More on 100% Solution - Weighted Student Funding

The authors of the so-called "100% Solution" ask, "How should different student characteristics be weighted?" They ask this in response to their proposal that "hard-to-educate" (sic) children receive more funds. But how do you determine how much each child gets? The authors admit, "WSF (weighted student funding) cannot work if there is not an accurate picture of the student population of every school. With more money flowing to students with greater needs, there will be great temptation for schools to exaggerate their students’ disadvantages. To ensure a fair process, the school should not have responsibility for classifying students."

As one way to crack this inherently corrupted nut, the authors sing the praises of the marketplace:

One approach is to set weights over time based on the “marketplace” for students that are weighted. In a comprehensive WSF system such as we propose, weights can (and should) be established such that hard-to-educate children become desirable for schools to enroll. Knowing that student performance standards must be reached, principals should find the weight for an at-risk child sufficient to make that child an asset to the school. Principals should seek out the children who bring with them weights that are at least sufficient to enable the school to meet achievement standards. Just as the free market sets prices for goods and services, the market for hard-to-educate children can determine their weighting. Principals and schools should seek to enroll hard-to-educate children because they know that with the money accompanying the child they can show improvement trends and reach performance levels. If this doesn’t happen, the district or state should adjust weights until it does.

So let me get this straight: under this proposal, principals will go out of their ways to find the most challenging "hard-to-educate children" because these children will bring more dollars with them.

But wait a minute: these extra dollars are supposed to be used to educate these so-called "hard-to-educate children." If that's the case, then it's a wash. In other words, there would be no incentive whatsoever to enroll these children. It would take more money to educate them. The principals would get more money to educate them. The principals would spend the extra money on educating them.

Or not.

It would most definitely be an incentive for principals to enroll these children if they got the extra money to educate them and then spend the extra funds on whatever they chose: a new football field, a new air-conditioned teachers' lounge, a new set of textbooks from McGraw-Hill.

Ironically, in pointing out the possibility of corruption within the system, the authors have provided a new channel for corruption in a plan ostensibly designed to prevent it.

A disproportionate percentage of these "hard-to-educate children" are black. A call to the marketplace to cure what ails them calls to mind a different kind of marketplace at a different time. But this marketplace was also designed to cure what ailed them. Their fates lay in the hands of the highest bidders.

The 100% Solution Is 100% Same Old Thing

The so-called "100% Solution" is a very clever strategy. Former Education Secretary Rod Paige had this to say about it in an op-ed in yesterday's NY Times:

"Our schools are failing our most at-risk students. Only 30 percent of eighth graders are 'proficient' or 'advanced' in reading, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Math scores are nearly as bad. The No Child Left Behind Act is helping, by focusing attention on our neediest students, but it will succeed only if we recognize that certain children require more resources to educate than others."

Fairly enlightened thinking. It would seem that Hot Rod has learned a few things since he left the helm of ED to Maggie Spellings.

Indeed, if you read the first part of the proposal, you'd never believe that this came from the likes of Paige and Fordham. For example:

"Money alone does not explain the success of these schools. But high expectations and a rigorous commitment to fulfilling them, especially with disadvantaged children, costs money—more money than it takes to educate children who don't face the challenges of poverty or disability. Achievement for all students will require more time on task (meaning longer school days and years), and it will require excellent teachers. Our chances of meeting ambitious achievement goals for all children will be greatly enhanced if we allocate resources equitably to all students based on the resources needed to educate them. Despite clear evidence that some students require more resources than others, less money often flows to schools serving children who need these extra resources most."

Holy cow! Amazing, right??

But then the other shoes drop.

Shoe 1 - The argument for more funding for charters, i.e., that more money follow children to charter schools.

"(U)nder the antiquated school financing structures in place today, students who opt out of their assigned district schools are often opting into schools that receive lower levels of funding. One example of these disparities emerged in a recent Fordham Institute study of funding differences between public charter schools and district schools in 16 states and the District of Columbia. With just one exception, charter schools received less revenue than district schools, with the per-pupil funding gap ranging from 4.8 percent in New Mexico to 39.5 percent in South Carolina. In dollars, the gap ranged from $414 in North Carolina to $3,638 in Missouri."

Shoe 2 - More money follow kids to private schools. The argument for "choice" and private schools is in an endnote (#38) right here.

"Some signers of this proposal would extend the solutions and principles discussed here beyond public schools. They favor a system in which public dollars follow children on a weighted basis to all schools, including those operated under private auspices, so long as schools receiving such funds agree to be held publicly accountable for their academic results."

Old wine. New Bottles.
Smoke. Mirrors.
You know the drill.

First Lies and Deceptions Found in Spellings Higher Commission Report

There was good reason for Charles Miller to try to keep his attack on higher ed under wraps (as reported by Inside Higher Ed) until he could get his hired guns to pull it all together and push it out the door this coming September. It is a nasty, cyncial, inaccurate (lying) and poorly resourced piece of angry opinion that any credible researcher would never put his name on.

You only have to go to page 6 to find the first lie in the draft report by the Spelllings Commission to Meddle in Higher Ed.

From the Draft Report, p. 6:

"According to the most recent National Assessment of Adult Literacy, for instance, the percentage of college graduates deemed proficient in prose literacy has actually declined by 40 percent in the past decade."

What the NAAL actually said is that there was a 9 point drop, rather than a drop of 40 percentage points. So when did facts matter to these thugs! From (p. 15, A First Look at Literacy in the 21st Century:

"On the prose scale,the percentage of college graduates with Proficient literacy decreased from 40 percent in 1992 to 31 percent in 2003."

The second example shows how Miller and Co. ignored findings in the NAAL when there was no drop in mathematical literacy rates to report. Instead, they move off to quote a report by AIR, an outfit bought and paid for by the neocons ED. From the Draft Report, p. 13:

Students’ basic computational and analytical skills are also lagging. Another national survey found that 20 percent of those completing 4-year degrees – and 30 percent of those earning 2-year degrees – are unable to estimate if their car has enough gasoline to get to the next gas station or calculate the total cost of ordering office supplies. More than half of students at four-year schools and more than 75 percent of those at two- year colleges lacked the skills to interpret a table about exercise and blood pressure, understand the arguments of newspaper editorials, compare credit card offers with different interest rates and annual fees, or summarize results of a survey about parental involvement in school.

Here is what the NAAL reported on mathematical literacy, the same study that is used (though exaggerated to the point of incredible lies) when it serves the purpose of the Commission to castigate higher ed. From p. 14, A First Look at Literacy in the 21st Century:

The distribution of adults across the four literacy levels on the quantitative scale did not change significantly between 1992 and 2003 within any of the educational attainment categories.


I will have much more to say about the Chuck Miller Side Show when I return from a two week holiday--beginning tomorrow. I will be posting not so often, so Peter Campbell and Judy Rabin will have the floor entirely.

No Oversight for Brennan's Ohio Charter Schools

Mr. White Hat Management, Inc. has done some fancy lawyering in Ohio, leading an effort to create for-profit charter schools that are run by his management company without accountability to the taxpayers of Ohio who are pumping hundreds of millions into his 125 for-profit charters. Not only that, but Brennan has been a big player the voucher movement and in stacking the Ohio Supreme Court with conservative like himself who believes that the best government is the government that has relinquished its oversight responsibilities for corporate greed run amok. Maybe that is why a decision on the legality of the charter thievery in Ohio still has not been handed down by the Court.

Here is the latest on the attempted audit of the Brennan empire in Ohio:

Ohio has no effective way to know if $20 million it has sent to charter schools for startup costs is being used properly, a state audit found.

The review, released Thursday by State Auditor Betty Montgomery, found the Ohio Department of Education "did not have an effective system in place" to determine whether 130 charter schools operating statewide used the money for planning and design as required.

"There was no effective system in place to determine if the charter schools were using these federal funds within applicable rules and regulations," said spokeswoman Courtney Whetstone. "There was a serious lack of controls."

Education Department spokeswoman Karla Carruthers said Ohio requires charter schools - which are publicly funded but privately run - to submit annual performance reviews, expenditure reports, and audits. "But the auditor said it wasn't thorough enough," she said.

Montgomery recommended on-site visits to the schools and establishment of a system to verify that the schools "did not request more cash than was needed to pay expenses."

Carruthers said the department plans to hire someone to do just that, but emphasized that no suggestion has been made that any of the schools squandered or misused the money.

A case before the Ohio Supreme Court could determine whether, or in what form, the educational experiment begun in 1998 should continue.

Over the past school year, Ohio spent an estimated $486 million on charter schools, which serve 72,000 students but have struggled academically.

Test Preparation Trumps Arts Education

Thanks to people outside of Joel Klein's office, the New York City Schools have what sounds like a first-class blueprint for a compreshensive arts curriculum for the Schools. Only problem--no leadership and no cash to make it happen.

