During the years (2001 - 2008) that Arne Duncan was CEO of Chicago's public schools, he implemented programs that resulted in the firing of hundreds of veteran teachers and the privatization of more than 70 public schools, mostly through controversial charter school programs. Duncan's years saw the most massive privatization of public school assets in the 175-year history of public education in Chicago. One of the smaller examples of that, was Duncan's decision to out source the work of trained physical education and health education teachers to the "Save-A-Life Foundation." Subsequent investigations showed that Save-A-Life was fraudulent, but Duncan made no effort, following the revelations regarding the foundation, to retrieve the public money he had authorized be paid to Save-A-Life. Substance photo by George N. Schmidt.
Jerry Bracey--America's lead progressive expert/voice on education--had just finished this column when he died on Oct. 20. (Open Left memorial diary here.) He had planned to release it at his Huffington Post blog on Halloween. Hence the rattling skeletons theme. It has published previously by Susan Ohanian and Substance News, and is republished here with permission.Halloween season is an appropriate time to talk about rattling skeletons in the closet. US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan appears to have a noisy one dating from his years running the Chicago Public Schools.
This same daughter died in a car crash in 1992 after which Spizzirri started the nonprofit Save-a-Life Foundation (SALF) whose charter was to teach first aid skills like CPR and the Heimlich maneuver to school children using EMTs and firemen as in-class trainers. According to Spizzirri, her daughter was the victim of a hit-and-run driver and bled to death because the ambulance took a half hour to reach the scene and no one at the scene knew how to stanch the flow of blood. Spizzirri claimed her mother's grief motivated her to start the foundation which attracted political and financial support, including about $9 million in IL state and federal dollars. Famed doctors Peter Safar (who developed CPR) and Henry J. Heimlich (known for the maneuver) served on SALF's medical advisory board.
But official records indicate that the daughter's alcohol level was twice the legal limit, that she flipped the car, and died a half hour after reaching a hospital. Confronted with these facts by Chicago TV investigative reporter Chuck Goudie in 2006, Spizzirri terminated the interview and stomped off the set. Over the next year, Goudie did another three reports raising more questions about SALF.
Those stories appear to have been the first time a Chicago reporter did any fact checking about the foundation. For instance, in an uncritical 2002 Sun-Times article, Spizzirri claimed that her foundation trained 400,000 Illinois school children in 2001 alone. Do the math. In a 180-day school year, that's 2,222 children per day.
(I would have done this myself, but I knew that Jeff could do a much better job. - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)
Quick! Who is your go-to expert on American education policy?
In a lot of political arguments, that's frequently the crux of the matter, isn't it? On the economy, you go to Robert Reich or George Will. For the Middle East, Juan Cole or Max Boot.
But when you're looking for opposing sides in the debate on America's public schools, the initial appearance is that, well, there aren't any opposing sides. For sure, there are differences of opinion on specifics that people often argue about with great passion - whether to give out school vouchers so students can attend private schools, whether to teach intelligent design in science classes. But among political leaders in Washington DC and prominent pundits in the MSM, there's a startling uniformity of belief about the state of American education - an over-arching narrative that provides a context that is rarely disputed even when people argue about the merits of year-round schools or whether or not to teach phonics.
For instance, when you look at the education policies that Republican presidential candidate John McCain was pushing for in his campaign, you'll find that these are the exact same policies - school accountability based on standardized test scores, merit pay for teachers, charter schools to compete with public schools -- that are being implemented by the Obama administration. And when the Bush administration's Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings passed the policy baton to the Obama administration's Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, she welcomed him as a "fellow reformer" of what's wrong with US schools.
The reason for this is that, for decades, the popular perspective on American education has been dominated, almost exclusively, by a single, simple narrative. Whether you listen to E.J. Dionne or Lou Dobbs, America's schools are "failing." American education is in a "crisis," we've been told again and again. Our students can no longer "compete" against the students of other nations in the race to, um, whatever we're all supposed to be racing toward. Educators themselves are seen as part of the problem. And only the leading business captains or the famed entrepreneur dé jeur - such as Bill Gates or Louis Gerstner - can possible know what to do to fix our "broken" schools.
For years, the most prominent and powerful antidote to this contagion of lock-step thinking has been the writings of Gerald Bracey. Like the impertinent youth who persistently remarked that the emperor had no clothes, Bracey wrote a different story about our schools, what their strengths and weaknesses are, and what was really true and not true about what was being said about them. In his books, his recurring column in Kappan magazine, and his diaries at HuffingtonPost, he argued persuasively - with actual facts and steel-eyed reason - that the conventional wisdom about our nation's public schools was not only false; it was a cover-up for what is, at the heart, a problem of our democracy.
Unfortunately, Dr. Bracey has left us. And as commenter craigspinks lamented at washingtonpost.com, "Who will take his indispensable place?"
