Making our public schools better is. As Arne Duncan was give the local KIPP school 500 grand for a music program, music programs throughout the district were being cut. -cpg
From the Brooklyn Rail
by Liza Featherstone
Community Roots Charter School (CRCS) is across the street from the housing projects in Fort Greene,and the bathrooms and the lunchroom look plenty run-down. But don’t be fooled: the kids are all right.
Kindergarteners are given “research notebooks” and taught how to interview people. One morning in late January, in one first-grade classroom, everyone was quietly reading a book, many of the kids comfortably sprawled on the floor. Fourth-graders were working in pairs, “editing” each other’s writing. Children here have music, art, and science twice a week.
Because of superb, well-rounded schools like CRCS, many Brooklyn parents respond with tail-wagging eagerness to any noise that includes the following buzzwords: “school choice,” “new schools,” and “charter schools.” But the education on tap at CRCS has nothing to do with the Department of Education’s (DOE) plans for the majority of our children. In fact, a recent report by the DOE’s own Office of Charter Schools shows exactly how shallow and cynical the city’s vision is.
The report, released January 4, details the observations of investigators from the Office of Charter Schools on six of the city’s charter schools, and its recommendations to the Regents (all of which were followed). The report shows that most of the schools are neglecting basic elements of decent education, yet in no case were they punished for this, or pressured to change their ways.
One thing is clear from this document: the Office of Charter Schools knows what good education looks like, but just doesn’t think poor, black kids need to have it.
Take critical thinking, for example. It’s hard to think of a skill that more people—from CEOs to anti-war activists—would agree is essential to both success and citizenship. Investigators from the Office of Charter Schools found that critical thinking was missing from several schools, none of which were penalized or closed down. One of these was Achievement First Endeavor in Clinton Hill, a middle school that has nonetheless been allowed to expand into elementary school grades (even though the neighborhood already has several decent public elementary schools). At Democracy Prep, a Harlem charter school where students have been acing standardized tests, “few lessons required higher-order thinking skills or deep analysis of concepts.” Yet Democracy Prep’s charter was renewed unconditionally.
Poor kids apparently don’t need to learn how to have an intellectual discussion. Or any kind of discussion, for that matter. At Democracy Prep, the Office of Charter Schools reports,
All class discussions took the form of the teacher asking questions and the students responding. Students were not observed participating in a discussion or responding directly to each other.
Along similar lines, at Achievement First, investigators observed that in some classes students had no opportunity to express their ideas. At International Leadership Charter School in the Bronx, which the Office of Charter Schools characterized as “academically successful,” the investigators nonetheless reported:
Teachers’ questions asked mainly for recall of information…with minimal questions that required explanation. Students’ responses were generally one or two words. In classrooms observed students did not respond to each other’s comments. Students sat in rows and did not interact with each other except for two instances in which students sat in pairs. Students did not discuss or share their ideas…There was no evidence of analysis, evaluation, or providing students with the opportunity to create a new product or defend a point of view.
Poor kids apparently don’t need to be prepared for college. At Democracy Prep, reports the Charter Office, “Some of the key skills necessary for college success were not observed in classrooms.” At International Leadership, the investigators noted, the administration did not evaluate teachers on anything related to “reinforcing skills and dispositions that indicate college readiness.”
And how about plain old reading and writing? Maybe they don’t need that, either. At International Leadership, the high school students reported that the longest paper they’d ever been asked to write was 3 – 4 pages. Seniors, when asked what they were reading, reported reading only short stories and poems—no novels or book-length nonfiction.
Meanwhile, at Hyde Leadership Charter School in the Bronx, the investigators acknowledged that, “While the school demonstrated a strong focus on excellence in character development, a focus on academic
excellence and achievement was less evident.” This elementary school’s charter was renewed, and Hyde has been allowed to expand into high school grades. Perhaps poor people lacking intellectual skills, but brimming with character are just the sort of workers the Bloomberg-era business elite desires. Is that what education “reform” is really all about?
Although the flaws the report does illuminate are devastating, the investigators glossed over some problems rather blithely. For example, Meredith Kolodner of the Daily News has reported parent complaints about verbally abusive discipline at an Achievement First School in Crown Heights, as well as the fact that 20 percent of the children at the school are in detention on any given day. One might think, then, that parents’ and students’ complaints over excessive discipline at the charter chain’s Clinton Hill location would deserve serious investigation and more than the half a sentence of acknowledgement that the Office of Charter Schools allots.
Reading the report, one gets the impression that it’s an achievement to provide schools that are “safe.” Over and over again, the charters in this report are praised, apparently for not having recreated Columbine. It seems like a low bar.
It’s not that the charter schools detailed in this report should necessarily be shut down. Families and kids depend on them now. But clearly, there’s a huge double standard. The DOE is closing traditional public schools for allegedly “failing”—often because they haven’t been given the resources to effectively teach kids for whom poverty is a daily obstacle to learning. Yet many charter schools that are also failing, by any reasonable measure, are given a free pass. Indeed, they are handed more resources, given more real estate, and entrusted with more children.
Why in the world is the DOE—for all its tough talk of standards—so lax with the charter schools?
Probably because with a handful of exceptions—most prominently, for Brooklynites, Community Roots, which was praised in the report though admonished to raise its test scores—well-educated, white New Yorkers with choices don’t send their children to charter schools. Bloomberg and his business cronies who set policy for the DOE are thus untroubled with the quality of the education such schools provide.
But why is the DOE going to the trouble of squeezing out—either through under-funding, “competition,” crippling space enclosure, or outright closing neighborhood public schools and replacing them with charter schools that are no better? If the DOE doesn’t care whether poor children get a good education, why not leave their schools alone?
The reasons are disheartening and not at all high-minded. The business class hates to see a sector in which most workers are unionized and still have some benefits. The project of replacing traditional schools with charters is at its heart a union-busting project. Another reason is ideology: Bloomberg and his ilk want to shrink the public sector and show how much better—and more important, how much cheaper—the private sector can do the job.
Don’t everyone’s children deserve the kinds of nurture, intellectual rigor, and joy that the best schools provide? Shouldn’t every kid in Brooklyn be reading real books and going to music class twice a week? Yes, yes, and yes. But such fabulous education isn’t going to be given away to all kids, at least not without a fight.
http://www.brooklynrail.org/2011/02/local/report-card-dubious-standards-for-charter-schools
Showing posts with label KIPP schools. Show all posts
Showing posts with label KIPP schools. Show all posts
Saturday, February 5, 2011
Friday, February 4, 2011
Teaching as a Service Industry
From the Guardian.co.uk with a Nod to Mike Klonskys Small Talk Blog
by Paul Thomas
Management and labour are hurtling towards an impasse, and a work stoppage looms. Workers are seeking public support by emphasising the importance of benefits for workers, specifically longterm healthcare for conditions caused by the profession that do not appear until later in life.
This may sound for many like the possible scenario for a teachers' strike, backed by a powerful teachers' union. But if this were a teachers' strike, in 2011, we could anticipate little support for those teachers – not least because of the propaganda created by Davis Guggenheim's documentary Waiting for "Superman" and the rise of false prophets of education reform (Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, Bill Gates and Michelle Rhee).
However, above, I am speaking about the possible NFL strike that hangs over this coming Super Bowl weekend: a struggle between billionaires and millionaires, which, indirectly, shines an important light on the rise of teacher and teacher union-bashing in the US. Adam Bessie, on Truthout, identifies how the myth of the bad teacher has evolved:
"In this political season of faux anti-establishment anger born of very real economic desperation, public educators have become the villain du jour, their reputations collateral damage in the war against 'big government'. In a remarkable sleight of hand, the super rich who imploded the economy, manufacturing the recession which now enrages the public, have successfully misdirected the public's justifiable anger away from them and toward teachers."
While few people have begun to demonise and criticise either the billionaire owners or the millionaire players (represented by a union) in the NFL, the education reform landscape is built on a false premise – blaming teachers and unions for school failures – that lacks credibility and masks the overwhelming source of education failures: namely, poverty.
Ironically, the new push against teachers' unions, cloaked in discourse about the damage done by "bad" teachers, comes from Democrats. For example, Arne Duncan, speaking on behalf of the Obama administration in Little Rock, Arkansas on 25 August 2010, focused on teacher quality:
"The big game-changer for us, however, in terms of both formula and competitive programmes, revolves around the issue of teacher quality … Nothing is more important and nothing has a greater impact on the quality of education than the quality and skill of the person standing in the front of the class – and there is so much that needs to change in the way that America recruits, trains, supports and manages our teachers."
But the political attacks on teachers and unions, which come from both the left and the right, would likely not resonate as much as they have done, if it were not for the celebrity tour on the back of the documentary Waiting for "Superman", whose message has been perpetuated by celebrity reformers. Two of those, Bill Gates and Geoffrey Canada, share an entrepreneur status that suggests expertise on everything simply because they are wealthy. (Possibly, also, this is what protects NFL owners and players from social ridicule in their fight.)
Both Gates and Canada also use compliant media adroitly to promote their unsupported claims. Canada appeared on the Colbert Report as part of his tour, specifically reinforcing the idea that teacher accountability is central to school reform. "We've got to hold the adults responsible … We've allowed our schools to fail these kids with no consequences," Canada told Colbert's audience.
Gates, again due to his incredible wealth and corporate success, commands media attention – media that rarely question his claims. Take, for example, the Newsweek interview by Daniel Lyons with Gates and Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. While the entire interview perpetuates misunderstanding about education reform, the focus on teacher quality and the role of unions exemplifies the claims of the new reformers – even as it exposes those claims' lack of credibility.
In August of 2010, the attack on teacher professionalism was intensified when the Los Angeles Times published teacher quality analyses based on value-added methods (VAM). The charges against teacher quality and teachers' unions elicited several stringent rejections (here, here, and here), but most challenges came from educators themselves – and, of course, received little media coverage when compared to the attention lavished on Gates, Rhee and Canada.
The message has solidified: US public schools are failures because we have too many bad teachers, and we have too many bad teachers because teachers' unions use their excessive power to keep bad teachers in jobs. But it doesn't end there.
By October 2010, the narrative developed further, to take in that our teaching core is weak because "[c]ountries with the best-performing school systems largely recruit teachers from the top third of high school and college graduates, while the United States has difficulty attracting its top students to the profession, a new report finds." The formula was growing complex, but there was a pattern to the proposed solutions: usurp teachers' union control and fire bad teachers; then restock the depleted teacher core with recruits from among top US students.
Ultimately, this PR campaign by corporate and political leaders has been effective, even if it remains inaccurate. Teacher quality represents only a small percentage of achievement, and there is little evidence that teacher quality is the greatest issue, or even one of the main problems, facing student achievement in public schools.
A provable problem with teacher quality, however, is teacher assignment. Peske and Haycock show that students in poverty, students of colour and ELL students are in classrooms with the least experienced teachers, who are often uncertified or underqualified. Of course, teacher quality does matter in terms of what happens once students are within the walls of schools, but we seem blind to the longstanding tradition of assigning the most experienced and best-qualified teachers to the elite students, who already experience major advantages in their lives outside of school.