Wouldn't this be a great beginning for spending just a tiny fraction of the Buffet billions that he is giving away? Or is he, like Gates, only interested in the work curriculum or the curriculum for corporate growth? A clip from the Times:

"The blueprint is not curriculum, the blueprint is only a recommendation," said Councilman Domenic M. Recchia Jr., a Democrat of Brooklyn, chairman of the council's Cultural Affairs Committee. "They're not requiring schools to have music teachers or art teachers. They're not saying, 'You have to have this much art.' " Because the blueprint is aimed at arts specialists, it does not address schools that do not have them, or those with insufficient art space or supplies. "There is such a gap between the aspiration and the resources to actually make that happen that it feels like a hoax or a P.R. document," said Eva S. Moskowitz, former chairwoman of the City Council Education Committee, who now runs a charter school, Harlem Success.

Given the intense emphasis on math and reading scores, schools remain focused on test preparation and have no comparable incentive to improve arts education. "Arts are not on the school report card," said Richard Kessler, the executive director of the Center for Arts Education.

No real change can occur until they are, arts advocates say. "The chancellor would have to issue a mandate that arts is required as part of the curriculum and schools will be assessed and held accountable," said David Shookhoff, the director of education for Manhattan Theater Club, which produces plays on and off Broadway. "That would be a necessary step to ensure that we really move forward where every school has qualified arts specialists."

That mandate is not likely to come, said Joel I. Klein, the schools chancellor: "I'm a little hesitant to start to say, 'I'm going to mandate an arts curriculum, and I'm going to mandate a social studies curriculum, and I'm going to mandate a language curriculum.' Sometimes a little bit of judgment and discretion goes a long way."

Discretion?? What kind of discretion was used to determine that children in grades 3, 5, and 7 would be held back in school if they did not pass the annual test of mandated reading and math content? Was it Klein's discretion of Bloomberg's to ignore the warnings of the American Psychological Society and American Education Research Association against the use of such tests as the sole criterion for making life-changing decisions? Discretion??

Spellings Visits Oracle of Exurbia

My favorite part of Spellings' speech to some teachers in Minnesota last week came when she bubbled this scoop about where she goes to replenish her supply of platitudes:

I had a meeting with Thomas Friedman from The New York Times last week. And he told me the number one skill our children will need to survive in the flat world is learning how to learn. We can make all the right policy moves in Washington, but without great teachers like you instilling a love of learning in our students, nothing else matters.

Nothing else matters? How about phonemic awareness, vocabulary words, math functions, and AYP? I thought it was the Oracle that was supposed to speak in riddles.

Research Shows Single-Sex Schools No Benefit

In our current test-obsessed, straight jacket learning environments, girls are making greater test score gains than boys. This has led some to advocate giving boys some relief by re-segregating them in "divergent" learning environments, while leaving girls to have their brains cooked in the same old test preparation factories. All in the name of good science, of course.

Perhaps the support for this nonsense will be knocked down some by a new study reported by Alan Smithers and reported in the Observer. Here is a clip of a piece well worth reading in its entirety:

. . . a growing movement in the US argues that boys' and girls' brains develop differently, so they benefit from separate teaching styles. In Britain more and more mixed schools are using single-sex classes because of ongoing concerns over boys' results, which have consistently lagged behind those of girls.

But Smithers, who will present his findings at a co-education conference at Wellington College in Berkshire, said that whether a school was single-sex or not had little impact on how well it did. His exhaustive review of data from across the world showed no evidence that single-sex schools were consistently superior. In Hong Kong, where 10 per cent of schools are single-sex, girls appeared to do better. But in Belgium, where co-educational schools are in the minority, boys and girls who study together get the best results. He highlighted the fact that 40 per cent of people who had a single-sex education wanted their children to go to a co-educational school.

The work was carried out on behalf of the Headmasters' and Headmistresses' Conference, an organisation that represents the headteachers of some 250 leading independent schools in Britain. It comes after research published last month in Scotland showed that even in a co-educational school, separating pupils into single-sex classes failed to improve boys' performance. Rather than raising success rates, the move led to greater indiscipline, it found. . . .

Could it be that girls have historically been programmed to sit still, keep their mouths shut, and speak when spoken to, thus becoming perfectly adapted to today's school expectations? Perhaps boys and girls both would do better in every respect if they were offered something more consistent with, let's say, the basic needs of the human animal.

Accountability

And they talk about holding teachers accountable.


The Road From K Street to Yusufiya
By FRANK RICH
Published: June 25, 2006

As the remains of two slaughtered American soldiers, Pfc. Thomas L. Tucker and Pfc. Kristian Menchaca, were discovered near Yusufiya, Iraq, on Tuesday, a former White House official named David Safavian was convicted in Washington on four charges of lying and obstruction of justice. The three men had something in common: all had enlisted in government service in a time of war. The similarities end there. The difference between Mr. Safavian's kind of public service and that of the soldiers says everything about the disconnect between the government that has sabotaged this war and the brave men and women who have volunteered in good faith to fight it.

Privates Tucker and Menchaca made the ultimate sacrifice. Their bodies were so mutilated that they could be identified only by DNA. Mr. Safavian, by contrast, can be readily identified by smell. His idea of wartime sacrifice overseas was to chew over government business with the Jack Abramoff gang while on a golfing junket in Scotland. But what's most indicative of Mr. Safavian's public service is not his felonies in the Abramoff-Tom DeLay axis of scandal, but his legal activities before his arrest. In his DNA you get a snapshot of the governmental philosophy that has guided the war effort both in Iraq and at home (that would be the Department of Homeland Security) and doomed it to failure.

Mr. Safavian, a former lobbyist, had a hand in federal spending, first as chief of staff of the General Services Administration and then as the White House's chief procurement officer, overseeing a kitty of some $300 billion (plus $62 billion designated for Katrina relief). He arrived to help enforce a Bush management initiative called "competitive sourcing." Simply put, this was a plan to outsource as much of government as possible by forcing federal agencies to compete with private contractors and their K Street lobbyists for huge and lucrative assignments. The initiative's objective, as the C.E.O. administration officially put it, was to deliver "high-quality services to our citizens at the lowest cost."

The result was low-quality services at high cost: the creation of a shadow government of private companies rife with both incompetence and corruption. Last week Representative Henry Waxman, the California Democrat who commissioned the first comprehensive study of Bush administration contracting, revealed that the federal procurement spending supervised for a time by Mr. Safavian had increased by $175 billion between 2000 and 2005. (Halliburton contracts alone, unsurprisingly, went up more than 600 percent.) Nearly 40 cents of every dollar in federal discretionary spending now goes to private companies.

In this favor-driven world of fat contracts awarded to the well-connected, Mr. Safavian was only an aspiring consigliere. He was not powerful enough or in government long enough to do much beyond petty reconnaissance for Mr. Abramoff and his lobbying clients. But the Bush brand of competitive sourcing, with its get-rich-quick schemes and do-little jobs for administration pals, spread like a cancer throughout the executive branch. It explains why tens of thousands of displaced victims of Katrina are still living in trailer shantytowns all these months later. It explains why New York City and Washington just lost 40 percent of their counterterrorism funds. It helps explain why American troops are more likely to be slaughtered than greeted with flowers more than three years after the American invasion of Iraq.

The Department of Homeland Security, in keeping with the Bush administration's original opposition to it, isn't really a government agency at all so much as an empty shell, a networking boot camp for future private contractors dreaming of big paydays. Thanks to an investigation by The Times's Eric Lipton, we know that some two-thirds of the top department executives, including Tom Ridge and his principal deputies, have cashed in on their often brief service by becoming executives, consultants or lobbyists for companies that have received billions of dollars in government contracts. Even John Ashcroft, the first former attorney general in American history known to immediately register as a lobbyist, is selling his Homeland Security connections to interested bidders. "When you got it, flaunt it!" as they say in "The Producers."

To see the impact of such revolving-door cronyism, just look at the Homeland Security process that mandated those cutbacks for New York and Washington. The official in charge, the assistant secretary for grants and training, is Tracy Henke, an Ashcroft apparatchik from the Justice Department who was best known for trying to politicize the findings of its Bureau of Justice Statistics. (So much so that the White House installed her in Homeland Security with a recess appointment, to shield her from protracted Senate scrutiny.) Under Henke math, it follows that St. Louis, in her home state (and Mr. Ashcroft's), has seen its counterterrorism allotment rise by more than 30 percent while that for the cities actually attacked on 9/11 fell. And guess what: the private contractor hired by Homeland Security to consult on Ms. Henke's handiwork, Booz Allen Hamilton, now just happens to employ Greg Rothwell, who was the department's procurement chief until December. Booz Allen recently nailed a $250 million Homeland Security contract for technology consulting.

The continuing Katrina calamity is another fruit of outsourced government. As Alan Wolfe details in "Why Conservatives Can't Govern" in the current Washington Monthly, the die was cast long before the storm hit: the Bush cronies installed at FEMA, first Joe Allbaugh and then Michael Brown, had privatized so many of the agency's programs that there was little government left to manage the disaster even if more competent managers than Brownie had been in charge.

But the most lethal impact of competitive sourcing, as measured in human cost, is playing out in Iraq. In the standard narrative of American failure in the war, the pivotal early error was Donald Rumsfeld's decision to ignore the advice of Gen. Eric Shinseki and others, who warned that several hundred thousand troops would be needed to secure the country once we inherited it. But equally reckless, we can now see, was the administration's lax privatization of the country's reconstruction, often with pet companies and campaign contributors and without safeguards or accountability to guarantee results.

