From the Ecconomist
How poverty passes from generation to generation is now becoming clearer. The answer lies in the effect of stress on two particular parts of the brain
Panos.THAT the children of the poor underachieve in later life, and thus remain poor themselves, is one of the enduring problems of society. Sociologists have studied and described it. Socialists have tried to abolish it by dictatorship and central planning. Liberals have preferred democracy and opportunity. But nobody has truly understood what causes it. Until, perhaps, now.
The crucial breakthrough was made three years ago, when Martha Farah of the University of Pennsylvania showed that the working memories of children who have been raised in poverty have smaller capacities than those of middle-class children. Working memory is the ability to hold bits of information in the brain for current use—the digits of a phone number, for example. It is crucial for comprehending languages, for reading and for solving problems. Entry into the working memory is also a prerequisite for something to be learnt permanently as part of declarative memory—the stuff a person knows explicitly, like the dates of famous battles, rather than what he knows implicitly, like how to ride a bicycle.
Since Dr Farah’s discovery, Gary Evans and Michelle Schamberg of Cornell University have studied the phenomenon in more detail. As they report in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they have found that the reduced capacity of the memories of the poor is almost certainly the result of stress affecting the way that childish brains develop.
Dr Evans’s and Dr Schamberg’s volunteers were 195 participants in a long-term sociological and medical study that Dr Evans is carrying out in New York state. At the time, the participants were 17 years old. All are white, and the numbers of men and women are about equal.
Stress in the city
To measure the amount of stress an individual had suffered over the course of his life, the two researchers used an index known as allostatic load. This is a combination of the values of six variables: diastolic and systolic blood pressure; the concentrations of three stress-related hormones; and the body-mass index, a measure of obesity. For all six, a higher value indicates a more stressful life; and for all six, the values were higher, on average, in poor children than in those who were middle class. Moreover, because Dr Evans’s wider study had followed the participants from birth, the two researchers were able to estimate what proportion of each child’s life had been spent in poverty. That more precise figure, too, was correlated with the allostatic load.
The capacity of a 17-year-old’s working memory was also correlated with allostatic load. Those who had spent their whole lives in poverty could hold an average of 8.5 items in their memory at any time. Those brought up in a middle-class family could manage 9.4, and those whose economic and social experiences had been mixed were in the middle.
These two correlations do not by themselves prove that chronic stress damages the memory, but Dr Evans and Dr Schamberg then applied a statistical technique called hierarchical regression to the results. They were able to use this to remove the effect of allostatic load on the relationship between poverty and memory discovered originally by Dr Farah. When they did so, that relationship disappeared. In other words, the diminution of memory in the poorer members of their study was entirely explained by stress, rather than by any more general aspect of poverty.
To confirm this result, the researchers also looked at characteristics such as each participant’s birthweight, his mother’s age when she gave birth, the mother’s level of education and her marital status, all of which differ, on average, between the poor and the middle classes. None of these characteristics had any effect. Nor did a mother’s own stress levels.
That stress, and stress alone, is responsible for damaging the working memories of poor children thus looks like a strong hypothesis. It is also backed up by work done on both people and laboratory animals, which shows that stress changes the activity of neurotransmitters, the chemicals that carry signals from one nerve cell to another in the brain. Stress also suppresses the generation of new nerve cells in the brain, and causes the “remodelling” of existing ones. Most significantly of all, it shrinks the volume of the prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus. These are the parts of the brain most closely associated with working memory.
Children with stressed lives, then, find it harder to learn. Put pejoratively, they are stupider. It is not surprising that they do less well at school, end up poor as adults and often visit the same circumstances on their own children.
Dr Evans’s and Dr Schamberg’s study does not examine the nature of the stress that the children of the poor are exposed to, but it is now well established that poor adults live stressful lives, and not just for the obvious reason that poverty brings uncertainty about the future. The main reason poor people are stressed is that they are at the bottom of the social heap as well as the financial one.
Sir Michael Marmot, of University College London, and his intellectual successors have shown repeatedly that people at the bottom of social hierarchies experience much more stress in their daily lives than those at the top—and suffer the consequences in their health. Even quite young children are socially sensitive beings and aware of such things.
So, it may not be necessary to look any further than their place in the pecking order to explain what Dr Evans and Dr Schamberg have discovered in their research into the children of the poor. The Bible says, “the poor you will always have with you.” Dr Evans and Dr Schamberg may have provided an important part of the explanation why.
http://www.economist.com/node/13403177
Showing posts with label poverty. Show all posts
Showing posts with label poverty. Show all posts
Tuesday, February 22, 2011
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
Wednesday, February 16, 2011
Concerns about Michelle Rhee
A concern I have is she will attempt to profit off her teacher evaluating tool IMPACT and that not concern for children drives her ideas. So often it is all about the money. -cpg
From the Washington Posts Answer Sheet
By Larry Ferlazzo
A local magazine here in Sacramento is doing a big story on former D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee, who, apart from Gov. Jerry Brown, might be Sacramento’s most famous newest resident. The writer asked if I would be willing to answer a few questions... Here's a summary of how I responded when he asked what I thought of the policies that Rhee and her allies in the “school reform” movement are promoting.
I responded by saying that I had four main concerns:
1) During her 3 1/2 year tenure as chancellor, Rhee seemed primarily interested in doing “to” teachers and families instead of doing “with” them. This lack of willingness to work in partnership and to listen, symbolized by her TIME Magazine cover holding a broom in a classroom, showed a lack of understanding of the basic tenets of power — sharing it with others doesn’t mean you have less; in fact, it means that the pie gets bigger for everybody with the new possibilities that are created.
2) I was very concerned with her focus on using test scores as the most important tool to evaluate teacher and student success. I referenced the discovery last week that the test scores her own students supposedly achieved when she was a teacher were far lower than she had claimed (see The Best Posts About Michelle Rhee’s Exaggerated Test Scores).
That doesn’t mean she wasn’t an excellent teacher — she might very have been. It does, however, point out that standardized test scores are easy to misinterpret and are probably not the best evaluation tool for teachers — or for students. At our school, we talk about being data-informed, not being data-driven. Test results are just one of many pieces of information that should be used when we reflect on our work.
3) I didn’t appreciate Ms. Rhee and her allies regularly portraying themselves as the “true” champions of children, while the rest of us were just “defenders of the status quo.” I believe that she and many of her allies truly do want to do what they think is best for children — I just don’t agree with their overall analysis of what needs to be done. That does not mean that I do not have the best interests of my students in my heart and mind everyday. I am wary of anyone, anywhere, in whatever policy or personal arena, feeling like they have a monopoly on the truth.
4) Plenty of research has shown that two-thirds of the factors that influence student achievement occur out of school. I don’t appreciate Ms. Rhee and her allies telling us that when we state that fact, we are just making “excuses.” That doesn’t mean that my colleagues and I don’t do everything within our power to push the boundary of that “one-third” area we can influence, including working with parents to try to combat some of those other factors. But saying that poverty doesn’t have a huge impact on our students doesn’t make it so.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/guest-bloggers/4-concerns-about-rhee.html
From the Washington Posts Answer Sheet
By Larry Ferlazzo
A local magazine here in Sacramento is doing a big story on former D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee, who, apart from Gov. Jerry Brown, might be Sacramento’s most famous newest resident. The writer asked if I would be willing to answer a few questions... Here's a summary of how I responded when he asked what I thought of the policies that Rhee and her allies in the “school reform” movement are promoting.
I responded by saying that I had four main concerns:
1) During her 3 1/2 year tenure as chancellor, Rhee seemed primarily interested in doing “to” teachers and families instead of doing “with” them. This lack of willingness to work in partnership and to listen, symbolized by her TIME Magazine cover holding a broom in a classroom, showed a lack of understanding of the basic tenets of power — sharing it with others doesn’t mean you have less; in fact, it means that the pie gets bigger for everybody with the new possibilities that are created.
2) I was very concerned with her focus on using test scores as the most important tool to evaluate teacher and student success. I referenced the discovery last week that the test scores her own students supposedly achieved when she was a teacher were far lower than she had claimed (see The Best Posts About Michelle Rhee’s Exaggerated Test Scores).
That doesn’t mean she wasn’t an excellent teacher — she might very have been. It does, however, point out that standardized test scores are easy to misinterpret and are probably not the best evaluation tool for teachers — or for students. At our school, we talk about being data-informed, not being data-driven. Test results are just one of many pieces of information that should be used when we reflect on our work.
3) I didn’t appreciate Ms. Rhee and her allies regularly portraying themselves as the “true” champions of children, while the rest of us were just “defenders of the status quo.” I believe that she and many of her allies truly do want to do what they think is best for children — I just don’t agree with their overall analysis of what needs to be done. That does not mean that I do not have the best interests of my students in my heart and mind everyday. I am wary of anyone, anywhere, in whatever policy or personal arena, feeling like they have a monopoly on the truth.
4) Plenty of research has shown that two-thirds of the factors that influence student achievement occur out of school. I don’t appreciate Ms. Rhee and her allies telling us that when we state that fact, we are just making “excuses.” That doesn’t mean that my colleagues and I don’t do everything within our power to push the boundary of that “one-third” area we can influence, including working with parents to try to combat some of those other factors. But saying that poverty doesn’t have a huge impact on our students doesn’t make it so.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/guest-bloggers/4-concerns-about-rhee.html
Monday, February 14, 2011
Education is on a race to the bottom
From in these times.com
By Roger Bybee
Diane Ravitch, author of The Death and Life of the Great American School System.
President Barack Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan have
formed an alliance with billionaire "school reformers" whose agenda
is to downgrade U.S. public education and blame its shortcomings on
"bad teachers," warns educational historian Diane Ravitch.
Ravitch spoke Thursday night before a crowd of more than 1,000 education professors, students, public school teachers, and community activists at the
University of Wisconsin.
"These corporate reformers are pursuing a strategy based on ideology, not on evidence," she charged. "It is demoralizing teachers and setting up public schools to be de-legitimized, as they are called upon to meet impossible goals. This is not an improvement strategy, it is a privatization strategy."
Ravitch, once assistant secretary of education under George W.
Bush, has undergone a remarkable transformation after observing how
the education system became fixated on test results, the scapegoating of teachers and the promoting of a privatized approach to education.
She has now emerged as one of the leading critics of the Obama-Duncan approach to public education, which has been driven by funding from several huge foundations--the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Eli and Edith Broad Foundation, and the Walton Family foundation.
The essence of this corporatized approach to public education is "choice, competition, deregulation, accountability, and data-based decision-making," as Joanne Barkan summarizes it an important Dissent article.
With progressive reforms for education generating little attention, the corporate model has managed to make surprising inroads among some liberals who have become persuaded that a market-driven education system is key to America's future.
The corporate style of reform began with "No Child Left Behind" enacted under George W. Bush, which promoted a preoccupation with standardized testing and the conclusion that children's failure to measure up was a direct result of inferior teachers.
This was followed by Duncan's "Race to the Top" program which embraced the same core beliefs, including the closing of "failed schools." Duncan and Obama, for example, applauded the decision of the Central Falls, Rhode Island School Board to close the high school and fire all 91 staff members, absurdly including the cafeteria and maintenance staff, based on the assumption that low test scores reflected the failures of the teachers.
The poverty of the students and the fact that a high percentage were immigrants learning English were seen as irrelevant to the low test scores. Eventually, both Duncan and the local school system were forced to back off due to public outcry.
But Duncan, along with the three huge foundations, is still pressing ahead with imposing what Ravitch calls their "punitive" and "market-based" assumptions on the nation's schools.
However, as both Ravitch and Barkan have pointed out, all the major studies show that the key elements of corporate-style education reform are simply not working:
No improvement in learning: The most comprehensive study of de-regulated "charter" schools, conducted by conservative economists at Stanford University, examined education results among students at 2,400 charter schools nationally. They found 83% of charter schools perform either worse or no better than public schools.
Merit pay: The new wave of corporate reformers have argued that
merit pay is vital to incentivize" and reward better-performing teachers. But a 2010 Vanderbilt University study clearly demonstrated that merit pay does not generate higher standardized testing.