That the evidence-based inequity of teacher assignment is ignored, while the myth of the bad teacher is perpetuated, is evidence of the motivation behind the new reformers – an unspoken commitment to the status quo of this social inequity that benefits the very people so keen to lay charges against teachers and unions. And the rants against unions are just as suspect as the claims that bad teachers are crippling schools. Two examples expose the flaws in union-bashing.
First, the new reformers hold up Finland as the model for education reform – while failing to identify two crucial facts: that Finland has low childhood poverty (about 3-4%, compared to over 20% in the US) and that Finland's teachers are nearly 100% unionised. Consider, also, South Carolina, a high-poverty state with a reputation for having a weak education system. South Carolina joined the accountability era at the beginning, taking "A Nation at Risk" seriously and creating standards, testing and accountability in 1984. Despite nearly three decades of precisely the process supported by the new reformers, South Carolina finds itself still ranking at the bottom of education in the US. The real dynamic here is that South Carolina remains a high-poverty state – the true cause of low test scores – and also that South Carolina is a non-union state, with no union contracts for teachers and no tenure.
Now, let's step back from all the separate but overlapping claims about teachers, teacher quality and teachers unions. If we look at them together, we discover that two powerful yet contradictory messages exist in the larger public discourse promoted by the new reformers: contradictory messages that allow one message to mask the other. Political and corporate leaders seek to speak about teaching as if it is a profession, while expecting those professionals to function as a service industry. The narratives offered by Obama and Duncan, Waiting for "Superman" and organisations such as Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) and Teach for America argue for the best and the brightest to implement mandated, common core standards, so that their students can take national tests for which those teachers will be held accountable. And all that while teachers are required to waive their first amendment rights, right to due process, and work for salaries that are less than a regular NFL fine.
Beneath the political and corporate veneer espousing teaching as a profession lurks a simple fact: the corporate and political elite wants teaching to be a service industry. Worse yet, they have their wish, because teaching is now a service industry, ultimately devoted to perpetuating an economic system based on social inequity and a venal consumer culture.
So, let's return to the NFL dispute. Corporate, political and public sentiment is against teachers' unions, framing unions as the source of all that ails public education; this narrative now holds firm. But virtually no one has cried foul when it comes to the unionised labour struggle of millionaire NFL players pitted against billionaire team owners. This may seem contradictory, but I believe it is not.
Corporate America benefits from the NFL thriving and from the de-professionalising of teaching – regardless of the union element. Outcries about bad teachers and corrupt teachers' unions are not about educational reform, but about guaranteeing that teaching will become permanently a service industry in which schools are reduced to the sole purpose of producing compliant workers.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/feb/04/usdomesticpolicy-schools
by Paul Thomas
Management and labour are hurtling towards an impasse, and a work stoppage looms. Workers are seeking public support by emphasising the importance of benefits for workers, specifically longterm healthcare for conditions caused by the profession that do not appear until later in life.
This may sound for many like the possible scenario for a teachers' strike, backed by a powerful teachers' union. But if this were a teachers' strike, in 2011, we could anticipate little support for those teachers – not least because of the propaganda created by Davis Guggenheim's documentary Waiting for "Superman" and the rise of false prophets of education reform (Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, Bill Gates and Michelle Rhee).
However, above, I am speaking about the possible NFL strike that hangs over this coming Super Bowl weekend: a struggle between billionaires and millionaires, which, indirectly, shines an important light on the rise of teacher and teacher union-bashing in the US. Adam Bessie, on Truthout, identifies how the myth of the bad teacher has evolved:
"In this political season of faux anti-establishment anger born of very real economic desperation, public educators have become the villain du jour, their reputations collateral damage in the war against 'big government'. In a remarkable sleight of hand, the super rich who imploded the economy, manufacturing the recession which now enrages the public, have successfully misdirected the public's justifiable anger away from them and toward teachers."
While few people have begun to demonise and criticise either the billionaire owners or the millionaire players (represented by a union) in the NFL, the education reform landscape is built on a false premise – blaming teachers and unions for school failures – that lacks credibility and masks the overwhelming source of education failures: namely, poverty.
Ironically, the new push against teachers' unions, cloaked in discourse about the damage done by "bad" teachers, comes from Democrats. For example, Arne Duncan, speaking on behalf of the Obama administration in Little Rock, Arkansas on 25 August 2010, focused on teacher quality:
"The big game-changer for us, however, in terms of both formula and competitive programmes, revolves around the issue of teacher quality … Nothing is more important and nothing has a greater impact on the quality of education than the quality and skill of the person standing in the front of the class – and there is so much that needs to change in the way that America recruits, trains, supports and manages our teachers."
But the political attacks on teachers and unions, which come from both the left and the right, would likely not resonate as much as they have done, if it were not for the celebrity tour on the back of the documentary Waiting for "Superman", whose message has been perpetuated by celebrity reformers. Two of those, Bill Gates and Geoffrey Canada, share an entrepreneur status that suggests expertise on everything simply because they are wealthy. (Possibly, also, this is what protects NFL owners and players from social ridicule in their fight.)
Both Gates and Canada also use compliant media adroitly to promote their unsupported claims. Canada appeared on the Colbert Report as part of his tour, specifically reinforcing the idea that teacher accountability is central to school reform. "We've got to hold the adults responsible … We've allowed our schools to fail these kids with no consequences," Canada told Colbert's audience.
Gates, again due to his incredible wealth and corporate success, commands media attention – media that rarely question his claims. Take, for example, the Newsweek interview by Daniel Lyons with Gates and Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers. While the entire interview perpetuates misunderstanding about education reform, the focus on teacher quality and the role of unions exemplifies the claims of the new reformers – even as it exposes those claims' lack of credibility.
In August of 2010, the attack on teacher professionalism was intensified when the Los Angeles Times published teacher quality analyses based on value-added methods (VAM). The charges against teacher quality and teachers' unions elicited several stringent rejections (here, here, and here), but most challenges came from educators themselves – and, of course, received little media coverage when compared to the attention lavished on Gates, Rhee and Canada.
The message has solidified: US public schools are failures because we have too many bad teachers, and we have too many bad teachers because teachers' unions use their excessive power to keep bad teachers in jobs. But it doesn't end there.
By October 2010, the narrative developed further, to take in that our teaching core is weak because "[c]ountries with the best-performing school systems largely recruit teachers from the top third of high school and college graduates, while the United States has difficulty attracting its top students to the profession, a new report finds." The formula was growing complex, but there was a pattern to the proposed solutions: usurp teachers' union control and fire bad teachers; then restock the depleted teacher core with recruits from among top US students.
Ultimately, this PR campaign by corporate and political leaders has been effective, even if it remains inaccurate. Teacher quality represents only a small percentage of achievement, and there is little evidence that teacher quality is the greatest issue, or even one of the main problems, facing student achievement in public schools.
A provable problem with teacher quality, however, is teacher assignment. Peske and Haycock show that students in poverty, students of colour and ELL students are in classrooms with the least experienced teachers, who are often uncertified or underqualified. Of course, teacher quality does matter in terms of what happens once students are within the walls of schools, but we seem blind to the longstanding tradition of assigning the most experienced and best-qualified teachers to the elite students, who already experience major advantages in their lives outside of school.
That the evidence-based inequity of teacher assignment is ignored, while the myth of the bad teacher is perpetuated, is evidence of the motivation behind the new reformers – an unspoken commitment to the status quo of this social inequity that benefits the very people so keen to lay charges against teachers and unions. And the rants against unions are just as suspect as the claims that bad teachers are crippling schools. Two examples expose the flaws in union-bashing.
First, the new reformers hold up Finland as the model for education reform – while failing to identify two crucial facts: that Finland has low childhood poverty (about 3-4%, compared to over 20% in the US) and that Finland's teachers are nearly 100% unionised. Consider, also, South Carolina, a high-poverty state with a reputation for having a weak education system. South Carolina joined the accountability era at the beginning, taking "A Nation at Risk" seriously and creating standards, testing and accountability in 1984. Despite nearly three decades of precisely the process supported by the new reformers, South Carolina finds itself still ranking at the bottom of education in the US. The real dynamic here is that South Carolina remains a high-poverty state – the true cause of low test scores – and also that South Carolina is a non-union state, with no union contracts for teachers and no tenure.
Now, let's step back from all the separate but overlapping claims about teachers, teacher quality and teachers unions. If we look at them together, we discover that two powerful yet contradictory messages exist in the larger public discourse promoted by the new reformers: contradictory messages that allow one message to mask the other. Political and corporate leaders seek to speak about teaching as if it is a profession, while expecting those professionals to function as a service industry. The narratives offered by Obama and Duncan, Waiting for "Superman" and organisations such as Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) and Teach for America argue for the best and the brightest to implement mandated, common core standards, so that their students can take national tests for which those teachers will be held accountable. And all that while teachers are required to waive their first amendment rights, right to due process, and work for salaries that are less than a regular NFL fine.
Beneath the political and corporate veneer espousing teaching as a profession lurks a simple fact: the corporate and political elite wants teaching to be a service industry. Worse yet, they have their wish, because teaching is now a service industry, ultimately devoted to perpetuating an economic system based on social inequity and a venal consumer culture.
So, let's return to the NFL dispute. Corporate, political and public sentiment is against teachers' unions, framing unions as the source of all that ails public education; this narrative now holds firm. But virtually no one has cried foul when it comes to the unionised labour struggle of millionaire NFL players pitted against billionaire team owners. This may seem contradictory, but I believe it is not.
Corporate America benefits from the NFL thriving and from the de-professionalising of teaching – regardless of the union element. Outcries about bad teachers and corrupt teachers' unions are not about educational reform, but about guaranteeing that teaching will become permanently a service industry in which schools are reduced to the sole purpose of producing compliant workers.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/feb/04/usdomesticpolicy-schools
Tuesday, January 18, 2011
Mayor Peyton seeks new job as KIPP school teacher
Mayor Peyton is about to be out of work but if you listened to his Martin Luther King Jr. speech it seems as if he is positioning himself for a new job. That as a teacher at the new Knowledge is Power Program School.
You can tell he is enamored with them when he said: When I look for those pockets of success and models that are working I always end up looking at KIPP.
Yes you might have found it ironic that he didn’t mention Stanton or Paxon long considered to be two of the best schools in the nation, or the fact Sandlewood a mega high school went from a C school to an A school this past year, or the La Villa school of the arts or dozens of other schools around town which have been lauded for their improvements or successes. In fact it wouldn’t have taken much effort for him to mention any school because despite many of their struggles there are amazing things going on at all of them. No he chose to mention the new KIPP school instead.
There are some things you might not know about the KIPP school that our mayor should, aterwards you decide if they are our one pocket of sucess.
First much of the KIPP schools funding come from tax payers and despite this the KIPP school gets to play by different rules.
They get to pick who they take. Public schools are obligated to try and educate everybody who shows up.
They get to pick who they keep. Public schools have to keep them all their children short of them selling drugs or bringing a weapon to school and even then it's nt a certainty they will be gone for a long period of time.
They require the student's parents to be involved. Public schools just get to wish parents would be involved as many are absentee or have abdicated their responsibilites.
KIPP schools are also the darlings of the federal government and entrepreneurs. As those two groups ignore cash starved public schools who have to cut guidance counselor and librarian positions and many of who are phasing out electives suffer, the local KIPP school just received a massive grant to fund a band.
