While many muse as a culture we cannot continue "Waiting for Superman" to transform our schools, others expect our Teachers to be Supermen or Superwomen. Some say private school Educators are superior. Only the Instructors employed in public educational institutions are flawed. There seems to be agreement in our society; these Teachers cannot take the lead. The system, critics cry, out must change. Philanthropists proclaim they are here to save the day. Privatization is the only way to work through what has been a woeful failure. No, Administrators and the current Administration avow; Teachers are the problem. We must assess their performance and pay Educators accordingly.
As the massive propaganda campaign against American public education rolled out this week, I was immediately struck dumbfound at how so many of the elitist crowd who send their children to private school, such as "Waiting for Superman" director Davis Guggenheim, convey their heartfelt angst over the mythical "failure in American education." Although I've yet to see Guggenheim's film, I'm totally puzzled as to why he would be so emotionally absorbed by an institution that he has deliberately held at arm's length. And I'm reluctant to take much stock in NBC's "in-depth conversation" about education that has largely excluded public school educators from the center of the discussion.
So instead of focusing on all the media insanity this week, I found more interest in three other items that to me had a more sane and sensible viewpoint on school improvement.
The first, was the release of a new study by Reading Is Fundamental, Inc., the oldest and largest children's and family nonprofit literacy organization in the United States. The study, available from a link at Valerie Strauss's The Answer Sheet blog, reveals that something very simple - access to printed reading materials at an early age - can have profound effects on the literacy achievement of children.
Yesterday, Matt Yglesias posted a strongly worded rebuttal to a portion of my Left Ed diary this Sunday. Rather than continuing with the harsh push-back I posted on the QuickHit from Mark Matson, I'm going to try to see if there is some common ground that Matt and I can agree on so that there can be some concerted effort among the progressive community to do right by the nation's school kids.
First off Matt, can you and I agree on the impact that poverty and socioeconomic conditions have on children? When you say that "it's difficult to obtain unimpeachable statistical data on how to improve life outcomes for children," I hope you would at least understand that there's nothing difficult at all about concluding that poverty has a huge impact on the outcomes of children. I would hope that you understand that the most far-reaching study of influences on student achievement, the Coleman Report, concluded that out-of-school factors - such as poverty, health, and homelife - had far and away the most influence on the "life outcomes of children" and that statistically schools had only a small influence on the trajectory of children's lives.
Second, I would hope that you agree that the next most influential set of factors affecting student achievement have to do with school level factors such as having a safe place to learn and having a guaranteed and viable curriculum. And I would hope that you would agree that a "teach to the test" approach where students are drilled in a direct instruction mode to do well on reading and math high-stakes tests is anything but a viable curriculum, because that approach ignores so many other aspects of a well-rounded education - like history and the arts.
Third, I would hope that you agree that the best instructional methods should be available to all children, regardless of their socioeconomic and cultural background. I would hope that you understand that a "one size fits all" approach to teaching simply doesn't work for every child. That instruction needs to be differentiated because we all learn in the different ways. And that children from poverty deserve the same access to instructional approaches that you and I want for our children. Since children of poverty are not inherently different from our kids, are they?
Next, I would hope that you understand that the opportunity costs (a business term I'm sure you value) of pursuing false approaches to improving our nation's schools - like the charter school movement, which produces in your words "about the same" as what we are currently achieving - are something to be avoided? Especially when we know that the results of charter schools are not just "about the same" as public schools, as you maintain, but actually worse for some kids. And especially when you know that results of KIPP charter schools in particular are grossly distorted by those schools selectively and attrition rates.
Instead of hurtling down these roads to nowhere, don't you think it would be better to talk about how we should address the root causes of low achievement with universal early childhood education and better health care for kids, which we know can work? True, these are long-term solutions, but isn't every year that we spend nitpicking around the edges of real progress with proposals such as "more charter schools" yet another year lost in the work of rescuing low-achieving kids?
Finally, I would hope that you understand the true dynamics of racism. I learned a long time ago from a public school teacher in Iowa that whenever you hear about what's best for "those kids" and how "they" should be treated differently from your children that what you're hearing in actuality is the language of racism. I grew up in Texas on the tattered edge of suburban Dallas during a time when there was something called "desegregation" going on. I went to a small, all-white elementary school perched high on a caliche knob where the September winds shocked our morning flag raising into immediate furl. After we recited the Pledge of Allegiance we were informed about the "new students" that were going to be bussed from the other side of town to "our school" and how they were "different" from us. Our political leaders back then told us that it would be better if those black and brown kids kept to their own schools because those schools were what "those kids needed." Back then, in the South, those politicians were all Democrats.