A National Research Council report, backing up numerous other studies, found that standardized test scores fail to effectively measure student learning The main result observed by Ravitch has been the tendency of school curriculums to get narrower and narrower, focusing almost exclusively on "teaching to the test" in reading and math. Supposed "success" stories of market-based, mayor-driven "reform" in Chicago and New York quickly unraveled once newspapers began independently evaluating the test scores of students.
Nonetheless, the combined PR clout of the Gates, Broad, and Walton
foundations has generated a massive wave of favorable publicity for
their crusade against what Ravitch called "the Bad Teacher Syndrome. This included a cover story in Newsweek, a weeklong series on NBC that "celebrated privatization and scapegoating teachers," as Ravitch put it, and two segments of Oprah devoted to discussing Waiting for Superman, which Ravitch called a badly-biased documentary.
All of these high-profile attacks on teachers, their unions, and union-won rights avoid the real causes of poor school performance. "Most of the nations that the US is comparing itself with have much lower rates of poverty among their children. It's 20% nationally here, and I know it's much higher in this community." (32 percent of children in Milwaukee are poor.)
"Poor performance is mostly due to poverty and racial isolation," Raitch said. Barkan further illuminated this point in Dissent:
The most recent results (2006) showed the following: students in US schools where the poverty rate was less than 10% rnked first in reading, first in cience, and third in math. But as the poverty rate rose till higher, students ranked lower and lower.
Twenty percent of all U.S. schools have poverty rates over 75%. The problem is not public schools; it is poverty.
And as dozens of studies have shown, the gap in cognitive, physical, and social development between children in poverty and middle-class children is set by age three.
The over-emphasis on testing, the targeting of teachers, the senseless closing of schools, and the substitution of a market model for the basic democratic right of public education are all generating an increasingly vocal backlash from both teachers and parents.
"Teachers are going to be marching on Washington D.C. July 28 to 30 to protest the 'testing and punishment' regime in education," Ravitch announced.
The top-down corporate-style reform championed by Obama and the billionaires threatens a further deterioration of education for poor kids, and is an imminent threat to America's democratic traditions, Ravitch concluded.
http://www.inthesetimes.com/working/entry/6939/obama_sides_with_corporate_attack_on_teachers_instead_of_new_war_on_po/
By Roger Bybee
Diane Ravitch, author of The Death and Life of the Great American School System.
President Barack Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan have
formed an alliance with billionaire "school reformers" whose agenda
is to downgrade U.S. public education and blame its shortcomings on
"bad teachers," warns educational historian Diane Ravitch.
Ravitch spoke Thursday night before a crowd of more than 1,000 education professors, students, public school teachers, and community activists at the
University of Wisconsin.
"These corporate reformers are pursuing a strategy based on ideology, not on evidence," she charged. "It is demoralizing teachers and setting up public schools to be de-legitimized, as they are called upon to meet impossible goals. This is not an improvement strategy, it is a privatization strategy."
Ravitch, once assistant secretary of education under George W.
Bush, has undergone a remarkable transformation after observing how
the education system became fixated on test results, the scapegoating of teachers and the promoting of a privatized approach to education.
She has now emerged as one of the leading critics of the Obama-Duncan approach to public education, which has been driven by funding from several huge foundations--the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Eli and Edith Broad Foundation, and the Walton Family foundation.
The essence of this corporatized approach to public education is "choice, competition, deregulation, accountability, and data-based decision-making," as Joanne Barkan summarizes it an important Dissent article.
With progressive reforms for education generating little attention, the corporate model has managed to make surprising inroads among some liberals who have become persuaded that a market-driven education system is key to America's future.
The corporate style of reform began with "No Child Left Behind" enacted under George W. Bush, which promoted a preoccupation with standardized testing and the conclusion that children's failure to measure up was a direct result of inferior teachers.
This was followed by Duncan's "Race to the Top" program which embraced the same core beliefs, including the closing of "failed schools." Duncan and Obama, for example, applauded the decision of the Central Falls, Rhode Island School Board to close the high school and fire all 91 staff members, absurdly including the cafeteria and maintenance staff, based on the assumption that low test scores reflected the failures of the teachers.
The poverty of the students and the fact that a high percentage were immigrants learning English were seen as irrelevant to the low test scores. Eventually, both Duncan and the local school system were forced to back off due to public outcry.
But Duncan, along with the three huge foundations, is still pressing ahead with imposing what Ravitch calls their "punitive" and "market-based" assumptions on the nation's schools.
However, as both Ravitch and Barkan have pointed out, all the major studies show that the key elements of corporate-style education reform are simply not working:
No improvement in learning: The most comprehensive study of de-regulated "charter" schools, conducted by conservative economists at Stanford University, examined education results among students at 2,400 charter schools nationally. They found 83% of charter schools perform either worse or no better than public schools.
Merit pay: The new wave of corporate reformers have argued that
merit pay is vital to incentivize" and reward better-performing teachers. But a 2010 Vanderbilt University study clearly demonstrated that merit pay does not generate higher standardized testing.
A National Research Council report, backing up numerous other studies, found that standardized test scores fail to effectively measure student learning The main result observed by Ravitch has been the tendency of school curriculums to get narrower and narrower, focusing almost exclusively on "teaching to the test" in reading and math. Supposed "success" stories of market-based, mayor-driven "reform" in Chicago and New York quickly unraveled once newspapers began independently evaluating the test scores of students.
Nonetheless, the combined PR clout of the Gates, Broad, and Walton
foundations has generated a massive wave of favorable publicity for
their crusade against what Ravitch called "the Bad Teacher Syndrome. This included a cover story in Newsweek, a weeklong series on NBC that "celebrated privatization and scapegoating teachers," as Ravitch put it, and two segments of Oprah devoted to discussing Waiting for Superman, which Ravitch called a badly-biased documentary.
All of these high-profile attacks on teachers, their unions, and union-won rights avoid the real causes of poor school performance. "Most of the nations that the US is comparing itself with have much lower rates of poverty among their children. It's 20% nationally here, and I know it's much higher in this community." (32 percent of children in Milwaukee are poor.)
"Poor performance is mostly due to poverty and racial isolation," Raitch said. Barkan further illuminated this point in Dissent:
The most recent results (2006) showed the following: students in US schools where the poverty rate was less than 10% rnked first in reading, first in cience, and third in math. But as the poverty rate rose till higher, students ranked lower and lower.
Twenty percent of all U.S. schools have poverty rates over 75%. The problem is not public schools; it is poverty.
And as dozens of studies have shown, the gap in cognitive, physical, and social development between children in poverty and middle-class children is set by age three.
The over-emphasis on testing, the targeting of teachers, the senseless closing of schools, and the substitution of a market model for the basic democratic right of public education are all generating an increasingly vocal backlash from both teachers and parents.
"Teachers are going to be marching on Washington D.C. July 28 to 30 to protest the 'testing and punishment' regime in education," Ravitch announced.
The top-down corporate-style reform championed by Obama and the billionaires threatens a further deterioration of education for poor kids, and is an imminent threat to America's democratic traditions, Ravitch concluded.
http://www.inthesetimes.com/working/entry/6939/obama_sides_with_corporate_attack_on_teachers_instead_of_new_war_on_po/
Friday, February 11, 2011
The Corporate Takeover of our Schools Continues
With a nod to the blog Modern Schools, from Solidaridad
by Robert D Skeets
" The education industry represents, in our opinion, the final frontier of a number of sectors once under public control... represents the largest market opportunity... the K-12 market is the Big Enchilada." — Montgomery Securities prospectus quoted in Jonathan Kozol's "The Big Enchilada"
If we ever needed more evidence that the entire charter-voucher charade is about market share and money making, Expand a Proven Finance Solution for All Charter Schools, by Ricardo Mireles, the well heeled Executive Director of Academia Avance, provides us with clear insight.
In the piece Mr. Mireles, without any regard to the fact that he's discussing public money, advocates "sell[ing] our state receivables to private companies." Let's bear in mind that the state receivables that Mireles refers to is our tax dollars. The last thing the public needs is unelected boards of privatized charter schools gambling with our hard earned tax dollars in cockamamy schemes smacking of the exotic mortgage derivatives market that crashed the economy and made a handful of Wall Street plutocrats even more rich.
By and large, nearly all charter schools (charter schools are schools that take public money, but are run by private entities including corporations), get huge grants from ideologically biased foundations like that of the neoliberal Broad/Gates/Walton Triumvirate. When charters cite studies by far-right think tanks that they tend to get slightly less public funding than public schools, they invariably leave out the fact that they more than make up for such minor shortfalls with a deluge of plutocrat funds to spend with little or no oversight.
No wonder hedge fund managers like the vile Whitney Tilson espouse charter-vouchers schools like they're the next bubble to profit from. Here's what the predatory parasite of Tilson Funds had to say in regards to the extremely lucrative charter-voucher industry he helped create:
"hedge funds are always looking for ways to turn a small amount of capital into a large amount of capital." A wealthy hedge fund manager can spend more than $1 million financing a charter school start-up. But once it is up and running, it qualifies for state funding, just like a public school... "It is extremely leveraged philanthropy," Mr. Tilson said. — Joel Klein’s Lesson Plan
Curiously Mireles says "CCSA is a great advocate." [1]. He doesn't say what they advocate, but we all know CCSA's advocacy story. Here's a few reminders:
CCSA and Market Share: Setting the Table for Vouchers
Racist Anti-Immigrant Speech from California Charter School Association
The real question is, does the CCSA disseminate any information that isn't biased and incorrect?
At first I was intrigued as to why Mireles would be pushing a very risky, but lucrative financial shell game. Turns our Mireles is somewhat exceptional in the highly paid charter-voucher CEO world. He only pays himself $65,327 according to his 2009 990 Part VII A, while most charter executives help themselves to lavish six figure salaries. So it isn't surprising he's on board with AIG style dupe-the-public financing. Such schemes give him a chance to further increase his fortunes at the public's expense via clever investing. We can all be sure that companies like Charter School Capital (CSC), discussed in Mireles' article, will be investment vehicles for all the vultures looking to profit off the privatization of public education.
Charter schools are notorious for gross malfeasance and financial mismanagement. Charter School Scandals is probably the best resource for viewing the scope of this endemic and ever growing problem. The site introduces itself with the following:
A compilation of news articles about charter schools which have been charged with, or are highly suspected of, tampering with admissions, grades, attendance and testing; misusing local, state, and federal funds; engaging in nepotism and conflicts of interest; engaging in complicated and shady real estate deals; and/or have been engaging in other questionable, unethical, borderline-legal, or illegal activities. This is also a record of charter school instability and other unsavory tidbits.
We don't need to look too far for charter schools scandals though, it turns out that "[f]ormer employees and parents accuse[d] Ricardo Mireles of improprieties because of financial pressure at Academia Avance" , this is detailed in a Howard Blume piece Critics assail director of L.A. charter. The article details how Mireless, a Coro Fellow [2], was embroiled in a major scandal at his school. Why LAUSD renewed Academia Avance's charter defies comprehension. Mireles must have gotten his financial advice from the notorious Mike Piscal of ICEF ignominy.
Privately managed charter schools are so rife with malfeasance, that the very birthplace of charter schools — Minnesota, recently placed a moratorium on them. This is because it was found that "75% [of charter schools] had a least one irregularity noted in their financial audit." — Minnesota 2020 (2008 Report). Rest assured, whenever you put public money into private hands, corporate charlatans will find a way to pocket it. All the while saying that they are doing it for the kids, and that theirs is a kids centered agenda.
I've got a better idea. "If corporate charter-voucher schools were obligated, like public schools, to educate every child, we would see the proliferation of charters disappear almost overnight. Take the profitability out of the equation, and charter schools would return to their original mission."
To join the fight-back against corporate charters and the privatization of public schools, join your local chapters of Coalition for Educational Justice (CEJ) and Parents Across America (PAA). Together, collectively, we can stop the privatization of public education by demanding people before profits.
___
NOTES
[1] According to Critics assail director of L.A. charter Mireles worked for the CCSA, he "helped set up computer and phone systems for the California Charter Schools Ass[ociation].