Their classes are smaller, their days are longer and despite all this they don’t do any better than their public school cousins.
Studies show that only about a sixth of charter schools perform any better than the average public schools with the vast majority performing just as well or worse and despite all this common knowledge, and despite all the successes Jacksonville schools have had and there have been many our Mayor chooses to praise this one charter school as Jacksonville's lone pocket of success.
What do you think now? How is that for a pocket of success?
The truth is our schools do need a lot of work but the mayor does them and the fine men and woment who work at them a disservice when he ignores them and talks about the KIPP school with such high regard, which by the way is also less than a year old which means at the very best the jury should still be out.
In the end I wish the KIPP school luck but also I wish more middle schools had bands, more people cared more about the cities public schools and our next mayor is capable of thinking before he speaks.
Chris Guerrieri
School Teacher
You can tell he is enamored with them when he said: When I look for those pockets of success and models that are working I always end up looking at KIPP.
Yes you might have found it ironic that he didn’t mention Stanton or Paxon long considered to be two of the best schools in the nation, or the fact Sandlewood a mega high school went from a C school to an A school this past year, or the La Villa school of the arts or dozens of other schools around town which have been lauded for their improvements or successes. In fact it wouldn’t have taken much effort for him to mention any school because despite many of their struggles there are amazing things going on at all of them. No he chose to mention the new KIPP school instead.
There are some things you might not know about the KIPP school that our mayor should, aterwards you decide if they are our one pocket of sucess.
First much of the KIPP schools funding come from tax payers and despite this the KIPP school gets to play by different rules.
They get to pick who they take. Public schools are obligated to try and educate everybody who shows up.
They get to pick who they keep. Public schools have to keep them all their children short of them selling drugs or bringing a weapon to school and even then it's nt a certainty they will be gone for a long period of time.
They require the student's parents to be involved. Public schools just get to wish parents would be involved as many are absentee or have abdicated their responsibilites.
KIPP schools are also the darlings of the federal government and entrepreneurs. As those two groups ignore cash starved public schools who have to cut guidance counselor and librarian positions and many of who are phasing out electives suffer, the local KIPP school just received a massive grant to fund a band.
Their classes are smaller, their days are longer and despite all this they don’t do any better than their public school cousins.
Studies show that only about a sixth of charter schools perform any better than the average public schools with the vast majority performing just as well or worse and despite all this common knowledge, and despite all the successes Jacksonville schools have had and there have been many our Mayor chooses to praise this one charter school as Jacksonville's lone pocket of success.
What do you think now? How is that for a pocket of success?
The truth is our schools do need a lot of work but the mayor does them and the fine men and woment who work at them a disservice when he ignores them and talks about the KIPP school with such high regard, which by the way is also less than a year old which means at the very best the jury should still be out.
In the end I wish the KIPP school luck but also I wish more middle schools had bands, more people cared more about the cities public schools and our next mayor is capable of thinking before he speaks.
Chris Guerrieri
School Teacher
Sunday, January 2, 2011
Education stories and the truths behind them
From the blog, Modern School, there is a link to it at the bottom of the page.
By Mike Dunn
Rachel Norton posted the following list of top ed news stories of the decade. While I would agree that these were important education stories, they are all well known to most of the public. Yet each also has a hidden story behind it that has been ignored by the media.
10. The rise of autism: In 2001, the incidence of autism was thought to be one case for every 160 people, which even then was much higher than in previous decades. Today, the accepted incidence is more like one case for every 100 people. Though the increased incidence is as much a public health issue as an educational one, I’ve included the phenomenon on this list because the increase in the number of children diagnosed with autism has had a profound impact on schools. From an educational perspective, autism is a perfect storm–children with autism have expensive needs, but respond well to intervention. No one really knows how much treatment is appropriate according to the framework set by special education laws.
While it is certainly shocking and significant to parents and educators that autism rates are going up, what has been virtually ignored by the media are the reasons for the increase. Autism rates increase dramatically among older parents. A ten-year increase in maternal age, for example, increases the risk of autism by 38%. Unlike Down syndrome, both older fathers and older mothers have a higher risk. Therefore, one likely reason for the increase in autism is the fact that many parents are waiting longer before having kids.
Increasing rates of Autism are also due in part to how it is identified and diagnosed. Autism can now be detected and diagnosed much more accurately and sometimes earlier than in the past. Further, the definition of Autism Spectrum Disorder, which includes Asperger’s Syndrome, is broader and includes more patients than earlier definitions.
Lastly, perhaps an equally important autism story this decade is the overwhelming and compelling evidence that there is NO link between vaccines and autism. Children’s vaccines are no longer allowed to contain any mercury and even those vaccines that still do contain mercury as a preservative (e.g., influenza vaccines) contain too little to cause a neurological effect. Further, while the number of autism diagnoses was going up over the past ten years, the amount of mercury in vaccines was declining. What has fueled the anti-vaccine hysteria is the fact that autism typically manifests in children between the ages of one and two years, precisely when they are getting many of their vaccines. Thus, coincidentally, many autism diagnoses happen right after a child has been vaccinated, creating the impression of cause and effect.
9. Still waiting for technology to revolutionize education: At the beginning of the decade, most people would have predicted that schools would be using computers and technology in ways that enhanced student achievement and learning. Today, at the end of a decade that has seen an enormous expansion in the use of technology in everyday life, schools are still using computers in much the same way that they were at the start of the decade. More classrooms have computers; more schools have computer labs; but curriculum development has not kept pace with the interconnected, social nature of today’s Internet. Even as students text, access YouTube and update Facebook on their mobile phones, their classroom computers block access to most of those same services. Teaching students to be smart consumers of sometimes unreliable Internet data and careful stewards of their personal information is of paramount importance for the next decade, but it’s not clear that schools are up to the task.
The hidden story here is that schools are spending bucket loads of their dwindling budgets on computers, software and other technology, while they fire teachers, librarians, nurses, custodians and secretaries and eliminate staff development days, and see a continuing achievement gap. Technology, like teacher quality, privatization, tenure and unions, is just another red herring that allows us to overlook the overwhelming cause of low student achievement: poverty. Bring families out of poverty and we’ll see dramatic improvements in student achievement, with or without fancy technology.
However, if we do want to see technology used in creative and clever ways to enhance learning, then teachers need to be provided more professional development opportunities to learn the technology, play with it and create innovative uses for it. This, sadly, is not happening, nor is it likely to happen with declining education budgets. One example of a creative use of technology is a series of experiments I designed for high school students to study the effects of drugs on nematodes using digital microscopy and software from the NIH to track their movements. It is a real world scientific experiment that not only teaches about the nervous system and cells, but has students collecting and analyzing their own original data. However, to develop this curriculum I spent three summers collaborating with scientists at UCSF and had to obtain all my own funding, without any support from my school, district or the state.
8. Curriculum wars continue: A bunch of Intelligent Design believers got elected to the Kansas State Board of Education, and suddenly we’re all debating Darwin again. Then Texas–one of the biggest textbook markets in the country, whose size gives it the power to shape curriculum choices far beyond its borders–decides that American History as traditionally taught is biased. So schoolchildren across the country will now learn, among other things, “about the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s, including Phyllis Schlafly, the Contract With America, the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority and the National Rifle Association.” If anything, these skirmishes should remind us all to pay attention to the compositions of our state Boards of Education–they are powerful enough to create quite a kerfuffle if captured by extremists of any stripe.
The truth is that some of us never stopped debating Darwin. I have taught biology for fourteen years and I have had students challenge me on it every single year, even in liberal San Francisco. The fact is that only 16% of Americans believe in secular evolution, (the idea that humans evolved from other life forms without any divine intervention). It should be no surprise that some of the overwhelming majority of doubters would fight for their version of reality to be portrayed in school textbooks. Also, many of the backers of Intelligent Design, and other creationist schemes, have substantial financial backing to pay for political campaigns (including school boards) and advertisements. The Discovery Institute, for example, has an annual budget of $5 million, most of which is used to promote Intelligent Design schemes.
Like the adage that history is written by the victors, the textbook industry is controlled by the biggest, most powerful publishing houses, each of which has a stake in perpetuating the American Dream mythology and the conflation of capitalism and democracy. Therefore, textbooks, especially history books, will always downplay, manipulate and censor the history of unions and working people, extol the virtues of capitalism, and glorify the histories of the rich and powerful, regardless of who is on the school boards.
7. After Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans rebuilds its schools from scratch: Prior to Katrina, New Orleans’ schools were considered to be among the worst in the nation–64 percent were deemed academically unacceptable by the state of Louisana, and the graduation rate was about 50 percent. The devastation and displacement of thousands of students in the wake of the disaster created an opportunity for reformers and policymakers, who quickly replaced schools that had been destroyed with a new network of charter schools. The district was rechristened the “Recovery School District,” and dollars flowed in, both from the Federal government and private sources. Recent college graduates, eager to make a difference, also came in droves to teach in the “new” New Orleans public schools. Results? Initially, very promising–test scores posted by New Orleans have risen dramatically in the five years since the storm. A decade from now, will New Orleans be one of the nation’s highest-achieving school systems? That kind of sustained improvement will depend on sustained effort and sustained investment.
Arne Duncan said that Katrina was the best thing that could have happened to the New Orleans schools. What he meant was that disasters are fantastic ways to rally popular support for otherwise unpopular ideas, in this case, a massive scheme to convert the entire district to charter schools and destroy the unions. 71% of New Orleans children are now attending charter schools, the highest rate in the nation. All employees, including teachers and custodians, were fired and forced to reapply, and all union contracts were canceled. Many of the unionized teachers were replaced by Teach For America interns.
It would be tempting to attribute New Orleans’ improved test scores to these charter schools, but it would be inaccurate. First, large numbers of New Orleans residents still have not returned. Many of these were low income from the Lower Ninth Ward, where only 3,600 residents have returned (out of the 19,000 who lived there prior to Katrina). Overall, New Orleans has become much more affluent. For example, there are 66% fewer poor African American women living in New Orleans today than a decade ago. Rents have gone up by 39%. And, as we all know, it’s the class, not the school, that matters most in terms of academic achievement
6. Geoffrey Canada and his Harlem Children’s Zone inspire reform movement: Adopting the motto “whatever it takes,” the charismatic and energetic Canada set out to fight poverty and low academic achievement in a 97-square-block zone in Harlem. Private donations and accolades poured in, and Mr. Canada’s ambitious (and breathtakingly expensive) project was chronicled in a well-reviewed book (“Whatever It Takes,” written by journalist Paul Tough). The Zone’s two charter schools initially showed positive results, but more recent studies have illustrated just how hard it is to break the interconnected cycles of poverty and low achievement.
First, it should be emphasized that two-thirds of Canada’s funding came from private donations, making his project a virtual private school and unsustainable or reproducible on a large scale. Second, despite his emphasis on hard work, Canada attributes his own academic success (despite growing up poor) to his avid reading. Ample studies show a strong correlation between reading, especially in early childhood, and later academic success. Yet low income families tend to read less to their young children and expose them to fewer new vocabulary words than middle class and wealthy families. This creates an achievement gap before kids have even started kindergarten that tends to increase as children get older, a problem that cannot be surmounted simply through hard work, accountability, or testing.
