Dump Arne Duncan Petition

Petition Text

Dear President Obama,

We, the undersigned, a cross section of the nation’s teachers and their supporters, wish to express our extreme displeasure with the policies implemented during your administration by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. Although many of us campaigned enthusiastically for you in 2008, it is unlikely that you will receive continued support unless the following three dimensions of your administration’s education initiatives are changed:

1. The exclusion of teachers from policy discussions in the US Department of Education and from Education Summits called under your leadership.
2. The use of rhetoric which blames failing schools on “bad teachers” rather than poverty and neighborhood distress.
3. The use of federal funds to compel states and municipalities to use student test scores in the evaluation of teachers and as the basis for closing low performing schools.

Because of these policies, teachers throughout the nation have become discouraged and demoralized, undermining your own stated goals of improving teacher quality, upgrading the nation’s educational performance, and encouraging creative pedagogy rather than “teaching to the test.”

We therefore submit the following measures to put your administration’s education policy back on the right track and to bring teachers in as full partners in this effort:

1. The removal of Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education and his replacement by a lifetime educator who has the confidence of the nation’s teachers.
2. The incorporation of parents, teachers, and school administrators in all policy discussion taking place in your administration, inside and outside the Department of Education.
3. An immediate end to the use of incentives or penalties to compel states and municipalities to use student test scores as a basis for evaluating teachers, preferring charter schools to existing public schools, and requiring closure of low performing schools.
4. Create a National Commission, in which teachers and parent representatives play a primary role, which explores how to best improve the quality of America’s schools.

We believe such policies will create an outpouring of good will on the part of teachers, parents and students which will promote creative teaching and educational innovation, leading to far greater improvements in the nation’s schools than policies which encourage a proliferation of student testing could ever hope to do.

Sincerely,

The Undersigned

Sign here.

Hey Student, Sign This Contract That Says You Will Be A Student, Or You Can't Come

My son started high school this year. He's a freshman. He loves it and is doing very well. I have mentioned in the past that he was a member of the leadership team at his middle school and is on the board at his temple's religious school (don't ask). My kid is awesome.

On the way to school this morning he told me he was getting out early today because there is an assembly or rally and there was a permission slip that needed to be turned in and he neglected to do it. He took full responsibility for not having turned it in yesterday when it was due. We parents aren't informed of things that come home, so it is entirely up to the students to get this kind of thing done.

The permission slip is not really a permission slip. The fact that my son considers it a permission slip is itself interesting; it speaks to his naivety and to the school's actual basis for requiring the "permission slip."

I have it right next to me, and it is called a Student Activities Contract. What? It talks about requirements students must meet in order to attend certain functions. It is a copy of something we all had to sign in the beginning of the year. And it is non-binding, because these children don't have any standing to sign contracts. But that's a whole other issue.

The contract talks about maintaining a 1.5 GPA or higher (really?), no suspensions, and an attendance record "deemed passable by the Dean of Attendance." So, the requirements are inherently unclear if one is decided in the vacuum of the Dean's head.

Why would a school demand that students sign a contract promising to be students? I'll tell you why.

It's to keep out the riffraff. If you make participation in activities contingent upon parent signatures --the signatures themselves contingent upon a teenager remembering to have mommy sign the silly thing-- then you are precluding many kids from participating, especially in a Title 1 district, like the one my son attends. Why? Inner city families often have more difficult work hours, or lack of interest, or who knows what that might prevent them from getting a silly form signed just so their kid can go to the school their tax dollars pay for.

It also precludes great, interested, competent, well-prepared kids from coming if they forget to get the stupid thing signed.

It's like giving someone a contract that says they will be human, and if they don't sign it, then, well, what? You're no longer human? These students are being asked to sign a contract that says they will be students. Why this stupid thing has to be turned in in order to attend the school and functions at the school is nonsense, and it's a ploy to limit attendance to the "good" kids.

The kids that need the adults the most are the ones who are precluded, as are the ones who are a good example to other kids, like my son, who don't get to go because they forgot to turn in what is a useless and manipulative form designed without him in mind (or, with only kids like him in mind--the point is to limit attendance).

This kind of policy invented by school administrators is what gives public schools a bad name.

It's calling everyone guilty before they even show up. It basically says, We know your fucked up kids who do drugs and are violent and get shitty grades, and if you bring that shit here, well, we won't let you in, fuckers!

It's like Nancy Reagan when she told everyone to just say no. It's easy when you're a coddled millionaire, isn't it? Not so easy when you are surrounded by it and it is the economy your hood runs on.

Students are not treated with the respect they deserve. As kids, they react poorly and act out. Think about that the next time you as principal decide to call everyone into question by making them sign some shit that makes them promise not to be drug-addled killers.