Today, as Linda Darling Hammond points out, "the achievement gap between minority and white students in reading and math is larger than it was in 1988," and a "growing share of African-American and Hispanic students" now find themselves in "highly segregated apartheid schools that lack qualified teachers; up-to-date textbooks and materials; libraries, science labs and computers; and safe, adequate facilities." And once again, as I saw on the blackland praries of my childhood, we have Democratic leaders telling us to support a charter school movement, which tends to foster highly segregated schools, as numerous studies have shown.
So my last question to you Matt is what kind of Democrat are you?
In recognition of today's celebration of our nation's birthday, I was planning on writing something inspirational and patriotic. Perhaps something about how America's "noble experiment" of universal education for all, regardless of social and economic standing, epitomizes the democratic spirit of our country. I thought I would expound on how public schools present us with the perfect example of how the future of humanity relies not solely on the rights of the individual but also on a "shared effort" among everyone in a community to ensure the well-being of future generations.
I thought I would take the patriotic bond we're all feeling today as an opportunity to remind people that the functions of schools extend way beyond, as Larry Cuban puts it here, "transferring knowledge and skills from adults to children." From the early grades - where little children are taught about "taking turns, no hitting or biting, washing hands, working independently, cooperating with others who look and act different" - through the middle and upper grades that prepare students for the the workplace and citizenship. I felt today would be the perfect time to point out that public schools are a "hotbed for democracy".
While it's true that our educational system cannot right the wrongs that are inflicted on children in every corner of American society - especially in violent, impoverished cities like Chicago and conservative, rural states like Oklahoma - that does not mean that universal public education is a systemic failure. After all, businesses fail all the time and our economy is currently in shambles, but there's no broad based movement to declare capitalism a failure.
So I was getting set for an emotional appeal to acknowledge the history and value of our public schools - what they really mean to this country. And then this flashed across my monitor. Resembling the bland countenance of Kim Jong Il, here we have the nemesis to everything American public education reveres: democratic input from the citizenry, local control, education of the whole child, equality of opportunity and access. And my friends, when you see the arsonist setting your house ablaze, you'd better not pause to reflect on what the house means to you. You'd better man the fire brigade.
Similarly, my Quick Hit linking to Charles Murray's ridiculous NY Times op-ed exempting voucher schools from the same kind of accountability being used to pummel traditional public schools also drew the attention of Diane Ravitch, who quite rightly pointed out the "double standard" that "when public schools fail to raise test scores, it is a sign of their decrepitude and failure; when voucher schools fail to raise test scores, well, so what, they weren't supposed to do that."
As if on cue, charter school cheerleader Paul E. Peterson anted-up to the stupidity of school "reformist" arguments by claiming that "what makes charters so important today is not so much their current success, on average, but their long-term potential to innovate." Got that? Charter schools don't have to prove they're any good at all. It's all about "choice" and "innovation." But in the meantime, those traditional public schools had better measure up!
In the meantime, what is the track record for "innovation?" When it comes to teacher preparation - another whipping post for the reformists - not so hot. Edublogger Claus von Zastrow uses a new report from The National Research Council as evidence of the whole folly of chasing after reformist innovations:
"We spend an awful lot of time in this country debating the relative merits of 'traditional' and 'alternative' approaches to education. We'd do far better to spend our time looking for what works, whether it's new or old, sexy or boring, alternative or traditional.
The National Research Council's new report on teacher preparation bears out this point. The report's authors found that 'there is more variation within the "traditional" and "alternative" categories than there is between these categories.' What's more, they found 'no evidence that any one pathway into teaching is the best way to attract and prepare desirable candidates and guide them into the teaching force.'
And that's our biggest problem. We lack evidence to inform our ever more strident debates between new and old."
(emphasis not added)
In the meantime, the number of scandals involving those "innovative" charter schools has grown so large that there is now a new blog devoted entirely to keeping us up to date on the whole disgraceful matter. (BIG hat tip to Jim Horn.
My reason for these scattershots across the arc of the education debate is to hammer home the point that the policy ideas of the Obama Administration and other school reform enthusiasts are not based on any evidence whatsoever that any of the new "innovations" they are pushing for - charter schools, basing teacher evaluations on student test scores, alternative certification - will work.
