk pop psychology of CIA advisor, Dr. Martin Seligman, whose mind fix for the poor is viewed as the affordable solution to a social fix that is much too expensive for the richest men in the world to consider. Never mind that these KIPP testing chain gangs have teacher and student attrition rates that make such "schools" entirely unsustainable beyond the boutique model within which they now grind out their test scores while turning poor children into automatons.

Another of Bill's favorite ideas is a pay-per-score plan that rewards good teaching. What is good teaching? Well, good teaching produces good test scores. And what makes good test scores? Well, it's good teaching, of course. As the good professor explained about the origin of turtles, it's turtles, then, all the way down.

. . . .Fixing what is wrong with American learning, Gates said, requires new ways of looking at its problems.

Teachers are rewarded for "seniority and master's degrees," he said, and that is not the best way to ensure educational quality.

Critical in determining whether a student will drop out of high school, he said, is whether he or she connects with a good teacher in the fifth to eighth grades and develops a passion for lifelong learning.

A quality teacher would boost scores by 10 percentage points in a single year, Gates noted. "What that means is that if, in the United States, for two years, our teachers were all top-quartile teachers, the differences between the United States and the very best scores in the world would go away," he said. "We should identify those teachers, we should reward them, we should retain them, we should make sure other teachers learn from them."

The economic-recovery money creates new opportunities for public and private partnerships. . . .

And how would Bill have our teachers crank out the highest test scores in the world? Simple, he would have all teachers improve so that they would produce test scores that would put them in the top quartile of test score producers, i. e., test score producers such that they would be more effective than 75-99% of all teachers. Even for a duplicitous jerk like Bill Gates, this is an astonishing expectation to put on teachers, here or in Timbuktu. Here's why, as patiently explained by Richard Rothstein in Class and Schools . . . (2004):

. . . improving teacher quality so that all teachers rise to the top quintile of effectiveness is a fanciful goal. Policy makers who cite Dr. Sanders [or Bill Gates] do not appreciate how unattainable is a 40 percentile gain--voving teachers from about the 50th percentile in effectiveness to about the 90th [or 87th]. This is more than what researchers call a full standard deviation. In no field can a policy reform reasonably aim for such enormous gain.

And here is an analogy that Rothstein offers to "help think about whether we can possibly recruit or train teachers to be as good as the 90th [or 87th] percentile group:"

In 2000, real median household income in the U.S. was $42,000 a year. The 90th percentile income was $112,000 a year, nearly three times as much. We could imagine radical labor market or macroeconomic policies that might raise typical household incomes up to, say, $45,000 or even $50,000 in a few years. But policies to move the median to $112,000 are unimaginable. Improvement of 40 [or 35] percentile points up a distribution is not a real world aspiration (p. 65).

The value for Gates and the other Oligarchs of such fanciful thinking comes from putting the achievement bar at an unachievable level. In doing so, teachers, students, administrators will never do enough to satisfy the corporate bosses who stand on the sidelines with their junk science, their media scourges, and their big scary threats about China and India and Korea eating our lunch. See NCLB.

If Gates had his way, of course, none of us on this side of the curtain would know enough to peek backstage. That is not the case, however, yet. In fact, you can come out from behind the curtain now, Mr. Gates: your balloon is ready to take you aloft.

After We Fill The Charters, Who Will Remain?

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

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

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

Where indeed, Arne?

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

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

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

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

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

"A Pretty Sobering Finding"

Will the Washington Post or NY Times Print the Facts About Charter Schools?

Not yet. Does this report from CREDO pose too much of a threat to the DFER's corporate charter agenda, which has nothing to do with quality education and everything to do with cheap, anti-union, apartheid, corporate welfare schools?

From the LA Times YESTERDAY:

6:54 PM PDT, June 15, 2009

California charter schools outperform traditional public schools in reading but significantly lag in math, according to a national study released Monday by researchers at Stanford University.

The study of charter schools in 15 states and the District of Columbia found that, nationally, only 17% of charter schools do better academically than their traditional counterparts, and more than a third "deliver learning results that are significantly worse than their student[s] would have realized had they remained in traditional public schools."

"We find that a pretty sobering finding," said lead researcher Margaret Raymond, director of the Center for Research on Education Outcomes.

Charter schools have been widely scrutinized, but the Stanford study was one of the broadest and deepest attempts to come to grips with their progress, in part because the researchers were able to look at test scores down to the level of individual students . . . .