From the Washinton Posts Answer Sheet
By Mark Phillips
And if I laugh at any mortal thing, ‘Tis that I may not weep” --Lord Byron
Summer vacations will be extended in all public schools in the U.S. this year. They will now be year-round.
This announcement yesterday by the Secretary of Education, which shocked parents all over the country, has been directly traced to the combined effects of the government programs No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. As one local teacher, now an applicant to teach on Mark Zuckerberg’s new Textbook, put it, “Now that the schools are closed, maybe we can get back to real teaching.”
A full analysis from The Institute for the Deconstruction of Twisted Logic in Palo Alto is due next week, but preliminary findings released help explain the events leading to the permanent closing of all public schools.
First, the Institute notes, there was evidently a major intelligence failure, detailed in the first chapter of the report, “Act First, Think Later.” None of the policymakers understood that their reform programs were solutions to the wrong problems.
“They were largely a solution to the problem policymakers have of needing numerical data quickly without wasting time doing a lot of research.” noted Lionel Mangrove, Institute spokesperson. “And it worked. They wasted none of their valuable time observing or listening or thinking, and got a lot of test results quickly.”
Few reforms have ever been more effective in changing statistics. Unfortunately, the real problem appears to have been low student engagement -- and the testing bombardment just made that worse. For some further understanding, read the earlier Institute report, “The Use of X-Rays and Marathon Running to Improve Lung Congestion.”
The likely effect of all of this on teachers was considered superfluous. Something had to give and a story out of Boston finally caught front pages across the country. A despondent teacher stood on the roof of his school screaming, “I’m mad as hell and and I’m not gonna take this anymore. Let’s just teach to the tests and give up the rest. Let’s give them exactly what they want!”
Soon, “Teach to the tests, the hell with the rest!” became a rallying cry for frustrated teachers throughout the country. Bumper stickers and t-shirts flourished. Eminem even wrote a hit rap song with that title and the lyrics:
“Our teaching is lousy
The laws are a scam
Test scores are rising
But we don’t give a damn
So teach to the tests
The hell with the rest
At least we’ll get funding
By the government blessed.”
The song reached No. 3 on the rap charts and won a Grammy.
Third, notes the report, almost no one noticed that more and more students just stopped showing up. One student, interviewed for 60 Minutes, stated, “When I decided to give up drugs, I knew I had to also give up tests. They were both making me homicidal. Now I’m really learning again. We hang out on Textbook, use Google and Twitter, discuss movies and books, real ideas and stuff, not that testing b.s.”
Zuckerberg’s brilliant spin-off from Facebook proved to be a colossal hit with students and teachers alike, helped by a nationwide ad campaign featuring the slogans “No Boredom on Textbook” and, “Tired of testing? Join a Textbook learning group today.” Soon, few students were showing up at school and even fewer for the tests.
The final blow was the Wikileaks report, Over the Top, based on a secret government study showing that almost 80 percent of American high schools had gone over the top, simultaneously achieving new highs in test scores, vandalism, and dropouts.
Still, the end came rather suddenly in recent weeks. It occurred to the few dedicated teachers left behind that if there were no students it was foolish to come to work. Besides, Zuckerberg was paying better, actually listening to teachers, students and parents, and, in an agreement with Amazon, providing all students with Kindles.
With no students and no teachers, the government stopped funding schools. As the Secretary of Education put it, “Let those guys foot the bill! We can use the money to improve the American family. Our great new program, No Family Left Behind, will do just that!”
Davis Guggenheim’s plans for another film, "Waiting for Close Encounters," about benevolent aliens who come from outer space after being contacted by Michelle Rhee to institute a lottery to rescue the schools, have apparently been shelved.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/guest-bloggers/the-day-all-the-public-schools.html
Showing posts with label no child left behind. Show all posts
Showing posts with label no child left behind. Show all posts
Thursday, February 24, 2011
Monday, February 21, 2011
Is Obamma hurting or helping education
From the Washington Posts Answer Sheet
By Valerie Strauss
For two years, President Obama has been pushing school reform that has demonized public school teachers. Now he has injected himself on the side of teachers into the confrontation in Wisconsin, where the new Republican governor is trying to pass emergency legislation that would drastically cut collective bargaining rights.
Obama’s support is ironic, given that teachers’ collective bargaining rights have already been undermined by his education reform policies.
Obama, a few days ago, threw his political machine onto the side of teachers who are helping to lead a protest movement in Wisconsin over Gov. Scott Walker’s plan to cut benefits and take away collective bargaining rights from labor. Madison public schools have been closed for several days because teachers called in sick, and the state Capitol building has been filled with protesters.
The public rationale for the assault on collective bargaining rights -- which is moving to other states as well -- is based on the premise that unions are at least partly responsible for the fiscal problems states find themselves in. My Post colleague Ezra Klein shows how untrue this is in this post: “Blame the banks. Blame global capital flows. Blame lax regulation of Wall Street. Blame home buyers, or home sellers. But don’t blame the unions. Not for this recession.”
The thing is that it has become all too easy to blame public school teachers. They and their unions have become the chief villain in the “what went wrong with public education” narrative under the Obama administration. It matters not that the problems in public education found in union states are identical to the problems found in non-union states (which you can read about here in a post that looks in depth at this).
In a number of ways, Obama’s education policies have gone a long way toward undermining the position of public school teachers and, separately, their unions. The two largest teachers unions in fact did not invite Obama or Education Secretary Arne Duncan to their 2010 conventions because they have been so upset at what they see as the administration's anti-union, anti-teacher policies.
The Obama administration, through its Race to the Top competition, dangled federal money to encourage the expansion of charter schools, which are largely non-union. It has provided verbal and cash support for teacher training programs that have as their distinguishing feature not the fact that they are anti-union (which they are) but that they believe a young person with little training is “highly qualified” to teach the neediest students.
And it has made standardized tests the main measurement of students, schools and, now, teachers. This obsession has bastardized the entire learning process, narrowing curriculum, fostering cheating scandals, harming real student achievement and putting teachers in a position of being blamed for things for which they are not responsible.
The administration has squeezed unions into accepting assessment schemes that link student standardized test scores to a varying but significant percentage of a teacher’s pay -- even though research shows that outside influences play at least as much a role in how a student does on a test as a teacher. Also ignored: Research showing the unreliability of systems that use scores to evaluate how much “value” a teacher has brought to a student.
What Obama’s policies have not done to any serious degree is provide support so that teachers are properly trained and developed, and so that teacher assessments fairly evaluate whether a teacher belongs in a classroom.
The popular perception of unions is that they have flat-out fought the administration at every turn. Not true. Local unions have in fact worked with management around the country to experiment with such “value-added” systems in an effort to cooperate with management and to avoid being seen as opposing modern reform.
Such cooperation was praised by Education Secretary Arne Duncan at a conference he convened in Denver to showcase cooperation between teachers unions and management in districts around the country.
Why anyone thinks it is a positive for local unions to cooperate on an assessment model shown to have serious flaws is a mystery to me.
If Obama can help teachers unions keep their collective bargaining rights from disappearing under Republican assault, good for him and them. That doesn’t eliminate the harm his policies have done already to teachers and their profession.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/race-to-the-top/the-irony-of-obamas-help-for-w.html?wprss=answer-sheet
By Valerie Strauss
For two years, President Obama has been pushing school reform that has demonized public school teachers. Now he has injected himself on the side of teachers into the confrontation in Wisconsin, where the new Republican governor is trying to pass emergency legislation that would drastically cut collective bargaining rights.
Obama’s support is ironic, given that teachers’ collective bargaining rights have already been undermined by his education reform policies.
Obama, a few days ago, threw his political machine onto the side of teachers who are helping to lead a protest movement in Wisconsin over Gov. Scott Walker’s plan to cut benefits and take away collective bargaining rights from labor. Madison public schools have been closed for several days because teachers called in sick, and the state Capitol building has been filled with protesters.
The public rationale for the assault on collective bargaining rights -- which is moving to other states as well -- is based on the premise that unions are at least partly responsible for the fiscal problems states find themselves in. My Post colleague Ezra Klein shows how untrue this is in this post: “Blame the banks. Blame global capital flows. Blame lax regulation of Wall Street. Blame home buyers, or home sellers. But don’t blame the unions. Not for this recession.”
The thing is that it has become all too easy to blame public school teachers. They and their unions have become the chief villain in the “what went wrong with public education” narrative under the Obama administration. It matters not that the problems in public education found in union states are identical to the problems found in non-union states (which you can read about here in a post that looks in depth at this).
In a number of ways, Obama’s education policies have gone a long way toward undermining the position of public school teachers and, separately, their unions. The two largest teachers unions in fact did not invite Obama or Education Secretary Arne Duncan to their 2010 conventions because they have been so upset at what they see as the administration's anti-union, anti-teacher policies.
The Obama administration, through its Race to the Top competition, dangled federal money to encourage the expansion of charter schools, which are largely non-union. It has provided verbal and cash support for teacher training programs that have as their distinguishing feature not the fact that they are anti-union (which they are) but that they believe a young person with little training is “highly qualified” to teach the neediest students.
And it has made standardized tests the main measurement of students, schools and, now, teachers. This obsession has bastardized the entire learning process, narrowing curriculum, fostering cheating scandals, harming real student achievement and putting teachers in a position of being blamed for things for which they are not responsible.
The administration has squeezed unions into accepting assessment schemes that link student standardized test scores to a varying but significant percentage of a teacher’s pay -- even though research shows that outside influences play at least as much a role in how a student does on a test as a teacher. Also ignored: Research showing the unreliability of systems that use scores to evaluate how much “value” a teacher has brought to a student.
What Obama’s policies have not done to any serious degree is provide support so that teachers are properly trained and developed, and so that teacher assessments fairly evaluate whether a teacher belongs in a classroom.
The popular perception of unions is that they have flat-out fought the administration at every turn. Not true. Local unions have in fact worked with management around the country to experiment with such “value-added” systems in an effort to cooperate with management and to avoid being seen as opposing modern reform.
Such cooperation was praised by Education Secretary Arne Duncan at a conference he convened in Denver to showcase cooperation between teachers unions and management in districts around the country.
Why anyone thinks it is a positive for local unions to cooperate on an assessment model shown to have serious flaws is a mystery to me.
If Obama can help teachers unions keep their collective bargaining rights from disappearing under Republican assault, good for him and them. That doesn’t eliminate the harm his policies have done already to teachers and their profession.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/race-to-the-top/the-irony-of-obamas-help-for-w.html?wprss=answer-sheet
Sunday, February 20, 2011
Are you there Mr. President?
From Education Week Teacher, Living in Dilogue
Peggy Robertson
When I was twelve I read a book that changed my life. It was titled Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret. I read it again and again. In that book, I finally saw that someone out there understood me. Ultimately, we all desperately desire to be heard and understood. Expert teachers know this; they spend every waking moment trying to figure out what makes their students tick. We watch, we observe, we truly listen and we make changes based on our students' needs.
When I was in my twenties, and a new teacher, I read another book, The Dreamkeepers, by Gloria Ladson-Billings. It rocked my world. It made me cry. The book came at a crucial time in my career as a teacher. I worked at a school "across the tracks," in a town in southern Missouri. My students were mainly African-American and many were very poor. I, like many new teachers today, got placed in a school with high need, high poverty students. It was the best job I ever had. Gloria was the voice in my head helping me along the way. She was my mentor but never knew it. She understood.
On February 17th, I attended a presentation by Diane Ravitch here in Denver, Colorado. I wanted to have her sign my copy of her book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System, but I honestly couldn't do it. I was feeling so emotional and I knew I might unravel. Diane hears me; my experience is simply an echo of the voices of many educators out there today. She knows what today's teachers are going through. If Diane and I did talk, she would understand what was beautiful about my fifteen years in the education field as well as what was haunting. She would know why I am debating whether I should return to the education field or not. She reports the facts accurately. She is our collective voice. She listens.
Are you there, President Obama? It's me, Peggy Robertson, the voice of a former teacher. Are you truly listening? I must say, with respect, that it does not feel as though you are. I have felt hopeless during your presidency. This week, for the first time, I have hope. Watching the public workers of Madison, Wisconsin protest and ask to be heard made me sit up a bit straighter. The American people have a voice! I saw democracy in action. But are you listening? I now hear that they are asking you to join them. I hope you do.
But this is about more than Madison, Wisconsin. Madison is the first snowball. Once it starts rolling, it may be unstoppable. We've got a lot of mountains here in Colorado and I hope that snowball heads our way. The corporate education reform going on here is devastating.
My fifteen years as an educator were spent teaching in the elementary grades as well as supporting teachers and administrators in developing and refining effective instructional practices. During my five final years I suddenly became jaded. NCLB destroyed my spirit. I watched it's evil hand touch children, teachers, schools and districts.
I saw the strangle hold NCLB had on everyone. I tried to support teachers with all of the obstacles NCLB placed in our way. I watched Reading First fail. I saw principals come and go and schools get closed. I saw students caught in the crossfire. I saw the light go out in children's eyes when they were drilled continually for the state test. I worked with teachers who told me we needed to hurry up and help that child read (in kindergarten mind you) before a negative label was placed on that child; we were in a pressure cooker. I supported administrators in knowing what to look for when they observed and evaluated teachers; many of them did not know what they were seeing because they had not actually spent much time teaching. Or, they had spent time teaching subjects, such as Spanish, in a high school classroom and they were now being asked to evaluate elementary school teachers who were focusing on developing readers and writers. Such an irony - teachers evaluated by administrators who haven't taught what the teachers are teaching. The administrators were under immense pressure as they are today. The scores simply had to be good.
When I left the education profession I left angry. My beliefs about education had been trampled on. I didn't believe in what I was being required to do. Too much testing. Too many young children not being allowed to be children. Too much data being shoved down everybody's throats. I have stayed home the last four years with my youngest son, and I have watched the destruction of our American school system continue. My youngest child is ready to start school, and I wonder if I should re-enter the education profession. But, do I really want to enter the lion's den? I want to work in the education field again, but I also want to be heard and respected.
The current corporate reform taking over our public schools is handing us many more teachers, administrators and superintendents who will need immense support to do their jobs well. If the new administrators haven't taught, then how in the world can you expect them to evaluate teachers? How is a former army sergeant, now made superintendent, supposed to evaluate and support administrators? How is a teacher with five weeks training expected to support our neediest students? And, (lucky us) we have the Bush Institute training principals, in cooperation with Teach for America of course! It's insulting. All of it - it's a slap in the face to students, educators and parents.
It appears there is no point in getting a degree in education with the TFA program leading the way. And then we are told that our master's degrees are pointless too? I think about that every month when I pay my student loan bill. And this week, my eyes rolled back in my head when I heard that the U.S. Department of Education just gave fifty million dollars to the TFA program. The TFA program is a band-aid. And it hurts the neediest children when those teachers leave after their two-year contract has ended.
In your State of the Union Address you asked for more college students to go in to education. I'm sorry, but I seriously laughed when you said that. I would pay both my children money to stay out of the education field right now. It's a hostile environment. Teachers have to teach to the test. The new common core standards are developmentally inappropriate. Children get labeled as failures before they've even finished kindergarten thanks to the pressures of NCLB. And let's not forget that those five year olds don't get a nap or a recess or time for imaginative play. RTTT is punishing to teachers and to schools. Encourage my children to enter the lion's den to teach? No thank you. Your administration has shown no respect for educators, parents or students.
Are you listening Obama? The strangle hold of RTTT may result in the death of public education. Have you read Ravitch's book? Have you followed any of the research being shared on expert educator blogs across the country? What do you really know about TFAs? Merit pay? Value-added assessment? Standardized Testing?
News Flash - it's all bad. Why are you listening to Gates? What educational credentials does he have? It is so difficult to have a voice as a teacher. We don't have a lot of money so we can't buy the media, such as the new Media Bullpen, like Gates can. But we can march. And march we will. July 28th to July 31st concerned citizens will find their way to Washington D.C. to take part in the Save our Schools March and National Call to Action. Will you join us? Will you listen?
When I voted for you I voted with my heart and soul. I believed everything you said. I thought you heard me. I thought we had found a president that truly understood the needs of the American people. I don't believe that anymore. There has been too much damage done. We now have Arne Duncan (a non-educator) leading the way with the corporate reformers whispering in his ear. We have more testing, more teacher bashing and more children being hurt at the hands of corporate reform.
Are you there President Obama? Did you hear Stephen Krashen talk about poverty? Again and again? Did you hear that our international test scores are actually excellent when we look at the scores of the children not living in poverty? Do you really believe poverty has nothing to do with the woes of our public schools? Have you read the research? I could provide all the links but it doesn't seem necessary considering they are all over the internet on every single education blog I read. I don't think you are listening. I think it's going to take an uprising for you to hear us. Madison, Wisconsin, is speaking.
I am placing my faith in the American people. I am listening Madison, Wisconsin. I signed the letter. You are speaking for all of us. President Obama, please listen. Please renew the hope we all had when we elected you.
Peggy Robertson
Former Educator
Centennial, Colorado
Peggy Robertson taught kindergarten, first, second, fourth, fifth and sixth grade, beginning her career in Missouri and continuing in Kansas, for a total of ten years. She was hired by Richard C. Owen Publishers in 2001 to serve as a Learning Network Coordinator and spent the next three years training teacher leaders and administrators in educational theory and practice in the state of Colorado, as well as around the country during the summer months. In 2004 she was hired as the Literacy Coordinator by the Adams 50 School District in Westminster, Colorado. While working in Adams 50 she mentored teachers and administrators and supported them in the writing and implementation of school development plans.
http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-dialogue/2011/02/are_you_there_mr_president_mad.html?sms_ss=facebook&at_xt=4d604596cdef1ba4%2C0
Peggy Robertson
When I was twelve I read a book that changed my life. It was titled Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret. I read it again and again. In that book, I finally saw that someone out there understood me. Ultimately, we all desperately desire to be heard and understood. Expert teachers know this; they spend every waking moment trying to figure out what makes their students tick. We watch, we observe, we truly listen and we make changes based on our students' needs.