Last week, the U.S. Senate rejected a plan that would have broken up the nation's six largest banks firms into firms that could fail without wreaking havoc on the economy. Even though the defeat reinforces Wall Street's political dominance, there is still room for a handful of other useful reforms, like banning banks from gambling with taxpayer money and protecting consumers from banker abuses. After looting our houses, banks are now pushing for the ability to bet on movie box-office receipts, and will keep trying to financialize anything they can unless Congress acts.
Wall Street calls the shots
Writing for The Nation, John Nichols details last week's Capitol Hill damage. Today's financial oligarchy, in which a handful of bigwig bankers and their lobbyists are able to write regulations and evade rules they don't like, will still be in place after the Wall Street reform bill is passed. The lesson is clear, as Nichols notes:
Whatever the final form of federal financial services reform legislation, one thing is now certain: The biggest of the big banks will still be calling the shots.
Still worth fighting for
As I emphasize for AlterNet, Congress has made a terrible mistake here, but there is still room for reform. It took President Franklin Delano Roosevelt seven years to enact his New Deal banking laws. It took even longer to reshape public opinion of monopolies when President Theodore Roosevelt took on Corporate America in the early 1900s.
What's still worth fighting for? We have to curb the derivatives market-the multi-trillion-dollar casino that destroyed AIG. We have to impose a strong version of the Volcker Rule, which would ban banks from engaging in speculative trading for their own accounts. We have to change the way the Federal Reserve does business and force the government's most secretive bailout engine to operate in the open. And we have to establish a strong, independent Consumer Financial Protection Agency to ensure that the horrific subprime mortgage abuses are not repeated.
As Nomi Prins details for The American Prospect, the current reform bill will not effectively deal with the dangers posed by hedge funds and private equity firms-companies that partnered with banks to blow up the economy through investments in subprime mortgages. That means that whatever happens with the current bill, Congress must again take action next year to rein in other financial sector excesses.
The derivatives casino at the movies
As Nick Baumann demonstrates for Mother Jones, banks are doing everything they can to gobble up other productive elements of the economy. The economy crashed in 2008 in large part because banks had used the derivatives market to place trillions of dollars in speculative bets on the housing market. This wasn't lending, it was pure gambling: Instead of using poker chips, bankers placed their bets with derivatives. But, as Baumann emphasizes, banks are now looking to expand the sort of thing they can make derivatives gambles with. The latest proposal is to allow banks to bet on the box office success of movies. That's right, banks would be gambling on movies.
Hollywood may be shallow, but it isn't stupid. It doesn't want to see the banking industry repeat its destructive looting of the housing industry on the movie business, and is pushing hard to ban banks from betting on movies. But we can't count on every industry having a powerful lobby group to counter every assault from the banking system.
Taking stock in schools
Consider the unsettling report by Juan Gonzales of Democracy Now!. Gonzales details how big banks gamed the charter school system to score huge profits while simultaneously saddling taxpayers with massive debts that make teaching kids supremely difficult. By exploiting multiple federal tax credits, banks that invest in charter schools have been able to double their money in seven years-no small feat in the investing world-while schools have seen their rents skyrocket. One school in Albany, N.Y. saw its rent jump from $170,000 to $500,000 in a single year.
About that unemployment rate...
It's not like public schools are flush with cash right now. The $330,000 increase in rent could pay the salaries of more than a few teachers. As the recession sparked by big bank excess grinds on, even the good news is pretty hard to swallow. As David Moberg emphasizes for Working In These Times, the economy added 290,000 jobs in April, but the unemployment rate actually climbed from 9.7 percent to 9.9 percent in March. That's because the unemployment rate only counts workers who are actively seeking a job-if you want a job but haven't found one for so long that you give up, you're not technically "unemployed." All of those "new" workers are driving the official figures up.
In other words, it's still rough out there. And likely to stay rough as state governments try to deal with the lost tax revenue from plunging home values and mass layoffs. Nearly half of all unemployed people in the U.S. have been out of a job for six months or more. And while we'd be much worse off without Obama's economic stimulus package, that percentage is likely to grow this year, Moberg notes.