[2] Poverty pimping and privatization pushing Coro Fellows list includes: Caprice Young, Yolie Flores-Aguilar, Ryan Smith, Jordan Henry, Ricardo Mireles, Gabe Rose...
by Robert D Skeets
" The education industry represents, in our opinion, the final frontier of a number of sectors once under public control... represents the largest market opportunity... the K-12 market is the Big Enchilada." — Montgomery Securities prospectus quoted in Jonathan Kozol's "The Big Enchilada"
If we ever needed more evidence that the entire charter-voucher charade is about market share and money making, Expand a Proven Finance Solution for All Charter Schools, by Ricardo Mireles, the well heeled Executive Director of Academia Avance, provides us with clear insight.
In the piece Mr. Mireles, without any regard to the fact that he's discussing public money, advocates "sell[ing] our state receivables to private companies." Let's bear in mind that the state receivables that Mireles refers to is our tax dollars. The last thing the public needs is unelected boards of privatized charter schools gambling with our hard earned tax dollars in cockamamy schemes smacking of the exotic mortgage derivatives market that crashed the economy and made a handful of Wall Street plutocrats even more rich.
By and large, nearly all charter schools (charter schools are schools that take public money, but are run by private entities including corporations), get huge grants from ideologically biased foundations like that of the neoliberal Broad/Gates/Walton Triumvirate. When charters cite studies by far-right think tanks that they tend to get slightly less public funding than public schools, they invariably leave out the fact that they more than make up for such minor shortfalls with a deluge of plutocrat funds to spend with little or no oversight.
No wonder hedge fund managers like the vile Whitney Tilson espouse charter-vouchers schools like they're the next bubble to profit from. Here's what the predatory parasite of Tilson Funds had to say in regards to the extremely lucrative charter-voucher industry he helped create:
"hedge funds are always looking for ways to turn a small amount of capital into a large amount of capital." A wealthy hedge fund manager can spend more than $1 million financing a charter school start-up. But once it is up and running, it qualifies for state funding, just like a public school... "It is extremely leveraged philanthropy," Mr. Tilson said. — Joel Klein’s Lesson Plan
Curiously Mireles says "CCSA is a great advocate." [1]. He doesn't say what they advocate, but we all know CCSA's advocacy story. Here's a few reminders:
CCSA and Market Share: Setting the Table for Vouchers
Racist Anti-Immigrant Speech from California Charter School Association
The real question is, does the CCSA disseminate any information that isn't biased and incorrect?
At first I was intrigued as to why Mireles would be pushing a very risky, but lucrative financial shell game. Turns our Mireles is somewhat exceptional in the highly paid charter-voucher CEO world. He only pays himself $65,327 according to his 2009 990 Part VII A, while most charter executives help themselves to lavish six figure salaries. So it isn't surprising he's on board with AIG style dupe-the-public financing. Such schemes give him a chance to further increase his fortunes at the public's expense via clever investing. We can all be sure that companies like Charter School Capital (CSC), discussed in Mireles' article, will be investment vehicles for all the vultures looking to profit off the privatization of public education.
Charter schools are notorious for gross malfeasance and financial mismanagement. Charter School Scandals is probably the best resource for viewing the scope of this endemic and ever growing problem. The site introduces itself with the following:
A compilation of news articles about charter schools which have been charged with, or are highly suspected of, tampering with admissions, grades, attendance and testing; misusing local, state, and federal funds; engaging in nepotism and conflicts of interest; engaging in complicated and shady real estate deals; and/or have been engaging in other questionable, unethical, borderline-legal, or illegal activities. This is also a record of charter school instability and other unsavory tidbits.
We don't need to look too far for charter schools scandals though, it turns out that "[f]ormer employees and parents accuse[d] Ricardo Mireles of improprieties because of financial pressure at Academia Avance" , this is detailed in a Howard Blume piece Critics assail director of L.A. charter. The article details how Mireless, a Coro Fellow [2], was embroiled in a major scandal at his school. Why LAUSD renewed Academia Avance's charter defies comprehension. Mireles must have gotten his financial advice from the notorious Mike Piscal of ICEF ignominy.
Privately managed charter schools are so rife with malfeasance, that the very birthplace of charter schools — Minnesota, recently placed a moratorium on them. This is because it was found that "75% [of charter schools] had a least one irregularity noted in their financial audit." — Minnesota 2020 (2008 Report). Rest assured, whenever you put public money into private hands, corporate charlatans will find a way to pocket it. All the while saying that they are doing it for the kids, and that theirs is a kids centered agenda.
I've got a better idea. "If corporate charter-voucher schools were obligated, like public schools, to educate every child, we would see the proliferation of charters disappear almost overnight. Take the profitability out of the equation, and charter schools would return to their original mission."
To join the fight-back against corporate charters and the privatization of public schools, join your local chapters of Coalition for Educational Justice (CEJ) and Parents Across America (PAA). Together, collectively, we can stop the privatization of public education by demanding people before profits.
___
NOTES
[1] According to Critics assail director of L.A. charter Mireles worked for the CCSA, he "helped set up computer and phone systems for the California Charter Schools Ass[ociation].
[2] Poverty pimping and privatization pushing Coro Fellows list includes: Caprice Young, Yolie Flores-Aguilar, Ryan Smith, Jordan Henry, Ricardo Mireles, Gabe Rose...
Thursday, February 10, 2011
It's poverty
The guest article by Robert Neid in the Times Union about the country falling behind other industrialized nations in education was pretty accurate in many regards. He was right we are falling behind and we should be alarmed. Furthermore I agree with him that we are costing ourselves both economical and socially by doing so. However he failed to mention the number one factor for the reason we currently find ourselves in the hole we are and that’s poverty.
Twenty-one percent of our children live in poverty. Another fifth aren’t that much above it and poverty is the number one measurable statistic which determines how well a student does in school, not teachers as Mr. Neid seems to imply. Simply put, children in poverty do not do as well as those who are not.
He went on to quote several impressive statistics about where our nation and our children find themselves when compared to our industrialized counterparts but once again he doesn’t mention that when we factor out poverty and just use the scores of children not living in it our scores rise tremendously. He also doesn’t mention that places like Finland, long considered a model of education excellence have very few children that live in poverty (one half of one percent) and have made education a national priority not an afterthought as we have done.
I get it that Mr. Neid wants our children and our nation to do better. I just think in order for us to improve we need to address our children and nations real issues.
Chris Guerrieri
School Teacher
Twenty-one percent of our children live in poverty. Another fifth aren’t that much above it and poverty is the number one measurable statistic which determines how well a student does in school, not teachers as Mr. Neid seems to imply. Simply put, children in poverty do not do as well as those who are not.
He went on to quote several impressive statistics about where our nation and our children find themselves when compared to our industrialized counterparts but once again he doesn’t mention that when we factor out poverty and just use the scores of children not living in it our scores rise tremendously. He also doesn’t mention that places like Finland, long considered a model of education excellence have very few children that live in poverty (one half of one percent) and have made education a national priority not an afterthought as we have done.
I get it that Mr. Neid wants our children and our nation to do better. I just think in order for us to improve we need to address our children and nations real issues.
Chris Guerrieri
School Teacher
Monday, February 7, 2011
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/
Thursday, February 3, 2011
A smarter way to spend education dollars
I don't agree with all the ideas but they generally seem less punative than the ideas our leaders here are proposing. Notice how the author sites how studies say merit pay doesn't work, so much for data driven reforms. This is from South Carolina. -cpg
From the state.com
by Paul Thomas
Education Superintendent Mick Zais’ recent proposals for the state education budget present an ideal platform for considering how best to move forward in difficult economic times.
First and foremost, political leaders need to set aside politics and partisanship when debating policy and funding for education. Instead, we should be guided by evidence.
Here are some evidence-based decisions that would benefit our schools and address the budget crunch, which reveal both the wisdom and the flaws in some of Dr. Zais’ proposals.
Cut funding for SAT preparation. This is his best proposal, but we should go further. Decades of data and research have confirmed that test scores are far more linked to out-of-school factors, such as poverty, than in-school quality. Exit exams have shown virtually no benefit despite huge amounts of money spent designing, implementing and scoring the tests. South Carolina should reduce or eliminate funding for test-prep and testing itself when there is no evidence that those tests are producing positive results. The only people who have benefitted from the rise in testing are test designers, test producers and companies scoring those tests.
Defund the National Board certification process, and reallocate funding to programs that are fair and match the wealth of evidence about the conditions that support teacher improvement (teaching conditions, class size, administrative support, teacher collegiality). A major study supported by National Board for Professional Teaching Standards itself has revealed that we have no evidence that board certification causes superior teaching; in fact, it is likely that board certification is attracting those teachers already excelling in the field. The board certification process is not fair (not all teachers have access to the opportunity), and it has nothing except advocacy to support the huge investment by our state.
Beware investments in technology and on-line education. Technology often widens the equity gap that disproportionately hurts students living in poverty. Since South Carolina already is suffering the inordinate burden of poverty — a fact reflected in the schools but not caused by them — massive commitments to technology are likely to increase, not decrease, our equity gap. As well, classrooms are littered with out-of-date technology and unused technology, untold money wasted, while children still lack adequate access to books in their homes.
One caveat on technology: We should work to replace traditional textbooks with electronic texts that can be quickly updated and slash the physical cost of production. Textbooks always have been the worst books in any child’s hands, lining the pockets of textbook companies at the expense of students. We can do better, and now is the time to consider something different.
Reject performance-based teacher pay, since the evidence clearly shows that it is neither motivating nor fair. Teacher accountability linked to student outcomes is flawed since teachers have no full or direct control over student behavior and test scores are a reflection of dozens of factors (and years of teachers). To characterize the teaching/learning process as a singular and direct relationship between one teacher and one student (or one class of students) is to misrepresent the process entirely.
South Carolina today and historically faces the overwhelming weight of poverty that is reflected in our schools. We must stop scapegoating schools and teachers, since neither caused our state’s poverty. Schools alone cannot erase poverty, but we can improve our schools and reshape our education budget if we are guided by evidence instead of ideology.
Thirty years of education reform in South Carolina has wasted millions and millions of dollars by trying the same things (accountability, standards, tests) over and over. If Superintendent Zais will apply the same evidence-based logic he has offered for eliminating our focus on the SAT to the rest of the education budget, I believe we can both weather the economic storm and reform our schools positively in the coming years.
Read more: http://www.thestate.com/2011/02/03/1676497/thomas-smarter-ways-to-spend-education.html##ixzz1CvoIHuAB
From the state.com
by Paul Thomas
Education Superintendent Mick Zais’ recent proposals for the state education budget present an ideal platform for considering how best to move forward in difficult economic times.
First and foremost, political leaders need to set aside politics and partisanship when debating policy and funding for education. Instead, we should be guided by evidence.
Here are some evidence-based decisions that would benefit our schools and address the budget crunch, which reveal both the wisdom and the flaws in some of Dr. Zais’ proposals.
Cut funding for SAT preparation. This is his best proposal, but we should go further. Decades of data and research have confirmed that test scores are far more linked to out-of-school factors, such as poverty, than in-school quality. Exit exams have shown virtually no benefit despite huge amounts of money spent designing, implementing and scoring the tests. South Carolina should reduce or eliminate funding for test-prep and testing itself when there is no evidence that those tests are producing positive results. The only people who have benefitted from the rise in testing are test designers, test producers and companies scoring those tests.
Defund the National Board certification process, and reallocate funding to programs that are fair and match the wealth of evidence about the conditions that support teacher improvement (teaching conditions, class size, administrative support, teacher collegiality). A major study supported by National Board for Professional Teaching Standards itself has revealed that we have no evidence that board certification causes superior teaching; in fact, it is likely that board certification is attracting those teachers already excelling in the field. The board certification process is not fair (not all teachers have access to the opportunity), and it has nothing except advocacy to support the huge investment by our state.
Beware investments in technology and on-line education. Technology often widens the equity gap that disproportionately hurts students living in poverty. Since South Carolina already is suffering the inordinate burden of poverty — a fact reflected in the schools but not caused by them — massive commitments to technology are likely to increase, not decrease, our equity gap. As well, classrooms are littered with out-of-date technology and unused technology, untold money wasted, while children still lack adequate access to books in their homes.