When I was in my twenties, and a new teacher, I read another book, The Dreamkeepers, by Gloria Ladson-Billings. It rocked my world. It made me cry. The book came at a crucial time in my career as a teacher. I worked at a school "across the tracks," in a town in southern Missouri. My students were mainly African-American and many were very poor. I, like many new teachers today, got placed in a school with high need, high poverty students. It was the best job I ever had. Gloria was the voice in my head helping me along the way. She was my mentor but never knew it. She understood.
On February 17th, I attended a presentation by Diane Ravitch here in Denver, Colorado. I wanted to have her sign my copy of her book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System, but I honestly couldn't do it. I was feeling so emotional and I knew I might unravel. Diane hears me; my experience is simply an echo of the voices of many educators out there today. She knows what today's teachers are going through. If Diane and I did talk, she would understand what was beautiful about my fifteen years in the education field as well as what was haunting. She would know why I am debating whether I should return to the education field or not. She reports the facts accurately. She is our collective voice. She listens.
Are you there, President Obama? It's me, Peggy Robertson, the voice of a former teacher. Are you truly listening? I must say, with respect, that it does not feel as though you are. I have felt hopeless during your presidency. This week, for the first time, I have hope. Watching the public workers of Madison, Wisconsin protest and ask to be heard made me sit up a bit straighter. The American people have a voice! I saw democracy in action. But are you listening? I now hear that they are asking you to join them. I hope you do.
But this is about more than Madison, Wisconsin. Madison is the first snowball. Once it starts rolling, it may be unstoppable. We've got a lot of mountains here in Colorado and I hope that snowball heads our way. The corporate education reform going on here is devastating.
My fifteen years as an educator were spent teaching in the elementary grades as well as supporting teachers and administrators in developing and refining effective instructional practices. During my five final years I suddenly became jaded. NCLB destroyed my spirit. I watched it's evil hand touch children, teachers, schools and districts.
I saw the strangle hold NCLB had on everyone. I tried to support teachers with all of the obstacles NCLB placed in our way. I watched Reading First fail. I saw principals come and go and schools get closed. I saw students caught in the crossfire. I saw the light go out in children's eyes when they were drilled continually for the state test. I worked with teachers who told me we needed to hurry up and help that child read (in kindergarten mind you) before a negative label was placed on that child; we were in a pressure cooker. I supported administrators in knowing what to look for when they observed and evaluated teachers; many of them did not know what they were seeing because they had not actually spent much time teaching. Or, they had spent time teaching subjects, such as Spanish, in a high school classroom and they were now being asked to evaluate elementary school teachers who were focusing on developing readers and writers. Such an irony - teachers evaluated by administrators who haven't taught what the teachers are teaching. The administrators were under immense pressure as they are today. The scores simply had to be good.
When I left the education profession I left angry. My beliefs about education had been trampled on. I didn't believe in what I was being required to do. Too much testing. Too many young children not being allowed to be children. Too much data being shoved down everybody's throats. I have stayed home the last four years with my youngest son, and I have watched the destruction of our American school system continue. My youngest child is ready to start school, and I wonder if I should re-enter the education profession. But, do I really want to enter the lion's den? I want to work in the education field again, but I also want to be heard and respected.
The current corporate reform taking over our public schools is handing us many more teachers, administrators and superintendents who will need immense support to do their jobs well. If the new administrators haven't taught, then how in the world can you expect them to evaluate teachers? How is a former army sergeant, now made superintendent, supposed to evaluate and support administrators? How is a teacher with five weeks training expected to support our neediest students? And, (lucky us) we have the Bush Institute training principals, in cooperation with Teach for America of course! It's insulting. All of it - it's a slap in the face to students, educators and parents.
It appears there is no point in getting a degree in education with the TFA program leading the way. And then we are told that our master's degrees are pointless too? I think about that every month when I pay my student loan bill. And this week, my eyes rolled back in my head when I heard that the U.S. Department of Education just gave fifty million dollars to the TFA program. The TFA program is a band-aid. And it hurts the neediest children when those teachers leave after their two-year contract has ended.
In your State of the Union Address you asked for more college students to go in to education. I'm sorry, but I seriously laughed when you said that. I would pay both my children money to stay out of the education field right now. It's a hostile environment. Teachers have to teach to the test. The new common core standards are developmentally inappropriate. Children get labeled as failures before they've even finished kindergarten thanks to the pressures of NCLB. And let's not forget that those five year olds don't get a nap or a recess or time for imaginative play. RTTT is punishing to teachers and to schools. Encourage my children to enter the lion's den to teach? No thank you. Your administration has shown no respect for educators, parents or students.
Are you listening Obama? The strangle hold of RTTT may result in the death of public education. Have you read Ravitch's book? Have you followed any of the research being shared on expert educator blogs across the country? What do you really know about TFAs? Merit pay? Value-added assessment? Standardized Testing?
News Flash - it's all bad. Why are you listening to Gates? What educational credentials does he have? It is so difficult to have a voice as a teacher. We don't have a lot of money so we can't buy the media, such as the new Media Bullpen, like Gates can. But we can march. And march we will. July 28th to July 31st concerned citizens will find their way to Washington D.C. to take part in the Save our Schools March and National Call to Action. Will you join us? Will you listen?
When I voted for you I voted with my heart and soul. I believed everything you said. I thought you heard me. I thought we had found a president that truly understood the needs of the American people. I don't believe that anymore. There has been too much damage done. We now have Arne Duncan (a non-educator) leading the way with the corporate reformers whispering in his ear. We have more testing, more teacher bashing and more children being hurt at the hands of corporate reform.
Are you there President Obama? Did you hear Stephen Krashen talk about poverty? Again and again? Did you hear that our international test scores are actually excellent when we look at the scores of the children not living in poverty? Do you really believe poverty has nothing to do with the woes of our public schools? Have you read the research? I could provide all the links but it doesn't seem necessary considering they are all over the internet on every single education blog I read. I don't think you are listening. I think it's going to take an uprising for you to hear us. Madison, Wisconsin, is speaking.
I am placing my faith in the American people. I am listening Madison, Wisconsin. I signed the letter. You are speaking for all of us. President Obama, please listen. Please renew the hope we all had when we elected you.
Peggy Robertson
Former Educator
Centennial, Colorado
Peggy Robertson taught kindergarten, first, second, fourth, fifth and sixth grade, beginning her career in Missouri and continuing in Kansas, for a total of ten years. She was hired by Richard C. Owen Publishers in 2001 to serve as a Learning Network Coordinator and spent the next three years training teacher leaders and administrators in educational theory and practice in the state of Colorado, as well as around the country during the summer months. In 2004 she was hired as the Literacy Coordinator by the Adams 50 School District in Westminster, Colorado. While working in Adams 50 she mentored teachers and administrators and supported them in the writing and implementation of school development plans.
http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-dialogue/2011/02/are_you_there_mr_president_mad.html?sms_ss=facebook&at_xt=4d604596cdef1ba4%2C0
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
Why I do not love public education
Another gret blog from Modern Schools. A lot of teachers have similar feelings about education. -cpg
Save Our Schools is hosting a Valentine’s Day blogging festival called I Love Public Education Blogging day. I’d like to participate, but I do not love public education. Here’s why:
I do love teaching and working with young people of all ages. Teaching is fun and inspiring, at least it was until the Ed Deformers really started to go crazy with accountability, testing, and attacking teacher compensation, tenure and pensions. I still learn a lot from my students and from my colleagues, which I really appreciate. I like the fact that education is free for all children, theoretically giving all kids the opportunity to grow and develop. Clearly, education is necessary so that people can learn the basic skills they need to survive in this world. It is also my livelihood, so I do not want to see it debased or eviscerated any further.
Herein lies the rub: Public Education has always existed as a tool for maintaining and enforcing the existing socioeconomic relations (i.e., ensuring that the rich remain rich and the rest of us have the minimal skills and attitude necessary to help them to do so). I do NOT love this most fundamental aspect of public education. The notion that education is the great equalizer is nothing but a liberal myth. It helps bolster the American Dream fantasy and it draws many do-gooder types to the teaching profession who make increasingly desperate sacrifices for “the good of our students,” and sometimes to the detriment of their colleagues. Yet the vast majority of people still end up in the same social class as adults as their parents, despite their schooling.
Certainly there is the potential for individual teachers to enlighten children and inspire them to resist the injustices in the world and to help some of them move up the social ladder, but even the very best teacher is fighting against tremendous odds. The fact is that the socioeconomic relations outside of school play a much stronger role in a child’s academic development than do the school or teacher. If we really want to see significant improvements in graduation rates and closing the achievement gap, then we need to be fighting for greater social and economic equity. We need to be organizing to take back the wealth that the rich have been sapping from us. We need stronger unions and higher pay for the 95% of Americans that are not part of the ruling elite. We need universal health care for all. We need childcare for all parents who want to work outside the home. We need mental health services and drug rehab for all who need it. We need affordable housing. We need to stop locking people up for nonviolent petty crimes like drug possession.
So for me, saving public education is about much more than just getting the billionaire (and millionaire) Ed Deformers off my back. Of course I would love to see an immediate end to NCLB and Race to the Top. It would be great if the voucher, charter-school and “choice” advocates would quit trying to raid public funds and even greater if we could start funding public schools generously instead of miserly. And it would be fantastic if we really did lower class sizes, provided adequate books and supplies, clean and well-maintained facilities. And while we’re at it, how about providing elementary teachers with a prep period or giving secondary teachers two or three prep periods so they had the time to really read all those essays and lab reports and to develop exciting new hands-on activities? How about providing full-time nurses and health clinics on campuses, reinstating counselors and librarians, arts and music? However, if we don’t also start organizing and fighting for some serious social transformations, even all these other great improvements will only help a fraction of our students to achieve at the high levels we have set for them.
http://modeducation.blogspot.com/2011/02/why-i-do-not-love-public-education.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ModernSchool+%28Modern+School%29
Save Our Schools is hosting a Valentine’s Day blogging festival called I Love Public Education Blogging day. I’d like to participate, but I do not love public education. Here’s why:
I do love teaching and working with young people of all ages. Teaching is fun and inspiring, at least it was until the Ed Deformers really started to go crazy with accountability, testing, and attacking teacher compensation, tenure and pensions. I still learn a lot from my students and from my colleagues, which I really appreciate. I like the fact that education is free for all children, theoretically giving all kids the opportunity to grow and develop. Clearly, education is necessary so that people can learn the basic skills they need to survive in this world. It is also my livelihood, so I do not want to see it debased or eviscerated any further.
Herein lies the rub: Public Education has always existed as a tool for maintaining and enforcing the existing socioeconomic relations (i.e., ensuring that the rich remain rich and the rest of us have the minimal skills and attitude necessary to help them to do so). I do NOT love this most fundamental aspect of public education. The notion that education is the great equalizer is nothing but a liberal myth. It helps bolster the American Dream fantasy and it draws many do-gooder types to the teaching profession who make increasingly desperate sacrifices for “the good of our students,” and sometimes to the detriment of their colleagues. Yet the vast majority of people still end up in the same social class as adults as their parents, despite their schooling.
Certainly there is the potential for individual teachers to enlighten children and inspire them to resist the injustices in the world and to help some of them move up the social ladder, but even the very best teacher is fighting against tremendous odds. The fact is that the socioeconomic relations outside of school play a much stronger role in a child’s academic development than do the school or teacher. If we really want to see significant improvements in graduation rates and closing the achievement gap, then we need to be fighting for greater social and economic equity. We need to be organizing to take back the wealth that the rich have been sapping from us. We need stronger unions and higher pay for the 95% of Americans that are not part of the ruling elite. We need universal health care for all. We need childcare for all parents who want to work outside the home. We need mental health services and drug rehab for all who need it. We need affordable housing. We need to stop locking people up for nonviolent petty crimes like drug possession.
So for me, saving public education is about much more than just getting the billionaire (and millionaire) Ed Deformers off my back. Of course I would love to see an immediate end to NCLB and Race to the Top. It would be great if the voucher, charter-school and “choice” advocates would quit trying to raid public funds and even greater if we could start funding public schools generously instead of miserly. And it would be fantastic if we really did lower class sizes, provided adequate books and supplies, clean and well-maintained facilities. And while we’re at it, how about providing elementary teachers with a prep period or giving secondary teachers two or three prep periods so they had the time to really read all those essays and lab reports and to develop exciting new hands-on activities? How about providing full-time nurses and health clinics on campuses, reinstating counselors and librarians, arts and music? However, if we don’t also start organizing and fighting for some serious social transformations, even all these other great improvements will only help a fraction of our students to achieve at the high levels we have set for them.
http://modeducation.blogspot.com/2011/02/why-i-do-not-love-public-education.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ModernSchool+%28Modern+School%29
Monday, February 14, 2011
Bashing Teachers and Public Schools comes from all sides
From the Washington Times Answer Sheet
By Stan Karp
Far too many people are bashing teachers and public schools. The attacks are coming from different places for different reasons, and we need to pay attention to the differences.
The parent who’s angry at the public school system because it’s not successfully educating his/her children is not the same as the billionaire with no education experience, who couldn’t survive in a classroom for two days, but who has made privatizing education policy a hobby, and who has the resources to do so because the country’s financial and tax systems serve the rich.
The educators who start a community-based charter school to create a collaborative school culture are not the same as the hedge fund managers who invest in charter schools to turn a profit, or who want to privatize our most important civic institution.
The well-meaning college grad who joins a Teach For America program is not the same as the corporate managers who want to use market reforms to create a less expensive, less secure and less experienced teaching force.
And the hard-pressed taxpayer who directs frustration at teachers struggling to hang on to their health insurance or pensions—which far too few people have at all—is not coming from the same place as those responsible for the obscene economic inequality that is squeezing both.
I’ve spent a large part of my adult life criticizing the flawed policies of public education as a teacher, an education activist and a policy advocate. But now I find myself spending a lot of time defending the very idea of public education against those who say, it should be blown up.
The increasingly polarized education policy debate is not just about whether teachers feel the sting of public criticism or whether school budgets suffer another round of cuts. It’s not even about the hot-button issues getting all the attention like merit pay or charter schools.
What’s at stake is more basic: Whether the right to a free public education for all children will survive as a fundamental democratic promise in our society, and whether the schools and districts needed to provide it are going to survive as public institutions.
Will they be collectively owned and democratically managed, however imperfectly, by all of us as citizens, or will they be privatized and commercialized by corporate interests that increasingly dominate our society?
The larger goal, to borrow a phrase from the Democrats for Education Reform (DFER), a political lobby financed by hedge fund millionaires that is a chief architect of the current campaign, is to “burst the dam” that has historically protected public education and its $600 billion annual expenditures from unchecked commercial exploitation and privatization.
What is new and alarming are the large strides those promoting business models and market reforms have made in attaching their agenda to the urgent need of poor communities who have, in too many cases, been badly served by the current system.
The narrative of public education as a systematic failure has been fed in recent years by shifting federal policy. It’s moved away from its historic role as a promoter of access and equity through support for things such as school integration, extra funding for high-poverty schools and services for students with special needs, and embraced a much less equitable set of mandates around testing, closing schools, firing school staff and distributing federal funds through “competitive grants” to “winners” at the expense of “losers.”
First with No Child Left Behind, and then with Race to the Top, Democrats have been playing tag team with Republicans building on the test and punish approach. Just how much this bipartisan consensus has solidified came home when I picked up my local paper one morning and saw Gov. Chris Christie, the most anti-public education governor New Jersey has ever had, quoted as saying “This is an incredibly special moment in American history, where you have Republicans in New Jersey agreeing with a Democratic president on how to get reform.”
Unless we change direction, the combined impact of these proposals will do for public schooling what market reform has done for housing, health care and the economy: produce fabulous profits for a few and unequal access and outcomes for the many.
The corporate/foundation crowd has successfully captured the media label as “education reformers.” If you support charters, merit pay, and control of school policy by corporate managers you’re a reformer. If you support increased school funding, collective bargaining and control of school policy by educators, you’re a defender of the status quo.
This is particularly true when it comes to the way the issue of poverty is being framed.
Of course poverty is no excuse for bad teaching, poor curriculum, massive dropout rates or year after year of lousy school outcomes. We need accountability systems that put pressure on schools to respond effectively to the communities they serve. And in my experience, parents are the key to creating that pressure and teachers are the key to implementing the changes needed to address it. Finding ways to promote a collaborative tension and partnership between these groups is a key to school improvement.
But the reformers’ notion that schools alone can make up for the inequality and poverty that exists all around them has become part of the “No Excuses” drumbeat used to impose reforms that have no record of success as school improvement strategies.
Instead they’re political strategies designed to bring market reform to public education.
Today we hear absurd claims about how super-teachers can eliminate achievement gaps with scripted curricula handed down from above, and how the real problem is not the country’s shameful 23% child poverty rate or underfunded schools. Instead it’s bad teachers.
Now it’s true that effective teachers and good schools can make an enormous difference in the life chances of children. And it’s also true that struggling teachers who don’t improve after they’ve been given support need to find other work.
But when it comes to student achievement—and especially the narrow, culturally-slanted, pseudo-achievement captured by standardized test scores—there is no evidence that the test score gaps you hear about constantly can be traced to bad teaching. And there is overwhelming evidence that they closely reflect the inequalities of race, class, and opportunity that follow students to school.
Teachers count a lot. But reality counts too. Reformers who discount the impact of poverty are actually the ones making excuses for their failure to make poverty reduction, and adequate and equitable school funding, a central part of school improvement efforts.