School Choice: Taxpayer-Funded Creationism, Bigotry, and Bias

School Choice: Taxpayer-Funded Creationism, Bigotry, and Bias from Rachel Tabachnick on Vimeo.

The Erection Of An Alternative National System Of Charter Schools (pun intended)

How the Corporate Right Divided Blacks from Teachers Unions and Each Other

by Glen Ford

Back in the mid-Nineties, devious right-wing activists at the Bradley Foundation, in Milwaukee, hit upon a “wedge” issue designed to wreck the alliance at the core of the Democratic Party’s urban base. Blacks and public employee unions – particularly teachers – were the foundations of Democratic power in the cities. Aware that African Americans revered education but were often in conflict with largely white teachers unions over issues of racism and community control, the Bradley gang, under president Michael Joyce, created out of whole cloth a “movement” for publicly-funded vouchers for private schools. No such Black community “demand” had ever existed, but well-aimed infusions of millions of dollars among opportunistic politicians like Cory Booker, a first term city councilman who aspired to become mayor of Newark, New Jersey, grafted Black faces onto a Hard Right corporate scheme to divide key progressive constituencies: Blacks and unions.

By the turn of the millennium, the Bradley outfit solidified its position as George W. Bush’s “favorite” foundation when it invented “faith-based initiatives” to funnel millions of public dollars to churches to provide social services. Faith-based funding and private school vouchers comprised the totality of Bush’s first term outreach to Black America. Neither program drew masses of Blacks into the Republican Party – even the wealthy social engineers at Bradley can’t perform miracles. But Bradley and its far-right sister funders – the Walton and DeVos Family Foundations, Olin, Scaife, Freidman and other troglodytes – had succeeded in penetrating Black Democratic politics, where the real action would unfold. Cory Booker, Harold Ford, Jr., the 29-year-old who inherited his father’s congressional seat in Memphis, in 1996, and other hustlers were the “new Black leaders” ready to embrace “pro-business” solutions to inner city problems, said corporate media boosters. The Democratic Leadership Council, the party’s corporate money bagmen, launched a frenzied, and quite effective, recruitment campaign among Black office-holders and aspirants.

This is the national stage onto which Barack Obama stepped with his U.S. Senate campaign, in 2003-2004, as the very embodiment of the “new” Black politician, full of phrases like “public-private partnerships” and other codes for corporate penetration of the public sphere. By this time, the wealthy foundations were directing much of their money and attention to hawking charter schools as the cure for what ails education in the inner cities. Not that the Waltons and Friedmans and Scaifes give a damn about ghetto kids, but because they understood that Black parents were desperate for anything that might save their children, and would be receptive when fellow Blacks made the pitch. From its inception, the purpose of the project was to drive a wedge between teachers unions and Black constituencies. In addition to being unencumbered by sticky constitutional considerations, charter schools are technically public schools, and African Americans remain broadly committed to the concept of public education. Most importantly, from the rich man’s point of view, charter schools are the gateway to corporate access to the public education purse, a “market” worth hundreds of billions a year in which the public takes all the risk – a capitalist’s paradise! Obama and his Education Secretary, Arne Duncan – a veteran Chicago union buster and corporatist – have labored mightily to erect an alternative national system of charter schools.

The Hard Right foundations now had even bigger company as boosters of charter schools: the institutional weight of Wall Street, huge hedge funds, and individual billionaires, all out to make a financial killing, knock off teachers unions, and mold the world views of new generations. After more than a decade of corporate cultivation of ambitious “new Black leaders,” a large cadre of business-friendly African American politicians was in place – including, by 2008, in the highest place of all.

President Obama is the guy that Michael Joyce, at the Bradley Foundation, was dreaming about when he launched his campaign to split Blacks from unions, 15 years ago. Obama and his Education Secretary, Arne Duncan – a veteran Chicago union buster and corporatist – have labored mightily to erect an alternative national system of charter schools, plugged into a private financial and educational services sector, that in some cities is as large or larger than the traditional public schools. Obama, because of his race and his party affiliation, is a far more effective foe of public education and teachers unions than his white Republican predecessor.

Michael Joyce was right; he knew that the crucial battle over school privatization would have to occur in Black Democratic circles, if it were to work as a fractious wedge issue. Last month, the NAACP and the United Federations of Teachers filed a lawsuit to halt the closing of 20 public schools and to stop giving preferential treatment to charter schools that often share the same buildings. The differences in learning conditions, schedules and equipment are so striking, says the NAACP, as to reduce public students to second-class citizens. Charter schools, which President Obama fawns over like his own legacy, are blatantly favored by school systems and corporate sponsors. The NAACP is seeking to prove – in a different age and racial context – that separate is not equal, in New York City and other sites of breakneck charterization.