One caveat on technology: We should work to replace traditional textbooks with electronic texts that can be quickly updated and slash the physical cost of production. Textbooks always have been the worst books in any child’s hands, lining the pockets of textbook companies at the expense of students. We can do better, and now is the time to consider something different.
Reject performance-based teacher pay, since the evidence clearly shows that it is neither motivating nor fair. Teacher accountability linked to student outcomes is flawed since teachers have no full or direct control over student behavior and test scores are a reflection of dozens of factors (and years of teachers). To characterize the teaching/learning process as a singular and direct relationship between one teacher and one student (or one class of students) is to misrepresent the process entirely.
South Carolina today and historically faces the overwhelming weight of poverty that is reflected in our schools. We must stop scapegoating schools and teachers, since neither caused our state’s poverty. Schools alone cannot erase poverty, but we can improve our schools and reshape our education budget if we are guided by evidence instead of ideology.
Thirty years of education reform in South Carolina has wasted millions and millions of dollars by trying the same things (accountability, standards, tests) over and over. If Superintendent Zais will apply the same evidence-based logic he has offered for eliminating our focus on the SAT to the rest of the education budget, I believe we can both weather the economic storm and reform our schools positively in the coming years.
Read more: http://www.thestate.com/2011/02/03/1676497/thomas-smarter-ways-to-spend-education.html##ixzz1CvoIHuAB
Sunday, January 23, 2011
What don't you get? It's poverrty
From the Wall Sreet Journal
by Jonah Leher
How much do the decisions of parents matter? Most parents believe that even the most mundane acts of parenting—from their choice of day care to their policy on videogames—can profoundly influence the success of their children. Kids are like wet clay, in this view, and we are the sculptors.
As wealth increases, adults play a much smaller role in determining the mental ability of their children.
Yet in tests measuring many traits, from intelligence to self-control, the power of the home environment pales in comparison to the power of genes and peer groups. We may think we're sculptors, but the clay is mostly set.
A new paper suggests that both metaphors can be true. Which one is relevant depends, it turns out, on the economic status of families.
For a paper in Psychological Science, researchers at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Virginia looked at 750 pairs of American twins who were given a test of mental ability at the age of 10 months and then again at the age of 2. By studying the performance of identical versus fraternal twins, the scientists could tease out the relative importance of factors such as genetics and the home environment. Because the infants came from households across the socioeconomic spectrum, it also was possible to see how wealth influenced test scores.
When it came to the mental ability of 10-month-olds, the home environment was the key variable, across every socioeconomic class. But results for the 2-year-olds were dramatically different. In children from poorer households, the choices of parents still mattered. In fact, the researchers estimated that the home environment accounted for approximately 80% of the individual variance in mental ability among poor 2-year-olds. The effect of genetics was negligible.
The opposite pattern appeared in 2-year-olds from wealthy households. For these kids, genetics primarily determined performance, accounting for nearly 50% of all variation in mental ability. (The scientists made this conclusion based on the fact that identical twins performed much more similarly than fraternal twins.) The home environment was a distant second. For parents, the correlation appears to be clear: As wealth increases, the choices of adults play a much smaller role in determining the mental ability of their children.
Children from wealthy households get all the advantages that money can buy, from music lessons to SAT tutors. Although parents might fret over the details of such advantages—is it better to play the piano or the violin?—these details are mostly insignificant, subject to the law of diminishing returns. As the science blogger Razib Kahn notes, "When you remove the environmental variance, the genetic variance remains."
These results capture the stunning developmental inequalities that set in almost immediately, so that even the mental ability of 2-year-olds can be profoundly affected by the socio-economic status of their parents. As a result, their genetic potential is held back.
Though this latest study doesn't speculate about the causes of these class differences, previous research has focused on a panoply of factors, such as the variety of words directed toward the child (more variety leads to higher test scores), the number of books in the home and even the ratio of encouraging remarks to discouraging warnings. By the age of 3, children from wealthier households hear, on average, about 500,000 encouragements and 80,000 discouragements. The ratio is reversed in households on welfare.
Such statistics have led many researchers to highlight the importance of improving the early-childhood environments of poor children. Economists such as James Heckman, a Nobel laureate at the University of Chicago, have long advocated for increased investments in preschool education, but this latest study suggests that interventions need to begin even earlier. One possible model is the "Baby College" administered by the Harlem Children's Zone, which seeks to equip brand-new parents with better parenting skills.
Eliminating such inequalities in the early years of life would simply create a new kind of inequality, driven by genetics. But such a world would at least let more children come closer to their mental potential, unconstrained by the mistakes or impoverishment of their parents. The greatest luxury we can give our children, it turns out, is the luxury of being the type of parent that doesn't matter at all.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703954004576090020541379588.html
by Jonah Leher
How much do the decisions of parents matter? Most parents believe that even the most mundane acts of parenting—from their choice of day care to their policy on videogames—can profoundly influence the success of their children. Kids are like wet clay, in this view, and we are the sculptors.
As wealth increases, adults play a much smaller role in determining the mental ability of their children.
Yet in tests measuring many traits, from intelligence to self-control, the power of the home environment pales in comparison to the power of genes and peer groups. We may think we're sculptors, but the clay is mostly set.
A new paper suggests that both metaphors can be true. Which one is relevant depends, it turns out, on the economic status of families.
For a paper in Psychological Science, researchers at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Virginia looked at 750 pairs of American twins who were given a test of mental ability at the age of 10 months and then again at the age of 2. By studying the performance of identical versus fraternal twins, the scientists could tease out the relative importance of factors such as genetics and the home environment. Because the infants came from households across the socioeconomic spectrum, it also was possible to see how wealth influenced test scores.
When it came to the mental ability of 10-month-olds, the home environment was the key variable, across every socioeconomic class. But results for the 2-year-olds were dramatically different. In children from poorer households, the choices of parents still mattered. In fact, the researchers estimated that the home environment accounted for approximately 80% of the individual variance in mental ability among poor 2-year-olds. The effect of genetics was negligible.
The opposite pattern appeared in 2-year-olds from wealthy households. For these kids, genetics primarily determined performance, accounting for nearly 50% of all variation in mental ability. (The scientists made this conclusion based on the fact that identical twins performed much more similarly than fraternal twins.) The home environment was a distant second. For parents, the correlation appears to be clear: As wealth increases, the choices of adults play a much smaller role in determining the mental ability of their children.
Children from wealthy households get all the advantages that money can buy, from music lessons to SAT tutors. Although parents might fret over the details of such advantages—is it better to play the piano or the violin?—these details are mostly insignificant, subject to the law of diminishing returns. As the science blogger Razib Kahn notes, "When you remove the environmental variance, the genetic variance remains."
These results capture the stunning developmental inequalities that set in almost immediately, so that even the mental ability of 2-year-olds can be profoundly affected by the socio-economic status of their parents. As a result, their genetic potential is held back.
Though this latest study doesn't speculate about the causes of these class differences, previous research has focused on a panoply of factors, such as the variety of words directed toward the child (more variety leads to higher test scores), the number of books in the home and even the ratio of encouraging remarks to discouraging warnings. By the age of 3, children from wealthier households hear, on average, about 500,000 encouragements and 80,000 discouragements. The ratio is reversed in households on welfare.
Such statistics have led many researchers to highlight the importance of improving the early-childhood environments of poor children. Economists such as James Heckman, a Nobel laureate at the University of Chicago, have long advocated for increased investments in preschool education, but this latest study suggests that interventions need to begin even earlier. One possible model is the "Baby College" administered by the Harlem Children's Zone, which seeks to equip brand-new parents with better parenting skills.
Eliminating such inequalities in the early years of life would simply create a new kind of inequality, driven by genetics. But such a world would at least let more children come closer to their mental potential, unconstrained by the mistakes or impoverishment of their parents. The greatest luxury we can give our children, it turns out, is the luxury of being the type of parent that doesn't matter at all.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703954004576090020541379588.html
Thursday, January 20, 2011
Are we are fine with Segragation as long as we have Charter Schools
From Ed Voices
by Nancy Flanigan
Nothing captures America's attention more than concentrating all the poor into one location."
Stephen Colbert
This blog started as a dialogue on the Facebook page of a friend whose ed-policy perspectives and knowledge I greatly admire and appreciate. Call him Respected Pundit. He was reviewing an op-ed on Choice Without Equity: Charter School Segregation, a study out of UCLA which contends that the growth of charter schools has fostered school segregation nationally, especially for African-American students.
RP's take: Charter schools should not be judged on their demographics. Parents choose charter schools, knowing the racial makeup of the student body, because they offer a better academic program. Ergo, an integrated study body is less important to minority parents than getting a good education.
OK. But when we're talking about something as complex and critical to the national well-being as public education, an either-or choice of integration vs. good schools is unacceptable. Here's the real question: Shouldn't all Americans be concerned about promoting racial and economic equity?
Aren't public schools the cornerstone for achieving this goal? Do we need a study to tell us what happens when the dangerous gap between haves and have-nots continues to expand?
Comments on RP's Facebook page and a response from Education Next are predictably centered on perceived methodological flaws in the study. My research is better than your research; my people have larger grants and bigger names than your people. Meanwhile, kids keep going to schools--terrible schools, lottery-admission schools, better choices and no choice at all.
Wake County, NC, is one of the few places in the country that has had some success--including a 94% parent satisfaction rate--in attempting to genuinely integrate students, both racially and economically, in its public education system. I have a number of friends who teach in Wake County; they're among the sharpest and most articulate teachers I know.
They're proud of Wake County's diversity policy, although some of them admit that test scores might be higher in their buildings if 4700 students return to schools in their more/less advantaged neighborhoods, per the recent School Board decision. And they're all appalled by the remarks of John Tedesco of the Wake County School Board:
"If we had a school that was, like, 80 percent high-poverty, the public would see the challenges, the need to make it successful. ... Right now, we have diluted the problem, so we can ignore it."
Isn't "diluting the problem" our goal? Aren't we supposed to be chugging along toward a more equitable society? Are we comfortable promoting non-diverse charters that concentrate students of poverty into clusters to be educated?
A friend who works in a high-functioning charter in Detroit told me that the charter was established to serve the poorest kids in Detroit. When it opened, the open enrollment process attracted lots of students from nearby suburbs whose parents worked in Detroit and could provide transportation into the city. In fact, access to transportation turned out to be the dividing line between the working-class kids who ended up there and the smaller number of truly disadvantaged kids the school was supposed to be serving.
The first set of baseline state assessment scores were higher than anticipated at the charter--leading to worries that there wasn't much room for the impressive growth needed to meet their publicly posted benchmarks. After everyone relaxed a bit, they decided that a mixed group of kids from middle-class, working-class and deep-poverty families was likely to be a good medium for academic growth.
Amen.
http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/teacher_in_a_strange_land/2011/01/were_fine_with_segregation--as_long_as_we_have_charter_schools.html
by Nancy Flanigan
Nothing captures America's attention more than concentrating all the poor into one location."
Stephen Colbert
This blog started as a dialogue on the Facebook page of a friend whose ed-policy perspectives and knowledge I greatly admire and appreciate. Call him Respected Pundit. He was reviewing an op-ed on Choice Without Equity: Charter School Segregation, a study out of UCLA which contends that the growth of charter schools has fostered school segregation nationally, especially for African-American students.
RP's take: Charter schools should not be judged on their demographics. Parents choose charter schools, knowing the racial makeup of the student body, because they offer a better academic program. Ergo, an integrated study body is less important to minority parents than getting a good education.
OK. But when we're talking about something as complex and critical to the national well-being as public education, an either-or choice of integration vs. good schools is unacceptable. Here's the real question: Shouldn't all Americans be concerned about promoting racial and economic equity?
Aren't public schools the cornerstone for achieving this goal? Do we need a study to tell us what happens when the dangerous gap between haves and have-nots continues to expand?
Comments on RP's Facebook page and a response from Education Next are predictably centered on perceived methodological flaws in the study. My research is better than your research; my people have larger grants and bigger names than your people. Meanwhile, kids keep going to schools--terrible schools, lottery-admission schools, better choices and no choice at all.