The federal government has put more effort into tying individual teacher compensation to test scores and pressing states to eliminate caps on charter schools than encouraging them to distribute more fairly the $600 billion they spend annually on K-12 education.
At the same time they want to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to create more tests based on the new common core standards and use those tests to implement merit pay plans.
Spending more money on standardized tests is like passing out thermometers in a malaria epidemic. People need better health care, more hospitals, and better-trained doctors, they don’t need more thermometers.
These test-based evaluation systems have the potential to seriously damage the teaching profession. Their basic assumptions are at odds with the way real schools actually work, and bending school practices to accommodate them could negatively affect everything from the way students are assigned to classes, to the willingness of teachers to serve high needs populations to the collaborative professional culture that good schools depend on for success. They’ll also require another massive increase in standardized testing.
The last issue I want to mention is charters. Today there are about 5,000 charter schools that enroll about 4% of all students. Few justify the hype they receive in "Waiting for Superman,” and those that do, like the schools featured in the film, are highly selective, privately subsidized schools that have very limited relevance for the public system. It’s like looking for models of public housing by studying luxury condo developments.
In the past 10 years, the character of the charter school movement has gone from community-based, educator-initiated local efforts to spur alternative approaches for a small number of students, to nationally funded efforts by foundations, investors and educational management companies to create a parallel, more privatized system.
This does not deny the reform impulse that is a real part of the charter movement. Many times during my 30 years of teaching at a large dysfunctional high school, I wanted to start my own school. And many of the issues that public school advocates like myself criticize in charters, like creaming, and unequal resources exist within the public system too.
But public schools have federal, state and district obligations that can be brought to bear. There are school boards, public budgets, public policies and public officials that can be held accountable in ways that privatized charters don’t allow. In post-Katrina New Orleans, where more than 60% of all students now attend unequal tiers of charter schools, there are students and parents who cannot find any schools to take them.
No one questions the desire of parents to find the best options they can for their children. But any strategy that promotes charter expansion at the expense of system-wide improvement and equity for the all schools is a plan for privatization not reform.
It took well over a hundred years to create a public school system that, for all its flaws, provides a free education for all children as a legal right. And public schools are one of the last places where an increasingly diverse and divided population still comes together for a common civic purpose in this country.
In some respects public education is our most successful democratic institution, doing more to reduce inequality, offer hope, and provide opportunity than the country’s financial, economic, political, and media institutions.
Those who believe that business models and market reforms hold the key to solving educational problems have a [reform] agenda, but:
It does not include all children and all families.
It does not include adequate, equitable and sustainable funding.
It does not include transparent public accountability.
It does not include the supports and reforms that educators need to do their jobs well.
It doesn’t address the legacy or the current realities of race and class inequality that surround our schools every day.
Where we go from here, as advocates and activists for social justice, depends in part on our ability to re-invent and articulate this missing equity agenda and to build a reform movement that can provide effective, credible alternatives to the strategies that are currently being imposed from above.
We need to reclaim not just our schools, but our political process and our public policy-making machinery, and control over our economic and social future. We don’t only need to fix our schools, we need to fix our democracy.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/teachers/why-teacher-bashing-is-dangero.html?wprss=answer-sheet
By Stan Karp
Far too many people are bashing teachers and public schools. The attacks are coming from different places for different reasons, and we need to pay attention to the differences.
The parent who’s angry at the public school system because it’s not successfully educating his/her children is not the same as the billionaire with no education experience, who couldn’t survive in a classroom for two days, but who has made privatizing education policy a hobby, and who has the resources to do so because the country’s financial and tax systems serve the rich.
The educators who start a community-based charter school to create a collaborative school culture are not the same as the hedge fund managers who invest in charter schools to turn a profit, or who want to privatize our most important civic institution.
The well-meaning college grad who joins a Teach For America program is not the same as the corporate managers who want to use market reforms to create a less expensive, less secure and less experienced teaching force.
And the hard-pressed taxpayer who directs frustration at teachers struggling to hang on to their health insurance or pensions—which far too few people have at all—is not coming from the same place as those responsible for the obscene economic inequality that is squeezing both.
I’ve spent a large part of my adult life criticizing the flawed policies of public education as a teacher, an education activist and a policy advocate. But now I find myself spending a lot of time defending the very idea of public education against those who say, it should be blown up.
The increasingly polarized education policy debate is not just about whether teachers feel the sting of public criticism or whether school budgets suffer another round of cuts. It’s not even about the hot-button issues getting all the attention like merit pay or charter schools.
What’s at stake is more basic: Whether the right to a free public education for all children will survive as a fundamental democratic promise in our society, and whether the schools and districts needed to provide it are going to survive as public institutions.
Will they be collectively owned and democratically managed, however imperfectly, by all of us as citizens, or will they be privatized and commercialized by corporate interests that increasingly dominate our society?
The larger goal, to borrow a phrase from the Democrats for Education Reform (DFER), a political lobby financed by hedge fund millionaires that is a chief architect of the current campaign, is to “burst the dam” that has historically protected public education and its $600 billion annual expenditures from unchecked commercial exploitation and privatization.
What is new and alarming are the large strides those promoting business models and market reforms have made in attaching their agenda to the urgent need of poor communities who have, in too many cases, been badly served by the current system.
The narrative of public education as a systematic failure has been fed in recent years by shifting federal policy. It’s moved away from its historic role as a promoter of access and equity through support for things such as school integration, extra funding for high-poverty schools and services for students with special needs, and embraced a much less equitable set of mandates around testing, closing schools, firing school staff and distributing federal funds through “competitive grants” to “winners” at the expense of “losers.”
First with No Child Left Behind, and then with Race to the Top, Democrats have been playing tag team with Republicans building on the test and punish approach. Just how much this bipartisan consensus has solidified came home when I picked up my local paper one morning and saw Gov. Chris Christie, the most anti-public education governor New Jersey has ever had, quoted as saying “This is an incredibly special moment in American history, where you have Republicans in New Jersey agreeing with a Democratic president on how to get reform.”
Unless we change direction, the combined impact of these proposals will do for public schooling what market reform has done for housing, health care and the economy: produce fabulous profits for a few and unequal access and outcomes for the many.
The corporate/foundation crowd has successfully captured the media label as “education reformers.” If you support charters, merit pay, and control of school policy by corporate managers you’re a reformer. If you support increased school funding, collective bargaining and control of school policy by educators, you’re a defender of the status quo.
This is particularly true when it comes to the way the issue of poverty is being framed.
Of course poverty is no excuse for bad teaching, poor curriculum, massive dropout rates or year after year of lousy school outcomes. We need accountability systems that put pressure on schools to respond effectively to the communities they serve. And in my experience, parents are the key to creating that pressure and teachers are the key to implementing the changes needed to address it. Finding ways to promote a collaborative tension and partnership between these groups is a key to school improvement.
But the reformers’ notion that schools alone can make up for the inequality and poverty that exists all around them has become part of the “No Excuses” drumbeat used to impose reforms that have no record of success as school improvement strategies.
Instead they’re political strategies designed to bring market reform to public education.
Today we hear absurd claims about how super-teachers can eliminate achievement gaps with scripted curricula handed down from above, and how the real problem is not the country’s shameful 23% child poverty rate or underfunded schools. Instead it’s bad teachers.
Now it’s true that effective teachers and good schools can make an enormous difference in the life chances of children. And it’s also true that struggling teachers who don’t improve after they’ve been given support need to find other work.
But when it comes to student achievement—and especially the narrow, culturally-slanted, pseudo-achievement captured by standardized test scores—there is no evidence that the test score gaps you hear about constantly can be traced to bad teaching. And there is overwhelming evidence that they closely reflect the inequalities of race, class, and opportunity that follow students to school.
Teachers count a lot. But reality counts too. Reformers who discount the impact of poverty are actually the ones making excuses for their failure to make poverty reduction, and adequate and equitable school funding, a central part of school improvement efforts.
The federal government has put more effort into tying individual teacher compensation to test scores and pressing states to eliminate caps on charter schools than encouraging them to distribute more fairly the $600 billion they spend annually on K-12 education.
At the same time they want to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to create more tests based on the new common core standards and use those tests to implement merit pay plans.
Spending more money on standardized tests is like passing out thermometers in a malaria epidemic. People need better health care, more hospitals, and better-trained doctors, they don’t need more thermometers.
These test-based evaluation systems have the potential to seriously damage the teaching profession. Their basic assumptions are at odds with the way real schools actually work, and bending school practices to accommodate them could negatively affect everything from the way students are assigned to classes, to the willingness of teachers to serve high needs populations to the collaborative professional culture that good schools depend on for success. They’ll also require another massive increase in standardized testing.
The last issue I want to mention is charters. Today there are about 5,000 charter schools that enroll about 4% of all students. Few justify the hype they receive in "Waiting for Superman,” and those that do, like the schools featured in the film, are highly selective, privately subsidized schools that have very limited relevance for the public system. It’s like looking for models of public housing by studying luxury condo developments.
In the past 10 years, the character of the charter school movement has gone from community-based, educator-initiated local efforts to spur alternative approaches for a small number of students, to nationally funded efforts by foundations, investors and educational management companies to create a parallel, more privatized system.
This does not deny the reform impulse that is a real part of the charter movement. Many times during my 30 years of teaching at a large dysfunctional high school, I wanted to start my own school. And many of the issues that public school advocates like myself criticize in charters, like creaming, and unequal resources exist within the public system too.
But public schools have federal, state and district obligations that can be brought to bear. There are school boards, public budgets, public policies and public officials that can be held accountable in ways that privatized charters don’t allow. In post-Katrina New Orleans, where more than 60% of all students now attend unequal tiers of charter schools, there are students and parents who cannot find any schools to take them.
No one questions the desire of parents to find the best options they can for their children. But any strategy that promotes charter expansion at the expense of system-wide improvement and equity for the all schools is a plan for privatization not reform.
It took well over a hundred years to create a public school system that, for all its flaws, provides a free education for all children as a legal right. And public schools are one of the last places where an increasingly diverse and divided population still comes together for a common civic purpose in this country.
In some respects public education is our most successful democratic institution, doing more to reduce inequality, offer hope, and provide opportunity than the country’s financial, economic, political, and media institutions.
Those who believe that business models and market reforms hold the key to solving educational problems have a [reform] agenda, but:
It does not include all children and all families.
It does not include adequate, equitable and sustainable funding.
It does not include transparent public accountability.
It does not include the supports and reforms that educators need to do their jobs well.
It doesn’t address the legacy or the current realities of race and class inequality that surround our schools every day.
Where we go from here, as advocates and activists for social justice, depends in part on our ability to re-invent and articulate this missing equity agenda and to build a reform movement that can provide effective, credible alternatives to the strategies that are currently being imposed from above.
We need to reclaim not just our schools, but our political process and our public policy-making machinery, and control over our economic and social future. We don’t only need to fix our schools, we need to fix our democracy.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/teachers/why-teacher-bashing-is-dangero.html?wprss=answer-sheet
Thursday, February 10, 2011
The Myth of Michelle Rhee Debunked
From the washington Posts Answer Sheet
By Valerie Strauss
Enough oxygen has been sucked out of the air about whether former D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee really raised student test scores through the roof when she taught briefly at a Baltimore school. I still find more telling her admission that she taped her students' mouths shut when she didn’t know what else to do to keep them quiet. (This really happened and it would be a career killer for anybody but Rhee.)
The real issue is what she and her supporters say she accomplished but didn’t in D.C. public schools when she was chancellor for about 3 1/2 years before quitting in October when her biggest supporter, Mayor Adrian M. Fenty, was ousted from office.
A myth has grown up around Rhee and her D.C. tenure that essentially has her swooping in like an avenging angel ridding the place of bad teachers and setting the troubled school system on the road to redemption. The reason it matters that the myth be dispelled is because Rhee has become a hero to state legislatures around the country who seem to think that everything she says about school reform is gospel.
If Rhee had in fact saved the school system, or even come a significant way toward that goal, nobody would be cheering more loudly than me. But she did nothing of the sort. She came to the District, talked very tough and proceeded to make a number of changes, as new school district leaders always do. Some were helpful, some weren't.
She didn't stay long enough to know if any could qualify as a success, but her major initiative, a multimillion-dollar teacher evaluation system called IMPACT, has serious flaws and as a result, there is no telling whether some of the teachers Rhee fired were really ineffective. The Rhee myth leaves no room for this reality.
Perhaps the person who knows best how much work Rhee left needs to be done is her successor, interim chancellor Kaya Henderson, who has been trying to clean up several messes Rhee left in her wake.
Henderson has already made two changes in school leadership because of Rhee’s bad decisions, and now, she faces having to implement the ruling of an independent arbitrator who concluded that Rhee improperly laid off 75 new teachers in 2008 because she didn’t follow this simple rule: She was supposed to tell the teachers why they were being let go. Pesky rules just weren't her thing.
My colleague Bill Turque reported that now the District has to find the teachers and offer them reinstatement in an appropriate job -- and give them back wages minus any earnings they have accumulated since. The total could cost the system $7.5 million.
Perhaps Rhee, who is raising $1 billion for her new anti-teachers union Students First organization, could contribute to pay for her mistake.
The debate of the last week has been over whether Rhee inflated how much her students’ test scores rose when she was a teacher at Harlem Park Elementary School. There seems to be no conclusive evidence, and, frankly, I care more about the ill-advised test obsession that drove her reform effort while she was chancellor. Standardized tests are a lousy way to measure anything, and she wanted to measure everything by the results.
The statement that the Students First organization issued to refute the allegations that she inflated student test scores had a most telling last line:
“To our members, this episode is further proof of what we’re up against and why we need your support to get the message out."
It is bewildering to imagine what Rhee thinks she is “up against.” She is the darling of the reform world. The Obama administration supports and funds her style of reform, Philanthropists have showered her with millions of dollars for her to pursue her educational dreams.
The people who need to get their message out there are the very people Rhee and other reformers have attacked: public school teachers.
Here’s part of an e-mail that was shared with a handful of people, written and sent by a veteran teacher in the Washington region, Ken Bernstein. He was responding to a critic who said that those people who do not support current education reforms only complain and offer no alternatives. That is not at all true, but that discussion is for another time.
I am publishing Bernstein’s response (edited to remove names) because I think it authentically speaks to the way many teachers are feeling. I will leave in his abbrevations but here is what they stand for: NCLB, No Child Left Behind;TFA, Teach for America; DFER, Democrats for Education Reform; NLNS, New Leaders for New Schools.
From Bernstein's e-mail:
“There is near systematic exclusion of other voices from the media.
"Yes, Diane Ravitch has gotten an audience as a result of her recent book. .... But that is swamped by the puff pieces on Rhee in Time and Newsweek, by editorials in supposedly liberal papers that support the test-centric - or should I say test-obsessed? - approach to education.
"One reason Diane Ravitch experienced the overwhelming support for her book is that for many teachers it was the first time they had heard a major voice expressing the things that really matter to them...
"We can tell lots of positive narratives. How about Lori Nazareno at Denver’s Math and Science Leadership Academy, a teacher-run school? But does the president focus on that, or does he not give a dog whistle by focusing on a school which is used to pound on teachers unions with the claim that the union rules were interfering?
And how can the President be telling people to become teachers when his Secretary of Education is agreeing with Bill Gates that masters degrees are a waste of money, when his administration supported putting language in that let TFAers and people out of similar programs be considered ‘highly qualified’ under NCLB in direct contradiction to the ruling of the 9th Circuit?
Right now the future of American public education is hanging by a thread.
Right now the administration, DFER, TFA, NLNS, Gates Foundation, Broad Foundation, Walton Foundation, and a whole host of other interconnected groups are pushing an untested (except where it has been tried and failed) set of approaches that will be destructive, yet the issue is how we present?
Why not ask Anthony Mullen about his experiences as NTOY [2009 National Teacher of the Year]? I remember one of his blog posts where he described that when he raised some questions he was treated like a skunk at the garden party, even though his was supposed to be the voice of America’s teachers.
The shape of the teaching profession has to change. Lots of us know that. But not in the direction being pushed by this administration.
Might I suggest that anyone who has not already done so read the new book called "Teaching 2030: What we Must Do for Our Students and Our Public Schools... Now and in the Future,” by Barnett Berry and a batch of teachers including the likes of Renee Moore, Ariel Sacks, Jose Vilson, Shannon C’de Baca, Cindi Rigsbee, Emily Vickery, Laurie Wasserman ....and if you do not know who every single one of those people is, is that not part of the problem....?
Heck, I want the voices of students included. I showed two brief clips from "Race to Nowhere" to my AP students. It absolutely coincides with their experience. These are highly motivated kids, taking college level government in 10th grade. They are getting burned out. And yet we are offered scare stories, international comparisons (which do not support the uses that are made for them, but that is nothing new in educational politics) with an insistence that we must do more, have higher standards at the same time as we are cutting funding (which still largely comes from local governments whose tax bases have shrunk dramatically) at the same time as supposedly we leave no child behind. Balderdash - although I would prefer stronger language.
Yes, we need to do the best job of presenting we can. But it will not matter if we cannot get access to the organs of mass media, without which it becomes harder to convince elected policy makers that we actually represent a point of view that is more commonly held by those who truly understand education.
OH, and by the way, why are so few in the media pointing out the obvious: we have been pursuing a path on education at least since 1983 that has repeatedly failed, so why do we act like the compulsive gambler and still keep doubling down again and again on the same failed approaches?
Sorry, I’m tired, and cranky.
I am spread too thin.
I am taking on even more, going to a conference cosponsored by EWA [Education Writers Association] and Carnegie on teacher quality. I am participating in a panel in my district trying to ameliorate the worst outcomes of tying teacher evaluation to student assessment. I keep writing.
Yet all of that has to take second seat behind my responsibilities to my students.
Those of us who take our teaching seriously already work too many hours.
Some of us are still willing to take on more, to ensure that the voices of teachers are heard....Peace.”