Canada, to his credit, acknowledges the strong impact that poverty has on academic achievement, and has sought to mitigate these effects with health care, adult classes for expecting parents, after school programs and other social supports. What he fails to realize or address (nor can he) is that the effects of poverty cannot be reversed through superficial means that occur only part-time (e.g., at school). The students and their families have spent much or all of their lives in poverty. Students continue to be poor when they go home. They start school with a disadvantage in terms of literacy and school readiness. Many lower income students have long histories academic failure and come to school with low self-efficacy. Poor kids are more likely to be born premature, with low birth weights, and to suffer malnutrition, lead poisoning or iron deficiency anemia, each of which can impair cognitive development or lead to learning disabilities. All of the best teaching and support services combined cannot overcome all of these problems for all low income students.
5. Landmark desegregation cases reshape student assignment policies: In 2007, the Supreme Court decided two major school busing cases (Meredith vs. Jefferson County Board of Education and People Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District No.1 et. al), striking down any school assignment plan using race as a tie-breaker. The 5-4 decision said student assignment policies could be “race-conscious” but could not take an individual student’s race into account. Many school desegregation advocates fear that the Court’s decision will intensify rapidly resegregating schools and worsen educational inequities between low- and high-income communities.
The hidden stories here are that charter schools are speeding up the re-segregation process, despite these court rulings and that class matters even more than race. The argument for desegregation in Brown vs Board of Education was that separate was inherently unequal; therefore, stop segregating. However, even when schools were desegregated by race, they were still heavily segregated by class, with higher income schools having higher graduation rates and sending more kids to four year universities. Wealthier parents tend to live in wealthier neighborhoods, thus concentrating their wealth in a few schools. When their kids aren’t automatically assigned to the desired school, they are more likely than lower income parents to have the time, connections and understanding of the system to fight for their kids’ placement in their desired schools. When they can’t get into the desired public schools (or when there are no desired public schools) they have the wealth to send their kids to elite private schools.
4. Charter movement reaches a peak: Though the first charter schools opened in the early 1990s, the charter school movement matured in the last decade, with the number of charter schools doubling since 2000 (there are now about 5,000 charter schools open nationwide). Initially, charters were seen as laboratories for promising practices, but they have since been hailed by some reformers as high-quality alternatives to traditional public schools (in New Orleans, discussed in #7 above, two-thirds of the Recovery School District’s schools have been reopened as charters). Others, notably education scholar Diane Ravitch, who wrote the 2010 book ”The Death and Life of the American School System,” the charter debate is really a distraction from a serious conversation about how to fix our educational system, which is and will continue to be dominated by traditional public schools. Finally, early claims about the stellar academic progress of students in charter schools (as compared to their counterparts in traditional schools), may have been overblown. Several studies released in 2009 and 2010 found that charters, on average, perform no better than traditional public schools.
There are several hidden stories here. First, the charter movement, which initially found its support among Christian fundamentalists who wanted “family values” schools, has become a multi-billion dollar industry dominated by large private education corporations, like Green Dot, Wall Street investors and billionaire cheerleaders like Bill Gates, Eli Broad, and the Walton Foundation. It should be emphasized that this is the primary impetus for the proliferation of charter schools and all the bogus claims about their potential. Over the past decade, the number of for-profit Education Management Organizations (EMOs) running charter schools has gone up seven-fold. Non-profit charter schools often subcontract out management of their schools to for-profit EMOs.
A second underreported story is that not only do charter schools perform no better than traditional public schools, and often much worse, but they also tend to be far more segregated and have a tendency to push out students who they think may lower their test scores, like special education students. For example, nearly 80% of Latino and 70% of black charter school students are in schools that are over 90% minority, nearly double the rate in traditional public schools. In 2007, public school enrollment was 47% white, 22% black, 21% Hispanic and 3% Asian. Private, religious school enrollment was 73% white, 9% black, 12% Hispanic, 3% Asian, while private, secular school enrollment was: 69% white, 11% black, 9% Hispanic, and 6% Asian. Poor students make up 40% of public schools, but only 17% of private religious and 10% of private secular schools.
3. Mayoral control is tempting, but not a magic bullet: The trend toward big-city mayors assuming control of their city’s school system actually began in the 1990s, when mayors in Boston and then Chicago took over their city’s schools. New York’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg took over his city’s schools in 2002, followed a few years later by Adrian Fenty in Washington, D.C. In 2006, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa was prevented by a judge’s ruling from assuming more power over the Los Angeles Unified School District. Assuming control of failing school districts is tempting for Mayors, who think that controlling school board and Superintendent appointments is a great way to ensure accountability and stability in school leadership. But does mayoral control actually improve schools? Researchers say there is no compelling evidence of a connection between rising achievement and mayoral control.
The hidden story here is that mayoral control is simply a way to eliminate oversight, accountability and democracy. It takes away the power of parents, teachers and community members and focuses it into the hands of a benign (or not so benign) dictator who, more likely than not, uses that power to hand over public schools to private ed profiteers and charter schools. It allows billionaire mayors like New York’s Bloomberg to install inexperienced rich cronies as schools chief (e.g., Cathie Black, Joel Klein) or Daley to install the equally inexperienced and wealthy Duncan in Chicago.
2. Race to the Top: With the creation of the $4.3 billion Race to the Top competition, President Obama and his Education Secretary Arne Duncan dramatically increased the Federal role in education. Is that a good thing? The four options for states to use to turn around failing schools are not supported by any particular research, and the huge jackpot being dangled by the U.S. Department of Education won’t necessarily go where it’s needed the most — instead, it will go to the states that best parrot Washington’s new party line.
The hidden story here is that Race to the Top (RTTT) is just another way to transfer taxpayer dollars into the hands of corporate education profiteers.
In California, for example, the state had to adopt the national content standards known as Common Core Standards, in order to be in the running for RTTT funds. This will cost $1.6 billion in new textbooks (a windfall to the ed publishing industry), yet the RTTT grant for California (had they succeeded) was only worth $700 million. RTTT also requires states to ease restrictions and quotas on new charter schools, which makes it easier for private, for-profit charter schools and EMOs to gain access to public education funds.
1. No Child Left Behind: I don’t think you can underestimate the impact this law had on schools over the past decade. NCLB was one of President George W. Bush’s signature policy achievements, but it was also backed by powerful Democrats in Congress, including the late Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts and Rep. George Miller of California. The law drastically expanded the use of standardized tests and set up the unachievable goal of making all students proficient by 2014. Schools that failed to meet growth targets (Adequate Yearly Progress or AYP) for all students and specific subgroups (like members of minority groups and students with disabilities) were subject to sanctions, which became more severe each passing year. The one good thing the law accomplished was to focus attention on the achievement gap, and put schools on notice that they should pay attention to the achievement of all students. But the law’s sanctions and targets were unnecessarily punitive and unrealistic, and led to a narrower focus on basic skills rather than critical thinking, problem-solving, and creativity.
NCLB (re-christened as the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, its original name) has been up for reauthorization since last year, but little progress has been made (the Obama Administration says reauthorization will be a top priority for 2011). Until that reauthorization happens, all of NCLB technically remains in effect, though it’s unclear whether its most toxic provisions will actually be enforced.
There are two big under-reported stories here. First, NCLB was designed so that its goals could never be attained. Virtually every school in California is expected to be failing by 2014, the year all students are supposed to be proficient under NCLB. The reason is that if any subgroup of students (e.g., special education, immigrant, ESL, low income, etc.) at a school fails to improve sufficiently, the entire school is deemed a failure under NCLB.
The second story is that NCLB, like RTTT, is big business and has the potential to become even bigger, especially if schools continue to fail. The tests bring in big bucks for the test publishers, while the pressure for schools to improve increases spending on new curricula, professional development and restructuring plans. Many of the curriculum suppliers had close ties with President Bush and some even helped to write NCLB. Barnett Alexander “Sandy” Kress, for example, was a lobbyist for McGraw-Hill and a key architect of NCLB. Harold McGraw, Jr., of McGraw-Hill, sat on the board of the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy, while his son, Harold McGraw III, was a member of the George W. Bush transition team. Kress also represented Ignite! Learning, a company headed by Neil Bush, and K12 Inc., owned by Bill Bennett, Reagan’s Education Secretary.
While there are certainly huge profits to be made by selling tests, textbooks and curriculum, there may be even greater potential profits ahead for charter school companies and EMOs. After four years of failure, schools must replace all their teachers, implement new curricula, appoint outside experts, or convert to a charter school. With states like California expecting nearly 100% failure by 2014, this could open up a backdoor route for the complete privatization of the k12 education system.
http://modeducation.blogspot.com/2011/01/top-10-censored-education-stories-of.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ModernSchool+%28Modern+School%29
By Mike Dunn
Rachel Norton posted the following list of top ed news stories of the decade. While I would agree that these were important education stories, they are all well known to most of the public. Yet each also has a hidden story behind it that has been ignored by the media.
10. The rise of autism: In 2001, the incidence of autism was thought to be one case for every 160 people, which even then was much higher than in previous decades. Today, the accepted incidence is more like one case for every 100 people. Though the increased incidence is as much a public health issue as an educational one, I’ve included the phenomenon on this list because the increase in the number of children diagnosed with autism has had a profound impact on schools. From an educational perspective, autism is a perfect storm–children with autism have expensive needs, but respond well to intervention. No one really knows how much treatment is appropriate according to the framework set by special education laws.
While it is certainly shocking and significant to parents and educators that autism rates are going up, what has been virtually ignored by the media are the reasons for the increase. Autism rates increase dramatically among older parents. A ten-year increase in maternal age, for example, increases the risk of autism by 38%. Unlike Down syndrome, both older fathers and older mothers have a higher risk. Therefore, one likely reason for the increase in autism is the fact that many parents are waiting longer before having kids.
Increasing rates of Autism are also due in part to how it is identified and diagnosed. Autism can now be detected and diagnosed much more accurately and sometimes earlier than in the past. Further, the definition of Autism Spectrum Disorder, which includes Asperger’s Syndrome, is broader and includes more patients than earlier definitions.
Lastly, perhaps an equally important autism story this decade is the overwhelming and compelling evidence that there is NO link between vaccines and autism. Children’s vaccines are no longer allowed to contain any mercury and even those vaccines that still do contain mercury as a preservative (e.g., influenza vaccines) contain too little to cause a neurological effect. Further, while the number of autism diagnoses was going up over the past ten years, the amount of mercury in vaccines was declining. What has fueled the anti-vaccine hysteria is the fact that autism typically manifests in children between the ages of one and two years, precisely when they are getting many of their vaccines. Thus, coincidentally, many autism diagnoses happen right after a child has been vaccinated, creating the impression of cause and effect.
9. Still waiting for technology to revolutionize education: At the beginning of the decade, most people would have predicted that schools would be using computers and technology in ways that enhanced student achievement and learning. Today, at the end of a decade that has seen an enormous expansion in the use of technology in everyday life, schools are still using computers in much the same way that they were at the start of the decade. More classrooms have computers; more schools have computer labs; but curriculum development has not kept pace with the interconnected, social nature of today’s Internet. Even as students text, access YouTube and update Facebook on their mobile phones, their classroom computers block access to most of those same services. Teaching students to be smart consumers of sometimes unreliable Internet data and careful stewards of their personal information is of paramount importance for the next decade, but it’s not clear that schools are up to the task.