Wake County, NC, is one of the few places in the country that has had some success--including a 94% parent satisfaction rate--in attempting to genuinely integrate students, both racially and economically, in its public education system. I have a number of friends who teach in Wake County; they're among the sharpest and most articulate teachers I know.
They're proud of Wake County's diversity policy, although some of them admit that test scores might be higher in their buildings if 4700 students return to schools in their more/less advantaged neighborhoods, per the recent School Board decision. And they're all appalled by the remarks of John Tedesco of the Wake County School Board:
"If we had a school that was, like, 80 percent high-poverty, the public would see the challenges, the need to make it successful. ... Right now, we have diluted the problem, so we can ignore it."
Isn't "diluting the problem" our goal? Aren't we supposed to be chugging along toward a more equitable society? Are we comfortable promoting non-diverse charters that concentrate students of poverty into clusters to be educated?
A friend who works in a high-functioning charter in Detroit told me that the charter was established to serve the poorest kids in Detroit. When it opened, the open enrollment process attracted lots of students from nearby suburbs whose parents worked in Detroit and could provide transportation into the city. In fact, access to transportation turned out to be the dividing line between the working-class kids who ended up there and the smaller number of truly disadvantaged kids the school was supposed to be serving.
The first set of baseline state assessment scores were higher than anticipated at the charter--leading to worries that there wasn't much room for the impressive growth needed to meet their publicly posted benchmarks. After everyone relaxed a bit, they decided that a mixed group of kids from middle-class, working-class and deep-poverty families was likely to be a good medium for academic growth.
Amen.
http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/teacher_in_a_strange_land/2011/01/were_fine_with_segregation--as_long_as_we_have_charter_schools.html
Monday, January 17, 2011
What Waiting for Superman doesn't show
From the Wahington posts Answer Sheet
By Kevin G. Welner
Over the past couple months, I’ve been asked to participate in a few panel discussions about Waiting for Superman. The film presents a stark, moving portrayal of the denial of educational opportunities in low-income communities of color. But while the movie includes statements such as "we know what’s wrong" and "we know how to fix it," viewers of the movie are hard-pressed to identify those causes and solutions -- other than to boo and hiss at teachers’ unions and to cheer at the heroic charter school educators.
So in the panel discussions we try to make sense of that simplistic black-hat/white-hat story. We argue about whether the movie offers a fair and complete picture (it doesn’t even come close, unfortunately). But we never get to deeper issues about what’s wrong and how to fix it.
I thought about that when leaving a showing of the other prominent documentary currently showing, called Inside Job. It offers an explanation of how the current economic crisis came about, describing the securitization of mortgages; the extraordinary leveraging of assets; the regulatory capture by Wall Street leading to minimal enforcement of federal regulations -- a deregulation intended to spur innovation; and the fraud, greed, hubris and general belief among hedge fund titans and others in the financial services world that they are infallible.
The film also points out the growing and now extreme inequality of wealth distribution in the United States. "The top 1 percent of American earners took in 23.5 percent of the nation’s pretax income in 2007 -- up from less than 9 percent in 1976."
Consider those final three items: (1) the advocacy of deregulation in order to free up innovation, (2) hubris and general belief among hedge fund titans that they are infallible, and (3) increased wealth inequality.
If Superman had explored these issues instead of bashing unions and promoting charters, moviegoers might have walked away understanding a great deal about why the families it profiled and so many similar families across America face a bleak educational future.
The movie certainly showed scenes of poverty, but its implications and the structural inequalities underlying that poverty were largely ignored. Devastating urban poverty was just there -- as if that were somehow the natural order of things but if we could only ’fix’ schools it would disappear.
Rick Hanushek is put forth, saying that if we fire the bottom 5 to 10 percent of the lowest-performing teachers every year, our national test scores would soon approach Finland at the top of international rankings in mathematics and science. But no mention is made of the telling fact that Finland had, in 2005, a child poverty rate of 2.8 percent while the United States had a rate of 21.9 percent. That gap has likely gotten even bigger over the intervening five years.
Rather than addressing these poverty issues, Superman serves up innovation through privatization and deregulation. We’re shown charter schools that give hope to these families. But what we’re not told is that the extra resources and opportunities found in these charters are funded in large part with donations from Wall Street hedge fund millionaires and billionaires.
Problems of structural inequality and inter-generational poverty are pushed aside in favor of a ’solution’ grounded in the belief that deregulation will prompt innovation, all the while guided by the infallible judgment of Wall Street tycoons. It’s no wonder that Inside Job better explained the school crisis than did Waiting for Superman.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/school-turnaroundsreform/why-waiting-for-superman-shoul.html?wprss=answer-sheet
By Kevin G. Welner
Over the past couple months, I’ve been asked to participate in a few panel discussions about Waiting for Superman. The film presents a stark, moving portrayal of the denial of educational opportunities in low-income communities of color. But while the movie includes statements such as "we know what’s wrong" and "we know how to fix it," viewers of the movie are hard-pressed to identify those causes and solutions -- other than to boo and hiss at teachers’ unions and to cheer at the heroic charter school educators.
So in the panel discussions we try to make sense of that simplistic black-hat/white-hat story. We argue about whether the movie offers a fair and complete picture (it doesn’t even come close, unfortunately). But we never get to deeper issues about what’s wrong and how to fix it.
I thought about that when leaving a showing of the other prominent documentary currently showing, called Inside Job. It offers an explanation of how the current economic crisis came about, describing the securitization of mortgages; the extraordinary leveraging of assets; the regulatory capture by Wall Street leading to minimal enforcement of federal regulations -- a deregulation intended to spur innovation; and the fraud, greed, hubris and general belief among hedge fund titans and others in the financial services world that they are infallible.
The film also points out the growing and now extreme inequality of wealth distribution in the United States. "The top 1 percent of American earners took in 23.5 percent of the nation’s pretax income in 2007 -- up from less than 9 percent in 1976."
Consider those final three items: (1) the advocacy of deregulation in order to free up innovation, (2) hubris and general belief among hedge fund titans that they are infallible, and (3) increased wealth inequality.
If Superman had explored these issues instead of bashing unions and promoting charters, moviegoers might have walked away understanding a great deal about why the families it profiled and so many similar families across America face a bleak educational future.
The movie certainly showed scenes of poverty, but its implications and the structural inequalities underlying that poverty were largely ignored. Devastating urban poverty was just there -- as if that were somehow the natural order of things but if we could only ’fix’ schools it would disappear.
Rick Hanushek is put forth, saying that if we fire the bottom 5 to 10 percent of the lowest-performing teachers every year, our national test scores would soon approach Finland at the top of international rankings in mathematics and science. But no mention is made of the telling fact that Finland had, in 2005, a child poverty rate of 2.8 percent while the United States had a rate of 21.9 percent. That gap has likely gotten even bigger over the intervening five years.
Rather than addressing these poverty issues, Superman serves up innovation through privatization and deregulation. We’re shown charter schools that give hope to these families. But what we’re not told is that the extra resources and opportunities found in these charters are funded in large part with donations from Wall Street hedge fund millionaires and billionaires.
Problems of structural inequality and inter-generational poverty are pushed aside in favor of a ’solution’ grounded in the belief that deregulation will prompt innovation, all the while guided by the infallible judgment of Wall Street tycoons. It’s no wonder that Inside Job better explained the school crisis than did Waiting for Superman.
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/school-turnaroundsreform/why-waiting-for-superman-shoul.html?wprss=answer-sheet
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
Poverty Hurts, Teachers Help
From the Blog, Modern school
By Mike Dunn
A common theme in my writing is how much poverty impacts our students and their academic success. On average, middle class and higher income kids simply do better in school and on standardized exams than lower income kids. The reasons for this are complex and have not been fully explored. However, we do know that wealth affects health and cognitive development, social development and language acquisition, creating an achievement gap that exists before kids have even entered school. Two seminal pieces of research bear this out: Unequal at the Starting Gate, by David Burkam and Valerie Lee, and Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children, by Betty Hart and Todd Risely. The latter work was discussed today on NPR, including an interview with coauthor Betty Hart. You can hear the interview or read the transcript at Closing the Achievement Gap with Baby Talk.
Arne Duncan, Bill Gates and many other Ed Deformers claim to be color and class blind, arguing that all kids can succeed in school, if we only provide quality teachers and schools. Many teachers enter the profession with these same assumptions. Likewise, when Betty Hart first started working with low income preschoolers, she believed she could help them transcend their limitations. Together with Todd Risley, she tried to improve the vocabularies of 4-year-olds in a low income preschool. However, after years of effort, they realized that they weren’t making much progress because they were catching the kids too late.
Shockingly, by the time kids are four, the effects of familial wealth have already made their mark on a child’s vocabulary. But Hart and Risely wanted to know why and they wanted to know how early these effects started to occur. So they followed 40 families from different income levels over the course of their children’s first three years, recording what the children said.
It took 10 years to transcribe and analyze their tapes. They found that children in welfare homes heard an average of 600 words per hour, compared to 2,100 in homes of professionals. By the time kids are four, this adds up to a total of about 13 million words heard by poor kids and 48 million words for affluent kids. Thus, before they have even entered kindergarten, there is a significant gap in language acquisition that affects school readiness.
Hart and Risely’s work was published in 1995 and led many in child development to rethink how they could work with parents to improve children’s language development. An important follow up to their research was conducted by Alan Mendelsohn, a pediatrician at New York’s Bellevue Hospital. In this study, Mendelsohn, et al, enrolled 675 mother-infant pairs in a randomized controlled experiment that compared two interventions that occurred during pediatric checkups: the Video Interaction Project and Building Blocks. A control group received standard pediatric treatment. For details, please see Study: Doctor Visits Give Opportunity for School Readiness Check-up.
All three groups of mother-child dyads received books and literacy materials from the Reach Out and Read program. Parents in the Building Blocks group also received developmental questionnaires and newsletters suggesting additional reading and play activities they could do at home to encourage literacy development. Those in the Video Interaction Project also met with child development experts at each of 15 wellness visits during their child’s first 3 years. During these visits, mothers were videotaped playing with their children. The child development experts then debriefed the videotapes with the mothers and coached them to help them become more effective in their interactions with their children.
By the age of 6 months, the infants in the video intervention group had significantly higher scores than those in the control group on the StimQ infant test, which measures pre-literacy activities. Those in the Building Blocks program had slightly higher scores than those in the control group. In summary, Mendelsohn’s work indicates that coaching parents can help them become better at communicating with their infants and improve their early language development.
It should be pointed out, though, that Mendelsohn’s program, even if fully implemented by pediatricians across the country, cannot alleviate all the negative effects that poverty has on school success. First, low income families are less likely to receive prenatal and postnatal care or regular checkups, thus precluding many families from receiving coaching during pediatric visits. Also, poverty negatively affects children in a variety of ways that cannot be mitigated solely through better parental communication. For example, poor children are much more likely to suffer malnutrition, low birth weights, lead or other environmental poisonings, and anemia, each of which can impair cognitive development and lead to learning disabilities. Financial insecurity creates chronic stress that can impair the immune system, memory and learning, and increase absenteeism. Low income families are much less likely to be able to provide ongoing extracurricular enrichment activities like travel, summer camp, art classes and athletics. Therefore, to really close the achievement gap requires a social movement that succeeds in closing the wealth gap.
http://modeducation.blogspot.com/2011/01/poverty-diminishes-vocabulary.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ModernSchool+%28Modern+School%29
By Mike Dunn
A common theme in my writing is how much poverty impacts our students and their academic success. On average, middle class and higher income kids simply do better in school and on standardized exams than lower income kids. The reasons for this are complex and have not been fully explored. However, we do know that wealth affects health and cognitive development, social development and language acquisition, creating an achievement gap that exists before kids have even entered school. Two seminal pieces of research bear this out: Unequal at the Starting Gate, by David Burkam and Valerie Lee, and Meaningful Differences in the Everyday Experience of Young American Children, by Betty Hart and Todd Risely. The latter work was discussed today on NPR, including an interview with coauthor Betty Hart. You can hear the interview or read the transcript at Closing the Achievement Gap with Baby Talk.