Washington's promises to rebuild Iraq were worth no more than its promises to rebuild New Orleans. The government that has stranded a multitude of Americans in flimsy "housing" on the gulf, where they remain prey for any new natural attacks the hurricane season will bring, is of a philosophical and operational piece with the government that has let down the Iraqi people. Even after we've thrown away some $2 billion of a budgeted $4 billion on improving electricity, many Iraqis have only a few hours of power a day, less than they did under Saddam. At his Rose Garden press conference of June 14, the first American president with an M.B.A. claimed that yet another new set of "benchmarks" would somehow bring progress even after all his previous benchmarks had failed to impede three years of reconstruction catastrophes.

Of the favored companies put in charge of our supposed good works in Iraq, Halliburton is the most notorious. But it is hardly unique. As The Los Angeles Times reported in April, it is the Parsons Corporation that is responsible for the "wholesale failure in two of the most crucial areas of the Iraq reconstruction — health and safety — which were supposed to win Iraqi good will and reduce the threat to American soldiers."

Parsons finished only 20 of 150 planned Iraq health clinics, somehow spending $60 million of the budgeted $186 million for its own management and administration. It failed to build walls around 7 of the 17 security forts it constructed to supposedly stop the flow of terrorists across the Iran border. Last week, reported James Glanz of The New York Times, the Army Corps of Engineers ordered Parsons to abandon construction on a hopeless $99.1 million prison that was two years behind schedule. By the calculation of Representative Waxman, some $30 billion in American taxpayers' money has been squandered on these and other Iraq boondoggles botched by a government adhering to the principle of competitive sourcing.

If we had honored our grand promises to the people we were liberating, Dick Cheney's prediction that we would be viewed as liberators might have had a chance of coming true. Greater loyalty from the civilian population would have helped reduce the threat to American soldiers, who are prey to insurgents in places like Yusufiya. But what we've wrought instead is a variation on Arthur Miller's post-World War II drama, "All My Sons." Working from a true story, Miller told the tragedy of a shoddy contractor whose defectively manufactured aircraft parts led directly to the deaths of a score of Army pilots and implicitly to the death of his own son.

Back then such a scandal was a shocking anomaly. Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration, the very model of big government that the current administration vilifies, never would have trusted private contractors to run the show. Somehow that unwieldy, bloated government took less time to win World War II than George W. Bush's privatized government is taking to blow this one.

Pataki & Bloomberg Handed Stinging Defeat on Charter Schools

Even though Pataki went into hostage mode late this week by attaching his charter expansion plan to a bill that would have extended important aid to the poor, the Legislature showed guts and voted down charter expansion plans to further remove public control of the public schools in the City. From the Times:

ALBANY, June 23 — As the smoke cleared in Albany, the Bloomberg administration's push to create more charter schools, a plan that was strongly backed by the governor, fell short. So did a plan to send millions of dollars to programs for needy families. And a proposal to allow early retirement for public workers.

For Gov. George E. Pataki, the biggest loss was the Legislature's refusal to lift the cap on charter schools. But it was an even bigger setback for Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. He has made charter schools a top priority in his bid to revamp the city school system and has vowed to open as many as 75 more by the end of his term.

Earlier this year, the state reached its cap of 100 charter schools, so Mr. Pataki proposed increasing the number allowed statewide by 150.

And in Albany, where the saying goes that nothing is done until everything is done, Mr. Pataki tied his charter school plan with other programs in a last-ditch effort to get the Legislature to go along.

In the end, they all sank. . . .

Who Is Doing the Choosing of School Choice?

Clint Bolick, President and Chief Counsel for one of the lead school privatization outfits, editorializes, nay, rhapsodizes this week in the the Wall Street Journal on all the recent strides made by the school voucher crowd. Missing from the success stories, however, are the historically-reliable opinion polls that continue to show Americans opposed to school vouchers that take money away from public schools. Not mentioned, either, is the smackdown of the J. Bush voucher plan by the Florida Supreme Court, a decision that promises to end Jeb's reign with a whimper, rather than a bang. Or how about the big plan in Ohio, where only a handful of parents signed on for vouchers (and many of those were religious school parents looking to avoid tuition payments).

What Bolick shows in his op-ed is the same kind of feeble imagination and limited either-or thinking that school privatizers are known for, those who are either legally on the payroll at ED or those who are getting their government funds in more creative ways. These binary thinkers present their two options, and that’s it: 1) continue to support the failing urban schools, or, 2) support vouchers. There is a new implication to their false dichotomy, however: if you don’t choose the voucher solution, that makes you an uncaring racist who is willing to leave these children behind in failing schools. Remember the “bigotry of low expectations” of those who do not support NCLB?” Same deal:

For Democrats who truly believe in social justice, that presents a terrible dilemma: Either forcing children to remain in schools where they have little prospect for a bright future, or enlisting private schools in a rescue mission. Democrats are increasingly unwilling to forsake the neediest children.

Forsaking the neediest children is, of course, exactly what school privatization does, but it does so by forsaking the children and the families of these children who are told, essentially, that they are not worth the effort to make their communities and schools better. By shutting down their schools, they are told that their communities are not worth saving and their school choice is to be limited to a voucher that will only buy them a seat in a marginal private school or in a church school—regardless of their religious beliefs.

Bolick would have something else added to the message to the urban poor: not only is the government going to give up on addressing poverty, crime, and lack of opportunity in your community, but the government is going to pay corporations with tax credits to put their names on the vouchers that you will receive to buy a marginal education for your children, one for which there is no evidence of being any better than the one you are leaving.

If Mr. Bolick and his faux bleeding heart corporationist friends at the Wall Street Journal are really interested in the “neediest children,” they would be willing to encourage public tax credits for corporations who do the public good, rather than using public dollars to pay corporations to shut off the civic life blood that the public schools have historically provided (at least in communites that we have not given up on).

Mr. Bolick, check out what is going on in the poor schools of Chattanooga, Tennessee, as reported by John Merrow this week. This is a great example of business, private foundations, and the government sitting down at the same table to figure out how to save their schools and the children and teachers that comprise them. It would seem from Mr. Bolick’s proposals, however, that he prefers de-enterprise zones rather than offering enterprising incentives for corporations to help end failure and poverty in urban centers (very good business for corporations, by the way).

Bolick does offer a bit of news with his rhapsody, and it relates directly to the final solution that the privatizers have had in mind ever since NCLB was crafted to assure the failure of public schools, offered here in apocalyptic tones:

For children in chronically failing schools, the day of reckoning is fast approaching: Legislation to add private school options to NCLB will be introduced next month. Democrats who supported private school relief for Katrina children to alleviate a disaster will be forced to confront the reality that New Orleans schools were in crisis long before the hurricane appeared--and so are millions of other children in inner cities across the nation.

I strongly suspect that Bolick knows that the proposal to add vouchers to NCLB is destined to be DOA, especially when it is not at all clear if NCLB will even survive the reauthorization debate. The likely failure of vouchers, if proposed, however, will be accompanied by efforts to negotiate for the real option that the privatizers are pushing— and that, of course, is the charter option as the transition phase to privatization. There has yet to be conceived a more underhanded way to shrink the influence of elected school boards and the rights of teachers and parent groups. Once those are gone, and control is essentially placed in the hands of administrator/managers, then Whittle, Inc. and White Hat, Inc. will be ready for the next phase.

Whether our distracted and uncaring Congressmen will notice the obvious manipulation, I would not bet on it without an outpouring of support for public schools from constituents. After all, the lead-up to Iraq provides plenty of evidence they weren't even reading the papers, then. The manipulation to shut down public education will take some educating by all those who care enough to act to preserve the public schools, thus preserving the possibility of preserving and renewing the Republic.

Return to Separate But Equal?

The Supreme Court will hear arguments concerning whether or not race can be used as a factor in determining which schools children attend. If the plan in question is overturned, schools in Louisville will likely resegregate.

--excerpt from NY Times story (full text below)--
Mr. Gordon represents the plaintiff in the . . . case, Crystal D. Meredith, who is white. She sued after the district denied her request to transfer her son Joshua from Young Elementary, in the West End, to Bloom Elementary, nearer her home. The district said the transfer would disrupt Young's racial balance.

Judge John G. Heyburn II of Federal District Court ruled against Ms. Meredith in 2004, saying that the district had shown a "compelling interest" in maintaining integrated schools. A federal appeals court upheld that ruling, but the Supreme Court has now agreed to review the case.

In an interview, Mr. Gordon predicted that if Louisville's student assignment plan was overturned, the schools would rapidly resegregate. But that should be of no concern, he said.

"We're a diverse society, a multiethnic society, a colorblind society," he said. "Race is history."

Chester Darling, the lawyer who represented parents in a 1999 suit challenging a school assignment plan in Lynn, Mass., holds similar views. "If children are in segregated schools, de facto or not, as long as they are getting the education they need that's fine," he said.

--full text--

June 24, 2006

Schools' Efforts on Race Await Justices' Ruling

By SAM DILLON
LOUISVILLE, Ky. — School officials in Berkeley, Calif., take race as well as parent income into account as they assign students to public schools, with a result that many black children who live downtown are bused to classes in the mostly white neighborhoods on the hills that overlook San Francisco Bay.