The hidden story here is that schools are spending bucket loads of their dwindling budgets on computers, software and other technology, while they fire teachers, librarians, nurses, custodians and secretaries and eliminate staff development days, and see a continuing achievement gap. Technology, like teacher quality, privatization, tenure and unions, is just another red herring that allows us to overlook the overwhelming cause of low student achievement: poverty. Bring families out of poverty and we’ll see dramatic improvements in student achievement, with or without fancy technology.
However, if we do want to see technology used in creative and clever ways to enhance learning, then teachers need to be provided more professional development opportunities to learn the technology, play with it and create innovative uses for it. This, sadly, is not happening, nor is it likely to happen with declining education budgets. One example of a creative use of technology is a series of experiments I designed for high school students to study the effects of drugs on nematodes using digital microscopy and software from the NIH to track their movements. It is a real world scientific experiment that not only teaches about the nervous system and cells, but has students collecting and analyzing their own original data. However, to develop this curriculum I spent three summers collaborating with scientists at UCSF and had to obtain all my own funding, without any support from my school, district or the state.
8. Curriculum wars continue: A bunch of Intelligent Design believers got elected to the Kansas State Board of Education, and suddenly we’re all debating Darwin again. Then Texas–one of the biggest textbook markets in the country, whose size gives it the power to shape curriculum choices far beyond its borders–decides that American History as traditionally taught is biased. So schoolchildren across the country will now learn, among other things, “about the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s, including Phyllis Schlafly, the Contract With America, the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority and the National Rifle Association.” If anything, these skirmishes should remind us all to pay attention to the compositions of our state Boards of Education–they are powerful enough to create quite a kerfuffle if captured by extremists of any stripe.
The truth is that some of us never stopped debating Darwin. I have taught biology for fourteen years and I have had students challenge me on it every single year, even in liberal San Francisco. The fact is that only 16% of Americans believe in secular evolution, (the idea that humans evolved from other life forms without any divine intervention). It should be no surprise that some of the overwhelming majority of doubters would fight for their version of reality to be portrayed in school textbooks. Also, many of the backers of Intelligent Design, and other creationist schemes, have substantial financial backing to pay for political campaigns (including school boards) and advertisements. The Discovery Institute, for example, has an annual budget of $5 million, most of which is used to promote Intelligent Design schemes.
Like the adage that history is written by the victors, the textbook industry is controlled by the biggest, most powerful publishing houses, each of which has a stake in perpetuating the American Dream mythology and the conflation of capitalism and democracy. Therefore, textbooks, especially history books, will always downplay, manipulate and censor the history of unions and working people, extol the virtues of capitalism, and glorify the histories of the rich and powerful, regardless of who is on the school boards.
7. After Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans rebuilds its schools from scratch: Prior to Katrina, New Orleans’ schools were considered to be among the worst in the nation–64 percent were deemed academically unacceptable by the state of Louisana, and the graduation rate was about 50 percent. The devastation and displacement of thousands of students in the wake of the disaster created an opportunity for reformers and policymakers, who quickly replaced schools that had been destroyed with a new network of charter schools. The district was rechristened the “Recovery School District,” and dollars flowed in, both from the Federal government and private sources. Recent college graduates, eager to make a difference, also came in droves to teach in the “new” New Orleans public schools. Results? Initially, very promising–test scores posted by New Orleans have risen dramatically in the five years since the storm. A decade from now, will New Orleans be one of the nation’s highest-achieving school systems? That kind of sustained improvement will depend on sustained effort and sustained investment.
Arne Duncan said that Katrina was the best thing that could have happened to the New Orleans schools. What he meant was that disasters are fantastic ways to rally popular support for otherwise unpopular ideas, in this case, a massive scheme to convert the entire district to charter schools and destroy the unions. 71% of New Orleans children are now attending charter schools, the highest rate in the nation. All employees, including teachers and custodians, were fired and forced to reapply, and all union contracts were canceled. Many of the unionized teachers were replaced by Teach For America interns.
It would be tempting to attribute New Orleans’ improved test scores to these charter schools, but it would be inaccurate. First, large numbers of New Orleans residents still have not returned. Many of these were low income from the Lower Ninth Ward, where only 3,600 residents have returned (out of the 19,000 who lived there prior to Katrina). Overall, New Orleans has become much more affluent. For example, there are 66% fewer poor African American women living in New Orleans today than a decade ago. Rents have gone up by 39%. And, as we all know, it’s the class, not the school, that matters most in terms of academic achievement
6. Geoffrey Canada and his Harlem Children’s Zone inspire reform movement: Adopting the motto “whatever it takes,” the charismatic and energetic Canada set out to fight poverty and low academic achievement in a 97-square-block zone in Harlem. Private donations and accolades poured in, and Mr. Canada’s ambitious (and breathtakingly expensive) project was chronicled in a well-reviewed book (“Whatever It Takes,” written by journalist Paul Tough). The Zone’s two charter schools initially showed positive results, but more recent studies have illustrated just how hard it is to break the interconnected cycles of poverty and low achievement.
First, it should be emphasized that two-thirds of Canada’s funding came from private donations, making his project a virtual private school and unsustainable or reproducible on a large scale. Second, despite his emphasis on hard work, Canada attributes his own academic success (despite growing up poor) to his avid reading. Ample studies show a strong correlation between reading, especially in early childhood, and later academic success. Yet low income families tend to read less to their young children and expose them to fewer new vocabulary words than middle class and wealthy families. This creates an achievement gap before kids have even started kindergarten that tends to increase as children get older, a problem that cannot be surmounted simply through hard work, accountability, or testing.
Canada, to his credit, acknowledges the strong impact that poverty has on academic achievement, and has sought to mitigate these effects with health care, adult classes for expecting parents, after school programs and other social supports. What he fails to realize or address (nor can he) is that the effects of poverty cannot be reversed through superficial means that occur only part-time (e.g., at school). The students and their families have spent much or all of their lives in poverty. Students continue to be poor when they go home. They start school with a disadvantage in terms of literacy and school readiness. Many lower income students have long histories academic failure and come to school with low self-efficacy. Poor kids are more likely to be born premature, with low birth weights, and to suffer malnutrition, lead poisoning or iron deficiency anemia, each of which can impair cognitive development or lead to learning disabilities. All of the best teaching and support services combined cannot overcome all of these problems for all low income students.
5. Landmark desegregation cases reshape student assignment policies: In 2007, the Supreme Court decided two major school busing cases (Meredith vs. Jefferson County Board of Education and People Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District No.1 et. al), striking down any school assignment plan using race as a tie-breaker. The 5-4 decision said student assignment policies could be “race-conscious” but could not take an individual student’s race into account. Many school desegregation advocates fear that the Court’s decision will intensify rapidly resegregating schools and worsen educational inequities between low- and high-income communities.
The hidden stories here are that charter schools are speeding up the re-segregation process, despite these court rulings and that class matters even more than race. The argument for desegregation in Brown vs Board of Education was that separate was inherently unequal; therefore, stop segregating. However, even when schools were desegregated by race, they were still heavily segregated by class, with higher income schools having higher graduation rates and sending more kids to four year universities. Wealthier parents tend to live in wealthier neighborhoods, thus concentrating their wealth in a few schools. When their kids aren’t automatically assigned to the desired school, they are more likely than lower income parents to have the time, connections and understanding of the system to fight for their kids’ placement in their desired schools. When they can’t get into the desired public schools (or when there are no desired public schools) they have the wealth to send their kids to elite private schools.
4. Charter movement reaches a peak: Though the first charter schools opened in the early 1990s, the charter school movement matured in the last decade, with the number of charter schools doubling since 2000 (there are now about 5,000 charter schools open nationwide). Initially, charters were seen as laboratories for promising practices, but they have since been hailed by some reformers as high-quality alternatives to traditional public schools (in New Orleans, discussed in #7 above, two-thirds of the Recovery School District’s schools have been reopened as charters). Others, notably education scholar Diane Ravitch, who wrote the 2010 book ”The Death and Life of the American School System,” the charter debate is really a distraction from a serious conversation about how to fix our educational system, which is and will continue to be dominated by traditional public schools. Finally, early claims about the stellar academic progress of students in charter schools (as compared to their counterparts in traditional schools), may have been overblown. Several studies released in 2009 and 2010 found that charters, on average, perform no better than traditional public schools.
There are several hidden stories here. First, the charter movement, which initially found its support among Christian fundamentalists who wanted “family values” schools, has become a multi-billion dollar industry dominated by large private education corporations, like Green Dot, Wall Street investors and billionaire cheerleaders like Bill Gates, Eli Broad, and the Walton Foundation. It should be emphasized that this is the primary impetus for the proliferation of charter schools and all the bogus claims about their potential. Over the past decade, the number of for-profit Education Management Organizations (EMOs) running charter schools has gone up seven-fold. Non-profit charter schools often subcontract out management of their schools to for-profit EMOs.
A second underreported story is that not only do charter schools perform no better than traditional public schools, and often much worse, but they also tend to be far more segregated and have a tendency to push out students who they think may lower their test scores, like special education students. For example, nearly 80% of Latino and 70% of black charter school students are in schools that are over 90% minority, nearly double the rate in traditional public schools. In 2007, public school enrollment was 47% white, 22% black, 21% Hispanic and 3% Asian. Private, religious school enrollment was 73% white, 9% black, 12% Hispanic, 3% Asian, while private, secular school enrollment was: 69% white, 11% black, 9% Hispanic, and 6% Asian. Poor students make up 40% of public schools, but only 17% of private religious and 10% of private secular schools.
3. Mayoral control is tempting, but not a magic bullet: The trend toward big-city mayors assuming control of their city’s school system actually began in the 1990s, when mayors in Boston and then Chicago took over their city’s schools. New York’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg took over his city’s schools in 2002, followed a few years later by Adrian Fenty in Washington, D.C. In 2006, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa was prevented by a judge’s ruling from assuming more power over the Los Angeles Unified School District. Assuming control of failing school districts is tempting for Mayors, who think that controlling school board and Superintendent appointments is a great way to ensure accountability and stability in school leadership. But does mayoral control actually improve schools? Researchers say there is no compelling evidence of a connection between rising achievement and mayoral control.
The hidden story here is that mayoral control is simply a way to eliminate oversight, accountability and democracy. It takes away the power of parents, teachers and community members and focuses it into the hands of a benign (or not so benign) dictator who, more likely than not, uses that power to hand over public schools to private ed profiteers and charter schools. It allows billionaire mayors like New York’s Bloomberg to install inexperienced rich cronies as schools chief (e.g., Cathie Black, Joel Klein) or Daley to install the equally inexperienced and wealthy Duncan in Chicago.
2. Race to the Top: With the creation of the $4.3 billion Race to the Top competition, President Obama and his Education Secretary Arne Duncan dramatically increased the Federal role in education. Is that a good thing? The four options for states to use to turn around failing schools are not supported by any particular research, and the huge jackpot being dangled by the U.S. Department of Education won’t necessarily go where it’s needed the most — instead, it will go to the states that best parrot Washington’s new party line.