The inequalities are by design. From President Obama on down, charter school strategists hope to expand their privatized systems by deliberately making charters relatively more attractive than traditional classrooms, in order to create a political constituency for more charters. At root, it is a kind of bait-and-switch that is not sustainable, and will come to a halt once the public school “competition” is marginalized or eliminated. By then, the political forces necessary to revive public schooling will have been exhausted in fratricidal battles, and the corporations will have established a system to suit their own purposes– as Michael Joyce foresaw.

When the NAACP joined in the teachers union’s suit, charter school advocates declared war on the civil rights group. Two thousand people attended a May 26 rally in Harlem, accusing the NAACP of dividing the community. Of course, Michael Joyce knows who did the dividing – he and his right-wing schemers and billionaires wrote the script.

A Pretend Letter To Obama From This Brazen Teacher

I have mentioned This Brazen Teacher a few times because she is awesome, brilliant, fearless and kind.

I think her new video (she claims she is new at the video making) hits it out of the park. Spread the word. Share the vid.

School Demographics

I was cleaning out an old hard drive and came across some old teacher stuff. This stood out because of what it says about a day (more like 190 days) in the life of a teacher.

This is from a lesson study I did ten years ago in a second grade classroom.

Languages and cultures represented in the class: There are 9 African American students, 3 Caucasian students, 4 Latino students, 2 Asian students, and 2 African students. All students speak and read English, though 2 Latino students are in Reading Recovery, 1 African American is a retained 2nd grader involved in special education, and 2 other students are at 1st grade reading level. 3 other students are above grade level.

Female to Male ratio: M__8___ F__12___

Class description: There is one student whose parents are in prison and she lives with her aunt and uncle. 1 student is from an alcoholic family, he comes to school hungry for food and attention each day. 1 student has 2 fathers (1 father is formerly biological mother, other father is former lesbian partner of biological mother, both now gendered male), 3 students come from obvious interested families and are above grade level in all areas. It is a challenging class, though a wonderful class, full of interest, vim & vigor, and lots of energy.

Note my positive attitude.

Dear DonorsChoose.org,

Accountable Talk wrote a post:

DonorsChoose Stabs Teachers in the Back

So you get a crappy $150 in Teacher's Choice every year, which will most likely be eliminated entirely this coming school year. DonorChoose.org seems like a good solution. You join up, tell donors what you need, and hopefully good hearted citizens will contribute to help support your classroom projects. Sounds like a great idea, right? And it was.

Until the ed deformers ruined it, that is. I was shocked to receive an email from DonorsChoose asking me to see the anti-teacher, anti-union film Waiting for Superman. If I pledge to see it, the email said, DonorsChoose will get some money to support more classroom projects. Never mind that if the film makers get their way, you most likely won't have a classroom or a job, so your need for project funding will be drastically reduced.

Here's a quote from the email: This fall DonorsChoose.org is poised to receive support from hundreds of thousands of movie-goers who see Waiting for "Superman," a new film from the director of An Inconvenient Truth. Just as An Inconvenient Truth inspired action on climate change, Waiting for "Superman" aims to inspire the nation to improve public education opportunities.

Uh, yeah. More like "Just as the actors in The Devil In Miss Jones did to each other, Waiting for Superman is trying to do to teachers."

I canceled my account there today, and I urge you to do the same. Let them know why you decided to cancel and why. Tell them they need to support teachers, not help villify them. Contact them at http://help.donorschoose.org/app/contact.

I agree and cancelled my account too.  After getting a respnse from Donors Choose as a comment to the above post, a letter was written in a subsequent post:

I was rather surprised to see a reply from DonorsChoose.Org in the comments section of my post accusing them of having stabbed teachers in the back. I do welcome the response, however, because if it is genuine, perhaps there is an opening to set the record straight. In brief, DonorsChoose has seen fit to urge their members--who are teachers--to pledge see the film Waiting for Superman. In return, DonorsChoose will get money for every pledge. Apparently, DonorsChoose sees nothing wrong with this, but I know a lot of teachers do, as well as some of my fellow bloggers, such as NYC Educator. I'd prefer to continue the dialogue here, in public, as DonorsChoose themselves claim to want to spur debate. So here's my open letter to you, DC--I'd love to hear your response (in email as well--I want to be sure you're really who you claim to be).

Dear DonorsChoose.org:

Thank you so much for replying. I'd like to respond by asking you a rather simple question: Why do you exist?

I'm not being facetious--I am dead serious. In my view, you exist because of the sorry state of public education funding today. In NYC, public school teachers receive a measly $150 a year for supplies, which for many of us works out to less than a dollar a year per child. We don't get a pencil, or a piece of chalk, or a sheet of paper unless it comes out of our own pockets. Many of us work in dilapidated classrooms and trailers, with no air conditioning in the summer and not enough heat in the winter. We work in severely overcrowded classrooms--the highest average class size in the state--and we take on any and all comers. No child is ever refused entrance to a public school, even if they're disruptive and completely unmotivated. Public schools take on this challenge every day, and we do a damn fine job.