Arne Duncan, Bill Gates and many other Ed Deformers claim to be color and class blind, arguing that all kids can succeed in school, if we only provide quality teachers and schools. Many teachers enter the profession with these same assumptions. Likewise, when Betty Hart first started working with low income preschoolers, she believed she could help them transcend their limitations. Together with Todd Risley, she tried to improve the vocabularies of 4-year-olds in a low income preschool. However, after years of effort, they realized that they weren’t making much progress because they were catching the kids too late.
Shockingly, by the time kids are four, the effects of familial wealth have already made their mark on a child’s vocabulary. But Hart and Risely wanted to know why and they wanted to know how early these effects started to occur. So they followed 40 families from different income levels over the course of their children’s first three years, recording what the children said.
It took 10 years to transcribe and analyze their tapes. They found that children in welfare homes heard an average of 600 words per hour, compared to 2,100 in homes of professionals. By the time kids are four, this adds up to a total of about 13 million words heard by poor kids and 48 million words for affluent kids. Thus, before they have even entered kindergarten, there is a significant gap in language acquisition that affects school readiness.
Hart and Risely’s work was published in 1995 and led many in child development to rethink how they could work with parents to improve children’s language development. An important follow up to their research was conducted by Alan Mendelsohn, a pediatrician at New York’s Bellevue Hospital. In this study, Mendelsohn, et al, enrolled 675 mother-infant pairs in a randomized controlled experiment that compared two interventions that occurred during pediatric checkups: the Video Interaction Project and Building Blocks. A control group received standard pediatric treatment. For details, please see Study: Doctor Visits Give Opportunity for School Readiness Check-up.
All three groups of mother-child dyads received books and literacy materials from the Reach Out and Read program. Parents in the Building Blocks group also received developmental questionnaires and newsletters suggesting additional reading and play activities they could do at home to encourage literacy development. Those in the Video Interaction Project also met with child development experts at each of 15 wellness visits during their child’s first 3 years. During these visits, mothers were videotaped playing with their children. The child development experts then debriefed the videotapes with the mothers and coached them to help them become more effective in their interactions with their children.
By the age of 6 months, the infants in the video intervention group had significantly higher scores than those in the control group on the StimQ infant test, which measures pre-literacy activities. Those in the Building Blocks program had slightly higher scores than those in the control group. In summary, Mendelsohn’s work indicates that coaching parents can help them become better at communicating with their infants and improve their early language development.
It should be pointed out, though, that Mendelsohn’s program, even if fully implemented by pediatricians across the country, cannot alleviate all the negative effects that poverty has on school success. First, low income families are less likely to receive prenatal and postnatal care or regular checkups, thus precluding many families from receiving coaching during pediatric visits. Also, poverty negatively affects children in a variety of ways that cannot be mitigated solely through better parental communication. For example, poor children are much more likely to suffer malnutrition, low birth weights, lead or other environmental poisonings, and anemia, each of which can impair cognitive development and lead to learning disabilities. Financial insecurity creates chronic stress that can impair the immune system, memory and learning, and increase absenteeism. Low income families are much less likely to be able to provide ongoing extracurricular enrichment activities like travel, summer camp, art classes and athletics. Therefore, to really close the achievement gap requires a social movement that succeeds in closing the wealth gap.
http://modeducation.blogspot.com/2011/01/poverty-diminishes-vocabulary.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ModernSchool+%28Modern+School%29
Saturday, January 8, 2011
The rich got richer, poor got poorer
From the blog Modern Schools
There are more than 4 million more Americans in living in poverty than previously reported and they make up 15.7% of the population, not 14.3%, as earlier estimated. The new figure takes into account actual costs of living that include medical expenses, transportation and childcare, putting the U.S. total at 47.8 million living in poverty. Keep in mind that even these estimates are artificially low, as they use the ridiculous figure of $22,050 annual income for a family of four as the threshold, when in cities like New York and San Francisco, a person would be lucky to pay $12,000 per year just for their rent.
Over 16% of seniors and 18% of children are now living in poverty and over 6% are now living in “deep” poverty, with family incomes of less than $11,000. Meanwhile, according the Economic Policy Institute, the wealth of the richest 1% of Americans was 225 times more than the median family net worth in 2009. According to the report, the bottom 20% of families saw their income grow only $200 for the entire period from 1979 to 2005, whereas families in the top 0.1% saw their income grow by nearly $6 million.
As a result of unemployment, wage cuts, furloughs, increased health costs (insurance premiums have increased 131% in the last 10 years), and overall growing immiseration, 1.53 million Americans filed for bankruptcy last year, an increase of 9%. It should be pointed out that in 2005, bankruptcy laws were changed, making it much more difficult and costly for families to file for bankruptcy, making the increase even more appalling.
http://modeducation.blogspot.com/2011/01/2010-rich-got-much-richer-and-poor-got.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ModernSchool+%28Modern+School%29
There are more than 4 million more Americans in living in poverty than previously reported and they make up 15.7% of the population, not 14.3%, as earlier estimated. The new figure takes into account actual costs of living that include medical expenses, transportation and childcare, putting the U.S. total at 47.8 million living in poverty. Keep in mind that even these estimates are artificially low, as they use the ridiculous figure of $22,050 annual income for a family of four as the threshold, when in cities like New York and San Francisco, a person would be lucky to pay $12,000 per year just for their rent.
Over 16% of seniors and 18% of children are now living in poverty and over 6% are now living in “deep” poverty, with family incomes of less than $11,000. Meanwhile, according the Economic Policy Institute, the wealth of the richest 1% of Americans was 225 times more than the median family net worth in 2009. According to the report, the bottom 20% of families saw their income grow only $200 for the entire period from 1979 to 2005, whereas families in the top 0.1% saw their income grow by nearly $6 million.
As a result of unemployment, wage cuts, furloughs, increased health costs (insurance premiums have increased 131% in the last 10 years), and overall growing immiseration, 1.53 million Americans filed for bankruptcy last year, an increase of 9%. It should be pointed out that in 2005, bankruptcy laws were changed, making it much more difficult and costly for families to file for bankruptcy, making the increase even more appalling.
http://modeducation.blogspot.com/2011/01/2010-rich-got-much-richer-and-poor-got.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ModernSchool+%28Modern+School%29
Wednesday, January 5, 2011
America’s disdain for its children
By Valerie Strauss
Americans don’t really think very much of their children. Not really.
Yes, we love our own children, and sometimes the kid next door. But a look at the education world as we enter 2011 reveals how little we really care about childhood and the importance of creating the conditions in which young people can grow and learn in safe and secure and smart environments.
If we did actually give a hoot about kids:
*We would never tolerate a poverty rate among children of 21 percent.
That’s one in five kids who live in poverty, or nearly 15 million children in the United States who live in families with incomes below the federal poverty level, currently pegged at $22,050 a year for a family of four.
And that, of course, doesn’t include the kids who live in families of four who make $22,051 a year. Or $22,052. In fact, research shows that families need an income of about twice the poverty level to cover basic costs, so at that rate, 42 percent of American children live at or close enough to the poverty level so that basics aren’t being covered.
*We would never pretend that any single institution, especially public schools, can overcome the problems caused by a life in poverty. Reformers would stop staying that citing poverty as a problem is “an excuse.”
Don’t, please, write me and tell me that I am offering teachers an excuse not to work hard. You know I’m not.
Acknowledging that poverty matters means that we have to counter its effects when children come to school -- making sure they eat, can see, hear, aren’t exhausted – and more broadly, address the causes of poverty on a societal level.
*We would stop our hypocrisy over standardized tests.
On one hand we admit that they are too rudimentary to be used for any high-stakes decisions.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in 2009 at the National Education Association’s annual conference: “I understand that tests are far from perfect and that it is unfair to reduce the complex, nuanced work of teaching to a simple multiple choice exam. Test scores alone should never drive evaluation, compensation or tenure decisions. That would never make sense."
And on the other, we use them for high-stakes decisions anyway.
When the Los Angeles Times published so-called “value added” test scores to rate teachers in the city’s public schools last summer, Duncan said, “What’s there to hide? In education, we’ve been scared to talk about success."
*We would not demonize teachers, but rather treat them as professionals.
This means paying them a professional salary, ensuring that they have professional training (not a summer crash course), giving them a large role in what happens in their own classrooms, and finding fair ways to evaluate teachers so that those who don’t belong in a classroom can be removed.
*We would stop thinking that we can tell anything about really young kids by subjecting them to silly tests and recognize the value of learning through play. Quality pre-kindergarten would be a national priority.
*We would stop underfunding public school systems.
We hear plenty about how much public money is being wasted, and, certainly, one can always find places where it is. But the bigger problem is that public systems are being starved. Some systems have cut out a day of school each week because they can’t afford it, and there is talk in California about cutting an entire month out of the public school calendar.
This is nothing but sickening.
*We would never allow the public school system to be dependent on the good will of private citizens or foundations.
*We would stop pretending that charter schools are the be-all and end-all of public education.
Yes, yes, some of them are tremendous schools. But most of them aren’t any better than their local traditional public school, and many have less “accountability” than traditional schools, but you couldn’t tell that by listening to some school reformers and wealthy funders.
*We would stop pretending that teachers unions are the cause of all of the ills of public education, and accept the common-sense refutation that the problems are the same in states without teachers unions. You don’t have to love unions to accept this reality.
*We would really try to consider what kids need and think.
For example, we know that for biological reasons, teenagers fall asleep later at night, and one study showed that students attending high schools with later start times were less likely to report being sleepy during the day. But we stick to early start times anyway.
*We would remember that the public school system is our most glorious civic institution. Yes, it needs to be improved, but not in the way we are doing it now. We would, in fact, inject humanity into public schooling. Somehow we’ve let that slip away.
Add up all
From the Washington Post's, Answer sheets:http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/charter-schools/americas-disdain-for-its-child.html
Americans don’t really think very much of their children. Not really.
Yes, we love our own children, and sometimes the kid next door. But a look at the education world as we enter 2011 reveals how little we really care about childhood and the importance of creating the conditions in which young people can grow and learn in safe and secure and smart environments.
If we did actually give a hoot about kids:
*We would never tolerate a poverty rate among children of 21 percent.
That’s one in five kids who live in poverty, or nearly 15 million children in the United States who live in families with incomes below the federal poverty level, currently pegged at $22,050 a year for a family of four.
And that, of course, doesn’t include the kids who live in families of four who make $22,051 a year. Or $22,052. In fact, research shows that families need an income of about twice the poverty level to cover basic costs, so at that rate, 42 percent of American children live at or close enough to the poverty level so that basics aren’t being covered.
*We would never pretend that any single institution, especially public schools, can overcome the problems caused by a life in poverty. Reformers would stop staying that citing poverty as a problem is “an excuse.”
Don’t, please, write me and tell me that I am offering teachers an excuse not to work hard. You know I’m not.
Acknowledging that poverty matters means that we have to counter its effects when children come to school -- making sure they eat, can see, hear, aren’t exhausted – and more broadly, address the causes of poverty on a societal level.
*We would stop our hypocrisy over standardized tests.
On one hand we admit that they are too rudimentary to be used for any high-stakes decisions.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in 2009 at the National Education Association’s annual conference: “I understand that tests are far from perfect and that it is unfair to reduce the complex, nuanced work of teaching to a simple multiple choice exam. Test scores alone should never drive evaluation, compensation or tenure decisions. That would never make sense."
And on the other, we use them for high-stakes decisions anyway.
When the Los Angeles Times published so-called “value added” test scores to rate teachers in the city’s public schools last summer, Duncan said, “What’s there to hide? In education, we’ve been scared to talk about success."
*We would not demonize teachers, but rather treat them as professionals.
This means paying them a professional salary, ensuring that they have professional training (not a summer crash course), giving them a large role in what happens in their own classrooms, and finding fair ways to evaluate teachers so that those who don’t belong in a classroom can be removed.
*We would stop thinking that we can tell anything about really young kids by subjecting them to silly tests and recognize the value of learning through play. Quality pre-kindergarten would be a national priority.