The hidden story here is that Race to the Top (RTTT) is just another way to transfer taxpayer dollars into the hands of corporate education profiteers.
In California, for example, the state had to adopt the national content standards known as Common Core Standards, in order to be in the running for RTTT funds. This will cost $1.6 billion in new textbooks (a windfall to the ed publishing industry), yet the RTTT grant for California (had they succeeded) was only worth $700 million. RTTT also requires states to ease restrictions and quotas on new charter schools, which makes it easier for private, for-profit charter schools and EMOs to gain access to public education funds.
1. No Child Left Behind: I don’t think you can underestimate the impact this law had on schools over the past decade. NCLB was one of President George W. Bush’s signature policy achievements, but it was also backed by powerful Democrats in Congress, including the late Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts and Rep. George Miller of California. The law drastically expanded the use of standardized tests and set up the unachievable goal of making all students proficient by 2014. Schools that failed to meet growth targets (Adequate Yearly Progress or AYP) for all students and specific subgroups (like members of minority groups and students with disabilities) were subject to sanctions, which became more severe each passing year. The one good thing the law accomplished was to focus attention on the achievement gap, and put schools on notice that they should pay attention to the achievement of all students. But the law’s sanctions and targets were unnecessarily punitive and unrealistic, and led to a narrower focus on basic skills rather than critical thinking, problem-solving, and creativity.
NCLB (re-christened as the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, its original name) has been up for reauthorization since last year, but little progress has been made (the Obama Administration says reauthorization will be a top priority for 2011). Until that reauthorization happens, all of NCLB technically remains in effect, though it’s unclear whether its most toxic provisions will actually be enforced.
There are two big under-reported stories here. First, NCLB was designed so that its goals could never be attained. Virtually every school in California is expected to be failing by 2014, the year all students are supposed to be proficient under NCLB. The reason is that if any subgroup of students (e.g., special education, immigrant, ESL, low income, etc.) at a school fails to improve sufficiently, the entire school is deemed a failure under NCLB.
The second story is that NCLB, like RTTT, is big business and has the potential to become even bigger, especially if schools continue to fail. The tests bring in big bucks for the test publishers, while the pressure for schools to improve increases spending on new curricula, professional development and restructuring plans. Many of the curriculum suppliers had close ties with President Bush and some even helped to write NCLB. Barnett Alexander “Sandy” Kress, for example, was a lobbyist for McGraw-Hill and a key architect of NCLB. Harold McGraw, Jr., of McGraw-Hill, sat on the board of the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy, while his son, Harold McGraw III, was a member of the George W. Bush transition team. Kress also represented Ignite! Learning, a company headed by Neil Bush, and K12 Inc., owned by Bill Bennett, Reagan’s Education Secretary.
While there are certainly huge profits to be made by selling tests, textbooks and curriculum, there may be even greater potential profits ahead for charter school companies and EMOs. After four years of failure, schools must replace all their teachers, implement new curricula, appoint outside experts, or convert to a charter school. With states like California expecting nearly 100% failure by 2014, this could open up a backdoor route for the complete privatization of the k12 education system.
http://modeducation.blogspot.com/2011/01/top-10-censored-education-stories-of.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ModernSchool+%28Modern+School%29
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
No thanks, not the change I hoped for
A version of this, is currently in this weeks Folio
I have to say during the lead up to the '08 election, I allowed myself to be hopeful. Then Senator Obama was saying all the right things. “No child left behind” was a failed experiment that would become a thing of the past and education would finally (after much lip service) become a priority. If only I would have read the fine print as (fast forward two years) things have become worse since he was elected. Teachers now have all the responsibility but none of the authority to teach our children and have had creativity and flexibility stripped from them all in the name of data. Instead of doing what's right for our children, we have turned to “in vogue solutions”, like charter schools and merit pay that both rob public schools of valuable resources that, incongruently, the “data” says work no better than not doing them.
I was very disheartened the other day when now President Obama’s Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan came to town to visit the new KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) school. The KIPP school is truly a formidable beast. Kids go to school longer, on Saturdays and all year long. They have to wear uniforms and parental involvement is mandatory. It also has resources far above and beyond the resources that local neighborhood schools have including a $500,000 grant to support its music program. That’s right, folks - this pseudo private school gets money from the government for a music program just as music programs in most middle schools are being slashed. Hey, Mr. President and Mr. Secretary of Education - how about helping the kids at P.S. this or P.S. that so they can have a music program too, before you fund one at the KIPP school. I mean aren’t the kids in public school worth it as well?
You know what scares me the most? It's what’s going to happen when the KIPP school succeeds and the man on the street says, look there, why can’t they do it at PS this or PS that. Public school teachers must be terrible. Then the powers that be in their far off ivory towers are going to have the excuses they need to further rob teachers of flexibility and creativity and buy them with even more paper work. They are going to have one more reason to take money out of the coffers of the already struggling public schools and steer money to more charter schools and voucher programs. Arne Duncan, by showing up and patting backs, has just given them tacit approval to do so.
Arne Duncan also talked about every kid going to college and this is a sentiment that his boss President Obama has echoed on many occasions, further showing us just how out of touch they are with the reality of the situation. I would just like to remind them and anybody reading that we don’t have the students and parental involvement we wish we had, we have the students and parents that we do and it’s time we made realistic plans to service their needs as well. The truth is the way we are doing things now with a one size fits all everybody is going to college mentality, regardless of ability, desire, and family support, curriculum, stacks the deck against the public school. It practically ensures failure. We need to change things so that in six or seven years from now when two sixth graders graduate, (one from the KIPP school who goes to college and one from PS that graduates with a skill and gets a steady job with room for advancement) we should applaud both. To me, that’s much better than dooming one to a life of public assistance and hopelessness, (that’s the public school kid, by the way).
In the end, however, other than a shiny bow, the KIPP school can’t make any promises that the public school can’t and their principal admits it. On the to the public school I work at, I heard him on the radio. He said, if the kids try hard and stick with the program, we’ll see them through. Well you know what - I am going to go ahead and make the same promise to all the kids in the county at all the public schools. Kids, stick with it and try hard and we will get you through, as well.
Unless you are teaching rocket science, education is not rocket science. Instead of trying extraordinary measures, charter schools and merit pay, (by the way, most teachers teach at the challenged schools because they love the kids there - not because they were bribed to do so) let's do what we should be doing anyway.
Let's put discipline in the classroom; let's not pass kids along until they have the skills to be successful at the next level; let's put in safety nets like social workers, counselors and legitimate summer school opportunities; let's have multiple curriculums that play to kid's strengths and desires, even if that means they don’t go to college right after they graduate and let's do so by making the teaching of trades and the arts as important as the teaching of math and science; let's not make school drudgery, (it’s no stretch of the imagination that if a kid doesn’t like school they aren’t going to do well); let's bring back rigor and slow things down; let's make sure they master the subjects even if that means they learn fewer subjects (we went through 157 pages in a nine week period in one of my classes as I was at the mercy of the pacing guide), and most importantly, instead of dumping on teachers and making them the scapegoats for all that’s wrong in education, we give them some autonomy - don’t overburden them with task after task that has little to do with education, and allow them to use creativity and flexibility even if it means they use data a little less.
I wish the staff and students at the KIPP school nothing but success. They have a long and hard road ahead of them, but at the same time I urge the powers that be not to forget about the neighborhood schools and the students and teachers there. I urge them that instead of funding pseudo private schools that really can’t be fairly compared to the typical public school, that where noble at the same time go to extraordinary lengths, how about they do what's right by the student and teachers at the neighborhood schools first. Then if that didn’t work, though I believe with all my heart it would, then well of course we would have to try something different.
Think about it, shouldn’t we be doing what we should be doing first and then only if that doesn’t work try something else after. Isn’t that how you do, say, everything?
Arne Duncan and his boss do not represent the change I hoped for. I hoped we would take education seriously and realistically. I hoped we would play to children's strengths and start respecting teachers. If extraordinary charter schools is the change they are selling, it is not a change I can believe in and it’s not a change that will work for most children.
I have to say during the lead up to the '08 election, I allowed myself to be hopeful. Then Senator Obama was saying all the right things. “No child left behind” was a failed experiment that would become a thing of the past and education would finally (after much lip service) become a priority. If only I would have read the fine print as (fast forward two years) things have become worse since he was elected. Teachers now have all the responsibility but none of the authority to teach our children and have had creativity and flexibility stripped from them all in the name of data. Instead of doing what's right for our children, we have turned to “in vogue solutions”, like charter schools and merit pay that both rob public schools of valuable resources that, incongruently, the “data” says work no better than not doing them.
I was very disheartened the other day when now President Obama’s Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan came to town to visit the new KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) school. The KIPP school is truly a formidable beast. Kids go to school longer, on Saturdays and all year long. They have to wear uniforms and parental involvement is mandatory. It also has resources far above and beyond the resources that local neighborhood schools have including a $500,000 grant to support its music program. That’s right, folks - this pseudo private school gets money from the government for a music program just as music programs in most middle schools are being slashed. Hey, Mr. President and Mr. Secretary of Education - how about helping the kids at P.S. this or P.S. that so they can have a music program too, before you fund one at the KIPP school. I mean aren’t the kids in public school worth it as well?
You know what scares me the most? It's what’s going to happen when the KIPP school succeeds and the man on the street says, look there, why can’t they do it at PS this or PS that. Public school teachers must be terrible. Then the powers that be in their far off ivory towers are going to have the excuses they need to further rob teachers of flexibility and creativity and buy them with even more paper work. They are going to have one more reason to take money out of the coffers of the already struggling public schools and steer money to more charter schools and voucher programs. Arne Duncan, by showing up and patting backs, has just given them tacit approval to do so.
Arne Duncan also talked about every kid going to college and this is a sentiment that his boss President Obama has echoed on many occasions, further showing us just how out of touch they are with the reality of the situation. I would just like to remind them and anybody reading that we don’t have the students and parental involvement we wish we had, we have the students and parents that we do and it’s time we made realistic plans to service their needs as well. The truth is the way we are doing things now with a one size fits all everybody is going to college mentality, regardless of ability, desire, and family support, curriculum, stacks the deck against the public school. It practically ensures failure. We need to change things so that in six or seven years from now when two sixth graders graduate, (one from the KIPP school who goes to college and one from PS that graduates with a skill and gets a steady job with room for advancement) we should applaud both. To me, that’s much better than dooming one to a life of public assistance and hopelessness, (that’s the public school kid, by the way).
In the end, however, other than a shiny bow, the KIPP school can’t make any promises that the public school can’t and their principal admits it. On the to the public school I work at, I heard him on the radio. He said, if the kids try hard and stick with the program, we’ll see them through. Well you know what - I am going to go ahead and make the same promise to all the kids in the county at all the public schools. Kids, stick with it and try hard and we will get you through, as well.
Unless you are teaching rocket science, education is not rocket science. Instead of trying extraordinary measures, charter schools and merit pay, (by the way, most teachers teach at the challenged schools because they love the kids there - not because they were bribed to do so) let's do what we should be doing anyway.