On the other side of the coin, we have charter schools--the kinds of schools being touted in films like Waiting for Superman. Charters are often given the most prime locations in their neighborhoods, frequently pushing out public school kids. I have never heard of a charter classroom being run from a trailer. Similarly, I have never heard of a charter school that didn't have more than adequate supplies. They are given the basics that are denied to public school teachers. Add to that the fact that many charters cherry-pick their students, and the ones that don't can kick out unruly children or even kids who don't perform up to their standards. When they are thrown out, guess where they go? Back to public schools.

Despite the huge advantage for charters, they show no better results than public schools nationwide.

Michelle Rhee and Joel Klein are pictured as the heroes of Waiting for Superman because they want to "reform" schools. By reform, they mean they want to eviscerate teacher contracts, eliminate seniority and tenure, and create charters where teachers are hired as will employees who can be fired at the drop of a hat. Check out any review of the film--this one by Roger Ebert, for example--and you will see that teachers and unions are cast as the villains in this script. According to the reviewers, teachers are seen as do-nothings who hide behind their union for protection. The truth is that all teachers are hired by the system, and the system has 4 years to evaluate whether a teacher is good enough. After that, if they believe a teacher is incompetent, there is a process to remove teachers by giving them a due process hearing.

What message does it send to teachers when an organization like yours, that claims to be working in the interests of teachers, accepts money from the producers of a film that casts public school teachers as the enemy?

Now, I'll be the first to admit I'm no Superman. There's no S on my chest--just a little chalk dust. I do my best to instruct whatever students show up in my room, in whatever numbers, and with whatever paper I can buy at the dollar store. I've been doing this for more than two decades. The vast majority of my 80,000 colleagues do the same thing, day in and day out, even when the roof is leaking.

So yes, DonorsChoose, there IS a superman, but if you're looking for red boots and a cape, you'll surely be disappointed. But if you peek into the typical public school classroom, you'll see dedicated teachers working hard every day. They are your members, and they want you to lend us a hand in a very difficult job--not to add another brick to an already far-too-heavy load.

If you want the support of teachers, reject the funding of those who want to see us lose our jobs.

I look forward to your reply.

Sincerely,

Mr. Talk

Good stuff!

"Portfolio Districts" Research: Data Unavailable

Current Trends

In the latter half of the past decade, school districts in several large cities, including New York, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and post-Katrina New Orleans, have implemented a new model of urban school decentralization often called “portfolio districts.” Others, including those in Denver and Cleveland, are following suit in what appears to be a growing trend. The portfolio strategy has become increasingly prominent in educational policy circles, think tank and philanthropy literature, and education news reporting. The appointment of Chicago Public Schools CEO Arne Duncan as U. S. Secretary of Education suggests administration support for the concept. Duncan embraced such decentralization in Chicago in the form of Renaissance 2010 and continues promoting its elements in such national policy as Race to the Top and in proposed revisions to the No Child Left Behind legislation. The premise supporting portfolio districts is that if education vendors compete on the basis of proposed innovations, with a school superintendent monitoring activities, children will receive greater opportunity for academic success. This brief examines the available evidence for the viability of this premise and the proposals (for example, making all schools in a district charter schools) that flow from it.

A number of urban districts have embraced or are considering adopting the portfolio model. National policy also favors the idea. However, there have been no substantive studies of the portfolio district approach. The only relevant research to date has been on its constituent elements, which include 1) decentralization; 2) charter school expansion; 3) reconstituting/closing “failing” schools; and 4) test-based accountability. As detailed below, the available scholarly peer-reviewed evidence on these various constituent elements shows no effect or negative effects on student achievement and on educational costs.

The published policy literature advocating implementation of the portfolio model and its elements most often makes assertions without providing credible evidence for its claims. For example, all of the relevant six articles available from the scholarly database Academic Search Premiere write favorably of the portfolio model, but none of them either constitute or reference careful empirical study reviewed by a community of policy scholars. Much of such advocacy writing published about the portfolio model and its constituent elements is generated by authors housed in or connected to policy think tanks that tend to have political and policy agendas.

h/t Schools Matter

Little Schools Of Horror: Updated

Claus von Zastrow explains why the spate of "school horror" films are damaging public education. Here is just a snippet:

The films generally offer simple solutions for the problems they present, and that lets viewers off the hook. Most examples of the genre point to charters and vouchers. Take, for example, The Cartel, which has just hit theaters. According to The Boston Globe, "'The Cartel' leads its audience to what Bowdon [the filmmaker] sees as a promised land of better American education, populated by vouchers and charter schools." Bowden is apparently blissfully untroubled by evidence.