This is what unrestrained banking behemoths do. They book big profits and bonuses for themselves, regardless of the consequences for the rest of the economy. Congress absolutely must impose serious financial reform this year. After the November election, breaking up the banks must once again be on the agenda when Congress considers the future fate of hedge funds, private equity firms, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. If we don't rein in Wall Street, banks will continue to wreak havoc on our homes, our jobs and even our schools. Congress must act.
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In America, conservatives couldn't kill the welfare state because it was too popular, so they decided to re-purpose it for conservative ends. These are their stories.
If you thought that Wall Street couldn't get more destructive, think again. And if you that the charter school movement couldn't get even more removed from serving the public good, you also need to think again. On Friday, NY Daily News columnist Juan Gonzalez wrote a column about how big investors can double their money in seven years using a special tax credit to invest in charter schools, and he also discussed what he uncovered in a brief segment on Democracy Now! which he co-hosts with Amy Goodman. Here's how he summarized it on the air:
One of the things I've been trying now for a couple of years is to try to figure out why is it that so many hedge fund managers, wealthy Americans, and big banks, Wall Street banks, executives of Wall Street banks, have all lined-up supporting and getting involved in the development of charter schools. I think I may have come across one of the reasons. There's a lot of money to be made in charter schools, and I'm not talking just about the for-profit management companies that run a lot of these charter schools.
It turns out that at the tail end of the Clinton administration in 2000, Congress passed a new kind of tax credit called a New Markets tax credit. What this allows is it gives enormous federal tax credit to banks and equity funds that invest in community projects in underserved communities and it's been used heavily now for the last several years for charter schools. I have focused on Albany, New York, which in New York state, is the district with the highest percentage of children in charter schools, twenty percent of the schoolchildren in Albany attend are now attending charter schools. I discovered that quite a few of the charter schools there have been built using these New Markets tax credits.
What happens is the investors who put up the money to build charter schools get to basically or virtually double their money in seven years through a thirty-nine percent tax credit from the federal government. In addition, this is a tax credit on money that they're lending, so they're also collecting interest on the loans as well as getting the thirty-nine percent tax credit. They piggy-back the tax credit on other kinds of federal tax credits like historic preservation or job creation or brownfields credits.
The result is, you can put in ten million dollars and in seven years double your money. The problem is, that the charter schools end up paying in rents, the debt service on these loans and so now, a lot of the charter schools in Albany are straining paying their debt service--their rent has gone up from $170,000 to $500,000 in a year or--huge increases in their rents as they strain to pay off these loans, these construction loans. The rents are eating-up huge portions of their total cost. And, of course, the money is coming from the state.
Earlier this week, the edublogosphere was swarming with links to this memorandum from the US Department of Education warning of the "vulnerabilities in the oversight of charter schools." (h/t The Frustrated Teacher)
Since 2005, there have been 40 investigations of charter schools using public funds fraudulently. What these investigations have found is that charter school officials have used taxpayer money to pay for things like "an extravagant lifestyle" (Minnesota), "spa treatments and personal vehicles" (California), "purchases at stores such as Louis Vuitton" (Illinois), and "funeral expenses" (Wisconsin - that's what passes for fun there).
There have been 18 indictments, 15 convictions, and 24 cases are still being pursued. But because this memorandum was sent as a warning for further vigilance in regard to this type of crime, it's easy to assume that the problem is apt to get much worse. And in fact there's ample proof that it is.
Unlike the battle over health care, the broader progressive community has yet to wake up to the scope of battle that's currently going on in education. This story was published in the March 18 edition of Random Lengths News in tandem with reporting on local demonstrations to save public education in California on March 4.
Fighting Back Against The War On Public Education
By Paul Rosenberg, Senior Editor
The March 4th demonstrations to defend public education-centered here in California, but extending across at least 30 states and several other countries-were long overdue in the eyes of some leading education activists and critics. "These protest movements are really healthy. I hope that political leadership listens to them," said Gary Orfield, head of the Civil Rights Project at UCLA . The Civil Rights Project has been tracking the re-segregation of American schools since the late 1980s.
Due to deep funding cuts, sharply increased fees, reduced class offerings and increased class sized, Orfield sees their prospects dwindling, absent a struggle.
"We project that here in California, which educates one-ninth of the students in the country that we're going to be on a path to lower average education levels for the first time in the history of the state within a very few years," Orfield told Random Lengths. "That's going to devastate our future development."