Let's put discipline in the classroom; let's not pass kids along until they have the skills to be successful at the next level; let's put in safety nets like social workers, counselors and legitimate summer school opportunities; let's have multiple curriculums that play to kid's strengths and desires, even if that means they don’t go to college right after they graduate and let's do so by making the teaching of trades and the arts as important as the teaching of math and science; let's not make school drudgery, (it’s no stretch of the imagination that if a kid doesn’t like school they aren’t going to do well); let's bring back rigor and slow things down; let's make sure they master the subjects even if that means they learn fewer subjects (we went through 157 pages in a nine week period in one of my classes as I was at the mercy of the pacing guide), and most importantly, instead of dumping on teachers and making them the scapegoats for all that’s wrong in education, we give them some autonomy - don’t overburden them with task after task that has little to do with education, and allow them to use creativity and flexibility even if it means they use data a little less.
I wish the staff and students at the KIPP school nothing but success. They have a long and hard road ahead of them, but at the same time I urge the powers that be not to forget about the neighborhood schools and the students and teachers there. I urge them that instead of funding pseudo private schools that really can’t be fairly compared to the typical public school, that where noble at the same time go to extraordinary lengths, how about they do what's right by the student and teachers at the neighborhood schools first. Then if that didn’t work, though I believe with all my heart it would, then well of course we would have to try something different.
Think about it, shouldn’t we be doing what we should be doing first and then only if that doesn’t work try something else after. Isn’t that how you do, say, everything?
Arne Duncan and his boss do not represent the change I hoped for. I hoped we would take education seriously and realistically. I hoped we would play to children's strengths and start respecting teachers. If extraordinary charter schools is the change they are selling, it is not a change I can believe in and it’s not a change that will work for most children.
Sunday, October 17, 2010
Arne Duncan: Not the Change I Hoped For, Not the Change I Can Believe In
I have to say during the lead up to the '08 election, I allowed myself to be hopeful. Then Senator Obama was saying all the right things. “No child left behind” was a failed experiment that would become a thing of the past and education would finally (after much lip service) become a priority. If only I would have read the fine print as (fast forward two years) things have become worse since he was elected. Teachers now have all the responsibility but none of the authority to teach our children and have had creativity and flexibility stripped from them all in the name of data. Instead of doing what's right for our children, we have turned to “in vogue solutions”, like charter schools and merit pay that both rob public schools of valuable resources that, incongruently, the “data” says work no better than not doing them.
I was very disheartened the other day when now President Obama’s Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan came to town to visit the new KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) school. The KIPP school is truly a formidable beast. Kids go to school longer, on Saturdays and all year long. They have to wear uniforms and parental involvement is mandatory. It also has resources far above and beyond the resources that local neighborhood schools have including a $500,000 grant to support its music program. That’s right, folks - this pseudo private school gets money from the government for a music program just as music programs in most middle schools are being slashed. Hey, Mr. President and Mr. Secretary of Education - how about helping the kids at P.S. this or P.S. that so they can have a music program too, before you fund one at the KIPP school. I mean aren’t the kids in public school worth it as well?
You know what scares me the most? It's what’s going to happen when the KIPP school succeeds and the man on the street says, look there, why can’t they do it at PS this or PS that. Public school teachers must be terrible. Then the powers that be in their far off ivory towers are going to have the excuses they need to further rob teachers of flexibility and creativity and buy them with even more paper work. They are going to have one more reason to take money out of the coffers of the already struggling public schools and steer money to more charter schools and voucher programs. Arne Duncan, by showing up and patting backs, has just given them tacit approval to do so.
Arne Duncan also talked about every kid going to college and this is a sentiment that his boss President Obama has echoed on many occasions, further showing us just how out of touch they are with the reality of the situation. I would just like to remind them and anybody reading that we don’t have the students and parental involvement we wish we had, we have the students and parents that we do and it’s time we made realistic plans to service their needs as well. The truth is the way we are doing things now with a one size fits all everybody is going to college mentality, regardless of ability, desire, and family support, curriculum, stacks the deck against the public school. It practically ensures failure. We need to change things so that in six or seven years from now when two sixth graders graduate, (one from the KIPP school who goes to college and one from PS that graduates with a skill and gets a steady job with room for advancement) we should applaud both. To me, that’s much better than dooming one to a life of public assistance and hopelessness, (that’s the public school kid, by the way).
In the end, however, other than a shiny bow, the KIPP school can’t make any promises that the public school can’t and their principal admits it. On the to the public school I work at, I heard him on the radio. He said, if the kids try hard and stick with the program, we’ll see them through. Well you know what - I am going to go ahead and make the same promise to all the kids in the county at all the public schools. Kids, stick with it and try hard and we will get you through, as well.
Unless you are teaching rocket science, education is not rocket science. Instead of trying extraordinary measures, charter schools and merit pay, (by the way, most teachers teach at the challenged schools because they love the kids there - not because they were bribed to do so) let's do what we should be doing anyway.
Let's put discipline in the classroom; let's not pass kids along until they have the skills to be successful at the next level; let's put in safety nets like social workers, counselors and legitimate summer school opportunities; let's have multiple curriculums that play to kid's strengths and desires, even if that means they don’t go to college right after they graduate and let's do so by making the teaching of trades and the arts as important as the teaching of math and science; let's not make school drudgery, (it’s no stretch of the imagination that if a kid doesn’t like school they aren’t going to do well); let's bring back rigor and slow things down; let's make sure they master the subjects even if that means they learn fewer subjects (we went through 157 pages in a nine week period in one of my classes as I was at the mercy of the pacing guide), and most importantly, instead of dumping on teachers and making them the scapegoats for all that’s wrong in education, we give them some autonomy - don’t overburden them with task after task that has little to do with education, and allow them to use creativity and flexibility even if it means they use data a little less.
I wish the staff and students at the KIPP school nothing but success. They have a long and hard road ahead of them, but at the same time I urge the powers that be not to forget about the neighborhood schools and the students and teachers there. I urge them that instead of funding pseudo private schools that really can’t be fairly compared to the typical public school, that where noble at the same time go to extraordinary lengths, how about they do what's right by the student and teachers at the neighborhood schools first. Then if that didn’t work, though I believe with all my heart it would, then well of course we would have to try something different.
Think about it, shouldn’t we be doing what we should be doing first and then only if that doesn’t work try something else after. Isn’t that how you do, say, everything?
Arne Duncan and his boss do not represent the change I hoped for. I hoped we would take education seriously and realistically. I hoped we would play to children's strengths and start respecting teachers. If extraordinary charter schools is the change they are selling, it is not a change I can believe in and it’s not a change that will work for most children.
I was very disheartened the other day when now President Obama’s Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan came to town to visit the new KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) school. The KIPP school is truly a formidable beast. Kids go to school longer, on Saturdays and all year long. They have to wear uniforms and parental involvement is mandatory. It also has resources far above and beyond the resources that local neighborhood schools have including a $500,000 grant to support its music program. That’s right, folks - this pseudo private school gets money from the government for a music program just as music programs in most middle schools are being slashed. Hey, Mr. President and Mr. Secretary of Education - how about helping the kids at P.S. this or P.S. that so they can have a music program too, before you fund one at the KIPP school. I mean aren’t the kids in public school worth it as well?
You know what scares me the most? It's what’s going to happen when the KIPP school succeeds and the man on the street says, look there, why can’t they do it at PS this or PS that. Public school teachers must be terrible. Then the powers that be in their far off ivory towers are going to have the excuses they need to further rob teachers of flexibility and creativity and buy them with even more paper work. They are going to have one more reason to take money out of the coffers of the already struggling public schools and steer money to more charter schools and voucher programs. Arne Duncan, by showing up and patting backs, has just given them tacit approval to do so.
Arne Duncan also talked about every kid going to college and this is a sentiment that his boss President Obama has echoed on many occasions, further showing us just how out of touch they are with the reality of the situation. I would just like to remind them and anybody reading that we don’t have the students and parental involvement we wish we had, we have the students and parents that we do and it’s time we made realistic plans to service their needs as well. The truth is the way we are doing things now with a one size fits all everybody is going to college mentality, regardless of ability, desire, and family support, curriculum, stacks the deck against the public school. It practically ensures failure. We need to change things so that in six or seven years from now when two sixth graders graduate, (one from the KIPP school who goes to college and one from PS that graduates with a skill and gets a steady job with room for advancement) we should applaud both. To me, that’s much better than dooming one to a life of public assistance and hopelessness, (that’s the public school kid, by the way).
In the end, however, other than a shiny bow, the KIPP school can’t make any promises that the public school can’t and their principal admits it. On the to the public school I work at, I heard him on the radio. He said, if the kids try hard and stick with the program, we’ll see them through. Well you know what - I am going to go ahead and make the same promise to all the kids in the county at all the public schools. Kids, stick with it and try hard and we will get you through, as well.
Unless you are teaching rocket science, education is not rocket science. Instead of trying extraordinary measures, charter schools and merit pay, (by the way, most teachers teach at the challenged schools because they love the kids there - not because they were bribed to do so) let's do what we should be doing anyway.
Let's put discipline in the classroom; let's not pass kids along until they have the skills to be successful at the next level; let's put in safety nets like social workers, counselors and legitimate summer school opportunities; let's have multiple curriculums that play to kid's strengths and desires, even if that means they don’t go to college right after they graduate and let's do so by making the teaching of trades and the arts as important as the teaching of math and science; let's not make school drudgery, (it’s no stretch of the imagination that if a kid doesn’t like school they aren’t going to do well); let's bring back rigor and slow things down; let's make sure they master the subjects even if that means they learn fewer subjects (we went through 157 pages in a nine week period in one of my classes as I was at the mercy of the pacing guide), and most importantly, instead of dumping on teachers and making them the scapegoats for all that’s wrong in education, we give them some autonomy - don’t overburden them with task after task that has little to do with education, and allow them to use creativity and flexibility even if it means they use data a little less.
I wish the staff and students at the KIPP school nothing but success. They have a long and hard road ahead of them, but at the same time I urge the powers that be not to forget about the neighborhood schools and the students and teachers there. I urge them that instead of funding pseudo private schools that really can’t be fairly compared to the typical public school, that where noble at the same time go to extraordinary lengths, how about they do what's right by the student and teachers at the neighborhood schools first. Then if that didn’t work, though I believe with all my heart it would, then well of course we would have to try something different.
Think about it, shouldn’t we be doing what we should be doing first and then only if that doesn’t work try something else after. Isn’t that how you do, say, everything?
Arne Duncan and his boss do not represent the change I hoped for. I hoped we would take education seriously and realistically. I hoped we would play to children's strengths and start respecting teachers. If extraordinary charter schools is the change they are selling, it is not a change I can believe in and it’s not a change that will work for most children.
Thursday, October 14, 2010
Garrulous Mr. Gates
By Arthur Goldstein, NYC Teacher since 1984
It's been a busy year for Bill GatesHe's been spreading his gospel far and wide. He spent 2 million dollars promoting Waiting for Superman, yet its alleged villainess, AFT President Randi Weingarten and company choose Gates to address her convention, an unlikely choise, to say the least.
I'm not an education expert like Gates, so I'll comment only on a Ted talk he gave last year. My experience is limited to teaching 25 years in New York City. Still, even a layperson such as myself has to wonder where the influential Gates gets his information:
How does that [KIPP charter school] compare to a normal school? Well, in a normal school teachers aren't told how good they are. The data isn't gathered. In the teacher's contract, it will limit the number of times the principal can come into the classroom -- sometimes to once per year. And they need advanced notice to do that.