Update: A film review by Stephen Whitty begins:

"The Cartel" Movie Review -- Reviewing documentaries used to be so much easier.
Back in the old days — say, pre-Michael-Moore — a critic went to a film, looked at the photography and editing, made a considered judgment and wrote it up. Now you almost have to re-report the thing yourself. Who didn’t the filmmakers interview? What’s the background of the three “experts” with whom they did speak? Who gave them funding? Which facts were left out?It’s exhausting and, practically speaking, nearly impossible...

...So let me state my own biases before I review “The Cartel,” a biased new film about New Jersey public education and some parents’ push for charter-school alternatives.

Years ago, my father attended Jersey City schools, then Rutgers, and got a good education. My two children are in suburban public schools now and get a great education. I know some schoolteachers who are doing terrific jobs.

Rep. George Miller: Charter School Lover

Representative George Miller (D-CA) has decided to rely on charter schools to fix what teachers and schools can't fix: poverty. He also chooses to ignore the facts: charters are no better than traditional public schools, and are sometimes worse. And none of these reformers ever mentions the fact that nearly every charter school deals with discipline in ways traditional public schools can't. It is a farce!

From Thompson:

WASHINGTON, February 26 — Signaling the important role of innovation in driving education reform, the House Education and Labor Committee chose charter schools as the focus of its first hearing to inform its rewrite of the eight-year-old No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law.

"If our goal is to build world-class schools," Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., said, "we absolutely need to look at high-performing charter schools for research and development and replicate what they are getting right."

Miller admitted that charter schools are not a "silver bullet," but those that are high performing can improve achievement levels of low-income and minority students by instilling competition into the traditional school system.

One in a "Handful" of Hearings

Committee spokeswoman Melissa Salmanowitz told Thompson Publishing that charter schooling is just one of many topics that will be discussed in a "handful of hearings" on reauthorizing NCLB, also known as the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA).

The charter school hearing focused on the All Students Achieving through Reform Act (H.R. 4330), a proposal to provide competitive grants to expand and replicate successful charter schools. (Currently, about 1.5 children are enrolled at almost 5,000 public charter schools.) The bill would give priority to students from families with low incomes or those from schools with low graduation rates or in need of improvement.

Charter school proponent Rep. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) said the bill was a "promising idea" to expand these types of schools. The federal government, he said, could encourage the growth of charter schools by eliminating state-imposed charter school enrollment and growth caps and allowing new schools to be established under an existing charter.

Other hearing participants, however, weren't so keen to see the federal government expand charter schools or, at the very least, said stronger oversight is needed.

Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Va., pointed to a February 2010 study by the Civil Rights Project at UCLA called Choice Without Equity: Charter School Segregation and the Need for Civil Rights Standards, which argues that "charter schools continue to stratify students by race, class, and possibly language, and are more racially isolated than traditional public schools."

Thomas Hehir, a professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, said more needs to be done "on the authorizing level" to improve charter school access for students with special needs and be sure that these schools aren't cherry picking the best and the brightest students, leading to concentrations of the hardest-to-serve students in the traditional public system.

h/t JH

Choice Without Equity

March 4 Day Of Action Events

March 4th is right around the corner and the local, national and international anticipation for this historic day is growing by the minute. Students, teachers, staff, parents and workers from all over California, the nation and the world have been organizing and building for the Strike and Day of Action. Below is a tentative list of events that will be happening on March 4th in California.

If you have any information to add to the list below, have information on events from places outside of California or have any questions about March 4th, please email march4strikeanddayofaction@gmail.com or visit PublicEducationNotWar.co.cc and tell us what is being planned in your school, workplace, community for March 4th Strike and Day of Action.

In Solidarity,

Follow-up committee of the October 24th Conference


List of March 4th Strike and Day of Action Events

Make It Better By Destroying It

From Fred Klonsky's blog about Illinois, but it might as well be about the whole country:

“We’ve work to do in the Shire now.”

While the sorry state of educational funding in Illinois has been getting most of the recent attention from the press, the corrosive policies of school district reform initiatives fly under the public’s radar. Editors and Superintendents have provided the dragons – test scores, failing students, bad teachers. As a result, legislators, with the passage of public act 96-0861, have armed district administrators with enhanced powers to destroy the dragons. And teachers find themselves in the dual role of both knights and dragons: in order to slay the dragons, they must attack themselves.

It is the Grand Collusion.

Too often editors are businessmen, while superintendents are politicians. Editors want to sell papers. Superintendents want to sell themselves. Their nexus is the public upon whose approval both depend. Both thrive on easy targets. Nothing sells papers like fear. High taxes, futureless children, and lazy teachers make nice dragons. Nothing sells a superintendent’s job like a response to these fears. Budget cuts, raised tests scores, and teacher-bashing make nice solutions.

Fear shapes the forum. Selling determines strategies.