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/michelle-rhee/missing-the-point-on-rhee.html?wprss=answer-sheet
By Valerie Strauss
Enough oxygen has been sucked out of the air about whether former D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee really raised student test scores through the roof when she taught briefly at a Baltimore school. I still find more telling her admission that she taped her students' mouths shut when she didn’t know what else to do to keep them quiet. (This really happened and it would be a career killer for anybody but Rhee.)
The real issue is what she and her supporters say she accomplished but didn’t in D.C. public schools when she was chancellor for about 3 1/2 years before quitting in October when her biggest supporter, Mayor Adrian M. Fenty, was ousted from office.
A myth has grown up around Rhee and her D.C. tenure that essentially has her swooping in like an avenging angel ridding the place of bad teachers and setting the troubled school system on the road to redemption. The reason it matters that the myth be dispelled is because Rhee has become a hero to state legislatures around the country who seem to think that everything she says about school reform is gospel.
If Rhee had in fact saved the school system, or even come a significant way toward that goal, nobody would be cheering more loudly than me. But she did nothing of the sort. She came to the District, talked very tough and proceeded to make a number of changes, as new school district leaders always do. Some were helpful, some weren't.
She didn't stay long enough to know if any could qualify as a success, but her major initiative, a multimillion-dollar teacher evaluation system called IMPACT, has serious flaws and as a result, there is no telling whether some of the teachers Rhee fired were really ineffective. The Rhee myth leaves no room for this reality.
Perhaps the person who knows best how much work Rhee left needs to be done is her successor, interim chancellor Kaya Henderson, who has been trying to clean up several messes Rhee left in her wake.
Henderson has already made two changes in school leadership because of Rhee’s bad decisions, and now, she faces having to implement the ruling of an independent arbitrator who concluded that Rhee improperly laid off 75 new teachers in 2008 because she didn’t follow this simple rule: She was supposed to tell the teachers why they were being let go. Pesky rules just weren't her thing.
My colleague Bill Turque reported that now the District has to find the teachers and offer them reinstatement in an appropriate job -- and give them back wages minus any earnings they have accumulated since. The total could cost the system $7.5 million.
Perhaps Rhee, who is raising $1 billion for her new anti-teachers union Students First organization, could contribute to pay for her mistake.
The debate of the last week has been over whether Rhee inflated how much her students’ test scores rose when she was a teacher at Harlem Park Elementary School. There seems to be no conclusive evidence, and, frankly, I care more about the ill-advised test obsession that drove her reform effort while she was chancellor. Standardized tests are a lousy way to measure anything, and she wanted to measure everything by the results.
The statement that the Students First organization issued to refute the allegations that she inflated student test scores had a most telling last line:
“To our members, this episode is further proof of what we’re up against and why we need your support to get the message out."
It is bewildering to imagine what Rhee thinks she is “up against.” She is the darling of the reform world. The Obama administration supports and funds her style of reform, Philanthropists have showered her with millions of dollars for her to pursue her educational dreams.
The people who need to get their message out there are the very people Rhee and other reformers have attacked: public school teachers.
Here’s part of an e-mail that was shared with a handful of people, written and sent by a veteran teacher in the Washington region, Ken Bernstein. He was responding to a critic who said that those people who do not support current education reforms only complain and offer no alternatives. That is not at all true, but that discussion is for another time.
I am publishing Bernstein’s response (edited to remove names) because I think it authentically speaks to the way many teachers are feeling. I will leave in his abbrevations but here is what they stand for: NCLB, No Child Left Behind;TFA, Teach for America; DFER, Democrats for Education Reform; NLNS, New Leaders for New Schools.
From Bernstein's e-mail:
“There is near systematic exclusion of other voices from the media.
"Yes, Diane Ravitch has gotten an audience as a result of her recent book. .... But that is swamped by the puff pieces on Rhee in Time and Newsweek, by editorials in supposedly liberal papers that support the test-centric - or should I say test-obsessed? - approach to education.
"One reason Diane Ravitch experienced the overwhelming support for her book is that for many teachers it was the first time they had heard a major voice expressing the things that really matter to them...
"We can tell lots of positive narratives. How about Lori Nazareno at Denver’s Math and Science Leadership Academy, a teacher-run school? But does the president focus on that, or does he not give a dog whistle by focusing on a school which is used to pound on teachers unions with the claim that the union rules were interfering?
And how can the President be telling people to become teachers when his Secretary of Education is agreeing with Bill Gates that masters degrees are a waste of money, when his administration supported putting language in that let TFAers and people out of similar programs be considered ‘highly qualified’ under NCLB in direct contradiction to the ruling of the 9th Circuit?
Right now the future of American public education is hanging by a thread.
Right now the administration, DFER, TFA, NLNS, Gates Foundation, Broad Foundation, Walton Foundation, and a whole host of other interconnected groups are pushing an untested (except where it has been tried and failed) set of approaches that will be destructive, yet the issue is how we present?
Why not ask Anthony Mullen about his experiences as NTOY [2009 National Teacher of the Year]? I remember one of his blog posts where he described that when he raised some questions he was treated like a skunk at the garden party, even though his was supposed to be the voice of America’s teachers.
The shape of the teaching profession has to change. Lots of us know that. But not in the direction being pushed by this administration.
Might I suggest that anyone who has not already done so read the new book called "Teaching 2030: What we Must Do for Our Students and Our Public Schools... Now and in the Future,” by Barnett Berry and a batch of teachers including the likes of Renee Moore, Ariel Sacks, Jose Vilson, Shannon C’de Baca, Cindi Rigsbee, Emily Vickery, Laurie Wasserman ....and if you do not know who every single one of those people is, is that not part of the problem....?
Heck, I want the voices of students included. I showed two brief clips from "Race to Nowhere" to my AP students. It absolutely coincides with their experience. These are highly motivated kids, taking college level government in 10th grade. They are getting burned out. And yet we are offered scare stories, international comparisons (which do not support the uses that are made for them, but that is nothing new in educational politics) with an insistence that we must do more, have higher standards at the same time as we are cutting funding (which still largely comes from local governments whose tax bases have shrunk dramatically) at the same time as supposedly we leave no child behind. Balderdash - although I would prefer stronger language.
Yes, we need to do the best job of presenting we can. But it will not matter if we cannot get access to the organs of mass media, without which it becomes harder to convince elected policy makers that we actually represent a point of view that is more commonly held by those who truly understand education.
OH, and by the way, why are so few in the media pointing out the obvious: we have been pursuing a path on education at least since 1983 that has repeatedly failed, so why do we act like the compulsive gambler and still keep doubling down again and again on the same failed approaches?
Sorry, I’m tired, and cranky.
I am spread too thin.
I am taking on even more, going to a conference cosponsored by EWA [Education Writers Association] and Carnegie on teacher quality. I am participating in a panel in my district trying to ameliorate the worst outcomes of tying teacher evaluation to student assessment. I keep writing.
Yet all of that has to take second seat behind my responsibilities to my students.
Those of us who take our teaching seriously already work too many hours.
Some of us are still willing to take on more, to ensure that the voices of teachers are heard....Peace.”
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/michelle-rhee/missing-the-point-on-rhee.html?wprss=answer-sheet
Monday, February 7, 2011
The Sad Status Quo of Education
With a nod to Education Notes On-line, from the blog, Seattle Education
by Sue peters
The current crowd of ed reformers like to dismiss any of us who disagree with their agenda as “defenders of the status quo.”
Nothing could be further from the truth.
I am not a defender of the status quo in public education – because the status quo is currently “No Child Left Behind” and its insidious spin-off, “Race to the Top.”
In fact, I decry the state of public education in this country right now, because a beleaguered, underfunded system has been disparaged and ravaged even further this last decade by damaging policies based on failed concepts pushed by those who want to privatize our public schools.
I do not support the status quo because the status quo is teacher bashing. I don’t support the demonizing of teachers and belittling or weakening of the profession.
The status quo is standardization and high-stakes testing which narrows curriculum and kills all creativity and joy for learning and teaching.
It is “merit pay” which lashes teacher evaluations to student test scores, and which repeated studies and common sense show doesn’t work.
It is data-manipulation to create the illusion of ed reform “success.” (See: “Standards Raised, More Students Fail Tests.”
It is the re-segregation of public schools, exacerbated by the growth of charter schools.
It is overpaid, revolving school superintendents or chancellors with no ties to the local community, often no background in education, and no plans to stick around. That is the Broad Foundation model and the cause of the recent outcry in New York when Mayor Bloomberg chose a publishing executive with no background in education to be the chancellor of New York’s schools.
The status quo is national public education policy largely determined by unelected billionaires with zero expertise in education. “Venture philanthropists” Eli Broad and Bill Gates spend millions shaping public education policy. Formers staffers from the Gates Foundation now seed the Obama Administration’s Department of Education.
“Two of Duncan’s top aides, Chief of Staff Margot Rogers and Assistant Deputy Secretary James H. Shelton III, came from the [Gates] foundation and were granted waivers by the Administration from its revolving-door policy limiting involvement with former employers.”– “Bill Gates’ School Crusade,” July 15, 2010, Bloomberg Businessweek.
Obama’s secretary of education, Arne Duncan, and former chief economic adviser, Lawrence Summers, are both former members of the Broad board of directors. The “Broad Prize for Urban Education” is a trophy and large cash sum awarded annually by the private Broad Foundation to school districts performing to its liking. In its 2009-10 Annual Report, Broad boasts that the trophy itself “resides at the U.S. Department of Education.”
You couldn’t ask for a better symbol of the infiltration of private corporate interests into federal government.
Have Mr. Broad or Mr. Gates been elected to public office, or to direct education policy? Do either have any expertise or experience in public education? No and no. Do either seek genuine parent input? No.
The status quo is Astroturf ed reform groups springing up like toadstools in the night, heavily funded by the same “venture philathropists” looking for a “return on their investment” and pushing the same corporate ed-reform agenda. Washington D.C. ex- school chancellor (Michelle Rhee’s new organization is apparently backed by the same wealthy interests. These organizations lobby for an ed reform agenda that we parents have no say in or may even oppose. But they have resources and media access at their disposal that ordinary parents don’t have. This is not a democratic dialogue about our children’s future when the main stakeholders — we the parents – are largely shut out of the debate.
I do not defend the current trend of sending recent college grads with just five weeks’ training and just a two-year commitment to teach in our nation’s most struggling schools which already suffer from high teacher turnover. But that is the model for Teach for America, Inc. a multimillion-dollar enterprise that is now funded by the Obama government to the tune of $50 million-plus and is arguably de-professionalizing the teaching profession.
Five weeks training does not make these uncredentialed grads “highly qualified,” despite the recent shenanigans by Congress.
I do not support the status quo that punishes teachers, principals and schools with mass layoffs, firings and closures because of student test scores, rather than addressing why some children are struggling and how else one might measure a child’s abilities and a teacher’s worth.
I do not support the status quo which is the mindset of the corporate ed reformers that schools should be run like businesses. Schools are not businesses. Their goal is not profit. The strongest schools are communities, more like families, and need to be cooperative, creative, engaging and nurturing environments.
I do not support the status quo of shameful attacks by the media on teachers and schools and the one-sided cheerleading for charter schools that fails to acknowledge the genuine proven limitations of these schools — their failure to serve children with special needs, the high attrition of kids (even a Geoffrey Canada Harlem Children Zone apparently booted an entire class of kids from a charter school because they weren’t deemed likely to do well on tests. (See: “The Myth of Charter Schools,” Brookings Institution, Nov. 11, 2010.)
I do not support the status quo which makes celebrities and “super(wo)men” out of spotlight-seeking figures like Michelle Rhee, Michael Bloomberg, and Arne Duncan, while all the real work is being done quietly by the thousands of anonymous teachers, principals, educators, parents and students, who suffer through reform after reform, trend after trend, searing budget cuts, and still manage to go on and offer a good education to many children in this nation without any national recognition.
I do not support a status quo that cuts so much from school budgets that the PTAs are left fundraising for such essentials as teachers and books, and school communities that do not have these extra resources suffer the most.
I do not support the status quo of education policies being driven by Wall Street interests and not by what’s in the best interests of our children.
I do not support mayoral control, abolishing of school boards, quashing of parent voices and end-runs around democracy.
I do not defend the federal government imposing its edicts on local school districts, suppressing local autonomy and skirting the edges of Constitutionality, which is what Race to the Top essentially does.
The research comes on the heels of a recent pledge by President Barack Obama’s education secretary, Arne Duncan, to use $5 billion of the $100 billion in federal stimulus funds for education to press states on charter schools. “States that don’t have charter school laws, or put artificial caps on the growth of charter schools, will jeopardize their application” for federal grant money, Duncan said in a call with reporters last week. Currently, 10 states lack laws that allow charter schools, and 26 others cap their enrollment.” — from: “Charter Schools Might Not Be Better,” U.S. News & World Report, June 19, 2009.)
No, I reject this status quo.
What I support and call for is: the long-term personal and professional investment in every child –which takes time and commitment, as has been demonstrated in Everett, Washington. It’s not flashy, doesn’t require expensive high-tech products, just good old-fashioned follow-up with kids, mentoring and genuine support. And an engaging curriculum.
I support small classes sizes that allow greater one-on-one interaction. I call for the parents’ voices to be the loudest in the discussion of how to run our schools. I support autonomy for schools, teachers and principals who know their communities best, and who can ensure their children are doing well, learning what they need to know and able to graduate.
I call for creative teaching, rich, varied curricula that include the arts and music and languages, science, physical education. I call for safe, decent well-maintained buildings and healthy school meals.
I call for an honest dialogue about the ravages of poverty on our nation’s children. We need to acknowledge the shameful fact that 21 percent of our children live in poverty, and that inequities in academic results are largely determined by income and home life of the child. This is not an excuse, it is a fact, and to expect teachers and schools alone to correct the deep and damaging inequalities of our society is irrational.
I call for an overhaul of school district administrations, to pare them down to the essentials, make them efficient and serving the interests of the school communities, not the whims of private foundations or vendors of standardized tests, text books or online learning products.
I call for the hiring of school superintendents and chancellors who have a local connection and commitment to the community they must serve which will in turn lead to greater accountability. I call to retain democratically elected school board members who must answer to their constituents and oversee the superintendent, and a paid position for school board so they can do their job thoroughly and well.
Public education is an integral ingredient in creating an informed public and a strong democracy. I believe we must keep our public schools free of private and political agendas and manipulations, strengthen our schools, not close them down, stop punishing and start nurturing.
If you agree that our nation needs a new vision for public education, I invite you to join a forum of parents from across the nation who are launching a new organization, Parents Across America, in New York on Feb. 7. Our keynote speaker will be education historian Diane Ravitch. The event is free and open to the public. It starts at 6 p.m. and will held at: PS/IS 89 – Liberty School, 201 Warren Street, New York, N.Y. 10282.
Help bring parents’ voices to the education debate and support progressive, positive, constructive education reforms that work.
http://seattleducation2010.wordpress.com/2011/02/04/why-i-am-not-a-defender-of-the-status-quo-in-education-because-the-status-quo-is-failed-ed-reforms/
by Sue peters
The current crowd of ed reformers like to dismiss any of us who disagree with their agenda as “defenders of the status quo.”
Nothing could be further from the truth.
I am not a defender of the status quo in public education – because the status quo is currently “No Child Left Behind” and its insidious spin-off, “Race to the Top.”
In fact, I decry the state of public education in this country right now, because a beleaguered, underfunded system has been disparaged and ravaged even further this last decade by damaging policies based on failed concepts pushed by those who want to privatize our public schools.
I do not support the status quo because the status quo is teacher bashing. I don’t support the demonizing of teachers and belittling or weakening of the profession.
The status quo is standardization and high-stakes testing which narrows curriculum and kills all creativity and joy for learning and teaching.
It is “merit pay” which lashes teacher evaluations to student test scores, and which repeated studies and common sense show doesn’t work.
It is data-manipulation to create the illusion of ed reform “success.” (See: “Standards Raised, More Students Fail Tests.”
It is the re-segregation of public schools, exacerbated by the growth of charter schools.
It is overpaid, revolving school superintendents or chancellors with no ties to the local community, often no background in education, and no plans to stick around. That is the Broad Foundation model and the cause of the recent outcry in New York when Mayor Bloomberg chose a publishing executive with no background in education to be the chancellor of New York’s schools.
The status quo is national public education policy largely determined by unelected billionaires with zero expertise in education. “Venture philanthropists” Eli Broad and Bill Gates spend millions shaping public education policy. Formers staffers from the Gates Foundation now seed the Obama Administration’s Department of Education.
“Two of Duncan’s top aides, Chief of Staff Margot Rogers and Assistant Deputy Secretary James H. Shelton III, came from the [Gates] foundation and were granted waivers by the Administration from its revolving-door policy limiting involvement with former employers.”– “Bill Gates’ School Crusade,” July 15, 2010, Bloomberg Businessweek.
Obama’s secretary of education, Arne Duncan, and former chief economic adviser, Lawrence Summers, are both former members of the Broad board of directors. The “Broad Prize for Urban Education” is a trophy and large cash sum awarded annually by the private Broad Foundation to school districts performing to its liking. In its 2009-10 Annual Report, Broad boasts that the trophy itself “resides at the U.S. Department of Education.”
You couldn’t ask for a better symbol of the infiltration of private corporate interests into federal government.
Have Mr. Broad or Mr. Gates been elected to public office, or to direct education policy? Do either have any expertise or experience in public education? No and no. Do either seek genuine parent input? No.
The status quo is Astroturf ed reform groups springing up like toadstools in the night, heavily funded by the same “venture philathropists” looking for a “return on their investment” and pushing the same corporate ed-reform agenda. Washington D.C. ex- school chancellor (Michelle Rhee’s new organization is apparently backed by the same wealthy interests. These organizations lobby for an ed reform agenda that we parents have no say in or may even oppose. But they have resources and media access at their disposal that ordinary parents don’t have. This is not a democratic dialogue about our children’s future when the main stakeholders — we the parents – are largely shut out of the debate.