In Lynn, Mass., the authorities guarantee that children can attend their neighborhood school, but consider race in weighing students' transfer requests, sometimes blocking those that would increase racial imbalance.

And here in Louisville, the school board uses race as a factor in a student assignment plan to keep enrollments at most schools roughly in line with the district's overall racial composition, making this one of the most thoroughly integrated urban school systems in the nation.

As different as they are, all these approaches and many more like them could now be in jeopardy, lawyers say, because of the Supreme Court's decision this month to review cases involving race and school assignment programs here and in Seattle.

"We'll be watching this very closely, because whichever way the Supreme Court rules, it will certainly have an impact on our district," said Arthur R. Culver, superintendent of schools in Champaign, Ill., where African-American students make up 36 percent of students. Under a court-supervised plan, the district keeps the proportion of black students in all schools within 15 percentage points of that average by controlling school assignments.

Over the past 15 years, courts have ended desegregation orders in scores of school districts. But many districts around the country seek to maintain diversity with voluntary programs like magnet schools and magnet programs, clustering plans that group schools in black neighborhoods with those in white, and weighted admissions lotteries that assign classroom seats by race.

All of this is now a gray area of the law until there is guidance from the Supreme Court on how far school systems may go in the quest for racial diversity.

Courts in the 1990's mostly struck down the use of race in assignment decisions, but three federal rulings since 2003 have permitted its use. As the legal ambiguity has grown, hundreds of districts have dropped voluntary efforts to maintain racial balance. Others have vigorously pursued them, even as a debate has emerged over whether racially mixed schools provide the nation with important educational benefits.

"Most school districts believe that there are educational benefits in having students attend school with other students of different backgrounds," said Maree Sneed, a lawyer who filed a brief in the Louisville case on behalf of the Council of the Great City Schools, a coalition of the nation's largest urban districts. "It prepares them to be better citizens."

But Roger Clegg, president of the Center for Equal Opportunity, a Washington group critical of affirmative action, said such assertions were based on "touchy-feely social science."

"It'd be dangerous for the court to allow discrimination whenever a school board produces some social scientist who claims that racially balancing schools to the nth degree is essential for teaching students to be good citizens," Mr. Clegg said.

The debate comes as immigration, housing patterns and ethnic change have made achieving racial balance in the schools an increasing challenge.

A study published this year by the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University reported that partly because of the rapid growth of Latino and Asian populations, the traditional black-white model of American race relations was breaking down. Yet white students remained the most racially isolated group, even though they were attending schools with more minority students than ever before, the report said.

Although whites in 2003-04 made up 58 percent of the nation's public school population, the average white student attended a school where 78 percent of pupils were also white, the study said.

The proportion of black students attending schools where 10 percent of students or fewer were white increased to 38 percent in 2003-04 from 34 percent in 1991-92.

Gary Orfield, the project's director, said a decision barring the use of race in student assignments would most likely intensify those trends.

"School boards would be captives to the racial segregation that occurs in housing markets," Mr. Orfield said. "Boards would be forbidden to do what courts once ordered them to do, and what they now want to do voluntarily."

How many of the nation's 15,000 districts currently consider race in assigning students to schools is unclear because no one keeps track, experts said. A brief filed in the Louisville case by the Pacific Legal Foundation, a conservative public-interest law firm, asserts that "nearly 1,000 districts" have some type of race-based assignment plan.

But that figure traces from a 1990 Department of Education survey of schools, and David J. Armor, a George Mason University professor who participated in that survey, said that in the 1990's, many districts abandoned race-based plans. Still, he estimated that "many hundreds of school districts" continued to use race in assigning students to schools.

Many of the nation's largest urban districts have so few white students that large-scale plans to seek racial balance are hardly feasible. New York, where 14 percent of students are white, does not consider race in school assignments, said Michael Best, the Department of Education's general counsel. The only exception is Mark Twain Intermediate School in Brooklyn, where a 1974 federal court order requires that the school's racial demographics be kept in line with surrounding middle schools.

At least a half-dozen cities have developed voluntary student transfer programs that involve enrolling minority students from an urban district in a suburban district.

The Jefferson County district in Louisville is one of the most thoroughly integrated urban school systems in the nation. That is partly because its boundaries include suburbs as well as Louisville's urban core. Sixty percent of students are white, and 35 percent are black.

Its student assignment plan, which evolved from a court-ordered desegregation effort, keeps black enrollment in most schools in the range of 15 percent to 50 percent by encouraging, and in some cases obliging, white students to attend schools in black neighborhoods, and vice versa.

Fran Ellers and her husband are writers who are white. They live in the Highlands neighborhood east of downtown. But they enrolled their children, Jack and Zoe, at Coleridge-Taylor Montessori Elementary in the largely black West End.

"We wanted a diverse environment," Ms. Ellers said. "When I toured Coleridge-Taylor, I was struck by the mix of black and white children, quietly working together as equals in a classroom."

Nechelle D. Crawford, by contrast, who is African-American and lives in the West End, said her sons Keion and Jeron could attend Coleridge-Taylor, but instead she opted to send them to Wilder Elementary in a largely white suburb 25 minutes away by bus. "The boys love Wilder," Mrs. Crawford said, adding that there are a number of international students. "They have different opportunities, see different faces."

In a survey carried out in 2000 by the University of Kentucky, 67 percent of parents said they believed that a school's enrollment should reflect the overall racial diversity of the school district.

A white lawyer, Teddy B. Gordon, ran for a seat on the Jefferson County School Board in 2004, promising to work to end the district's desegregation plan. He finished last, behind three other candidates.

Mr. Gordon represents the plaintiff in the Louisville case, Crystal D. Meredith, who is white. She sued after the district denied her request to transfer her son Joshua from Young Elementary, in the West End, to Bloom Elementary, nearer her home. The district said the transfer would disrupt Young's racial balance.

Judge John G. Heyburn II of Federal District Court ruled against Ms. Meredith in 2004, saying that the district had shown a "compelling interest" in maintaining integrated schools. A federal appeals court upheld that ruling, but the Supreme Court has now agreed to review the case.

In an interview, Mr. Gordon predicted that if Louisville's student assignment plan was overturned, the schools would rapidly resegregate. But that should be of no concern, he said.

"We're a diverse society, a multiethnic society, a colorblind society," he said. "Race is history."

Chester Darling, the lawyer who represented parents in a 1999 suit challenging a school assignment plan in Lynn, Mass., holds similar views. "If children are in segregated schools, de facto or not, as long as they are getting the education they need that's fine," he said.

Lynn, nine miles north of Boston, is one of 20 Massachusetts school districts that receives financial incentives for promoting racial balance under state law. Lynn's plan seeks to keep the proportion of nonwhite students in elementary schools within 15 percent of the overall proportion of minorities in the district's student population. Last year, 32 percent of students were white, and 68 percent were nonwhite.

Under the Berkeley plan, parents choose three schools, and the district weighs classroom space and parents' education and income, as well as race in assigning the child.

"New parents would prefer to have their kids in a neighborhood school, that's pretty overwhelming," said Michele Lawrence, Berkeley's superintendent. "But if I surveyed parents who have gone through the process and met teachers, they would have a high percentage of satisfaction."

"Poverty Is No Excuse" Is No Excuse

"THE PROBLEM" with education is not really education. It's social and economic injustice, largely manifested as poverty, segregation, racism, and classism. As my post on McWhorter shows, there are a large number of blacks entering the middle class who are now turning their backs on low-income blacks in ways that are savage and disturbing. It shows the extent to which money, power, and privilege can be horribly corrupting forces.

"THE PROBLEM" with education is symptomatic -- literally -- of the disease of social and economic injustice. But the climate in this country is overtly hostile to this idea. It's very easy to see why: social and economic injustice gets distorted into the conversation called "Poverty Is No Excuse." It then gets further distorted by saccharine anecdotes of "the little black kid that could," the kid who -- despite the odds -- managed to graduate suma cum laude from Harvard. If you counted these little bromides up, they'd probably number in the dozens. So there exist in the public discourse on education several dozen uplifting stories about poor kids with crack-addicted mothers that made it. The moral? If they could do it, any person could. The same Horatio Alger story is applied to schools, e.g., KIPP. It goes like this: KIPP schools can take poor black kids, raise their test scores, and get them into elite prep schools. Moral of the story? If they could do it, any school could.

What's wrong with this logic? This is -- IMHO -- the most important argument to make right now RE: "THE PROBLEM" with education.

As I have been trying to argue, successfully or not, the logic behind these feel-good stories is faulty. On the individual level, the logic is faulty because NOT everyone can grow up with a crack-addicted mother and graduate suma cum laude from Harvard. If they could, these kinds of stories would never be told. We don't tell stories about the little kid who drank orange juice and then played baseball. Why not? Because every little kid can drink orange juice and play baseball. This is an UNREMARKABLE story -- a banal, commonplace, everyday event. But the reason we tell stories about poor kids with crack-addicted mothers that make it is because they are so incredibly rare. We say, "Wow! Did you hear that story about the poor kid with the crack-addicted mother that became the president of General Motors??"