I can almost forgive the legislators at this point. They’re politicians, but at least we know what kind of creatures they are. They’ll do the expedient thing like this recent reform that will tie student performance to teacher evaluations. Sounds like a plan. But, leaving the details to the devil, as this vague law has done, promises not a Race to the Top (whatever that is) as much as it guarantees a retreat to primitive ground. Much of what we’ve learned about the development of sentient beings will be jettisoned in favor of data-friendly practices (like test scores). This won’t help the millions of children who are being left behind. This won’t improve our public schools as engines of democracy. And it most certainly won’t deliver a compassionate and literate society. But, it will be measurable, with learning geared to the instruments of evaluation.

Coercion will corrupt the curriculum. And it will do so under the banner of reform.

An awful lot of educators and administrators are in a dragon slaying frenzy. I watch in frustration as millions of teacher hours and billions of taxpayer dollars are squandered on initiatives based upon unexamined or debunked assumptions about learning, all in the name of what is measurable. The fact that we are, in effect, assaulting public school education in the name of improving it is not lost on me. Which leads me to the title of this piece. It comes from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, and it is a line that haunts me at most institute days. At the end of the book, the hobbits, having saved all of Middle Earth, return to their beloved home, the Shire, only to discover that it is being ruined, and that some hobbits are actually feeling progressive in turning a pastoral setting into a polluted wasteland. Their zeal and their goals have been harnessed by a malevolent power intent on destroying the Shire, but they are under the illusion that they are making a better world, even while they are destroying their homes. They even scorn and deride those who do not cooperate.

Collusion creates illusion.

There’s a lot of this in our own ranks now. Until we clear up this confusion in our own ranks, until we say these policies are no good for our children, for our futures, and for our communities, No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top will continue unchallenged by the public, measured not by the scales of justice, but by the scales of dragons.

We’ve work to do now.

Safe Schools: Stop Capitulating And Make Some!

Danny Weil of The Daily Censored writes about public education, charters, and the horrors we are destined to realize unless we get the word out to interested citizens that there is another way. To see links in the piece, go see it at The Daily Censored (linked above).

Having safe schools is imperative, but the reason schools are not safe is the same reason all of us are not safe — the material economic and social conditions of our society have left us with a broken ‘free market’ fundamentalist system that has decimated our country and economic and social structure over thirty years.

You know the routine and the banshee cries: the cities are broke, the public coffers are empty; the parents are concerned and righly so (as indicated above) for their kid’s safety and the kids themselves are getting more desperate and afraid — for they are victimized, bored, tired, penniless, come from broken families, enclaves of domestic violence, victims of saturation carpet bomb marketing; many of them they live in the streets, have no adequate shelter and little or no future. Will they turn to an authoritarian state in hopes that it will improve their individual lives? Maybe.

Here is the thinking of one blogger who works in Philly schools:

“I agree that the creation of Renaissance Schools cannot be stopped (emphasis is mine) and that it is important for teachers to try to influence this process. I also agree that drastic changes need to be made in Philadelphia Public School system in general. Where I may differ is that I am and will remain in opposition to this the whole Renaissance plan as it currently stands” (http://www.blogger.com/profile/07326311110464959460).

Then if you are in opposition why not fight for public schools? Why capitulate and become a valet for the whole sordid mess? We see this same mindset in the health ‘care’ debate, don’t we? Resignation. But only due to the fact there is no ‘fight on the ground’.

There will be a fight

There will be a fight though, and the banksters and the corporatists know this. Take this quote from the same Philly notebook site but from an anonymous, yet astute commentator:

“We don’t have to wait four more years to witness the results of Dr. Ackerman’s (the school district CEOs) Imagine 2014 agenda. All we need to do is to reflect upon the current state of Audenried High School. During the course of this school year violent teenage behavior within and outside of this school has been ripping it asunder. The school was literally torn to the ground and rebuilt during the Vallas administration. A new school facility was erected at a cost in excess of sixty million dollars. The school reopened last year under the watch of the Ackerman administration. Its staff has been replaced. There is a new principal who leads a reconstituted staff of relatively young and energetic teachers.

The instructional reforms (remedial reading and math programs) that Dr Ackerman has trumpeted as the district’s next great curriculum innovation are being implemented there. It should be a great school to attend.

Apparently it isn’t as good as it was intended to be. Currently the Ackerman administration is pouring tens of millions of dollars of stimulus money and additional state funding into purchase of new textbook series, consultant fees, testing instruments and the services of various “for profit” contractors. Who is monitoring these expenditures? The Notebook has not been successful in gaining access to information concerning any of these proposed expenditures until after the SRC has voted their approval. For too long the people who are most invested in our schools (children, parents, teachers, and principals) have been the subjects of questionable experiments and the victims of failed reform efforts. It is time that we demand accountability from the adults who are the architects and sponsors of these so-called reform activities. It is time that we the people hold our leadership accountable” (http://www.thenotebook.org/blog/102211/what-youve-been-saying-about-renaissance-schools).