I do not defend the current trend of sending recent college grads with just five weeks’ training and just a two-year commitment to teach in our nation’s most struggling schools which already suffer from high teacher turnover. But that is the model for Teach for America, Inc. a multimillion-dollar enterprise that is now funded by the Obama government to the tune of $50 million-plus and is arguably de-professionalizing the teaching profession.
Five weeks training does not make these uncredentialed grads “highly qualified,” despite the recent shenanigans by Congress.
I do not support the status quo that punishes teachers, principals and schools with mass layoffs, firings and closures because of student test scores, rather than addressing why some children are struggling and how else one might measure a child’s abilities and a teacher’s worth.
I do not support the status quo which is the mindset of the corporate ed reformers that schools should be run like businesses. Schools are not businesses. Their goal is not profit. The strongest schools are communities, more like families, and need to be cooperative, creative, engaging and nurturing environments.
I do not support the status quo of shameful attacks by the media on teachers and schools and the one-sided cheerleading for charter schools that fails to acknowledge the genuine proven limitations of these schools — their failure to serve children with special needs, the high attrition of kids (even a Geoffrey Canada Harlem Children Zone apparently booted an entire class of kids from a charter school because they weren’t deemed likely to do well on tests. (See: “The Myth of Charter Schools,” Brookings Institution, Nov. 11, 2010.)
I do not support the status quo which makes celebrities and “super(wo)men” out of spotlight-seeking figures like Michelle Rhee, Michael Bloomberg, and Arne Duncan, while all the real work is being done quietly by the thousands of anonymous teachers, principals, educators, parents and students, who suffer through reform after reform, trend after trend, searing budget cuts, and still manage to go on and offer a good education to many children in this nation without any national recognition.
I do not support a status quo that cuts so much from school budgets that the PTAs are left fundraising for such essentials as teachers and books, and school communities that do not have these extra resources suffer the most.
I do not support the status quo of education policies being driven by Wall Street interests and not by what’s in the best interests of our children.
I do not support mayoral control, abolishing of school boards, quashing of parent voices and end-runs around democracy.
I do not defend the federal government imposing its edicts on local school districts, suppressing local autonomy and skirting the edges of Constitutionality, which is what Race to the Top essentially does.
The research comes on the heels of a recent pledge by President Barack Obama’s education secretary, Arne Duncan, to use $5 billion of the $100 billion in federal stimulus funds for education to press states on charter schools. “States that don’t have charter school laws, or put artificial caps on the growth of charter schools, will jeopardize their application” for federal grant money, Duncan said in a call with reporters last week. Currently, 10 states lack laws that allow charter schools, and 26 others cap their enrollment.” — from: “Charter Schools Might Not Be Better,” U.S. News & World Report, June 19, 2009.)
No, I reject this status quo.
What I support and call for is: the long-term personal and professional investment in every child –which takes time and commitment, as has been demonstrated in Everett, Washington. It’s not flashy, doesn’t require expensive high-tech products, just good old-fashioned follow-up with kids, mentoring and genuine support. And an engaging curriculum.
I support small classes sizes that allow greater one-on-one interaction. I call for the parents’ voices to be the loudest in the discussion of how to run our schools. I support autonomy for schools, teachers and principals who know their communities best, and who can ensure their children are doing well, learning what they need to know and able to graduate.
I call for creative teaching, rich, varied curricula that include the arts and music and languages, science, physical education. I call for safe, decent well-maintained buildings and healthy school meals.
I call for an honest dialogue about the ravages of poverty on our nation’s children. We need to acknowledge the shameful fact that 21 percent of our children live in poverty, and that inequities in academic results are largely determined by income and home life of the child. This is not an excuse, it is a fact, and to expect teachers and schools alone to correct the deep and damaging inequalities of our society is irrational.
I call for an overhaul of school district administrations, to pare them down to the essentials, make them efficient and serving the interests of the school communities, not the whims of private foundations or vendors of standardized tests, text books or online learning products.
I call for the hiring of school superintendents and chancellors who have a local connection and commitment to the community they must serve which will in turn lead to greater accountability. I call to retain democratically elected school board members who must answer to their constituents and oversee the superintendent, and a paid position for school board so they can do their job thoroughly and well.
Public education is an integral ingredient in creating an informed public and a strong democracy. I believe we must keep our public schools free of private and political agendas and manipulations, strengthen our schools, not close them down, stop punishing and start nurturing.
If you agree that our nation needs a new vision for public education, I invite you to join a forum of parents from across the nation who are launching a new organization, Parents Across America, in New York on Feb. 7. Our keynote speaker will be education historian Diane Ravitch. The event is free and open to the public. It starts at 6 p.m. and will held at: PS/IS 89 – Liberty School, 201 Warren Street, New York, N.Y. 10282.
Help bring parents’ voices to the education debate and support progressive, positive, constructive education reforms that work.
http://seattleducation2010.wordpress.com/2011/02/04/why-i-am-not-a-defender-of-the-status-quo-in-education-because-the-status-quo-is-failed-ed-reforms/
Get the federal government out of the business of punishing schools
From schoolboardnews.nsba.org
By Diane Ravtch
“I’m here because I’m frightened for the future of public education.”
That was the opening salvo by education historian Diane Ravitch, as she offered a spirited condemnation of many of today’s popular school reform ideas at a Sunday afternoon session of NSBA’s Federal Relations Network Conference.
As a matter of history, it’s unclear that public education has ever faced such fierce criticism as it does today, said Ravitch, a nationally recognized education author, former U.S. assistant secretary of education, and research professor at New York University.
Certainly the public schools have come under criticism before, she said. But there was a difference from today.
“Critics of public education wanted to make public education better. They didn’t want to replace it with privatization. They wanted higher standards … more funding and more equitable funding … an end to segregation. They didn’t want to get rid of public education.”
Today, it appears some school reformers are out to demoralize the education community and undermine public confidence in the public schools, she said.
They’re telling people the schools are terrible, Ravitch said. The schools are failing. Educators can’t solve any of their problems. Teachers are responsible for the failure. The schools are filled with bad teachers.
“They want to divide people who support public education,” she continued. “Then, when everybody is divided and demoralized, that’s when they’ll move in and privatize our schools. That’s just a terrible scenario.”
As Ravitch described it, the cacophony against public schools is the work of “politicians, Wall Street hedge fund managers, media tycoons, and the wealthiest in the nation who have their eyes on the ‘education industry,’ as they call it. They see an opportunity for desegregation, to put schools in the hands of entrepreneurs.”
This effort really gained momentum with the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act, a “toxic brand” as Ravitch described the law. By setting impossibly high standards for 2014, school reformers ensured that more and more schools would be labeled as “failing”—setting the stage for public disillusionment with public education.
“No Child Left Behind is a timetable for the deconstruction of public education in America.”
Today’s reformers no better. Ravitch criticized the Obama administration’s Race to the Top (RTTT) program for its competitive approach to reform. The federal role in education was designed to bring equity to the nation’s schools, she said, not to create a generation of winners and losers for federal funding.
“Federal funding should be available to all children … to all students in need, not those in states that happened to win a competition.”
Another of today’s popular reform ideas — the closing of low-performing schools — also is wrongheaded, she says. That practice has been used in the Chicago schools for years, but research shows that the majority of students at these schools simply end up transferring to other low-performing schools—and, on top of that, they lose any community supports that exited at their old school.
Such efforts are nothing but a case of musical chairs, she said. “No child will be helped by any of these measures. It will be accompanied by turmoil, with new schools opening with the same kids and the same problems unaddressed.”
Finally, such reforms ignore what educators have known for years — that a school’s academic success is highly linked to the number of impoverished children it serves, she said. “You keep having corporate types saying that poverty is just an excuse,” she said. But “we have 100 years of political science that says they don’t know what they’re talking about.”
So when school leaders walk out of the FRN conference later this week to visit with to lawmakers in Congress, she said, the message should be: “Stop closing schools. Closing schools is not a turnaround strategy … Fix the schools. Evaluate their needs and help them. The federal government has dramatically overstepped its bounds … Get the federal government out of the business of punishing schools.”
http://schoolboardnews.nsba.org/2011/02/ravitch-decries-reformers-seeking-to-divide/
By Diane Ravtch
“I’m here because I’m frightened for the future of public education.”
That was the opening salvo by education historian Diane Ravitch, as she offered a spirited condemnation of many of today’s popular school reform ideas at a Sunday afternoon session of NSBA’s Federal Relations Network Conference.
As a matter of history, it’s unclear that public education has ever faced such fierce criticism as it does today, said Ravitch, a nationally recognized education author, former U.S. assistant secretary of education, and research professor at New York University.
Certainly the public schools have come under criticism before, she said. But there was a difference from today.
“Critics of public education wanted to make public education better. They didn’t want to replace it with privatization. They wanted higher standards … more funding and more equitable funding … an end to segregation. They didn’t want to get rid of public education.”
Today, it appears some school reformers are out to demoralize the education community and undermine public confidence in the public schools, she said.
They’re telling people the schools are terrible, Ravitch said. The schools are failing. Educators can’t solve any of their problems. Teachers are responsible for the failure. The schools are filled with bad teachers.
“They want to divide people who support public education,” she continued. “Then, when everybody is divided and demoralized, that’s when they’ll move in and privatize our schools. That’s just a terrible scenario.”
As Ravitch described it, the cacophony against public schools is the work of “politicians, Wall Street hedge fund managers, media tycoons, and the wealthiest in the nation who have their eyes on the ‘education industry,’ as they call it. They see an opportunity for desegregation, to put schools in the hands of entrepreneurs.”
This effort really gained momentum with the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act, a “toxic brand” as Ravitch described the law. By setting impossibly high standards for 2014, school reformers ensured that more and more schools would be labeled as “failing”—setting the stage for public disillusionment with public education.
“No Child Left Behind is a timetable for the deconstruction of public education in America.”
Today’s reformers no better. Ravitch criticized the Obama administration’s Race to the Top (RTTT) program for its competitive approach to reform. The federal role in education was designed to bring equity to the nation’s schools, she said, not to create a generation of winners and losers for federal funding.
“Federal funding should be available to all children … to all students in need, not those in states that happened to win a competition.”
Another of today’s popular reform ideas — the closing of low-performing schools — also is wrongheaded, she says. That practice has been used in the Chicago schools for years, but research shows that the majority of students at these schools simply end up transferring to other low-performing schools—and, on top of that, they lose any community supports that exited at their old school.
Such efforts are nothing but a case of musical chairs, she said. “No child will be helped by any of these measures. It will be accompanied by turmoil, with new schools opening with the same kids and the same problems unaddressed.”
Finally, such reforms ignore what educators have known for years — that a school’s academic success is highly linked to the number of impoverished children it serves, she said. “You keep having corporate types saying that poverty is just an excuse,” she said. But “we have 100 years of political science that says they don’t know what they’re talking about.”
So when school leaders walk out of the FRN conference later this week to visit with to lawmakers in Congress, she said, the message should be: “Stop closing schools. Closing schools is not a turnaround strategy … Fix the schools. Evaluate their needs and help them. The federal government has dramatically overstepped its bounds … Get the federal government out of the business of punishing schools.”
http://schoolboardnews.nsba.org/2011/02/ravitch-decries-reformers-seeking-to-divide/
Monday, January 31, 2011
Where kids have kids and learning dies
From the City Journal.org
by Gerry Garibaldi
In my short time as a teacher in Connecticut, I have muddled through President Bush’s No Child Left Behind act, which tied federal funding of schools to various reforms, and through President Obama’s Race to the Top initiative, which does much the same thing, though with different benchmarks. Thanks to the feds, urban schools like mine—already entitled to substantial federal largesse under Title I, which provides funds to public schools with large low-income populations—are swimming in money. At my school, we pay five teachers to tutor kids after school and on Saturdays. They sit in classrooms waiting for kids who never show up. We don’t want for books—or for any of the cutting-edge gizmos that non–Title I schools can’t afford: computerized whiteboards, Elmo projectors, the works. Our facility is state-of-the-art, thanks to a recent $40 million face-lift, with gleaming new hallways and bathrooms and a fully computerized library.
Here’s my prediction: the money, the reforms, the gleaming porcelain, the hopeful rhetoric about saving our children—all of it will have a limited impact, at best, on most city schoolchildren. Urban teachers face an intractable problem, one that we cannot spend or even teach our way out of: teen pregnancy. This year, all of my favorite girls are pregnant, four in all, future unwed mothers every one. There will be no innovation in this quarter, no race to the top. Personal moral accountability is the electrified rail that no politician wants to touch.
My first encounter with teen pregnancy was a girl named Nicole, a pretty 15-year-old who had rings on every finger and great looped earrings and a red pen with fluffy pink feathers and a heart that lit up when she wrote with it. Hearts seemed to be on everything—in her signature, on her binder; there was often a little plastic heart barrette in her hair, which she had dyed in bright hues recalling a Siamese fighting fish. She was enrolled in two of my classes: English and journalism.
My main gripe with Nicole was that she fell asleep in class. Each morning—bang!—her head hit the desk. Waking her was like waking a badger. Nicole’s unmarried mother, it turned out, worked nights, so Nicole would slip out with friends every evening, sometimes staying out until 3 am, and then show up in class exhausted, surly, and hungry.
After a dozen calls home, her mother finally got back to me. Your daughter is staying out late, I reported. The voice at the other end of the phone sounded abashed and bone-weary. “I know, I know, I’m sorry,” she repeated over and over. “I’ll talk to her. I’m sorry.”
For a short time, things got better. Nicole’s grades started to improve. Encouraged, I hectored and cajoled and praised her every small effort. She was an innately bright girl who might, if I dragged her by the heels, eventually survive the rigors of a community college.
Then one morning, her head dropped again. I rapped my knuckles on her desk. “Leave me alone, mister,” she said. “I feel sick.”
There was a sly exchange of looks among the other girls in class, a giggle or two, and then one of them said: “She’s pregnant, Mr. Garibaldi.”
She lifted her face and smiled at her friends, then dropped her head back down. I picked up my grimy metal garbage can and set it beside her desk, just in case. A moment later she vomited, and I dispatched her to the nurse. In the years since, I’ve escorted girls whose water has just broken, their legs trembling and wobbly, to the principal’s office, where their condition barely raises an eyebrow.
Within my lifetime, single parenthood has been transformed from shame to saintliness. In our society, perversely, we celebrate the unwed mother as a heroic figure, like a fireman or a police officer. During the last presidential election, much was made of Obama’s mother, who was a single parent. Movie stars and pop singers flaunt their daddy-less babies like fishing trophies.
None of this is lost on my students. In today’s urban high school, there is no shame or social ostracism when girls become pregnant. Other girls in school want to pat their stomachs. Their friends throw baby showers at which meager little gifts are given. After delivery, the girls return to school with baby pictures on their cell phones or slipped into their binders, which they eagerly share with me. Often they sit together in my classes, sharing insights into parenting, discussing the taste of Pedialite or the exhaustion that goes with the job. On my way home at night, I often see my students in the projects that surround our school, pushing their strollers or hanging out on their stoops instead of doing their homework.
Connecticut is among the most generous of the states to out-of-wedlock mothers. Teenage girls like Nicole qualify for a vast array of welfare benefits from the state and federal governments: medical coverage when they become pregnant (called “Healthy Start”); later, medical insurance for the family (“Husky”); child care (“Care 4 Kids”); Section 8 housing subsidies; the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program; cash assistance. If you need to get to an appointment, state-sponsored dial-a-ride is available. If that appointment is college-related, no sweat: education grants for single mothers are available, too. Nicole didn’t have to worry about finishing the school year; the state sent a $35-an-hour tutor directly to her home halfway into her final trimester and for six weeks after the baby arrived.
In theory, this provision of services is humane and defensible, an essential safety net for the most vulnerable—children who have children. What it amounts to in practice is a monolithic public endorsement of single motherhood—one that has turned our urban high schools into puppy mills. The safety net has become a hammock.
The young father almost always greets the pregnancy with adolescent excitement, as if a baby were a new Xbox game. In Nicole’s case, the father’s name was David. David manfully walked Nicole to class each morning and gave her a kiss at the door. I had him in homeroom and asked if he planned to marry her. “No” was his frank answer. But he did have plans to help out. David himself lived with his mother. His dad had served a short sentence in prison for drug possession and ran a motorcycle-repair shop somewhere upstate. One afternoon, David proudly opened his father’s website to show me the customized motorcycles he built. There he was, the spit and image of his son, smiling atop a gleaming vintage Harley, not a care in the world.
Boys without fathers, like David, cultivate an overweening bravado to overcome a deeper sense of vulnerability and male confusion. They strut, swear, and swagger. There’s a he-man thing to getting a girl pregnant that marks you as an adult in the eyes of your equally unmoored peers. But a boy’s interest in his child quickly vanishes. When I ask girls if the father is helping out with the baby, they shrug. “I don’t care if he does or not,” I’ve heard too often.
As for girls without fathers, they are often among my most disruptive students. You walk on eggshells with them. You broker remarks, you negotiate insults, all the while trying to pull them along on a slender thread. Their anger toward male authority can be lacerating. They view trips to the principal’s office like victory laps.
With Nicole, I dug in. In journalism class, I brought up the subject of teen pregnancy and suggested that she and a friend of hers, Maria, write a piece together about their experiences. They hesitated; I pressed the matter. “Do you think getting pregnant when you’re a teenager is a good thing or a bad thing?”
“Depends,” Nicole replied caustically, glancing at Maria and another friend, Shanice, for support. They knew this was coming and went on the defensive.
“On what?”