A new report, ""Multiple Choice: Charter School Performance in 16 States.""(pdf) (pdf executive summery / pdf press release), from Stanford University's Center for Research on Education Outcomes, or CREDO, finds that charter schools significantly underperform overall compared to the traditional public schools they are supposed to improve on--a major embarrassment that will no doubt be ignored, just as all evidence of privatization and corporatization are ignored, especially since Obama's basketball buddy and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is a huge charter school booster.
Here's the graphic representation of results:
And the accompanying text:
The Quality Curve results are sobering:
• Of the 2403 charter schools reflected on the curve, 46 percent of charter schools have math gains that are statistically indistinguishable from the average growth among their TPS comparisons.
• Charters whose math growth exceeded their TPS equivalent growth by a significant amount account for 17 percent of the total.
• The remaining group, 37 percent of charter schools, posted math gains that were significantly below what their students would have seen if they enrolled in local traditional public schools instead.
Nore from Democracy Now!, Gerald Bracey and Rethinking Schools on the flip.
At DKos, teacherken has a rather frightening new diary (h/t dkmich), "Schools - are we headed for national tests and standards?", in which he lays out various bits of evidence, recent statements of President Obama and Secretary of Education Duncan, and concludes that the answer is "yes". He then asks, what exactly will these standards aim at producing--a happy hive of worker bees?
He raises a whole host of important questions, to which I want to add one that Gerald Bracey has repeatedly pointed to, as I've noted before: the professed purpose of workforce development and increased US competitiveness is totally bogus. The US is already #1 in competitiveness, while other countries where students outscore ours--such as Japan--have worse economic problems than we do. Furthermore, we already produce a workforce that is underemployed for its skill level.
I am all in favor improved education, but (a) we need a broader concept of what education is for--as teacherken argues, and (b) we need to improve our entire economic system so that it makes full use of the workforce we already have, and has jobs for the workers of the future we are intent on educating today. These two points imply a very different approach to education and our economic future than Obama appears to have in mind--and, most troubling of all, there appears to be virtually no public discussion of these very important issues.
Quotes from teacherken and further discussion on the flip.
In part one, I presented the background for this diary, a partial framework for understanding the battle of elite conservative and neo-liberal "reformers" to take over education. With that background in mind, let us consider four columns written anmd published at Huffington Post by Gerald Bracey, America's leading mythbuster on the education front, whose been on that job since 1991.
Bracey's first column looked back at the severely limited public debate preceding the choice, which had virtually shut out the possible nomination of Linda Darling-Hammond, an actual life-long educator who appeared to have the insider track as head of Obama's transition team on education. The next takes aim at the myth of educational crisis. The last two look at the utter cluelessness of Obama and his eventual choice, his basketball buddy Arne Duncan.
Compared to Admiral Blair or Sanjay Gupta, Obama's pick for Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan may not seem too bad. He hasn't been responsible for enabling any massacres that we know about, and he hasn't lied through his teeth on national TV that we know of, either-yet, at least.
Sure, those are pretty low standards, but standards are for kids and for teachers, not for "education reformers," especially those in the upper circles of Versailles. So, like I said, not too bad, by Bush-lite standards. And Bush-lite seems to be pretty much exactly what Arne Duncan is. All sorts of failed conservative ideas-these about dismantling public education in the name of "reform"-tricked out a little bit differently than the last round of failed conservative ideas, just to look "new" and "innovative" and "outside the box" and whatever new buzzwords they've come up with this year.
"Hey, didn't those guys lose in November?" You ask. No. They're the House. The House never loses, they smile.
Duncan is most decidedly NOT an educator. He's a lawyer. But Duncan has this extraordinary qualification: He's Obama's pick-up basketball buddy from Hyde Park.
I can't make this up.
Not that Duncan hasn't mucked about in the educational system. Chicago Boss Richie Daley put this guy in charge of the horror show called Chicago Public Schools where Duncan turned a bad system into a REALLY bad system.
And Obama knows it. Indeed, although he plays roundball with Duncan (who was captain of the Harvard basketball team), State Senator Obama was one of the only local Chicago officials who refused to send his kids to Duncan's public schools. (The Obamas sent Sasha and Malia to the Laboratory School, where Duncan's methods are derided as dangerously ludicrous.)
So, as they say in the trade, the optics are not good. And Obama's all about the optics, as we well know. So why does he go with such bad ones? Could it be his belief that no one really cares?
During the years (2001 - 2008) that Arne Duncan was CEO of Chicago's public schools, he implemented programs that resulted in the firing of hundreds of veteran teachers and the privatization of more than 70 public schools, mostly through controversial charter school programs. Duncan's years saw the most massive privatization of public school assets in the 175-year history of public education in Chicago. One of the smaller examples of that, was Duncan's decision to out source the work of trained physical education and health education teachers to the "Save-A-Life Foundation." Subsequent investigations showed that Save-A-Life was fraudulent, but Duncan made no effort, following the revelations regarding the foundation, to retrieve the public money he had authorized be paid to Save-A-Life. Substance photo by George N. Schmidt.