My principal can and does visit my classroom whenever he golly goshdarn feels like it. He offers no advanced notice, and walks around the building visiting my colleagues in exactly the same fashion. Gates's version of what happens in a "normal school" sounds more like a crass stereotype than any contract I've ever heard of.
So imagine running a factory where you've got these workers, some of them just making crap and the management is told, "Hey, you can only come down here once a year, but you need to let us know, because we might actually fool you, and try and do a good job in that one brief moment."
I'm having trouble imagining a teacher who shines like a Christmas tree on an annual basis. If you can't teach, you don't give a sterling lesson on command. If you hate kids, you don't instantly learn to love them when the principal walks in.
Gates claims a top quartile teacher will increase the test scores of students by over 10 percent in a single year. Thus, he reasons, if all students had this teacher, we'd be doing fabulously. I don't know if I'm in the top quartile, but I raise scores when I have to. Yet when I do, I'm not as effective as a teacher.
.
I try to inspire kids. I try to trick them, for example, into loving any book I teach, with high hopes they'll love not only that book, but another, and then another. Will those kids get higher test scores? Maybe. But isn't it possible a love of reading might pay off in some as-yet undetermined future? Isn't it possible they might make career choices, pivotal decisions, based on something gleaned in my classroom?
Gates suggests teachers lack motivation, perhaps because we're not getting merit pay, or because too few administrators tell us how wonderful we are. Why, then, do we write glowing recommendations for kids, pushing for them to be admitted to universities, special programs, or new careers?
Teachers have intrinsic motivation Gates can neither measure nor (apparently) conceive of. I appreciate money, and I'll say thanks to praise from almost anyone. But I especially treasure it from kids. Last June I told my class I'd miss them. They shouted, "We'll miss you too!" They asked me if I'd teach them next year. I was honored, far more than by anything Gates could do or say.
But Gates proves things with charts, one of which says:
Once somebody has taught for three years, their teaching quality does not improve thereafter.
That’s proposterous. Many societies value wisdom and experience, but if they don't drive test scores, Gates's charts are unaffected.
But charts don't face 34 teenagers at a time. I do. You never know what can, what will happen next. Live kids do unimaginable things, things that constantly perplexed me in year three. Even now, I steal any trick, any tip, anything from anyone if it sounds practical. My bag of tricks is considerably larger now than it was 22 years ago, and I learn new things every day.
Says Gates's chart:
A master's degree doesn't raise scores.
But if I hadn't studied bilingualism, language acquisition, and the structures of English (that we all know instinctively but have likely as not never thought about), I'd be unqualified to teach ESL. I'd also never have passed the grueling Board of Examiners test the city required back in the day.
For my kid (and yours), I want a teacher with the deepest possible subject knowledge. Teachers compete with cell phones, iPods, and Microsoft's own Xbox 360 (on which teenagers play some of the most sordid and vulgar war games I've ever seen), and need all the help they can get.
Maybe you don't need a master's to move kids from 55 on one test to 65 on the next test. A more worthy challenge is developing a kid who derives joy from class, one who eagerly participates and will continue studying it even when force is not involved. I will give that kid a better grade than test scores indicate, even if charts disapprove.
Anybody who has access to a DVD player could have the very best teachers.
That's because he wants to film what he considers to be good teachers, and amass a video library. But doing that would mean only that anyone with a DVD player would be able to watch the best teachers.
There'd be no interaction, and certainly no assessment of the kid's work by these best teachers. It's not the same as having someone in your face. Gates seems to know that when it suits his purposes. When he describes his experiences at KIPP, he becomes giddy with excitement:
The teacher was running around, and the energy level is high ... and the teacher was constantly scanning to see which kids weren't paying attention, which kids were bored and calling on kids rapidly, putting things up on the board ... ... keeping people engaged and setting the tone that everyone in the classroom needs to pay attention.
Here, I agree with Gates. But in my school, these things happen every day. And of course everyone needs to pay attention. Were someone to make a statement like that to my 14-year-old, it would merit an unhesitating, "Well, DUH!"
96 percent of KIPP's high school graduates go to four year colleges.
That may be true. Or it may not. KIPP hasn't been around that long, and mostly runs junior high schools, so KIPP students in college represent a very small sample. More to the point, the 96 percent figure, if true on any level, doesn't include kids who don't finish the program -- which at some schools could run to more than half. Who teaches the kids who fail KIPP, and who does Gates blame for that? (I'm thinking me.)
Why not give the high schools the kids attend after KIPP some credit? Are they the "normal" public schools, the schools in which Gates claims administrators are contractually forbidden to observe teachers? Maybe Gates should sponsor that contract.
Charts don't show underlying problems with poor performers. What if the kid has interrupted formal education, shuffled back and forth from one country to another, and by high school cannot read or write? What if there is abuse, neglect, or who knows what waiting for the kid at home? Gates seems to think if only we could raise that kid's test score by 10 percent, all would be well.
Gates's employees can't be bothered with rudimentary fact-checking, nor can American print reporters. They're all too busy fawning over him.
Frankly, it broke my heart to see 3,400 teachers in Seatle doing precisely the same thing. Americans deserve the truth, and if we check a little more carefully, it's not that hard to find.
Taken from the Huffington post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arthur-goldstein/teaching-in-the-out-back_b_741413.html
It's been a busy year for Bill GatesHe's been spreading his gospel far and wide. He spent 2 million dollars promoting Waiting for Superman, yet its alleged villainess, AFT President Randi Weingarten and company choose Gates to address her convention, an unlikely choise, to say the least.
I'm not an education expert like Gates, so I'll comment only on a Ted talk he gave last year. My experience is limited to teaching 25 years in New York City. Still, even a layperson such as myself has to wonder where the influential Gates gets his information:
How does that [KIPP charter school] compare to a normal school? Well, in a normal school teachers aren't told how good they are. The data isn't gathered. In the teacher's contract, it will limit the number of times the principal can come into the classroom -- sometimes to once per year. And they need advanced notice to do that.
My principal can and does visit my classroom whenever he golly goshdarn feels like it. He offers no advanced notice, and walks around the building visiting my colleagues in exactly the same fashion. Gates's version of what happens in a "normal school" sounds more like a crass stereotype than any contract I've ever heard of.
So imagine running a factory where you've got these workers, some of them just making crap and the management is told, "Hey, you can only come down here once a year, but you need to let us know, because we might actually fool you, and try and do a good job in that one brief moment."
I'm having trouble imagining a teacher who shines like a Christmas tree on an annual basis. If you can't teach, you don't give a sterling lesson on command. If you hate kids, you don't instantly learn to love them when the principal walks in.
Gates claims a top quartile teacher will increase the test scores of students by over 10 percent in a single year. Thus, he reasons, if all students had this teacher, we'd be doing fabulously. I don't know if I'm in the top quartile, but I raise scores when I have to. Yet when I do, I'm not as effective as a teacher.
.
I try to inspire kids. I try to trick them, for example, into loving any book I teach, with high hopes they'll love not only that book, but another, and then another. Will those kids get higher test scores? Maybe. But isn't it possible a love of reading might pay off in some as-yet undetermined future? Isn't it possible they might make career choices, pivotal decisions, based on something gleaned in my classroom?
Gates suggests teachers lack motivation, perhaps because we're not getting merit pay, or because too few administrators tell us how wonderful we are. Why, then, do we write glowing recommendations for kids, pushing for them to be admitted to universities, special programs, or new careers?
Teachers have intrinsic motivation Gates can neither measure nor (apparently) conceive of. I appreciate money, and I'll say thanks to praise from almost anyone. But I especially treasure it from kids. Last June I told my class I'd miss them. They shouted, "We'll miss you too!" They asked me if I'd teach them next year. I was honored, far more than by anything Gates could do or say.
But Gates proves things with charts, one of which says:
Once somebody has taught for three years, their teaching quality does not improve thereafter.
That’s proposterous. Many societies value wisdom and experience, but if they don't drive test scores, Gates's charts are unaffected.
But charts don't face 34 teenagers at a time. I do. You never know what can, what will happen next. Live kids do unimaginable things, things that constantly perplexed me in year three. Even now, I steal any trick, any tip, anything from anyone if it sounds practical. My bag of tricks is considerably larger now than it was 22 years ago, and I learn new things every day.
Says Gates's chart:
A master's degree doesn't raise scores.
But if I hadn't studied bilingualism, language acquisition, and the structures of English (that we all know instinctively but have likely as not never thought about), I'd be unqualified to teach ESL. I'd also never have passed the grueling Board of Examiners test the city required back in the day.
For my kid (and yours), I want a teacher with the deepest possible subject knowledge. Teachers compete with cell phones, iPods, and Microsoft's own Xbox 360 (on which teenagers play some of the most sordid and vulgar war games I've ever seen), and need all the help they can get.
Maybe you don't need a master's to move kids from 55 on one test to 65 on the next test. A more worthy challenge is developing a kid who derives joy from class, one who eagerly participates and will continue studying it even when force is not involved. I will give that kid a better grade than test scores indicate, even if charts disapprove.
Anybody who has access to a DVD player could have the very best teachers.
That's because he wants to film what he considers to be good teachers, and amass a video library. But doing that would mean only that anyone with a DVD player would be able to watch the best teachers.
There'd be no interaction, and certainly no assessment of the kid's work by these best teachers. It's not the same as having someone in your face. Gates seems to know that when it suits his purposes. When he describes his experiences at KIPP, he becomes giddy with excitement:
The teacher was running around, and the energy level is high ... and the teacher was constantly scanning to see which kids weren't paying attention, which kids were bored and calling on kids rapidly, putting things up on the board ... ... keeping people engaged and setting the tone that everyone in the classroom needs to pay attention.
Here, I agree with Gates. But in my school, these things happen every day. And of course everyone needs to pay attention. Were someone to make a statement like that to my 14-year-old, it would merit an unhesitating, "Well, DUH!"
96 percent of KIPP's high school graduates go to four year colleges.
That may be true. Or it may not. KIPP hasn't been around that long, and mostly runs junior high schools, so KIPP students in college represent a very small sample. More to the point, the 96 percent figure, if true on any level, doesn't include kids who don't finish the program -- which at some schools could run to more than half. Who teaches the kids who fail KIPP, and who does Gates blame for that? (I'm thinking me.)
Why not give the high schools the kids attend after KIPP some credit? Are they the "normal" public schools, the schools in which Gates claims administrators are contractually forbidden to observe teachers? Maybe Gates should sponsor that contract.
Charts don't show underlying problems with poor performers. What if the kid has interrupted formal education, shuffled back and forth from one country to another, and by high school cannot read or write? What if there is abuse, neglect, or who knows what waiting for the kid at home? Gates seems to think if only we could raise that kid's test score by 10 percent, all would be well.
Gates's employees can't be bothered with rudimentary fact-checking, nor can American print reporters. They're all too busy fawning over him.
Frankly, it broke my heart to see 3,400 teachers in Seatle doing precisely the same thing. Americans deserve the truth, and if we check a little more carefully, it's not that hard to find.
Taken from the Huffington post: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arthur-goldstein/teaching-in-the-out-back_b_741413.html
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)