“My mom and my grandma both got pregnant when they were teens, and they’re good mothers.”
“Nobody gets married any more, mister,” Shanice and Maria chime in. “You’re just picking on us because we have kids.”
At this point, my “picking” has only just begun. It’s partly for their benefit, but mostly for the other girls in the room, who haven’t said a word. As much as Nicole is aware of her mother’s sacrifices, she is equally proud of her mother’s choice to keep her. It’s locked away in her heart like a cameo. They’re best friends, she offers. The talk turns to her mother’s loyalty and love, and soon the class rises in a choir to mom’s defense.
“Fine,” I say, glowering like Heath Ledger’s Joker. “If that’s your position, like any good journalist, you have to back up your arguments with facts and statistics.”
As do most of my 11th-graders, Nicole reads at a fifth-grade level, which means I must peruse the articles and statistics along with her, side by side. She groans each time I pick out a long article and counts the number of pages before she reads. With my persistent nudging, she and Maria begin to pull out the statistics for the children of single parents. From the FBI: 63 percent of all suicides are individuals from single-parent households. From the Centers for Disease Control: 75 percent of adolescents in chemical-dependency hospitals come from single-parent households. From the Children’s Defense Fund: more than half of all youths incarcerated for criminal acts come from single-parent households. And so on.
“I don’t want to write about this!” Nicole complains. “I’ve changed my mind.”
“Why?”
“Nobody wants to read it.”
I point out that they committed to it. If they don’t complete the essay by the due date, they know I will give them an F.
Their first drafts are little more than two scribbled paragraphs, which they toss to me as a completed assignment and I toss back. Maria, in particular, rebels. She wants to recast the article in a rosier vein and talk about how happy her son makes her. It’s in these light skirmishes that we have our richest discussions. When the girls open up, their vague doubts come to the surface, and my flinty-eyed circuit preacher melts away. A father myself, I understand a parent’s love. Our talk turns more sweetly to teething cures, diaper rashes, and solid food. Nicole listens to us with tender interest. It’s in these moments that I feel most effective as a teacher. I suggest ways of incorporating that love into the piece, while also hoping that some of these grim statistics have gotten through to them.
As morbid as it sounds, the students take an interest in obituary writing. I have them write their own obits, fictional biographies that foretell the arc of their lives. From Nicole’s, I learn that her mother was 16 when she had Nicole; her father, 14. After high school, the fictional Nicole went on to have four more kids—with strangely concocted names, all beginning with M—whom she loved dearly and who loved her dearly. She also left six grandchildren. She died of old age in her bed.
“Nicole, you never got married?” I remarked.
“No,” she responded with a note of obstinacy in her voice.
“I think you would make a wonderful wife for someone.”
“I would make a good wife,” she replied. “I know a lot of stuff. But I’m not going to get married.” She was speaking to a hard fate that she was accepting as her future. She was slipping away.
As Nicole entered her third trimester, she had a minor complication with her pregnancy and disappeared for nearly two weeks. She returned, pale and far behind in my classes. She no longer had to report to two classes: physical education and a science lab where strong chemicals were used. The administration didn’t want her to be alone during those periods, and since my schedule coincided with the vacant spots, I was asked to be her chaperone.
For five weeks, Nicole became my shadow. If I had cafeteria duty, she’d happily trot along. I’d buy her a candy bar and she’d plop down in the seat beside me. I’d also escort her to her restroom runs, which were frequent, and wait for her outside the door. She carried a grainy sonogram picture of the baby, framed in a pink card with a stork on the front. Gazing at it with a smile, I felt my duplicity and the ragged trap of my convictions.
Her paleness and fatigue alarmed me. I carried Vitamin C drops in my pocket and slipped her a constant supply. A second private concern began to nag at me: the father in me wanted to be protective and kind, but Nicole was becoming too connected with me. She blew off assignments regularly now. When I admonished her, she only giggled and promised to get them done. She trusted me and would never think that falling behind in my classes would result in a failing grade. Life had allowed her to slide before, through every year of her education, as others in her life had slid—starting with her father, whom she barely recalled.
I felt that I was being drawn into this undertow. A simple D would ease everyone’s load, particularly mine, and Nicole wouldn’t register yet another betrayal of trust. More than anything, she wanted a buoy in her choppy sea.
Nicole failed both my classes, which meant summer school. When she returned the following year, she was in good spirits. The birth of her son had gone well. She had a heart-adorned album full of photos of her boy. Things were settled, she said. She was going to work hard this year; she felt motivated, even eager. And by year’s end, her reading level had indeed risen nearly two grades—but it was still far below what she would need to score as proficient on the Connecticut Academic Performance Test, one of the yardsticks for accountability in Title I schools.
The path for young, unwed mothers—and for their children—can be brutal. Consider how often girls get molested in their own homes after Mom has decided to let her boyfriend move in. The boyfriend splits the rent and the food bill, but he often sees his girlfriend’s teenage daughter as fair game. Teachers whisper their suspicions in the lunchroom or in the hallways when they notice that one of their students has become suddenly emotional, that her grades have inexplicably dropped, or that she stays late after school to hang out in her teacher’s classroom or begins sleeping over at a friend’s house several nights a week. Sometimes she simply disappears.
And there are other dangers. I once had a student named Jasmine, who had given birth over the summer. She did just enough to earn Ds in my class. One day, I observed her staring off mulishly into space for nearly the entire period, not hearing a word I said and ignoring her assignment. At the end of class, I took her aside and asked, with some irritation, what the matter was.
Her eyes welled with tears. “I gave my son to his father to look after yesterday. When I picked him up, he had bruises on his head and a cut.” Her son was six months old.
Honestly? I just wanted that day to go by. But we have a duty to our students, both moral and legal. “You have to be a brave mama and report him,” I said. I led her to the office and to the school social worker, and I tipped off the campus trooper. Even with that support, she backed off from filing a complaint and shortly afterward dropped out of school to be with her baby.
My students often become curious about my personal life. The question most frequently asked is, “Do you have kids?”
“Two,” I say.
The next question is always heartbreaking.
“Do they live with you?”
Every fall, new education theories arrive, born like orchids in the hothouses of big-time university education departments. Urban teachers are always first in line for each new bloom. We’ve been retrofitted as teachers a dozen times over. This year’s innovation is the Data Wall, a strategy in which teachers must test endlessly in order to produce data about students’ progress. The Obama administration has spent lavishly to ensure that professional consultants monitor its implementation.
Every year, the national statistics summon a fresh chorus of outrage at the failure of urban public schools. Next year, I fear, will be little different.
Gerry Garibaldi was an executive and screenwriter in Hollywood before becoming an English teacher at an urban high school in Connecticut.
http://www.city-journal.org/2011/21_1_teen-pregnancy.html
by Gerry Garibaldi
In my short time as a teacher in Connecticut, I have muddled through President Bush’s No Child Left Behind act, which tied federal funding of schools to various reforms, and through President Obama’s Race to the Top initiative, which does much the same thing, though with different benchmarks. Thanks to the feds, urban schools like mine—already entitled to substantial federal largesse under Title I, which provides funds to public schools with large low-income populations—are swimming in money. At my school, we pay five teachers to tutor kids after school and on Saturdays. They sit in classrooms waiting for kids who never show up. We don’t want for books—or for any of the cutting-edge gizmos that non–Title I schools can’t afford: computerized whiteboards, Elmo projectors, the works. Our facility is state-of-the-art, thanks to a recent $40 million face-lift, with gleaming new hallways and bathrooms and a fully computerized library.
Here’s my prediction: the money, the reforms, the gleaming porcelain, the hopeful rhetoric about saving our children—all of it will have a limited impact, at best, on most city schoolchildren. Urban teachers face an intractable problem, one that we cannot spend or even teach our way out of: teen pregnancy. This year, all of my favorite girls are pregnant, four in all, future unwed mothers every one. There will be no innovation in this quarter, no race to the top. Personal moral accountability is the electrified rail that no politician wants to touch.
My first encounter with teen pregnancy was a girl named Nicole, a pretty 15-year-old who had rings on every finger and great looped earrings and a red pen with fluffy pink feathers and a heart that lit up when she wrote with it. Hearts seemed to be on everything—in her signature, on her binder; there was often a little plastic heart barrette in her hair, which she had dyed in bright hues recalling a Siamese fighting fish. She was enrolled in two of my classes: English and journalism.
My main gripe with Nicole was that she fell asleep in class. Each morning—bang!—her head hit the desk. Waking her was like waking a badger. Nicole’s unmarried mother, it turned out, worked nights, so Nicole would slip out with friends every evening, sometimes staying out until 3 am, and then show up in class exhausted, surly, and hungry.
After a dozen calls home, her mother finally got back to me. Your daughter is staying out late, I reported. The voice at the other end of the phone sounded abashed and bone-weary. “I know, I know, I’m sorry,” she repeated over and over. “I’ll talk to her. I’m sorry.”
For a short time, things got better. Nicole’s grades started to improve. Encouraged, I hectored and cajoled and praised her every small effort. She was an innately bright girl who might, if I dragged her by the heels, eventually survive the rigors of a community college.
Then one morning, her head dropped again. I rapped my knuckles on her desk. “Leave me alone, mister,” she said. “I feel sick.”
There was a sly exchange of looks among the other girls in class, a giggle or two, and then one of them said: “She’s pregnant, Mr. Garibaldi.”
She lifted her face and smiled at her friends, then dropped her head back down. I picked up my grimy metal garbage can and set it beside her desk, just in case. A moment later she vomited, and I dispatched her to the nurse. In the years since, I’ve escorted girls whose water has just broken, their legs trembling and wobbly, to the principal’s office, where their condition barely raises an eyebrow.
Within my lifetime, single parenthood has been transformed from shame to saintliness. In our society, perversely, we celebrate the unwed mother as a heroic figure, like a fireman or a police officer. During the last presidential election, much was made of Obama’s mother, who was a single parent. Movie stars and pop singers flaunt their daddy-less babies like fishing trophies.
None of this is lost on my students. In today’s urban high school, there is no shame or social ostracism when girls become pregnant. Other girls in school want to pat their stomachs. Their friends throw baby showers at which meager little gifts are given. After delivery, the girls return to school with baby pictures on their cell phones or slipped into their binders, which they eagerly share with me. Often they sit together in my classes, sharing insights into parenting, discussing the taste of Pedialite or the exhaustion that goes with the job. On my way home at night, I often see my students in the projects that surround our school, pushing their strollers or hanging out on their stoops instead of doing their homework.
Connecticut is among the most generous of the states to out-of-wedlock mothers. Teenage girls like Nicole qualify for a vast array of welfare benefits from the state and federal governments: medical coverage when they become pregnant (called “Healthy Start”); later, medical insurance for the family (“Husky”); child care (“Care 4 Kids”); Section 8 housing subsidies; the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program; cash assistance. If you need to get to an appointment, state-sponsored dial-a-ride is available. If that appointment is college-related, no sweat: education grants for single mothers are available, too. Nicole didn’t have to worry about finishing the school year; the state sent a $35-an-hour tutor directly to her home halfway into her final trimester and for six weeks after the baby arrived.
In theory, this provision of services is humane and defensible, an essential safety net for the most vulnerable—children who have children. What it amounts to in practice is a monolithic public endorsement of single motherhood—one that has turned our urban high schools into puppy mills. The safety net has become a hammock.
The young father almost always greets the pregnancy with adolescent excitement, as if a baby were a new Xbox game. In Nicole’s case, the father’s name was David. David manfully walked Nicole to class each morning and gave her a kiss at the door. I had him in homeroom and asked if he planned to marry her. “No” was his frank answer. But he did have plans to help out. David himself lived with his mother. His dad had served a short sentence in prison for drug possession and ran a motorcycle-repair shop somewhere upstate. One afternoon, David proudly opened his father’s website to show me the customized motorcycles he built. There he was, the spit and image of his son, smiling atop a gleaming vintage Harley, not a care in the world.
Boys without fathers, like David, cultivate an overweening bravado to overcome a deeper sense of vulnerability and male confusion. They strut, swear, and swagger. There’s a he-man thing to getting a girl pregnant that marks you as an adult in the eyes of your equally unmoored peers. But a boy’s interest in his child quickly vanishes. When I ask girls if the father is helping out with the baby, they shrug. “I don’t care if he does or not,” I’ve heard too often.
As for girls without fathers, they are often among my most disruptive students. You walk on eggshells with them. You broker remarks, you negotiate insults, all the while trying to pull them along on a slender thread. Their anger toward male authority can be lacerating. They view trips to the principal’s office like victory laps.
With Nicole, I dug in. In journalism class, I brought up the subject of teen pregnancy and suggested that she and a friend of hers, Maria, write a piece together about their experiences. They hesitated; I pressed the matter. “Do you think getting pregnant when you’re a teenager is a good thing or a bad thing?”
“Depends,” Nicole replied caustically, glancing at Maria and another friend, Shanice, for support. They knew this was coming and went on the defensive.
“On what?”
“My mom and my grandma both got pregnant when they were teens, and they’re good mothers.”
“Nobody gets married any more, mister,” Shanice and Maria chime in. “You’re just picking on us because we have kids.”
At this point, my “picking” has only just begun. It’s partly for their benefit, but mostly for the other girls in the room, who haven’t said a word. As much as Nicole is aware of her mother’s sacrifices, she is equally proud of her mother’s choice to keep her. It’s locked away in her heart like a cameo. They’re best friends, she offers. The talk turns to her mother’s loyalty and love, and soon the class rises in a choir to mom’s defense.
“Fine,” I say, glowering like Heath Ledger’s Joker. “If that’s your position, like any good journalist, you have to back up your arguments with facts and statistics.”
As do most of my 11th-graders, Nicole reads at a fifth-grade level, which means I must peruse the articles and statistics along with her, side by side. She groans each time I pick out a long article and counts the number of pages before she reads. With my persistent nudging, she and Maria begin to pull out the statistics for the children of single parents. From the FBI: 63 percent of all suicides are individuals from single-parent households. From the Centers for Disease Control: 75 percent of adolescents in chemical-dependency hospitals come from single-parent households. From the Children’s Defense Fund: more than half of all youths incarcerated for criminal acts come from single-parent households. And so on.
“I don’t want to write about this!” Nicole complains. “I’ve changed my mind.”
“Why?”
“Nobody wants to read it.”
I point out that they committed to it. If they don’t complete the essay by the due date, they know I will give them an F.
Their first drafts are little more than two scribbled paragraphs, which they toss to me as a completed assignment and I toss back. Maria, in particular, rebels. She wants to recast the article in a rosier vein and talk about how happy her son makes her. It’s in these light skirmishes that we have our richest discussions. When the girls open up, their vague doubts come to the surface, and my flinty-eyed circuit preacher melts away. A father myself, I understand a parent’s love. Our talk turns more sweetly to teething cures, diaper rashes, and solid food. Nicole listens to us with tender interest. It’s in these moments that I feel most effective as a teacher. I suggest ways of incorporating that love into the piece, while also hoping that some of these grim statistics have gotten through to them.
As morbid as it sounds, the students take an interest in obituary writing. I have them write their own obits, fictional biographies that foretell the arc of their lives. From Nicole’s, I learn that her mother was 16 when she had Nicole; her father, 14. After high school, the fictional Nicole went on to have four more kids—with strangely concocted names, all beginning with M—whom she loved dearly and who loved her dearly. She also left six grandchildren. She died of old age in her bed.
“Nicole, you never got married?” I remarked.
“No,” she responded with a note of obstinacy in her voice.
“I think you would make a wonderful wife for someone.”
“I would make a good wife,” she replied. “I know a lot of stuff. But I’m not going to get married.” She was speaking to a hard fate that she was accepting as her future. She was slipping away.
As Nicole entered her third trimester, she had a minor complication with her pregnancy and disappeared for nearly two weeks. She returned, pale and far behind in my classes. She no longer had to report to two classes: physical education and a science lab where strong chemicals were used. The administration didn’t want her to be alone during those periods, and since my schedule coincided with the vacant spots, I was asked to be her chaperone.
For five weeks, Nicole became my shadow. If I had cafeteria duty, she’d happily trot along. I’d buy her a candy bar and she’d plop down in the seat beside me. I’d also escort her to her restroom runs, which were frequent, and wait for her outside the door. She carried a grainy sonogram picture of the baby, framed in a pink card with a stork on the front. Gazing at it with a smile, I felt my duplicity and the ragged trap of my convictions.
Her paleness and fatigue alarmed me. I carried Vitamin C drops in my pocket and slipped her a constant supply. A second private concern began to nag at me: the father in me wanted to be protective and kind, but Nicole was becoming too connected with me. She blew off assignments regularly now. When I admonished her, she only giggled and promised to get them done. She trusted me and would never think that falling behind in my classes would result in a failing grade. Life had allowed her to slide before, through every year of her education, as others in her life had slid—starting with her father, whom she barely recalled.
I felt that I was being drawn into this undertow. A simple D would ease everyone’s load, particularly mine, and Nicole wouldn’t register yet another betrayal of trust. More than anything, she wanted a buoy in her choppy sea.
Nicole failed both my classes, which meant summer school. When she returned the following year, she was in good spirits. The birth of her son had gone well. She had a heart-adorned album full of photos of her boy. Things were settled, she said. She was going to work hard this year; she felt motivated, even eager. And by year’s end, her reading level had indeed risen nearly two grades—but it was still far below what she would need to score as proficient on the Connecticut Academic Performance Test, one of the yardsticks for accountability in Title I schools.
The path for young, unwed mothers—and for their children—can be brutal. Consider how often girls get molested in their own homes after Mom has decided to let her boyfriend move in. The boyfriend splits the rent and the food bill, but he often sees his girlfriend’s teenage daughter as fair game. Teachers whisper their suspicions in the lunchroom or in the hallways when they notice that one of their students has become suddenly emotional, that her grades have inexplicably dropped, or that she stays late after school to hang out in her teacher’s classroom or begins sleeping over at a friend’s house several nights a week. Sometimes she simply disappears.