Education scholar David Berliner-co-author of The Manufactured Crisis: Myths, Fraud, And The Attack On America's Public Schools, published in 1995-is a leading voice among critics who have been battling the tide of hysterical attacks on public education for several decades now. "I'm wondering where they were all along," Berliner said about the widespread involvement of teachers. Referring to the Williams v. California lawsuit over systemic second-class educational conditions for poor and minority communities, settled in 2004, Berliner said, "Every teacher in the state should have walked out."
Better late than never, perhaps. And better that students themselves have taken center stage. But when it comes to the war on public education, it's much, much later than most people realize. In the future, it could mean "a timetable for the demolition of public education in the United States" in 2014, according to a new book by Diane Ravitch, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education. Ravitch had been a long-time advocate of conservative education "reforms," including GW Bush's "No Child Left Behind" [NCLB] Act. But in 2006, she came to realize that none of the promised gains were materializing, and that NCLB's provisions meant that the result of this failure could and would be used to dismantle public education as a whole, unless changes were made to existing law.
According to leading "education researchers" (sub required), the draft guidelines that the Obama administration has published for federal economic-stimulus money and Title I aid for schools "have no credible basis in research."
The researchers point to two regulatory priorities in particular that are lacking in research evidence: evaluating teachers based on students' standardized test scores and promoting the growth of charter schools.
"One theory of action seems to be that holding teachers more accountable for the gain in their students' test scores will induce them to become better teachers," writes Duke University's Helen Ladd. "At this point, I am not aware of any credible evidence in support of that proposition."
And research on the performance of charter schools has shown that their track record is "highly variable." ....
I wrote an earlier diary, back in June, about the research on charter schools--which came from charter school advocates, actually. I also managed to find an open link to the article, here.
Jeff goes on to say:
The article points out that the Bush administration was famous for insisting that schools adhere to policies and programs that were based on "scientific research" while it promoted an agenda that had nothing "scientific" about it.
Now, the Obama administration is insisting that schools make decisions based on "data that shows what works," while it pursues mandates that have no data to support them.
What's the difference?
The difference is, apparently, that just like Clinton with NAFTA, a Democratic President has much easier time screwing the Democratic base than a Republican would.
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.
Jindal bragged of using Katrina as an opportunity to push charter schools. This is something Naomi Klien discusses in "The Shock Doctrine", but Louisiana Charter schools like Charter Schools elsewhere in the country are a scam!
"When Katrina hit New Orleans, I was two weeks into my senior year at Frederick Douglass Senior High School," said Maria Hernandez. "So far, I've had to start my senior year three times at three different schools in three different cities."
"All of these changes happened within a month's time," she continued, "From Douglass in New Orleans to Telequa High outside of Muscogee, Oklahoma and from Telequa to Union High in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Now after everything is said and done, I miss the high school that was my alma mater. I'm afraid to get my class ring because we might just move again, and I'd be stuck."
Hernandez was one of thousands of people displaced after Hurricane Katrina's violence crushed the Gulf coast August 29, 2005. While at Douglass public high school, she was a member of Students at the Center (SAC). An independent program initiated by Center for Community Change in Washington, D.C., it had been operating in two Orleans Parish public schools since 1996. Hernandez is one of five students and two New Orleans public school teachers whose essays are included in "Dismantling a Community," a short 40-page, excellent booklet published by the Center. In addition to the noteworthy African-American essays, it includes revealing time-lines focusing on the hurried dismantlement of the city's former public school system of 63,000 students (93% African American, 75% low-income) and 117 school buildings, half of them damaged beyond repair. "In the immediate chaos after the storm, many both in and outside New Orleans - people who were not searching for relatives, who had dry shoes and a place to lay their heads - seized on the disaster as an 'opportunity,'" the "Dismantling" booklet noted.
Although the No Child Left Behind education act (NCLB) has virtually expunged "history" via its high stakes testing in other subjects, Katrina's aftermath brought recent and past history onto center stage. Seizing on education "disasters" was one of them. A dictionary definition for "carpetbagger" is "U.S. history; a Northerner who went to the South after the Civil War and became active in Republican politics, esp., as to profiteer from the unsettled social and political conditions of the area during Reconstruction.(2) Any opportunistic or exploitive outsider (1865- 1870)." Welcome to new New Orleans.
I didn't see the debate, but I understand that Obama brought up DC School Chancellor Michelle Rhee as an example of what we should do about eduction.
Rhee is like the Miranda Priestly character in The Devil Wears Prada, arrogant, capricious, and without a single care for anyone's view point but her own.
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