*We would stop underfunding public school systems.
We hear plenty about how much public money is being wasted, and, certainly, one can always find places where it is. But the bigger problem is that public systems are being starved. Some systems have cut out a day of school each week because they can’t afford it, and there is talk in California about cutting an entire month out of the public school calendar.
This is nothing but sickening.
*We would never allow the public school system to be dependent on the good will of private citizens or foundations.
*We would stop pretending that charter schools are the be-all and end-all of public education.
Yes, yes, some of them are tremendous schools. But most of them aren’t any better than their local traditional public school, and many have less “accountability” than traditional schools, but you couldn’t tell that by listening to some school reformers and wealthy funders.
*We would stop pretending that teachers unions are the cause of all of the ills of public education, and accept the common-sense refutation that the problems are the same in states without teachers unions. You don’t have to love unions to accept this reality.
*We would really try to consider what kids need and think.
For example, we know that for biological reasons, teenagers fall asleep later at night, and one study showed that students attending high schools with later start times were less likely to report being sleepy during the day. But we stick to early start times anyway.
*We would remember that the public school system is our most glorious civic institution. Yes, it needs to be improved, but not in the way we are doing it now. We would, in fact, inject humanity into public schooling. Somehow we’ve let that slip away.
Add up all
From the Washington Post's, Answer sheets:http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/charter-schools/americas-disdain-for-its-child.html
Tuesday, January 4, 2011
Public Executions or Public Education?
Last I looked Florida was ranked 16th (nationaly) in what it spends on prisons and 50th on what it spends on education. -cpg
From the blog, Modern Schools
By Mike Dunn
Cutting the Death Penalty Would Save California $1 Billion in 5 Years
According to the ACLU, holding one person on death row costs taxpayers $90,000 per year over and above the cost of keeping that inmate in the general population.
The state spends $10.9 million on each capital trial
California spends as much per year pursuing executions as it would cost to hire 2,500 teachers
Of course these are impressive numbers and should be sufficient to piss off most people, especially in light of the fact that murder rates have not gone done. Clearly we should have more teachers and pay them better and we should abolish the death penalty. But it is a cynical and simplistic analysis to criticize the death penalty from such a cost-benefit perspective.
The death penalty is state sanctioned revenge, and as such is the legitimized manifestation of a revenge fantasy shared by many. Kill the bad guys! This is perhaps the main reason for its popular support. The victim of the death penalty is transformed into a beast by the media prior to trial, thus increasing public empathy for the prosecution and its lust for revenge. Never mind that the victim is often innocent and almost always poor, at least justice was served (maybe)!
Why do Americans have so much desire for revenge, if not for their own sense of being wronged? Of course, we have been wronged, repeatedly and legally, by our bosses, politicians and the ruling elite (and occasionally illegally, too, by street criminals or white collar crooks). We are also made to believe that society is filled with dangerous predators who might attack us or a loved one without warning and that each execution miraculously makes us safer by ridding the world of one more of these monsters. Therefore, support for the death penalty is due to a sense of powerlessness (and the misperception that something is being done about it).
Yet it is the state that decides what is or is not a crime and who should be punished. Those who cause injury and death to their employees by emphasizing profit over safety are considered good businessmen. Those who kill civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan to protect the interests of oil and arms producers are considered good soldiers. People who die because of lack of health care or pollution in their communities are simply the unfortunate victims of an otherwise legitimate system in which everyone can succeed if they only play by the rules and work hard. (Apparently these poor souls just weren’t working hard enough and certainly no one should be punished for their deaths). And those with good lawyers who can get evidence, witnesses or jurors thrown out are often set free, even if they actually did the crime.
Schools Good, Jails Bad
A common mantra on the left is “Money for schools, not for prisons (or wars, or bailouts).” Of course this sentiment is understandable when education budgets are constantly slashed, while trillions are spent on Wall Street bailouts, wars, and incarcerating more people than any other country in the world. However, the logic behind this comparison is that if money is available for wars, banks and prisons, then money should also available to educate those who will manage the wars, banks and prisons of the future. What kind of argument is it to oppose war because of the financial cost, or because some are denied the right to profit from it, rather than because it involves the slaughter of humans?
Likewise, why oppose the death penalty because it is expensive, rather than because it kills [often innocent] people? Punishment for crimes (violent or otherwise) does not cause those crimes to go away or provide any reparations for those victimized. The rich and powerful remain rich and powerful, while the poor remain poor, and crimes continue to occur.
Why not oppose the death penalty and prisons because they help keep the lower classes low and the ruling class in power? Consider that the death penalty is the most extreme expression of state power over its citizens, and a constant reminder of what could happen if one steps too far out of line, or if one is blamed for doing so. Yet lesser degrees of state violence and punishment are routinely meted out to keep the rabble in line (e.g., against protesting workers and students in France, Ireland, Greece, Spain, and England).
Some argue that a spending more money on education keeps people out of prison, so perhaps the slogan, “Money for schools, not for prison,” is indeed relevant. However, it is not a poverty of education that causes people to be locked up, but just plain poverty. Poor people get stuck with overworked and underpaid public defenders who are less able to get them off than high priced celebrity lawyers. They are more likely to accept plea bargains, even when innocent, because they lack the money and hope to fight. They are more likely to live in poor neighborhoods with high crime rates and high police presence and thus are more likely to be arrested in the first place.
What about the staggering illiteracy rates of prisoners? Education can certainly help people learn to read. However, their inability to read and write is more a product of growing up poor, than a failure of the education system. Poverty creates an achievement gap before kids have even started school and worsens the achievement gap as they move through the system. Rather than diverting tax dollars from prisons to schools, a better solution would be to divert wealth from the rich to the rest of us.
http://modeducation.blogspot.com/2011/01/public-executions-or-public-education.html
From the blog, Modern Schools
By Mike Dunn
Cutting the Death Penalty Would Save California $1 Billion in 5 Years
According to the ACLU, holding one person on death row costs taxpayers $90,000 per year over and above the cost of keeping that inmate in the general population.
The state spends $10.9 million on each capital trial
California spends as much per year pursuing executions as it would cost to hire 2,500 teachers
Of course these are impressive numbers and should be sufficient to piss off most people, especially in light of the fact that murder rates have not gone done. Clearly we should have more teachers and pay them better and we should abolish the death penalty. But it is a cynical and simplistic analysis to criticize the death penalty from such a cost-benefit perspective.
The death penalty is state sanctioned revenge, and as such is the legitimized manifestation of a revenge fantasy shared by many. Kill the bad guys! This is perhaps the main reason for its popular support. The victim of the death penalty is transformed into a beast by the media prior to trial, thus increasing public empathy for the prosecution and its lust for revenge. Never mind that the victim is often innocent and almost always poor, at least justice was served (maybe)!
Why do Americans have so much desire for revenge, if not for their own sense of being wronged? Of course, we have been wronged, repeatedly and legally, by our bosses, politicians and the ruling elite (and occasionally illegally, too, by street criminals or white collar crooks). We are also made to believe that society is filled with dangerous predators who might attack us or a loved one without warning and that each execution miraculously makes us safer by ridding the world of one more of these monsters. Therefore, support for the death penalty is due to a sense of powerlessness (and the misperception that something is being done about it).
Yet it is the state that decides what is or is not a crime and who should be punished. Those who cause injury and death to their employees by emphasizing profit over safety are considered good businessmen. Those who kill civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan to protect the interests of oil and arms producers are considered good soldiers. People who die because of lack of health care or pollution in their communities are simply the unfortunate victims of an otherwise legitimate system in which everyone can succeed if they only play by the rules and work hard. (Apparently these poor souls just weren’t working hard enough and certainly no one should be punished for their deaths). And those with good lawyers who can get evidence, witnesses or jurors thrown out are often set free, even if they actually did the crime.
Schools Good, Jails Bad
A common mantra on the left is “Money for schools, not for prisons (or wars, or bailouts).” Of course this sentiment is understandable when education budgets are constantly slashed, while trillions are spent on Wall Street bailouts, wars, and incarcerating more people than any other country in the world. However, the logic behind this comparison is that if money is available for wars, banks and prisons, then money should also available to educate those who will manage the wars, banks and prisons of the future. What kind of argument is it to oppose war because of the financial cost, or because some are denied the right to profit from it, rather than because it involves the slaughter of humans?
Likewise, why oppose the death penalty because it is expensive, rather than because it kills [often innocent] people? Punishment for crimes (violent or otherwise) does not cause those crimes to go away or provide any reparations for those victimized. The rich and powerful remain rich and powerful, while the poor remain poor, and crimes continue to occur.
Why not oppose the death penalty and prisons because they help keep the lower classes low and the ruling class in power? Consider that the death penalty is the most extreme expression of state power over its citizens, and a constant reminder of what could happen if one steps too far out of line, or if one is blamed for doing so. Yet lesser degrees of state violence and punishment are routinely meted out to keep the rabble in line (e.g., against protesting workers and students in France, Ireland, Greece, Spain, and England).
Some argue that a spending more money on education keeps people out of prison, so perhaps the slogan, “Money for schools, not for prison,” is indeed relevant. However, it is not a poverty of education that causes people to be locked up, but just plain poverty. Poor people get stuck with overworked and underpaid public defenders who are less able to get them off than high priced celebrity lawyers. They are more likely to accept plea bargains, even when innocent, because they lack the money and hope to fight. They are more likely to live in poor neighborhoods with high crime rates and high police presence and thus are more likely to be arrested in the first place.
What about the staggering illiteracy rates of prisoners? Education can certainly help people learn to read. However, their inability to read and write is more a product of growing up poor, than a failure of the education system. Poverty creates an achievement gap before kids have even started school and worsens the achievement gap as they move through the system. Rather than diverting tax dollars from prisons to schools, a better solution would be to divert wealth from the rich to the rest of us.
http://modeducation.blogspot.com/2011/01/public-executions-or-public-education.html
Wednesday, December 29, 2010
Slashing Education is Good for America
From the blog Modern Teacher
Public education always has and continues to be a means of social control, one with the specific function of perpetuating a status quo in which a tiny minority rules over the overwhelming majority in order to sequester increasing amounts of wealth. The hysteria over the deplorable state of our schools is a deliberate deception, as schools never really got worse at this function. They still reproduce a well-educated elite minority and vast numbers of poorly educated, compliant workers with just enough training to run their machines and offices and purchase their goods.
One goal of this deception is to convince the public that it is in their best interests to relinquish local control, and allow private companies to take over and turn a profit. Bill Gates, Arne Duncan, Michael Bloomberg, Broad, Walton, and others promulgate this trickery by repeatedly reminding us about terrible test scores and graduation rates, blaming it on recalcitrant and selfish unions, and promising us perfection if only more charter schools and corporate management were allowed. What’s good for Bill Gates is good for America.
Divide and Conquer
However, the deception is not just about privatization. As more and more tax dollars get diverted to wars, tax cuts and corporate bailouts, there is less available for social services, like education, and there needs to be a scapegoat other than Halliburton, Goldman Sachs and Citigroup. As children become more impoverished and consequently do poorer in school, and as schools lose funding and consequently provide fewer services, the schools and teachers (and occasionally the parents) get the blame for low student achievement, rather than the ruling elite who are the real culprits. It is classic divide and conquer: the public continues to support their bosses and the wealthy, some dreaming of joining their ranks, while attacking members of their own class, like teachers and other government workers, under the mistaken perception that they are the ones responsible for their misery. What’s good for Wall Street is good for America.
Downsizing and Streamlining
A more immediate goal of slashing education budgets is to obtain the same productivity from educators for less money, thus freeing up tax dollars for more important needs (like bailouts and tax cuts for the wealthy). The same numbers of children must still be taught. The same delusional outcomes are still required, such as 100% proficiency on NCLB exams by 2014. Yet all this must occur with fewer teachers, custodians, nurses, librarians and money. Worse, those who are lucky enough to still have their jobs are expected to do more despite this reduction in funding. They must do their own jobs, plus those of their former colleagues who were fired, furloughed or not replaced. Additionally, they must work harder and longer to create and implement new programs that are supposed to raise test scores. What’s good for the boss, is good for America.