And there are other dangers. I once had a student named Jasmine, who had given birth over the summer. She did just enough to earn Ds in my class. One day, I observed her staring off mulishly into space for nearly the entire period, not hearing a word I said and ignoring her assignment. At the end of class, I took her aside and asked, with some irritation, what the matter was.
Her eyes welled with tears. “I gave my son to his father to look after yesterday. When I picked him up, he had bruises on his head and a cut.” Her son was six months old.
Honestly? I just wanted that day to go by. But we have a duty to our students, both moral and legal. “You have to be a brave mama and report him,” I said. I led her to the office and to the school social worker, and I tipped off the campus trooper. Even with that support, she backed off from filing a complaint and shortly afterward dropped out of school to be with her baby.
My students often become curious about my personal life. The question most frequently asked is, “Do you have kids?”
“Two,” I say.
The next question is always heartbreaking.
“Do they live with you?”
Every fall, new education theories arrive, born like orchids in the hothouses of big-time university education departments. Urban teachers are always first in line for each new bloom. We’ve been retrofitted as teachers a dozen times over. This year’s innovation is the Data Wall, a strategy in which teachers must test endlessly in order to produce data about students’ progress. The Obama administration has spent lavishly to ensure that professional consultants monitor its implementation.
Every year, the national statistics summon a fresh chorus of outrage at the failure of urban public schools. Next year, I fear, will be little different.
Gerry Garibaldi was an executive and screenwriter in Hollywood before becoming an English teacher at an urban high school in Connecticut.
http://www.city-journal.org/2011/21_1_teen-pregnancy.html
Surviving the present
From Colorlines.com
by Julianne Hing
Education reform is about to return to the headlines, if not the floor of Congress, if President Obama’s State of the Union is any indication. Obama built his feel-good speech Tuesday night around the uncontroversial theme of “winning the future” and nestled every major policy issue within this rhetorical frame. He put particular emphasis on education as the path to that victorious future. But the education agenda the president articulated contained no surprises. It’s the same one his administration’s been selling for the past two years—and it’s the same one many of his critics have been fretting about for just as long.
Education reform watchers offered Obama reserved praise for giving education such a prominent place in his speech. “One reaction I had was exactly that he spent a lot of time on education, which I think is a good thing,” said John Rogers, associate professor at UCLA’s Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. But Rogers, like a handful of other educators I spoke with after the speech, added long caveats after this initial praise.
Obama touted his administration’s undeniable wins, including student aid reform, and championed the more questionable achievements of Race to the Top, which is a $4.35 billion competitive grants program for states that adopt the president’s reform agenda. Eleven states have won millions of dollars each as a reward for opening up their states to more charter schools and agreeing to make test scores a component of teacher evaluations and salaries.
Under Race to the Top, states were rewarded for forcing public schools that were designated as failing to undergo a total restructuring or a takeover from a charter school company. The program remains controversial, especially among teachers who oppose new evaluation systems that they feel unfairly punish individual educators for a systemic problem.
Obama also called for 100,000 more science and math teachers by the end of the decade and called on Congress to take up a No Child Left Behind reauthorization in the model of Race to the Top. He didn’t suggest how those teachers would get funded, and congressional watchers consider it unlikely that the new Congress will have the stomach for a major overhaul of any program, including No Child Left Behind.
Obama called Race to the Top “the most meaningful reform of our public schools in a generation.” If success is measured by impact, Obama’s correct. The program circumvented Congress entirely and got 39 states to rewrite their education laws. But if success is measured in students’ improved performance and teachers’ increased retention rates, the jury’s still out.
“I think the speech clearly shows the president understands the link between education and our country’s future,” said John Jackson, president of the Schott Foundation for Public Education, which works toward racial equity in public education. (Colorlines’ publisher, the Applied Research Center, has done contract research for the Schott Foundation.) But, Jackson stresses, the Race to the Top initiatives Obama is pushing aren’t proven to work. “We haven’t seen one state that has reformed its education system by removing its charter school cap, or reformed its education system by linking teacher salaries to student performance.”
A September 2010 study by Vanderbilt University found that performance pay on its own had no measurable impact on teachers’ ability to raise their students’ test scores.
Global Competition
In his speech, Obama tapped into the pain that many Americans are feeling right now as they wade through seemingly endless economic crisis, and tried to redirect that frustration toward global competitiveness. He warned that while America’s middle class has been dismantled over the course of a generation, other countries have been ascending, creeping onto the medal stands that the U.S. occupied alone for decades.
“Nations like China and India realized that with some changes of their own, they could compete in this new world,” Obama said. “And so they started educating their children earlier and longer, with greater emphasis on math and science. They’re investing in research and new technologies.”
But pitting the U.S. against other countries unsettled some educators.
“The line here is: ‘Yeah, they go to the sweatshops now and make stuff for us, but if they beat us they won’t be in the sweatshops making stuff anymore. They might dare to have a standard of living that’s better than us,’ ” said Rick Ayers, adjunct professor of education at the University of San Francisco and co-author of “Teaching the Taboo: Courage and Imagination in the Classroom.” “It’s all put out in a very polite, liberal veneer, but I would point out that it’s the dark, Asiatic other that is being called up.”
Ayers said that the true comparison between present-day America and Cold War America is “an extraordinary rise in income inequality that public policy could address separately, an extraordinary rise in incarceration rates that public policy could address. The presumption that education can act independently of economic inequality and incarceration is wrong.”
The United States is ninth globally in the percentage of undergraduate degree holders, Obama said. He wants the country to claw its way back to the top. As it is, more than a third of college students don’t graduate in six years, and that number is even higher for undergraduate students of color—something Obama pointed out in a speech he gave at UT Austin last year. The president seemingly knows that students of color are key to achieving his education goals.
Jackson said other countries’ educational success has been linked to the educational equity that the U.S. has not yet found. “All of the countries that are outcompeting us don’t deal with fringe structural issues,” he argued. “They provide all students access to early education. They hold teachers in high regard, and not in a punitive frame, and they have a much more equitable distribution of their resources.”
Jackson pointed out that there are over a million homeless children in the U.S., for instance.
“Yes, we want to ‘win the future,’ but for many the concern now is surviving the present,” Rogers echoed, adding that 22 percent of American children below the age of six are living below the poverty line. “How do young people who are growing up in families that are really facing difficult economic circumstances survive the present without a whole host of social supports that are being eroded or eliminated outright?”
There was a time not so long ago when Obama was willing to examine the structural factors that influence a kid’s education, Rogers said. “None of that was in the speech [Tuesday] night,” he complained. “Instead, all we get is that parents need to shut off the TV.”
Obama’s lone reference to the role that parents and communities play in the nation’s education effort was to declare, “Only parents can make sure the TV is turned off and homework gets done.”
That’s the narrow, individualized perspective that makes teachers and parents feel so besieged. Obama tried to soothe teachers—“Here in America, it’s time we treated the people who educate our children with the same level of respect”—but critics say his policies don’t match that rhetoric. “The truth is I didn’t feel the sincerity in that,” said Jim Anderson, who serves on the statewide board of the Alliance for Quality Education. “I haven’t seen the policies that shows that respect.”
Educators said that Obama’s rhetoric contradicted his policy in other parts of his education remarks as well. Obama praised America’s public school systems for providing students with more than memorization drills for standardized tests. “It’s why our students don’t just memorize equations,” Obama said, “but answer questions like ‘What do you think of that idea? What would you change about the world? What do you want to be when you grow up?’ “
Rogers considered it one of Obama’s strongest lines and said that it reflected the part of the president’s vision he most admires. “But that’s not the sort of question that emerges when you have the narrowed standardized tests we have now,” he warned.
“Obama’s good at co-opting the criticism,” said Ayers. “He said, ‘We’re not talking about rote memorization; we’re about learning deeply and asking questions.’ But that’s our argument,” Ayers said, referring to progressives who take issue with the Obama administration’s policies, “that the test prep stuff undermines the possibility of deep learning and learning for democracy.”
Of course, amidst everything the president was said, there were notable silences as well. Rogers said he wished Obama was more willing to address the vast racial disparities in kids’ educational opportunities. “I was struck by the fact that there was so little attention paid explicitly to the issue of race in education, or even outside of education,” Rogers said. “He didn’t highlight those equity issues.”
The upcoming year holds many uncertainties. It’s still unclear whether Republicans or Democrats have any interest in tackling No Child Left Behind, or even what another Race to the Top round would look like. In the meantime, the debate rages on over what winning the future even means, let alone how to do it.
by Julianne Hing
Education reform is about to return to the headlines, if not the floor of Congress, if President Obama’s State of the Union is any indication. Obama built his feel-good speech Tuesday night around the uncontroversial theme of “winning the future” and nestled every major policy issue within this rhetorical frame. He put particular emphasis on education as the path to that victorious future. But the education agenda the president articulated contained no surprises. It’s the same one his administration’s been selling for the past two years—and it’s the same one many of his critics have been fretting about for just as long.
Education reform watchers offered Obama reserved praise for giving education such a prominent place in his speech. “One reaction I had was exactly that he spent a lot of time on education, which I think is a good thing,” said John Rogers, associate professor at UCLA’s Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. But Rogers, like a handful of other educators I spoke with after the speech, added long caveats after this initial praise.
Obama touted his administration’s undeniable wins, including student aid reform, and championed the more questionable achievements of Race to the Top, which is a $4.35 billion competitive grants program for states that adopt the president’s reform agenda. Eleven states have won millions of dollars each as a reward for opening up their states to more charter schools and agreeing to make test scores a component of teacher evaluations and salaries.
Under Race to the Top, states were rewarded for forcing public schools that were designated as failing to undergo a total restructuring or a takeover from a charter school company. The program remains controversial, especially among teachers who oppose new evaluation systems that they feel unfairly punish individual educators for a systemic problem.
Obama also called for 100,000 more science and math teachers by the end of the decade and called on Congress to take up a No Child Left Behind reauthorization in the model of Race to the Top. He didn’t suggest how those teachers would get funded, and congressional watchers consider it unlikely that the new Congress will have the stomach for a major overhaul of any program, including No Child Left Behind.
Obama called Race to the Top “the most meaningful reform of our public schools in a generation.” If success is measured by impact, Obama’s correct. The program circumvented Congress entirely and got 39 states to rewrite their education laws. But if success is measured in students’ improved performance and teachers’ increased retention rates, the jury’s still out.
“I think the speech clearly shows the president understands the link between education and our country’s future,” said John Jackson, president of the Schott Foundation for Public Education, which works toward racial equity in public education. (Colorlines’ publisher, the Applied Research Center, has done contract research for the Schott Foundation.) But, Jackson stresses, the Race to the Top initiatives Obama is pushing aren’t proven to work. “We haven’t seen one state that has reformed its education system by removing its charter school cap, or reformed its education system by linking teacher salaries to student performance.”
A September 2010 study by Vanderbilt University found that performance pay on its own had no measurable impact on teachers’ ability to raise their students’ test scores.
Global Competition
In his speech, Obama tapped into the pain that many Americans are feeling right now as they wade through seemingly endless economic crisis, and tried to redirect that frustration toward global competitiveness. He warned that while America’s middle class has been dismantled over the course of a generation, other countries have been ascending, creeping onto the medal stands that the U.S. occupied alone for decades.
“Nations like China and India realized that with some changes of their own, they could compete in this new world,” Obama said. “And so they started educating their children earlier and longer, with greater emphasis on math and science. They’re investing in research and new technologies.”
But pitting the U.S. against other countries unsettled some educators.
“The line here is: ‘Yeah, they go to the sweatshops now and make stuff for us, but if they beat us they won’t be in the sweatshops making stuff anymore. They might dare to have a standard of living that’s better than us,’ ” said Rick Ayers, adjunct professor of education at the University of San Francisco and co-author of “Teaching the Taboo: Courage and Imagination in the Classroom.” “It’s all put out in a very polite, liberal veneer, but I would point out that it’s the dark, Asiatic other that is being called up.”
Ayers said that the true comparison between present-day America and Cold War America is “an extraordinary rise in income inequality that public policy could address separately, an extraordinary rise in incarceration rates that public policy could address. The presumption that education can act independently of economic inequality and incarceration is wrong.”
The United States is ninth globally in the percentage of undergraduate degree holders, Obama said. He wants the country to claw its way back to the top. As it is, more than a third of college students don’t graduate in six years, and that number is even higher for undergraduate students of color—something Obama pointed out in a speech he gave at UT Austin last year. The president seemingly knows that students of color are key to achieving his education goals.
Jackson said other countries’ educational success has been linked to the educational equity that the U.S. has not yet found. “All of the countries that are outcompeting us don’t deal with fringe structural issues,” he argued. “They provide all students access to early education. They hold teachers in high regard, and not in a punitive frame, and they have a much more equitable distribution of their resources.”
Jackson pointed out that there are over a million homeless children in the U.S., for instance.
“Yes, we want to ‘win the future,’ but for many the concern now is surviving the present,” Rogers echoed, adding that 22 percent of American children below the age of six are living below the poverty line. “How do young people who are growing up in families that are really facing difficult economic circumstances survive the present without a whole host of social supports that are being eroded or eliminated outright?”
There was a time not so long ago when Obama was willing to examine the structural factors that influence a kid’s education, Rogers said. “None of that was in the speech [Tuesday] night,” he complained. “Instead, all we get is that parents need to shut off the TV.”
Obama’s lone reference to the role that parents and communities play in the nation’s education effort was to declare, “Only parents can make sure the TV is turned off and homework gets done.”
That’s the narrow, individualized perspective that makes teachers and parents feel so besieged. Obama tried to soothe teachers—“Here in America, it’s time we treated the people who educate our children with the same level of respect”—but critics say his policies don’t match that rhetoric. “The truth is I didn’t feel the sincerity in that,” said Jim Anderson, who serves on the statewide board of the Alliance for Quality Education. “I haven’t seen the policies that shows that respect.”
Educators said that Obama’s rhetoric contradicted his policy in other parts of his education remarks as well. Obama praised America’s public school systems for providing students with more than memorization drills for standardized tests. “It’s why our students don’t just memorize equations,” Obama said, “but answer questions like ‘What do you think of that idea? What would you change about the world? What do you want to be when you grow up?’ “
Rogers considered it one of Obama’s strongest lines and said that it reflected the part of the president’s vision he most admires. “But that’s not the sort of question that emerges when you have the narrowed standardized tests we have now,” he warned.
“Obama’s good at co-opting the criticism,” said Ayers. “He said, ‘We’re not talking about rote memorization; we’re about learning deeply and asking questions.’ But that’s our argument,” Ayers said, referring to progressives who take issue with the Obama administration’s policies, “that the test prep stuff undermines the possibility of deep learning and learning for democracy.”
Of course, amidst everything the president was said, there were notable silences as well. Rogers said he wished Obama was more willing to address the vast racial disparities in kids’ educational opportunities. “I was struck by the fact that there was so little attention paid explicitly to the issue of race in education, or even outside of education,” Rogers said. “He didn’t highlight those equity issues.”
The upcoming year holds many uncertainties. It’s still unclear whether Republicans or Democrats have any interest in tackling No Child Left Behind, or even what another Race to the Top round would look like. In the meantime, the debate rages on over what winning the future even means, let alone how to do it.
Sunday, January 30, 2011
NCLB responsible for the dumbing down of America
I think I wrote about this three yeas ago. -cpg
From the Hill.com
by Emmanuel Touhey
President Obama placed special emphasis on education in his State of the Union address Tuesday night, mentioning it 10 times in all. With Congress set to renew the ‘No Child Left Behind’ law this year, The Hill’s Comment Editor Emmanuel Touhey sat down Thursday with Education Secretary Arne Duncan here in Washington, D.C. They discussed the approach Congress should take to overhauling the law, school vouchers, the DREAM Act and proposed rules governing for-profit colleges and universities.
The Hill: ‘No Child Left Behind’ is up due for reauthorization this year. What exactly do you want to see fixed in the law?
Secretary Duncan: There are a number of things that I think are broken with the current law that working in a bipartisan way we can have common sense fixes. I think the law is too punitive, too prescriptive, it’s led to a dumbing down of standards, and it’s led to a narrowing of curriculum. We need to fix all of those things. We have to reward success, reward excellence, look at growth and gain, not just absolute test scores. We have to be much more flexible. When I ran the Chicago public schools, I almost had to sue this department for the right to tutor my children after school. It made no sense why I had to fight this department to help kids who wanted to learn after school, so we have to really get out of the way there. We have to continue to raise standards. We’ve seen 40 states provide leadership, and do that, and we need to provide a well-rounded curriculum, so reading and math are important, but science, social studies, dance, drama, art, music, foreign languages, physical education, all those things. We want the new law to be fair, to be focused to be flexible. And we think we can do these things working together this year.
The Hill: You said recently that education reform is a chance for bipartisan governing. Education is something that both parties have rallied around, but in the current climate where there is a lot of talk about budget cuts, do you think that is possible?
Secretary Duncan: I do think it’s possible. It’s possible and we want to continue to invest in education, not in the status quo but in this new vision of reform in where we’re going. But I think what folks haven’t really understood is reauthorizing the law, that’s a legislative fix, that doesn’t cost a nickel. There is no price tag attached with that. So these are two separate conversations, and we need to have them both and we need to have them at the same time, but fixing the law, we need to do and we need to do now, and there’s no dollars attached to doing that.
The Hill: Are there any programs that you would like to see actually cut that you think are not necessary now?
Secretary Duncan: We’re making some very tough calls on our budget. We’re looking to consolidate 38 programs into 11. We’re trying to streamline, we’re trying to become much more efficient and focus scarce resources in those areas that are making the biggest difference. And we hope Congress will understand that while we’re looking for an increased investment in education, we’re trying to do business in a very tough way and make some tough choices ourselves.