Yet, for some extraordinary reason, our brains freeze up when we hear these stories. Somehow, we are simultaneously -- and paradoxically -- aware that (1) this is very rare and yet (2) if he could do it, anyone can. This makes absolutely zero sense logically. But we are inherently sentimental beasts, we Americans. So we eat this shit up because we are addicted to stories of inspiration. All we really want to do is feel good. Believing that this extraordinarily remarkable event is somehow reproducible may not make sense logically, but it makes us feel good to think that it might be possible. But feeling good is not the foundation on which public policy should be placed.

The same exact logic applies to "the little KIPP school that could." We see the story and say, "Wow! These black kids can do it. That must mean that every school and every poor black kid can do it!" But what does "do it" mean? In most cases of these feel-good stories, "do it" means higher test scores. In other words, the school is successful because it has raised test scores. This is the evidence that is presented as proof that it is successful. But higher test scores certainly does NOT mean better-educated kids. The Center on Education Policy released a report showing that non-tested subjects like art, music, and social studies are not being taught any more so schools -- including the little schools that could -- can focus exclusively on the subjects that are tested, i.e., reading and math. Translation? "Successful" schools are turning into test-prep factories.

KIPP counters this by showing that they offer a broad range of subjects -- including art, music, social studies -- and that their students are given opportunities to sing in the choir, play in the orchestra, etc. One would certainly expect that if kids spend from 7:30 a.m. until 5:00 p.m. during the week, four hours on Saturdays, and a month during the summer that they would be able to be exposed to a broad range of subjects. KIPP students put in roughly 70% more time in class than typical public school students.

So we say, "Hurray! Every school should be like KIPP!"

But as I've argued again and again, KIPP can't scale. Right now, there are 45 KIPP schools with 400 teachers serving over 9,000 students in 15 states and the District of Columbia. 9,000 students out of the total population of 54,593,000 students in all of public K-12 schools means that KIPP serves 0.00016486% of the population. And yet, 0.00016486% of students makes us stand up and say, "This should work for the remaining 99.999835% of students!"

The average KIPP teacher is in his/her early 20's, is single, and has no kids. They are clearly very dedicated young people who are not only willing to work longer hours and on Saturdays, but who are ABLE to work longer hours and on Saturdays. Teachers with families simply can't do this. They have to go home, fix dinner, do the dishes, walk the dog, and help with their kids' homework.

Moreover, the "success" of KIPP is tarnished when you consider where the students come from. Interviews with KIPP teachers indicate that they refer mostly already high-achieving students to KIPP who come from intact families and whose parents are unusually involved in the school (Carnoy, M., Jacobsen, R., Mishel, L., & Rothstein, R. (2005). The charter school dust-up: Examining evidence on enrollment and achievement. Washington, DC: Economic Policy Institute and New York: Teachers College Press., p. 58).

So again - a TOTALLY remarkable, unique, unreproducible model is held up as the hope for all.

To achieve the tipping point, we have to trash the logic that underlies the "Poverty Is No Excuse" crap. Certainly some kids can pull themselves up out of the inner-city despite the tremendous odds. Certainly some great schools have formed and will continue to form in poor neighborhoods and attract motivated teachers, students, and parents to work together to improve the educational outcomes of poor kids. KIPP is a good example of this. But the dozens of examples of personal success pale in comparison to the hundreds of thousands of personal failures. The 45 KIPP schools make up a tiny fraction of the thousands and thousands of schools where children are ground up and spat out. So why do so many poor kids fail? Why are so many poor children chewed up and spat out?

Clearly, kids can't wait for us adults to figure things out. We obviously need to craft both short and long-term stategies. TFA, KIPP, etc. are short-term strategies. We have to get at the source of the problem if we are serious about leaving no child behind.

"If you think we're alive, you ought to speak"

Tweedledum and Tweedledee
Agreed to have a battle!
For Tweedledum said Tweedledee
Had spoiled his nice new rattle.

Just then flew down a monstrous crow,
As black as a tar-barrel!
Which frightened both the heroes so,
They quite forgot their quarrel.'


If there could ever be a more appropriate political analog for these two delicious characters, it would have to the Thompson and Barnes Show produced by Bill Gates and intermittently staged at the Aspen Institute in D.C. Here is part of the latest flyer:

Washington, DC—Today former Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson and former Georgia Governor Roy Barnes, co-chairs for the Commission on No Child Left Behind, announced the second in a series of in-depth roundtables on the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). This roundtable will focus on how NCLB has impacted rural schools and assist the Commission in gaining a more extensive and thorough understanding of the unique, positive and negative effects of NCLB on rural schools. The roundtable will take place on Wednesday, June 28th at 2 PM EST at the Aspen Institute in Washington, DC.

In case you harbor any belief that these meetings have any connection with anything outside the fantasy creation of the NCLB public relations machine, check out Alice's, er, Annie's account of her visit at the Dum and Dee Show this week.

The Public Supports Public Education

Public Agenda has out its Reality Check 2006, a survey of parents, teachers, and administrators on issues related to public education. If the privatizers and boot camp enthusiasts, in and out of ED, cared what the public thinks, they would find something to chew on in this result:

Reality Check 2006 shows that relatively few parents, teachers, principals or superintendents see more of the same as the best course for the future. In this year's survey, respondents were asked to choose among four hypothetical candidates for the local school board –- one running on a platform of standards and testing, a second backing vouchers, a third backing charter schools, and a fourth calling for more money for schools and smaller classes. Among parents, the standards and testing candidate comes in a distant second to a candidate backing smaller classes and more funding. Fewer than one in four parents picked the standards candidate out of the four options. Among the educators, support for a school board candidate focusing primarily on standards and testing is in the single digits.

The actual numbers for the hypothetical candidates:

More money and smaller classes 45%
More testing and higher standards 22%
School Vouchers 19%
Charter Schools 9%

Does this give us some indication of how out of touch this Admninistration is with its citizens?

Bill Cosby, John McWhorter, and the New Black Racial Classism: Part 2

Even if we grant that everyone must assume a greater degree of responsibility for their lives and spend less time blaming others for their shortcomings, we can never, never, never simply leave it at that. But this is precisely what McWhorter's colleagues at the Manhattan Institute want to do. The New Black Racial Classism gets eaten up by the Manhattan Institute and others like it. If all we have to do is convince poor blacks to quit their whining and assume responsibility for their lives, think of the billions that would be saved!!

It's understandable why conservatives eat McWhorter's stuff up. But it's also eaten up by "progressive" organizations like Teach for America, schools for inner-city kids like the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), by Democratic politicians like NCLB co-sponsor and architect George Miller, by editorial staffs like The New York Times, and by educational activists like Susan Uchitelle (who helped fight segregation in St. Louis but who now serves on the board of an Edison-run charter school in inner-city St. Louis).

Miller, a staunch liberal and the ranking Democratic member of the House Education and the Workforce Committee, wrote an op-ed with Education Trust’s Russlyn Ali that read:

"Perhaps the most insidious myth being perpetuated is that California's demographics make it impossible to expect much of its kids. This sentiment is more than just collective apathy. It is bigotry. Schools all over the country, in every type of community, have shown that all students--minority and non-minority, rich and poor--can succeed if they are held to high standards and given the requisite resources. It is time to put this myth to rest for good.” (Miller, G. and Ali, R., "The fate of our schools." San Francisco Chronicle, 3/18/03, p. A25)

As evidence of the voracious appetite that white conservatives have for McWhorter's gilded truffles, consider the comments made by Stephan Thernstrom, a white Senior Fellow at Manhattan Institute and the Winthrop Professor of History at Harvard. Thernstrom, along with his wife Abigail, is the author of No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning. "The Thernstroms urge a daunting overhaul where every urban public school becomes a charter school; longer school days, weeks and years are common; and school vouchers are more broadly available to low-income, urban families." (source - The Seattle Times, 10/8/03; "Stop making excuses: Close the learning gap" by Matt Rosenberg) Here is what Stephan Thernstrom had to say when introducing McWhorter: (listen to it here)

(McWhorter's work) helps to explain a very troubling paradox. That is to say, the status of African-Americans in American society has been revolutionarily changed over the past half century or so. My wife Abigail and I published a book several years ago, America in Black and White, which has several dozen tables which indicates that by almost every measurable way enormous, phenomenal progress has been made towards equality on the part of African-Americans since the Civil Rights revolution. And if I were to update those tables today, almost all the trend lines continue upward. And the two areas that were very troubling in the mid-90's, the last data we had available then, have also turned around in a remarkable way. That is, the crime rate has declined precipitously and the disproportionate involvement of African-Americans in committing crimes. And, second, the black family structure, which had been deteriorating sharply since the 1960's when Senator Moynihan first warned of that tendency. In the last several years, that has been turning around a little. The rate of out-of-wedlock births for African-Americans is down two to three points. The percentage of African-American children living in two-parent households is up four or five points. So it isn't a remarkable shift, but it's a very impressive and positive one. So, progress almost unimaginable to people half a century ago. But you wouldn't know it if you listened to what the leadership of that community is saying and doing. Both the civil rights groups, whose mission is supposed to be to improve the welfare of the group, and certainly the political leadership -- the members of the Congressional Black Caucus -- are talking about a totally different world than the one I see. They are talking in hysterical and paranoid terms, finding racism in the most unlikely places. And it almost seems that the greater the progress, the more shrill and despairing the voices of that segment of the black community become. . . Katrina did display that tendency in very vivid terms. . . The question is, "What's going on? How could this have happened?" Some part of it reflects the simple fact that the African-American leadership is almost entirely, monolithically, part of the Democratic party's left wing. And the Democratic party left wing, for reasons I can't fully understand, seems to have been driven totally bonkers by the Bush administration. It has such an acute case of the "Hate Bush Syndrome" that they can't think clearly any more. . . . Another part of it, of course, is the old cliche the "revolution of rising expectations." Groups that are totally down-trodden can appreciate even a few extra crumbs and may feel grateful. Groups that have made the kind of progress blacks have made by the end of the 1960's were now impatient with waiting any longer for full equality. I can't say much more than that by way of explaining it, but I do think that John McWhorter's really interesting book tells us a lot to explain where we are today and what needs to happen for, in fact, the crisis in black America to be resolved.