Yes, the same suspect: Paul Vallas ran the Philadelphia school district before saddling up to ride to New Orleans to help privatize that one. This is where he languishes now, with publicly paid for chauffeurs and a six figure salary. He made it ‘back’, one of the few who did.

Do not be discouraged for people do understand!

There are people who understand as the blogger above indicates, all over the country, which is my point and why I share this with you. And as the first parent post and teacher post illuminates, there are people who are confused as well, resigned to the whole mess; they have to work for a living and if there is no work, then they simply live to survive.

But many know that giving our public schools over to the ‘new turnaround’ artists who are really ‘turnover’ artists who wish to bench our children in privately run for profit schools is not only not the answer, it’s criminal. Even the word despicable word ‘provider’ shows the contempt for humanity embedded in the business doublespeak and the deadly scheme as all the wonderment is sucked out of education for brand names and bureaucratic references. We are askance in health providers, school providers, and military providers: it seems there are some who ‘provide’ and some who are ‘provided’ for — the class society.

It is the same all over now from San Francisco to Chicago to Philly

Of course now that tax breaks for the rich and cuts in public schools have forced the cities into bankruptcy, it’s time for the disaster politics in Philly now. This is where we are: from D.C. to LA, from Detroit to Philly, it’s the same and the plutocrats and billionaire philanthro-capitalists use the same language to ‘manage perceptions’ and manufacture consent. It is either a ‘Renaissance’ as in Chicago where Duncan left bloody fingerprints, or it is “Imagine Schools” but it’s all the same – the privatization of education, meaning no democratic decision making but instead centralized control of decision making; no transparency in government but instead secrecy in government; public funds will be used to prime the pump as the schools are bankrolled by ‘investors’ or billionaires who now have all the money; and of course more draconian cuts in public education for the two-tiered educational system like that created in New Orleans, the model for it all, and of course merit pay for teachers to destroy unions, less salaries and benefits for teachers, no job security and teachers divorced from the conception of lesson plans as corporate canned curriculum and the newly written corporate textbooks are ushered into schools.

This is the Wal-Mart model of education also known as neo-liberalism, a stage of economics we are now in and have been for more than thirty years. It is when everything is privatized from prisons to schools and then financed by the public though taxpayer funds. The government is used as a collection agency to fund the privatizers. And since the dragnet has replaced the safety net as social services are cut, keep an eye out for the faith-based charlatans to come along and ‘Mother Theresa’ the whole thing into further illegitimacy.

We are cannibalizing our children

Children used to be our future, the hope for the mobility of another generation. In this disaster phase of capitalism there is no future for children and thus the ‘war on youth’. They must now be contained, militarized, regimented and otherwise controlled for there is no future for them in a country that makes nothing, is broke and owned and operated as an outsourcing enterprise for profit. No public playgrounds, no public schools, no public libraries — no public ‘nothin’. Tethered to the carpet loom of NCLB children will learn quickly that child wonderment has been replaced with adult bewilderment.

They won’t stand for it either, you’ll see. They will either go into gangs (70,000 gang members in Chicago alone), drop out of school, go to prison or be swallowed up by the military industrial complex for the next resource war.

The website Socialist Equality said it best:

“Under conditions in which American capitalism has no future for tens of millions of working class youth, except permanent unemployment, the ruling elite and its political representatives are repudiating the principle that every child, no matter what his or her background, should have access to at least a basic education.

The egalitarian principles that underlie public education are incompatible with the extreme levels of social inequality that characterize American society today. Therefore the fight to defend the right to universal access to high-quality education is inextricably tied to a broader struggle for social equality and the reorganization of society in the interests of the working class. The alternative to capitalism is socialism, i.e., a society democratically controlled by the working class, based on production for social need, not private profit” (The way forward for Detroit teachers, Social Equality, December 8, 2009http://socialequality.com/node/682).

We must take moral and social responsibility

We have an ethical responsibility to assure no harm comes to our nation’s children, not just are own children, don’t we? If so, then many of us know that change will not come from capitulating to the new ‘turnaround’ artists’, the elite social engineers and social Darwinists who habitat the educational landscape – it will come from social organization and united direct action from working people that challenges the brutality of capitalism at its core.

If we want to nurture children and provide them with decent community schools and a decent future, then we don’t ‘turn them over’ to the auctioneers do we? No, not at all, we work to build a better society and this will take time, mobilization, communication and effort. I am hopeful underneath the current cloud of despair for I understand history, and history is the history of class struggle. We have been at such crossroads before and although it is easy to become deracinated and cynical, it is far more gratifying to resist with others. We must help parents understand it is the system itself that has been pocketed. Once they do, I am confident in their ability to understand.