Business as Usual
The transfer of wealth from the public to the ruling elite (through tax cuts, subsidies and bailouts, all financed by cutting programs that help the poor and working class) should be seen as evidence of the true nature of our economy and the political system that serves it. The interests of banks, speculators and the war machine are far more urgent and necessary than the needs of regular people, especially teachers and students. After all, both parties have supported continued military funding, corporate bailouts and tax cuts for the rich, while allowing or promoting cuts to education, Medicare, food stamps, and social security. The notion of political expediency, the “stalemate” in D.C., the “necessary” compromises that must occur as a “natural” part of our political system, are all cover-ups: the corporate rulers run the show and make the decisions. Politicians who even consider not playing by their rules not only lose their office, they lose all hope of a cushy corporate job after being termed out. Their interests are the same as corporate interests.
http://modeducation.blogspot.com/2010/12/slashing-education-is-good-for-america.html?spref=fb
Public education always has and continues to be a means of social control, one with the specific function of perpetuating a status quo in which a tiny minority rules over the overwhelming majority in order to sequester increasing amounts of wealth. The hysteria over the deplorable state of our schools is a deliberate deception, as schools never really got worse at this function. They still reproduce a well-educated elite minority and vast numbers of poorly educated, compliant workers with just enough training to run their machines and offices and purchase their goods.
One goal of this deception is to convince the public that it is in their best interests to relinquish local control, and allow private companies to take over and turn a profit. Bill Gates, Arne Duncan, Michael Bloomberg, Broad, Walton, and others promulgate this trickery by repeatedly reminding us about terrible test scores and graduation rates, blaming it on recalcitrant and selfish unions, and promising us perfection if only more charter schools and corporate management were allowed. What’s good for Bill Gates is good for America.
Divide and Conquer
However, the deception is not just about privatization. As more and more tax dollars get diverted to wars, tax cuts and corporate bailouts, there is less available for social services, like education, and there needs to be a scapegoat other than Halliburton, Goldman Sachs and Citigroup. As children become more impoverished and consequently do poorer in school, and as schools lose funding and consequently provide fewer services, the schools and teachers (and occasionally the parents) get the blame for low student achievement, rather than the ruling elite who are the real culprits. It is classic divide and conquer: the public continues to support their bosses and the wealthy, some dreaming of joining their ranks, while attacking members of their own class, like teachers and other government workers, under the mistaken perception that they are the ones responsible for their misery. What’s good for Wall Street is good for America.
Downsizing and Streamlining
A more immediate goal of slashing education budgets is to obtain the same productivity from educators for less money, thus freeing up tax dollars for more important needs (like bailouts and tax cuts for the wealthy). The same numbers of children must still be taught. The same delusional outcomes are still required, such as 100% proficiency on NCLB exams by 2014. Yet all this must occur with fewer teachers, custodians, nurses, librarians and money. Worse, those who are lucky enough to still have their jobs are expected to do more despite this reduction in funding. They must do their own jobs, plus those of their former colleagues who were fired, furloughed or not replaced. Additionally, they must work harder and longer to create and implement new programs that are supposed to raise test scores. What’s good for the boss, is good for America.
Business as Usual
The transfer of wealth from the public to the ruling elite (through tax cuts, subsidies and bailouts, all financed by cutting programs that help the poor and working class) should be seen as evidence of the true nature of our economy and the political system that serves it. The interests of banks, speculators and the war machine are far more urgent and necessary than the needs of regular people, especially teachers and students. After all, both parties have supported continued military funding, corporate bailouts and tax cuts for the rich, while allowing or promoting cuts to education, Medicare, food stamps, and social security. The notion of political expediency, the “stalemate” in D.C., the “necessary” compromises that must occur as a “natural” part of our political system, are all cover-ups: the corporate rulers run the show and make the decisions. Politicians who even consider not playing by their rules not only lose their office, they lose all hope of a cushy corporate job after being termed out. Their interests are the same as corporate interests.
http://modeducation.blogspot.com/2010/12/slashing-education-is-good-for-america.html?spref=fb
Saturday, December 25, 2010
It's not teachers, it's poverty
"There are three kinds of lies; lies, damn lies, and statistics."--Mark Twain
There has been much talk about how the United States is falling behind the rest of the world when it comes to education, however when you factor out poverty something where sadly we are one of the leaders in the world with over 20% of our children living in it, we do a lot better. Teacher quality is just a drop in the bucket of education problems.
Follow the link to the article to learn more. -cpg
http://nasspblogs.org/principaldifference/2010/12/pisa_its_poverty_not_stupid_1.html
There has been much talk about how the United States is falling behind the rest of the world when it comes to education, however when you factor out poverty something where sadly we are one of the leaders in the world with over 20% of our children living in it, we do a lot better. Teacher quality is just a drop in the bucket of education problems.
Follow the link to the article to learn more. -cpg
http://nasspblogs.org/principaldifference/2010/12/pisa_its_poverty_not_stupid_1.html
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
Rick Scott's education reform heads in wrong direction
Those seeking to steer the course of education reform in Florida, which includes many of Governor elect Rick Scott’s education team, would have the public believe several falsehoods.
Poverty is just an excuse. The truth is, poverty is a huge issue. Kids that come from homes with absentee parents, where a lack of food and violence are constant factors often perform poorly in school. Quite frankly they have more serious issues to deal with than learning the capital of Alaska and dividing two digit numbers.
Class size doesn’t matter: Class size is extremely important. It allows students to gain more valuable face time with their teachers and fewer kids get lost in the crowd. The Heritage Foundation (Jeb Bush’s education think tank) recently touted all of the great progress that Florida’s schools have experienced over the last decade but completely ignored the fact that most of the progress has occurred since 2003 when the class size amendment began to be phased in.
Test scores are the way to measure student learning. Test scores should be a component of education not the end all be all that they have become. Some kids don’t test well, some kids have bad days, and no kid should be tested at one time over a whole year, or several years’ worth of material.
Reform MUST be driven by external measures such as comprehensive tests. Assessments are most useful and reliable when they are closely connected to classroom instruction. Furthermore just who is going to get rich creating and scoring these tests? The Bush family profited greatly from the F-Cat and No Child Left Behind.
Classroom experience doesn’t matter. Most teachers don’t hit their stride, where they are most effective, till they are several years in. Unfortunately about half of all teachers do not last five years.
Tenure provides teachers with lifetime jobs. Teachers do not have "jobs for life"; they have due process and what’s wrong with allowing professionals who sacrifice so much having at least that.
Charter schools are deserving of public funds and support. Actually, charters have not been shown to have better test scores, on average, than regular public schools, their teachers aren't certified and they pick and choose who they allow in and retain.
Data must drive our children’s education. How about having a child’s ability, aptitude and desire drive their education; that might prove more effective.
Vouchers give parents choice. Vouchers also provide welfare for the well off and take much needed resources from cash starved public schools. The answer at least in the short term should be to improve public schools, not further erode them by siphoning money away.
Performance Pay for the most deserving teachers. This sounds great in a vacuum, unfortunately when put in practice it is arbitrary and hard to quantify. Somebody way smarter than me would have to come up with a way for this to be done fairly if it is to be both effective and meaningful.
Advanced degrees do not matter. I find it ironic that in every profession but education, do most people feel the need for more education is a good thing, ironic and disingenuous that is.
Improving teacher quality is the number one issue facing our schools. Improving teacher quality should always be an issue, but as long as we keep doing things the way we do now; we will never have meaningful improvement. Teachers don’t set the policies that put them and their children in no win situations and teachers did not choose to erode discipline nor bury themselves with mountains of superfluous paper work. Teachers did not decide to practically eliminate the teaching of the trades, skills and arts and put every child, regardless of aptitude, desire and ability into a one size fits all curriculum either. Yet teachers, not the policy makers, politicians, absentee parents, the public and children devoid of discipline or a work ethic are the ones who bear the brunt of the responsibility for the problems in education.
Education without a doubt needs to improve but many of the ideas put forth by the “education reformers” will do more harm than good, and serve interests other than schools and children. The truth is it wouldn’t take reinventing the wheel, breaking the bank or demonizing teachers to make things dramatically improve. Bring back discipline, develop alternative, rigorous and realistic curriculums, that play to children’s strengths, abilities and desires, and then stop overloading teachers, try giving them autonomy and encouraging creativity instead.
Governor Scott I can make the time if you need some help, unlike most of your education team the only special interests I serve are our children and the teachers who toil selflessly day in and day out.
Above was inspired by (and a tad bit was borrowed from) the Blog Lessons Learned: http://lessonslearnedteacher.blogspot.com/
Poverty is just an excuse. The truth is, poverty is a huge issue. Kids that come from homes with absentee parents, where a lack of food and violence are constant factors often perform poorly in school. Quite frankly they have more serious issues to deal with than learning the capital of Alaska and dividing two digit numbers.
Class size doesn’t matter: Class size is extremely important. It allows students to gain more valuable face time with their teachers and fewer kids get lost in the crowd. The Heritage Foundation (Jeb Bush’s education think tank) recently touted all of the great progress that Florida’s schools have experienced over the last decade but completely ignored the fact that most of the progress has occurred since 2003 when the class size amendment began to be phased in.
Test scores are the way to measure student learning. Test scores should be a component of education not the end all be all that they have become. Some kids don’t test well, some kids have bad days, and no kid should be tested at one time over a whole year, or several years’ worth of material.
Reform MUST be driven by external measures such as comprehensive tests. Assessments are most useful and reliable when they are closely connected to classroom instruction. Furthermore just who is going to get rich creating and scoring these tests? The Bush family profited greatly from the F-Cat and No Child Left Behind.
Classroom experience doesn’t matter. Most teachers don’t hit their stride, where they are most effective, till they are several years in. Unfortunately about half of all teachers do not last five years.
Tenure provides teachers with lifetime jobs. Teachers do not have "jobs for life"; they have due process and what’s wrong with allowing professionals who sacrifice so much having at least that.
Charter schools are deserving of public funds and support. Actually, charters have not been shown to have better test scores, on average, than regular public schools, their teachers aren't certified and they pick and choose who they allow in and retain.
Data must drive our children’s education. How about having a child’s ability, aptitude and desire drive their education; that might prove more effective.
Vouchers give parents choice. Vouchers also provide welfare for the well off and take much needed resources from cash starved public schools. The answer at least in the short term should be to improve public schools, not further erode them by siphoning money away.
Performance Pay for the most deserving teachers. This sounds great in a vacuum, unfortunately when put in practice it is arbitrary and hard to quantify. Somebody way smarter than me would have to come up with a way for this to be done fairly if it is to be both effective and meaningful.
Advanced degrees do not matter. I find it ironic that in every profession but education, do most people feel the need for more education is a good thing, ironic and disingenuous that is.
Improving teacher quality is the number one issue facing our schools. Improving teacher quality should always be an issue, but as long as we keep doing things the way we do now; we will never have meaningful improvement. Teachers don’t set the policies that put them and their children in no win situations and teachers did not choose to erode discipline nor bury themselves with mountains of superfluous paper work. Teachers did not decide to practically eliminate the teaching of the trades, skills and arts and put every child, regardless of aptitude, desire and ability into a one size fits all curriculum either. Yet teachers, not the policy makers, politicians, absentee parents, the public and children devoid of discipline or a work ethic are the ones who bear the brunt of the responsibility for the problems in education.
Education without a doubt needs to improve but many of the ideas put forth by the “education reformers” will do more harm than good, and serve interests other than schools and children. The truth is it wouldn’t take reinventing the wheel, breaking the bank or demonizing teachers to make things dramatically improve. Bring back discipline, develop alternative, rigorous and realistic curriculums, that play to children’s strengths, abilities and desires, and then stop overloading teachers, try giving them autonomy and encouraging creativity instead.
Governor Scott I can make the time if you need some help, unlike most of your education team the only special interests I serve are our children and the teachers who toil selflessly day in and day out.
Above was inspired by (and a tad bit was borrowed from) the Blog Lessons Learned: http://lessonslearnedteacher.blogspot.com/
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