In our society today, this is as far as a white man can go without being called a racist. In our society today, a white man can't say, "Poor blacks should quit their whining and assume responsibility for their lives." But a black man can. In response to Cosby's speech, Kweisi Mfume, the NAACP president who was on stage with Cosby, said "The issue of personal responsibility is real. A lot of people didn't want him to say what he said because it was an open forum. But if the truth be told, he was on target."

So Thernstrom contends there has been phenomenal progress for blacks. He contends that critics of this notion "are talking in hysterical and paranoid terms, finding racism in the most unlikely places." But phenomenal progress for whom? It's clear that there has been phenomenal progress for blacks entering the middle and upper classes. But for blacks still trapped in poverty, all there is for them to do is pull themselves up by their own bootstraps or shut the hell up. No, there aren't actual signs any more that say "For Whites Only." But these signs still exist. They're just invisible today. Or, even worse, they are simply accepted as "the way things are."

Perhaps most shockingly of all, especially in light of Cosby's choice to vilify low-income blacks on the anniversary of Brown v. Board, public schools in America's largest cities have experienced re-segregation on an unprecedented level. As Jonathan Kozol recounts in The Shame of the Nation,

In Chicago, by the academic year 2002-2003, 87 percent of public-school enrollment was black or Hispanic; less than 10 percent of children in the schools were white. In Washington, D.C., 94 percent of children were black or Hispanic; less than 5 percent were white. In St. Louis, 82 percent of the student population were black or Hispanic; in Philadelphia and Cleveland, 79 percent; in Los Angeles, 84 percent, in Detroit, 96 percent; in Baltimore, 89 percent. In New York City, nearly three quarters of the students were black or Hispanic.

Even these statistics, as stark as they are, cannot begin to convey how deeply isolated children in the poorest and most segregated sections of these cities have become. In the typically colossal high schools of the Bronx, for instance, more than 90 percent of students (in most cases, more than 95 percent) are black or Hispanic. At John F. Kennedy High School in 2003, 93 percent of the enrollment of more than 4,000 students were black and Hispanic; only 3.5 percent of students at the school were white. At Harry S. Truman High School, black and Hispanic students represented 96 percent of the enrollment of 2,700 students; 2 percent were white. At Adlai Stevenson High School, which enrolls 3,400 students, blacks and Hispanics made up 97 percent of the student population; a mere eight tenths of one percent were white.

A teacher at P.S. 65 in the South Bronx once pointed out to me one of the two white children I had ever seen there. His presence in her class was something of a wonderment to the teacher and to the other pupils. I asked how many white kids she had taught in the South Bronx in her career. "I've been at this school for eighteen years," she said. "This is the first white student I have ever taught."

So this is "phenomenal progress"? This is "talking in hysterical and paranoid terms, finding racism in the most unlikely places"? For conservatives like McWhorter and Thernstrom, the answer is "yes."

Bill Cosby, John McWhorter, and the New Black Racial Classism: Part 1

If you put racism and classism together and have it pour from the mouths of those who vilify the low-income members of their own race because they have yet to adopt the customs of the middle-class, you have an extraordinarily toxic cocktail that has the potential to gut the bedrock of progressive polices of the 20th century, from Brown v. Board to the Civil Rights Act to affirmative action. I call this toxic cocktail "The New Black Racial Classism."

The New Black Racial Classism appeared on my radar screen when Bill Cosby ripped into low-income blacks in May 2004 at an NAACP gala event to mark the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board. As a way to celebrate, Cosby decided to excoriate poor blacks.

The speech has been called "The Pound Cake Speech" because Cosby referred to an incident in which a young black man was shot and killed by the police after he stole a pound cake: "Looking at the incarcerated, these are not political criminals. These are people going around stealing Coca Cola. People getting shot in the back of the head over a piece of pound cake! And then we all run out and we're outraged, 'Ah, the cops shouldn'ta shot him.' What the hell was he doing with the pound cake in his hand?" (quoted in Dyson, Is Bill Cosby Right?: Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind?, p. 59)

Here are some other excerpts:

"The lower economic and lower middle economic people are not holding their end in this deal. In the neighborhood that most of us grew up in, parenting is not going on. ... I'm talking about people who cry when their son is standing there in an orange suit. Where were you when he was 2? Where were you when he was 12? And where were you when he was 18, and how come you don't know he had a pistol? . . . Brown v. Board of Education is no longer the white person's problem. We've got to take the neighborhood back. We've got to go in there. Just forget telling your child to go to the Peace Corps. It's right around the corner. It can't speak English. It doesn't want to speak English. I can't even talk the way these people talk. "Why you ain't where you is go, ra." ... Everybody knows how important it is to speak English except these knuckleheads. You can't land a plane with 'Why you ain't ...' You can't be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth."

A similar kind of savage vitriol drips from the lips of John McWhorter, a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Like Cosby, McWhorter also is black. Like Cosby, McWhorter also has a thing about poor people, especially poor black people. Like Cosby, McWhorter also relays a story about a young black man who was murdered. Like Cosby, McWhorter also uses the story rhetorically to suggest that these murders could be understood -- and justified -- given the contexts in which they occurred. These stories are also used by both men as allegories of what has gone wrong with, as Cosby calls them, "these people."

For Cosby, the fact that a young black man was shot for stealing a pound cake is trumped by the thunder of his rhetorical question, "What the hell was he doing with the pound cake in his hand?" While I certainly would not want to defend someone for stealing anything, I would wonder why a young black man would steal a pound cake. I would ask genuinely, not rhetorically, "What was he doing with the pound cake in his hand? Why did he steal it? Why would anyone steal a pound cake? What were the factors that contributed to this action?" I would also wonder why stealing a pound cake warrants being shot and killed. I might also wonder how many young white men had been shot and killed for similar offenses.

For McWhorter, a young black man getting shot serves as a kind of template for poor blacks as a whole. In describing an episode of inner-city violence involving a young black man named Robert Parsons, McWhorter -- like Cosby -- poses his own rhetorical question. In musing on Parson's life and death, McWhorter smirks glibly, "One might expect that someone with four offspring would work nine to five (at least?), but Parsons worked only part-time. He was a 'free spirit,' apparently, and then he also had injured one of his hands. But really, there are so very many ways one can work full-time without having full power in one hand, and there remains the simple question as to why a man with four kids worked only part-time." (Winning the Race: Beyond the Crisis in Black America, p. 9)

The "simple question as to why a man with four kids worked only part-time" might be answered in a number of different ways. "What the hell was he doing with the pound cake in his hand?" might also be answered in a number of different ways. Unfortunately, neither Cosby nor McWhorter chooses to address these questions at all. If they were to ask these questions seriously and not rhetorically, it would require that they do something that neither one of them is willing to do: put aside their bitter disdain for low-income blacks and consider the issues in depth. But rather than do this, both Cosby and McWhorter choose to use these examples as measures of poor blacks' fall into depravity. They are not interested in analysis. They are interested in morality tales. And the moral of their stories? Poor blacks should quit their whining and assume responsibility for their lives.

A simpler, more powerful moral could not be found. How could anyone argue the merits of such a lesson? Indeed, for blacks like Cosby and McWhorter, it must be especially painful to look at all "these people." As Cosby railed, "People with their hats on backwards, pants down around the crack, isn't that a sign of something, or are you waiting for Jesus to pull his pants up? Isn't it a sign of something when she has her dress all the way up to the crack and got all type of needles going through her body? What part of Africa did this come from? Those people are not Africans; they don't know a damn thing about Africa. With names like Shaniqua, Taliqua, and Mohammed and all of that crap, and all of them are in jail."