Tuesday Cartoon Fun: Funding Edition

SOTU & Education & Poverty

President Obama:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"If They Vote Against You, Remember It!"

Charters Are Private?

Just How Private are Charter Schools?

There's been a concerted effort by the pro-charter crowd to "educate" the public about the so-called publicness of charter schools. You'll regularly see "charters" referred to as "public charter schools" these days, and don't think this slight change in label was accidental. The variety, quality, and types of charter schools - from your blatantly for-profit EMOs like the Edison Schools, the assortment of no excuses charter chaingangs like KIPP, rather progressive versions like the Big Picture schools, "mom and pop" charters started and run by legitimate teachers, and a number of other different types - makes this field more complicated than it first appears.

Given the variety of changes during the Bush years (and extending back towards Reagan), the whole privatization and for-profit thing has gotten a bad reputation (deservedly so), particularly given the whole Wall Street collapse '08, America's high poverty rate, and the vast disparities in income and access to resources.

"Public charter schools" is precisely the kind of term designed to obscure or confuse. Make no mistake about it - there are some very real things about charter schools that make them private. They're not a full-blown version of privatization a la vouchers, but they share a heck of a lot with the nuclear option for public education. From the East Valley Tribune:

Court ruling favors charter schools

HOWARD FISCHER, CAPITOL MEDIA SERVICES

January 4, 2010 - 3:41PM , updated: January 5, 2010 - 5:34PM

Employees cannot use federal civil rights laws to sue the owners of Arizona charter schools, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Monday.

The judges acknowledged that, under Arizona law, charter schools are "public schools." They are authorized to operate under state law and must comply with some - but not all - of the same requirements as traditional district schools.

But Judge Sandra Ikuta, writing for the unanimous court, said that does not make the school and its owners "state actors," something required to make a civil rights challenge. Instead, the court concluded, the school is a private company despite those state laws, at least for purposes of deciding who to hire, fire and, in this case, whether to provide a referral for a future job.

The ruling is a setback for Michael Caviness, who claims that actions by Horizon Community Learning Center employees prevented him from getting a job with the Mesa Unified School District. But attorney David Larkin, who represents Caviness, said it could have broader implications for those who work for charter schools.

For example, he said, public school employees who make comments in the media on matters of public concern are protected against retaliation from their principals and school boards. He said the civil rights laws his client cited can clearly be used to sue those officials for violating the teacher's freedom of speech.

"If a charter school teacher now does that, they don't have the (same) right to freedom of speech as a public school employee," he said.

[Continued here]

So it's not some crazy left-wing blabble to raise concerns about charters being a privatization movement - but the pro-charter crowd will do all they can to misinform the public about the private-ness of public schools. The 9th Court's ruling further confirms the privateness of charter schools; sure, they operate with public funds, but they're fall less transparent than most public schools (and public schools are not as transparent as they should be - see Michelle Rhee in particular).

They often claim education is a "civil right," but their pro-charter agenda wipes away your civil rights.

h/t KL

Surely You Read It

I am on a little vacation in Portland with the Frustrated Son visiting the Frustrated Mother and her new Frustrated Boyfriend!  It's very nice for mom to have someone she feels good with, and the boyfriend is very lucky--and he knows it!  Good for both of them.

I read the Nick Anderson piece in the WaPo about Arne Duncan's failure in Chicago.  Did you?  Maybe you should!

Basically, while CEO of Chicago public schools Arne did not perform miracles.  In fact he may have done damage of the sort he is doing now.  Get critical citizens, media!

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.

Cutting Off Noses To Spite Faces

Sent to the Pioneer Press (Twin Cities, MN)

One of the strategies Carver Elementary is using to increase its unsatisfactory test scores ("A school on the edge," Dec. 28) is "vocabulary study." Research consistently shows that by far the best way to boost vocabulary is through wide, self-selected reading. Picking up words by reading is faster than word study and gives children more complete knowledge of words. Wide reading, in fact, has a positive influence on nearly every subject taught in school.

Wide self-selected reading requires access to lots of books. For many children, especially children of poverty (38% of the Carver student population receives free or reduced price lunch), the school library is the major source of reading material. Study after study confirms that school library quality and the presence of a credentialed librarian are positively related to growth in literacy.

Carver Elementary is in a district that let all their elementary school librarians go four years ago. Now one middle school librarian is also responsible for three elementary schools. Firing the librarian and then instituting vocabulary study is like stealing all your money and then giving you a bus token to get home with.

Tori Jensen
President Elect, Minnesota Educational Media Organization

Stephen Krashen
Professor Emeritus, University of Southern California

Original article at: http://www.twincities.com/ci_14070492?source=email

And then there's this from Berkeley, CA:

Berkeley High School is considering eliminating science labs and the five science teachers who teach them because science labs were largely classes for white students.

America: land of the free (from thought) and home of the brave (or blind).