The Hill: Are you in favor of one single bill, or several small bills?
Secretary Duncan: I’m open to that conversation. What I’m interested in is getting to the right outcome, and whatever the best way to get to the finish line makes sense. I don’t think we need another thousand-page, thousand-pound bill. Maybe we do it in 100 pages, and do it in a way that folks can really understand it and be thoughtful on it. Whatever it takes to get there, what I want to get is to the right finish line. We did a national conference call Wednesday with Senator Harkin, Senator Enzi, Senator Alexander, they were very, very positive on this. And the goal is to get a bill to the President before the recess in August. And there are a lot of reasons why it may not happen, but if you ask me today, I’m actually very hopeful.
The Hill: As a practical matter, which do you think would be better, doing a number of small bills – John Kline in the House has talked about that possibility.
Secretary Duncan: Yeah he’s talked about that. I actually was in Minnesota with Congressman Kline on Friday and we talked about that. I talked about maybe the idea of maybe doing a smaller bill, he was interested in that, and I think that conversation will continue. So I don’t know if there’s an exact right answer on it. For me it’s been very clear about where we end up, and what’s the best way to get there.
The Hill: You did spend some time with him visiting some schools in Minnesota, what did you talk about in terms of education and moving forward?
Secretary Duncan: We talked about a range of things. I just have so much respect for Chairman Kline. He’s thoughtful, he’s smart and he’s committed on this issue. We share fundamentally a need to fix the current law. He has about 26 or 27 schools in his district. Under the current law almost every single one is going to be labeled a failure in the coming year. And we went to some phenomenal schools, they’re not a failure by any stretch, any definition of what failure is. So schools that are being mislabeled, that are being stigmatized is very demoralizing to hard working teachers, very confusing to parents, and we need to work together to fix it and to do it now.
The Hill: Speaker Boehner has introduced some legislation regarding the school choice program here in the District. Are you in support of that legislation?
Secretary Duncan: I’m just really pleased that the Speaker’s really focused on education. I think the more we have these conversations that’s helpful. In the past as you know we’ve fought hard to keep children who are in those current programs, in them, not have them leave schools. We didn’t push for renewal of it. And what I’m really interested in is not just saving one or two or three children, but in turning around these chronically underperforming schools. And as you know, we’ve put $4 billion behind these efforts, these school improvement grants, and I don’t want to just save a handful of children and leave 500 in the school to drown. We want to fix the entire schools, turn them around, and that’s the focus of my efforts.
The Hill: Can you do both though? Allow his legislation, and Sen. Lieberman is also doing a similar bill, and your efforts side-by-side?
Secretary Duncan: Well I’m happy to have the conversation and continue to talk it through. Again I think the more all of us are focused on education that’s a good thing, and we’ll continue to talk with Speaker Boehner. As you know he was a real champion in the previous authorization of No Child Left Behind, worked very hard in a bipartisan way, and I think he’s going to be a crucial leader as we move forward this year.
The Hill: The Cardinal Archbishop of Washington was his guest at the State of the Union, so this seems to be something that’s important to him, I just want to press you on it. Do you think that his piece of legislation should go forward?
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•Talking with Arne Duncan
Secretary Duncan: Well I haven’t read his piece of legislation, so I don’t know the specifics. I haven’t in the past supported the continuation of the voucher program. When I got here what I fought hard to do was to keep the current students in the program and what I’m most interested in is thinking about how we help every single student in this country be more successful.
The Hill: And new students maybe coming back into it, at the moment you’re not willing to go there?
Secretary Duncan: We hadn’t supported that in the past. Again my focus has been on these school improvement grants to significantly fix the schools here in D.C. As you also know D.C. is one of the places that won our Race to the Top grant, so we’re very heavily invested here in transforming the entire school system in D.C. Again not just saving one or two children.
The Hill: What do you say to the parents who have been invested in those programs themselves, that live in the District, that can’t because you don’t support that legislation as of now?
Secretary Duncan: Again, every family, every student that was in that program, we absolutely fought hard to keep them in that program.
The Hill: But new people that want to go in.
Secretary Duncan: Right, well we want to, I’m repeating myself here now, fix the entire program to make the District a high performing District.
The Hill: The DREAM Act almost made it in the last Congress, but didn’t. The president talked rather passionately about immigration in the State of the Union, you’ve also described it as personal to you. Can you elaborate on why the DREAM Act is personal to you?
Secretary Duncan: I will and I’ll also say how disappointed I am that it didn’t pass. I mean it was a big step in the right direction but ultimately this has to pass. When I ran Chicago’s public schools, I had about 400,000 students in my system. About a third of them, more than 100,000, were from the Hispanic community. Many of those were people who came to this country as 4- or 5- or 6-year-olds with their families, don’t have status. In my school system they worked extraordinarily hard. They got good grades, stayed in school, were often on the student council, were community leaders, played on sports teams, served in the neighborhood. And then when it was time for them to graduate, the dream of going to college wasn’t there for them. And that was just absolutely heartbreaking to me. That students who hadn’t committed any crimes, who had done nothing wrong, had done quite the opposite, quite the contrary, have played by all the rules, have been assets, for us to not take advantage of their skills and talents as a community and as a country, is absolutely backwards to me. And my wife and I set up a small, we don’t have much money, but we set up a small scholarship program to help some of these students. We had one young man who graduated from high school, was working 40 hours a week at a gas station trying to pay his tuition, the full freight at the University of Illinois-Chicago, it made no sense to me whatsoever. We should all work hard in college. I know I had a job in college, but you shouldn’t have to work 40 hours a week pumping gas to try and pay your tuition. And I just think as a country we’re leaving tremendous talent on the sidelines at a time when we need every smart, talented, innovator, entrepreneur, and to deny this community the chance to go to college is fundamentally backwards.
The Hill: So what happens now?
Secretary Duncan: I’ll do whatever I can to help this come back. I don’t know timing, I don’t know what the next move is, but I was just deeply, deeply disappointed that it didn’t pass.
The Hill: Have you had any conversations with the Chairman of the Judiciary Committee in the House, Lamar Smith or others on the Republican side of the aisle to moving this?
Secretary Duncan: I haven’t had a conversation with him directly. I have had conversations with folks from both sides of the aisle, and I just think as a country we missed a real opportunity to strengthen our nation by helping more young people go to college.
The Hill: Final question for you is on the lawsuit from the Association for Private Sector Colleges. What’s your reaction?
Secretary Duncan: We’re happy to continue working with them, and I’ve said repeatedly that our ultimate goal in this country is to see many more young people graduate from college, the president has drawn a line in the sand, he’s said by 2020 we need to again lead the world in college graduation rates, and that’s really the north star of all of our work. We think the vast majority of for-profits do a very good job of helping people get back on their feet and retrain or retool and get skills to be competitive in the global marketplace today. We have unfortunately some bad actors that have taken advantage of folks and left them with tremendous debt and without the skills they need to be successful. And so as we work through all of this, we want to really draw that line in supporting those folks who are doing great work, but also letting those know that where they’re abusing this situation, that where they’re taking advantage of taxpayer money, that where they’re taking advantage of disadvantaged folks who are trying to better their lives, and leaving them in a worse position and not a better one, that we simply can’t tolerate that.
The Hill: Any final words as we close on the possibility of cuts that are been talked about?
Secretary Duncan: These are very tough economic times, but there’s nothing more important than continuing to dramatically improve the condition of education. You saw in the State of the Union how passionate and how committed the president is on this issue. I don’t know if you’ve seen the president anytime ever talk so thoroughly and from the heart about education in a State of the Union Address. We want to work hard together and in a bipartisan, bicameral way, to improve the quality of education and to help our country get where we need to go.
http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/the-administration/140977-interview-with-education-secretary-arne-duncan
From the Hill.com
by Emmanuel Touhey
President Obama placed special emphasis on education in his State of the Union address Tuesday night, mentioning it 10 times in all. With Congress set to renew the ‘No Child Left Behind’ law this year, The Hill’s Comment Editor Emmanuel Touhey sat down Thursday with Education Secretary Arne Duncan here in Washington, D.C. They discussed the approach Congress should take to overhauling the law, school vouchers, the DREAM Act and proposed rules governing for-profit colleges and universities.
The Hill: ‘No Child Left Behind’ is up due for reauthorization this year. What exactly do you want to see fixed in the law?
Secretary Duncan: There are a number of things that I think are broken with the current law that working in a bipartisan way we can have common sense fixes. I think the law is too punitive, too prescriptive, it’s led to a dumbing down of standards, and it’s led to a narrowing of curriculum. We need to fix all of those things. We have to reward success, reward excellence, look at growth and gain, not just absolute test scores. We have to be much more flexible. When I ran the Chicago public schools, I almost had to sue this department for the right to tutor my children after school. It made no sense why I had to fight this department to help kids who wanted to learn after school, so we have to really get out of the way there. We have to continue to raise standards. We’ve seen 40 states provide leadership, and do that, and we need to provide a well-rounded curriculum, so reading and math are important, but science, social studies, dance, drama, art, music, foreign languages, physical education, all those things. We want the new law to be fair, to be focused to be flexible. And we think we can do these things working together this year.
The Hill: You said recently that education reform is a chance for bipartisan governing. Education is something that both parties have rallied around, but in the current climate where there is a lot of talk about budget cuts, do you think that is possible?
Secretary Duncan: I do think it’s possible. It’s possible and we want to continue to invest in education, not in the status quo but in this new vision of reform in where we’re going. But I think what folks haven’t really understood is reauthorizing the law, that’s a legislative fix, that doesn’t cost a nickel. There is no price tag attached with that. So these are two separate conversations, and we need to have them both and we need to have them at the same time, but fixing the law, we need to do and we need to do now, and there’s no dollars attached to doing that.
The Hill: Are there any programs that you would like to see actually cut that you think are not necessary now?
Secretary Duncan: We’re making some very tough calls on our budget. We’re looking to consolidate 38 programs into 11. We’re trying to streamline, we’re trying to become much more efficient and focus scarce resources in those areas that are making the biggest difference. And we hope Congress will understand that while we’re looking for an increased investment in education, we’re trying to do business in a very tough way and make some tough choices ourselves.
The Hill: Are you in favor of one single bill, or several small bills?
Secretary Duncan: I’m open to that conversation. What I’m interested in is getting to the right outcome, and whatever the best way to get to the finish line makes sense. I don’t think we need another thousand-page, thousand-pound bill. Maybe we do it in 100 pages, and do it in a way that folks can really understand it and be thoughtful on it. Whatever it takes to get there, what I want to get is to the right finish line. We did a national conference call Wednesday with Senator Harkin, Senator Enzi, Senator Alexander, they were very, very positive on this. And the goal is to get a bill to the President before the recess in August. And there are a lot of reasons why it may not happen, but if you ask me today, I’m actually very hopeful.
The Hill: As a practical matter, which do you think would be better, doing a number of small bills – John Kline in the House has talked about that possibility.
Secretary Duncan: Yeah he’s talked about that. I actually was in Minnesota with Congressman Kline on Friday and we talked about that. I talked about maybe the idea of maybe doing a smaller bill, he was interested in that, and I think that conversation will continue. So I don’t know if there’s an exact right answer on it. For me it’s been very clear about where we end up, and what’s the best way to get there.
The Hill: You did spend some time with him visiting some schools in Minnesota, what did you talk about in terms of education and moving forward?
Secretary Duncan: We talked about a range of things. I just have so much respect for Chairman Kline. He’s thoughtful, he’s smart and he’s committed on this issue. We share fundamentally a need to fix the current law. He has about 26 or 27 schools in his district. Under the current law almost every single one is going to be labeled a failure in the coming year. And we went to some phenomenal schools, they’re not a failure by any stretch, any definition of what failure is. So schools that are being mislabeled, that are being stigmatized is very demoralizing to hard working teachers, very confusing to parents, and we need to work together to fix it and to do it now.
The Hill: Speaker Boehner has introduced some legislation regarding the school choice program here in the District. Are you in support of that legislation?
Secretary Duncan: I’m just really pleased that the Speaker’s really focused on education. I think the more we have these conversations that’s helpful. In the past as you know we’ve fought hard to keep children who are in those current programs, in them, not have them leave schools. We didn’t push for renewal of it. And what I’m really interested in is not just saving one or two or three children, but in turning around these chronically underperforming schools. And as you know, we’ve put $4 billion behind these efforts, these school improvement grants, and I don’t want to just save a handful of children and leave 500 in the school to drown. We want to fix the entire schools, turn them around, and that’s the focus of my efforts.
The Hill: Can you do both though? Allow his legislation, and Sen. Lieberman is also doing a similar bill, and your efforts side-by-side?
Secretary Duncan: Well I’m happy to have the conversation and continue to talk it through. Again I think the more all of us are focused on education that’s a good thing, and we’ll continue to talk with Speaker Boehner. As you know he was a real champion in the previous authorization of No Child Left Behind, worked very hard in a bipartisan way, and I think he’s going to be a crucial leader as we move forward this year.
The Hill: The Cardinal Archbishop of Washington was his guest at the State of the Union, so this seems to be something that’s important to him, I just want to press you on it. Do you think that his piece of legislation should go forward?
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•Talking with Arne Duncan
Secretary Duncan: Well I haven’t read his piece of legislation, so I don’t know the specifics. I haven’t in the past supported the continuation of the voucher program. When I got here what I fought hard to do was to keep the current students in the program and what I’m most interested in is thinking about how we help every single student in this country be more successful.
The Hill: And new students maybe coming back into it, at the moment you’re not willing to go there?
Secretary Duncan: We hadn’t supported that in the past. Again my focus has been on these school improvement grants to significantly fix the schools here in D.C. As you also know D.C. is one of the places that won our Race to the Top grant, so we’re very heavily invested here in transforming the entire school system in D.C. Again not just saving one or two children.
The Hill: What do you say to the parents who have been invested in those programs themselves, that live in the District, that can’t because you don’t support that legislation as of now?
Secretary Duncan: Again, every family, every student that was in that program, we absolutely fought hard to keep them in that program.
The Hill: But new people that want to go in.
Secretary Duncan: Right, well we want to, I’m repeating myself here now, fix the entire program to make the District a high performing District.
The Hill: The DREAM Act almost made it in the last Congress, but didn’t. The president talked rather passionately about immigration in the State of the Union, you’ve also described it as personal to you. Can you elaborate on why the DREAM Act is personal to you?
Secretary Duncan: I will and I’ll also say how disappointed I am that it didn’t pass. I mean it was a big step in the right direction but ultimately this has to pass. When I ran Chicago’s public schools, I had about 400,000 students in my system. About a third of them, more than 100,000, were from the Hispanic community. Many of those were people who came to this country as 4- or 5- or 6-year-olds with their families, don’t have status. In my school system they worked extraordinarily hard. They got good grades, stayed in school, were often on the student council, were community leaders, played on sports teams, served in the neighborhood. And then when it was time for them to graduate, the dream of going to college wasn’t there for them. And that was just absolutely heartbreaking to me. That students who hadn’t committed any crimes, who had done nothing wrong, had done quite the opposite, quite the contrary, have played by all the rules, have been assets, for us to not take advantage of their skills and talents as a community and as a country, is absolutely backwards to me. And my wife and I set up a small, we don’t have much money, but we set up a small scholarship program to help some of these students. We had one young man who graduated from high school, was working 40 hours a week at a gas station trying to pay his tuition, the full freight at the University of Illinois-Chicago, it made no sense to me whatsoever. We should all work hard in college. I know I had a job in college, but you shouldn’t have to work 40 hours a week pumping gas to try and pay your tuition. And I just think as a country we’re leaving tremendous talent on the sidelines at a time when we need every smart, talented, innovator, entrepreneur, and to deny this community the chance to go to college is fundamentally backwards.
The Hill: So what happens now?
Secretary Duncan: I’ll do whatever I can to help this come back. I don’t know timing, I don’t know what the next move is, but I was just deeply, deeply disappointed that it didn’t pass.
The Hill: Have you had any conversations with the Chairman of the Judiciary Committee in the House, Lamar Smith or others on the Republican side of the aisle to moving this?
Secretary Duncan: I haven’t had a conversation with him directly. I have had conversations with folks from both sides of the aisle, and I just think as a country we missed a real opportunity to strengthen our nation by helping more young people go to college.
The Hill: Final question for you is on the lawsuit from the Association for Private Sector Colleges. What’s your reaction?
Secretary Duncan: We’re happy to continue working with them, and I’ve said repeatedly that our ultimate goal in this country is to see many more young people graduate from college, the president has drawn a line in the sand, he’s said by 2020 we need to again lead the world in college graduation rates, and that’s really the north star of all of our work. We think the vast majority of for-profits do a very good job of helping people get back on their feet and retrain or retool and get skills to be competitive in the global marketplace today. We have unfortunately some bad actors that have taken advantage of folks and left them with tremendous debt and without the skills they need to be successful. And so as we work through all of this, we want to really draw that line in supporting those folks who are doing great work, but also letting those know that where they’re abusing this situation, that where they’re taking advantage of taxpayer money, that where they’re taking advantage of disadvantaged folks who are trying to better their lives, and leaving them in a worse position and not a better one, that we simply can’t tolerate that.
The Hill: Any final words as we close on the possibility of cuts that are been talked about?
Secretary Duncan: These are very tough economic times, but there’s nothing more important than continuing to dramatically improve the condition of education. You saw in the State of the Union how passionate and how committed the president is on this issue. I don’t know if you’ve seen the president anytime ever talk so thoroughly and from the heart about education in a State of the Union Address. We want to work hard together and in a bipartisan, bicameral way, to improve the quality of education and to help our country get where we need to go.
http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/the-administration/140977-interview-with-education-secretary-arne-duncan
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