But as any simpleton can point out, it's easy for those that have made it to condemn those that haven't. Ironically -- and cruelly -- Cosby knows better. He himself came from poverty. He himself acknowledged the pernicious effects of racism in his own doctoral dissertation. According to Michael Eric Dyson in his book Is Bill Cosby Right?: Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind?, "Cosby spoke passionately in his dissertation about the reasons black students fail: because of the urban school's indifference to changing learning conditions; because they have had the right to fail removed; because they are bored, due to the unimaginative methods of teachers interested in controlling the student; and because little of what goes on in class makes sense. Cosby argued that the failure black children experienced would only reinforce 'the debilitating sense of worthlessness whites convey in a variety of ways,' feeding the self-hatred of the black student." (from Bill Cosby's dissertation An Integration of the Visual Media Via Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids into the Elementary School Curriculum as a Teaching Aid and Vehicle to Achieve Increased Learning, University of Massachusetts, September 1976, p. 8; quoted in Dyson, Is Bill Cosby Right?: Or Has the Black Middle Class Lost Its Mind?, p. 70)

Cosby himself made a career -- and a very famous cartoon show called Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids -- about the life and language of inner-city kids. And he himself failed 10th grade not once but three times and eventually dropped out of school. Yet somewhere along the way, Cosby got sick and tired of what he saw. Perhaps he lost faith. Perhaps he has become old and crotchety. Yet his attack on low-income blacks is especially powerful because it comes from him -- Cos, the Jello Pudding Man, the Fat Albert guy, the funny, likeable guy, Dr. Huxtable -- one of the most well-known and well-respected black men in America.

McWhorter is a different story, a classic case of Bourdieu's notion of cultural capital, of power and privilege being bestowed upon those in a particular socioeconomic milieu or what Bourdieu calls "habitus." And, as McWhorter's life story makes clear, power and privilege can be bestowed on anyone, regardless of his or her race.

Click here for more on McWhorter's bio.

"My parents were rather socially insular people who conveyed, without ever being explicit about it, that 'we' were not like 'them,' " McWhorter says. "It wasn't that I didn't spend time with other black kids. But I was inculcated subtly with a sense that 'You do not do what they do.' "

McWhorter says he could not escape the troubling attitudes that he says are prevalent among both black students and some of his black colleagues. Not only did he find black students not working hard, but he believes they tended to overstate the presence of racism to confound whites and fit in with one another.

So, once again, Cosby's and McWhorter's moral is, "Poor blacks should quit their whining and assume responsibility for their lives." Coming from Cosby, this spiritual tonic might have some legitimacy. But coming from McWhorter -- someone whose parents were both middle class and who both worked at universities, who went to private school, who shunned sports for books, who shunned other black kids ("You do not do what they do") -- there is no legitimacy whatsoever in his trashing poor people. His "analysis" reminds me of something that Professor Henry Higgins might have written. But instead of singing, "Why Can't the English Teach Their Children How to Speak?", McWhorter would sing, "Why Can't the Negro Teach Their Children How to Speak English?"

Corporate Welfare Tax Credits and School Vouchers Lite

Since the Courts and the American public have made it increasingly clear that they are not in favor of taking money from public schools to offer private school vouchers, a new wrinkle has been introduced in the voucher crusade by the privatizers and the union busters. Regardless of its chances for approval among the American public, it is already a big hit among the corporate welfare types who are always looking for new ways to soak up public dollars while whining free-spending big government.

You see, this new voucher scam offers dollar-for-dollar tax credits to corporations to buy the school vouchers that otherwise would paid for directly from community coffers. Besides the public relations advantage of a less direct assault on public schools, the corporate tax credits carry the added bonus of lining the pockets of privatizers by reducing their taxes while they work to dismantle the public schools. A true case of having your cake and eating it, too.

How this new voucher scheme benefits the public will surely be the subject for litigators as they will certainly challenge the constitutionality of tax reductions for non-public uses. It would seem prudent for New Jersey, then, to cancel consideration of this non-solution to bad urban schools, even though it is the one preferred by nominal Democrat, Cory Booker, and his political patrons at the New York Times.

What Booker and the Times show in spades is a total lack of imagination in dealing with the problem of poor schools in poor communities. Is the solution to give up and farm these kids out to Catholic schools or the KIPP chain gangs, whether or not they want a Catholic education or boot camp indoctrination? Because the police department has not been able to stop crime in Newark, does Booker want to fire the Department and bring in Blackwater mercenaries to patrol the streets there? Why so fast to give up on schools, the last potential democratizing influence in poor children's lives?

On the other hand, would it not make sense to give corporations tax credits for, let’s see, helping the public schools of Newark and Camden?? Now there is a novel idea! Let Verizon, Prudential Financial, Continental, and MBNA pump some of their millions into Newark Public Schools to transform them, just like the poorest publics are being transformed in Chattanooga, Tennessee. On the News Hours last evening, John Merrow reported on a very successful experiment there that involves a partnership of corporations, foundations, and the school system to provide the financial support to make professional development and curriculum innovation and mentoring and additional coursework possible in the poorest schools of Chattanooga.

Now that is good public use of corporate dollars, one fully deserving of corporate tax credits.

Corporate Welfare Tax Credits and School Vouchers Lite

Since the Courts and the American public have made it increasingly clear that they are not in favor of taking money from public schools to offer private school vouchers, a new wrinkle has been introduced in the voucher crusade by the privatizers and the union busters. Regardless of its chances for approval among the American public, it is already a big hit among the corporate welfare types who are always looking for new ways to soak up public dollars while whining about free-spending big government.

You see, this new voucher scam offers dollar-for-dollar tax credits to corporations to buy the school vouchers that otherwise would paid for directly from community coffers. Besides the public relations advantage of a less direct assault on public schools, the corporate tax credits carry the added bonus of lining the pockets of privatizers by reducing their taxes while they work to dismantle the public schools. A true case of having your cake and eating it, too.

How this new voucher scheme benefits the public will surely be the subject for litigators as they will certainly challenge the constitutionality of tax reductions for non-public uses. It would seem prudent for New Jersey, then, to cancel consideration of this non-solution to bad urban schools, even though it is the one preferred by nominal Democrat, Cory Booker, and his political patrons at the New York Times.

What Booker and the Times show in spades is a total lack of imagination in dealing with the problem of poor schools in poor communities. Is the solution to give up and farm these kids out to Catholic schools or the KIPP chain gangs, whether or not they want a Catholic education or boot camp indoctrination? Because the police department has not been able to stop crime in Newark, does Booker want to fire the Department and bring in Blackwater mercenaries to patrol the streets there? Why so fast to give up on schools, the last potential democratizing influence in poor children's lives?

On the other hand, would it not make sense to give corporations tax credits for, let’s see, helping the public schools of Newark and Camden?? Now there is a novel idea! Let Verizon, Prudential Financial, Continental, and MBNA pump some of their millions into Newark Public Schools to transform them, just like the poorest publics are being transformed in Chattanooga, Tennessee. On the News Hours last evening, John Merrow reported on a very successful experiment there that involves a partnership of corporations, foundations, and the school system to provide the financial support to make professional development and curriculum innovation and mentoring and additional coursework possible in the poorest schools of Chattanooga.

Now that is good public use of corporate dollars, one fully deserving of corporate tax credits.

Cronies First at Reading First

Susan Ohanian has posted (in two parts here and here) the research by Slavin & Co. to document how those outside the Bush Pioneer circle have been largely shut out of the Reading First bonanza of billions $$$$$$.

When will Congressman Miller stop grandstanding about his commitment to civil rights (by supporting ED policy that does not) and start investigating the thievery that has been going on at ED since 2000?

New Front in the Reading Wars

First of all, let me say that I am enthusiastic about science and for what it may yield to educators and policymakers regarding learning and schooling. I use the future tense deliberately here, for as yet science has yielded very little that can be translated from neurology, cognitive science, or even psychology into educational strategies that may be deemed scientific. Education, after all, is a marginal science, if one at all. It occupies a ragged borderland between the social sciences and the humanities, leaving many educationists with an even more pronounced physics envy than the one normally attributed to more respected social scientists.

The phonics phonies and the Crackpots of the Code, on the other hand, have pretended for years that their preferred dogma constitutes a science of reading that must be adhered to for a child to learn to read properly. Their crusade culminated in 2000 when Doug Carnine and Reid Lyon were able to stack the deck of the National Reading Panel to arrive at an ideological conclusion on reading strategy that was promoted as a scientifically-based conclusion. Scientific it was not, but the Panel did prove that when you toss out all the studies that do not support your preconceived conclusions, it is easy to come up with evidence to overwhelmingly support the conclusion you set out to prove in the first place. The NRP may be thought of as the Cheney Method for going to war against the whole language terrorists: manipulate and manufacture evidence to push your agenda, and suppress or marginalize evidence to the contrary.

The fact that legitimate scholars were not duped by Carnine and Lyon has set off a new round of thuggish efforts to force the adoption of the one way “science” of the phonics fundamentalists. This time the masterminds at ED are using Lyon’s fake science to try to bully education schools by threatening the accrediting organizations that determine who gets the stamp of federal approval. And seeing how NCATE has thus far only responded by saying how high when ED says jump, I suggest it is time for an organized response by reading and literacy scholars if the door is to kept open to more legitimate approaches to literacy instruction. If you doubt it, have a look the bottom line message of a report (Full pdf report) sponsored by NCTQ:

EDUCATION SCHOOLS THAT DO NOT TEACH THE SCIENCE OF READING SHOULD NOT BE ELIGIBLE FOR ACCREDITATION. (p. 44)

So this is what they do at NCTQ with the millions they get handed by ED.

And, of course, a call in to Staples at the NY Times is all that is needed to get Brent bent about the evil racist government schools that refuse to embrace the new scientific ways of reading instruction. Would he be surprised that the claims of this new “scientific” phonics are the same ones made in the 1840s by the Latin Grammar School masters of Boston?

Bill Horne

Just some of what Bill Horne (no relation) had to say yesterday in the Hillsboro Times-Gazette. Go Bill:

. . . .Folks, it is time to take control of our government and our schools. These so-called “experts” have no clue. These experts have a one-size -fits-all mentality. They think that we can produce citizens like producing products on an assembly line. However, every child is different, every class is different, and every community is different.

Somehow, we have given away our rights to self-government. The government is telling us what to do, instead of us telling the government what to do.

There should never be a student who is not allowed to graduate from high school just because they scored a point or two below what some bureaucrat says is the minimum score on a test. No student’s life should be wrecked just because somebody sitting behind a desk in Columbus, whose salary we are paying, has pulled a minimum test score out of the air.

Teach for America: Why We Should Be Afraid

OK, so it's an admittedly hyperbolic title. I honestly don't think we need to fear TFA. But, then again, given the strength of its brand, its image, and its underlying philosophy, and the fact that a record 19,000 people – roughly a 10 percent jump from the previous year – applied this academic year to Teach for America, we have a lot to be concerned about. The reason? In a nutshell, TFA represents a growing "progressive" or "Democratic" flavor of mainstream thinking on educational reform. So for those of us who oppose NCLB and the high-stakes testing regime and are looking for someone or something to take the lead on national education reform, we will be sorely disappointed -- perhaps even disturbed or afraid -- by what this so-called "progressive alternative" looks like.

Although TFA is not a policy shop per se, it embodies a very powerful policy message: "poverty should not be used as an excuse for why our schools won't work." In adopting this philosophy, TFA aligns itself with every policy shop (e.g., the Fordham Foundation, the Manhattan Institute) that holds a similar view. It also un-aligns itself with policy shops (e.g., the Children's Defense Fund, the NAACP) that believe that poverty plays a crucial role in shaping educational outcomes.

TFA President and Founder Wendy Kopp says we need to take pressure off schools, increase access to high-quality pre-schools, improve public services, etc. But then she turns around and argues that poverty should not be used as an excuse for why our schools won't work. So which is it? Do we acknowledge the harmful effects that poverty has on educational outcomes and work very hard to eradicate it? Or do we look at poverty as an excuse, saying that it doesn't really matter and that the effects really aren't that bad and can be compensated for? TFA clearly argues the latter and, in so doing, makes an extremely powerful policy statement about closing the educational achievement gap.

Kopp says that we have many examples of how schools can take kids growing up in poverty and put them on a level playing field with kids in other communities. I know of some schools that have been able to do this, most notably the KIPP schools that TFA alumni Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin started. But these are only a handful of schools scattered amongst the country's 15,000 school districts. We must never mistake these isolated examples as the norm. They aren't. Nor must we ever believe that these isolated cases can be reproduced nation-wide. They can't. KIPP relies on energetic idealists in their 20's who are single and have no kids to work 10 hour days, an extra day on Saturday, and an extra month in the summer. There are only so many people who are willing to do this. There are even fewer who can do this because of their family commitments. They have to go home, fix dinner, do the dishes, walk the dog, and help with their kids' homework.

Certainly some kids can pull themselves up out of the inner-city despite the tremendous odds. Certainly some great schools have formed and will continue to form in poor neighborhoods and attract motivated teachers, students, and parents to work together to improve the educational outcomes of poor kids. KIPP is a good example of this. But the dozens of examples of personal success pale in comparison to the hundreds of thousands of personal failures. The 40 or so KIPP schools make up a tiny fraction of the thousands and thousands of schools where children are ground up and spat out. So why do so many poor kids fail? Why are so many poor children chewed up and spat out?

Clearly, kids can't wait for us adults to figure things out. We obviously need to craft both short and long-term stategies. TFA is short-term strategy. But there are major problems with it.

Number one, it will never scale to the level where it can do something substantive for all of public education. According to a recent Inside Higher Education article, TFA itself hopes -- hopes -- that it can place 8,000 teachers by 2010 (as compared to the 3,500 it currently places). 8,000 teachers, no matter how passionate and effective, will not close the achievement gap.

Number two, TFA draws a lot of praise and support from very conservative organizations. The problem with this is that TFA walks -- unwittingly or not -- right into the poltical hacksaw that these organizations want to take to public education. The message of TFA is, "If we hire great teachers, have great school leaders, and have higher expectations of students, our problems will be solved." This lets conservatives off the hook because they can point to TFA's success and say, "See, they are saying the same thing that we are. TFA is successful. They aren't complaining about poverty, and look how great they are doing." This is very, very dangerous. Each successful TFA teacher makes it that much more difficult to address the larger issues that contribute to the achievement gap because it takes the wind out of progressive educators' sails. The irony is that TFA frames itself as a progressive organization, a noble organization, but it is being used as a pawn to derail the efforts to accomplish the kinds of substantive changes that true progressives call for.

In a recent speech, Kopp said:

Each year, the Gallup organization does a survey in which they ask the public why we have low educational outcomes in low-income communities. The public’s top three responses are (1) lack of student motivation, (2) lack of parental involvement, and (3) home-life issues. Those responses strike me as capturing accurately the views of most Americans – even most thoughtful and civic-minded Americans. And yet, based on their experiences actually working with kids and families, our corps members . . . answer the Gallup question very differently. Given the same question and the same twenty choices, our corps members respond at the end of their second year that the top three factors contributing to low outcomes are (1) teacher quality, (2) school leadership, and (3) expectations of students. There is such hope in this. Our corps members are telling us that this problem is within our control… that we can ensure that all of our nation’s children have the opportunities they deserve.

Let me take each of the corps members' beliefs about low outcomes one by one:

1) teacher quality - the corp members' opinions appear to rest on the assumption that all teachers can (and should) be like TFA teachers. But TFA teachers are a special breed. To begin with, they have a different kind of motivation operating as they enter the classroom. I taught for two years at a Japanese high school. I entered the classroom knowing I was there for two years. I loved the experience, but when things got bad, I knew I only had one year to go, then only six months to go, then only one month to go. Knowing I was leaving helped make the insurmountable things bearable. Throughout the experience, the exit door was always clearly marked. While many TFA teachers choose to stay on past their two year commitments, many don't. (I've read different reports on what the attrition rate is -- some say it's higher than average, others say it's about the same.) Based on my own experience in a two-year teaching commitment, I could afford to work very hard with the end in sight. This is not the case for the average classroom teacher. The attrition rate for average classroom teachers is about 50% in the first five years. These teachers can't make a long-term commitment to a profession that is so riddled with problems and inequities, so they leave.

Moreover, the average TFA teacher is in his/her early 20's, is single, and has no kids. They are clearly very dedicated young people who are not only willing to work longer hours and on Saturdays, but who are able to to work longer hours and on Saturdays. Teachers with families simply can't do this.

How, then, can the TFA model of a teacher be reproducible? For teachers with families who enter the profession with no exit door in sight, holding TFA up as a model is simply not realistic. Saying "this problem is within our control" is also not realistic in this context.

Of course we want better trained, better supported, and more motivated teachers in our classrooms. But how do we achieve this goal? By holding up an unsustainable, unattainable model as the goal?

2) school leadership - given that TFA receives support from The Broad Foundation and Edison Schools, Inc., and has deep connections to KIPP schools, I'm assuming that the model of school leadership TFA is holding up is one that is associated with these organizations. If so, that is troubling to me. Edison's for-profit model, Broad's metaphor of running schools like businesses, and KIPP's use of heavy rewards and punishments are not consistent with forms of teaching and learning that honor the highest aspirations of education. According to Craig Gordon, a high school teacher and educational activist in Oakland:

Randolph Ward, sent to run Oakland's public schools by the Broad Foundation, has championed "results based budgeting" as the solution to the district's inefficiency because it makes every school operate as a small business. Each school's budget depends upon its average daily attendance (not enrollment), so a big school in a poor neighborhood with low attendance rates might actually get fewer dollars than a smaller school in a wealthier neighborhood. Ward proudly sold this Broad vision of "educational entrepreneurship" that makes each principal a CEO who must maximize revenues (attending students) and minimize costs (especially salaries) to survive. "CEOs" compete with each other to attract more students, get them into the building and hire the newest, lowest-paid teachers they can find, demand more waivers to the union contract (if the union survives) to get more done with fewer resources and reduced staff. Teacher burnout and high turnover equals a perpetually young, cheap staff. Yes, these are 'public' schools, but operating on a private sector model.

Of course we want better trained, better supported, and more motivated leaders in our schools. But how do we achieve this goal? By turning principals into CEO's? By using "results-based budgeting" as per Randy Ward and the Broad Foundation? By turning schools into profit-making ventures for entrepreneurs who look at children as commodities (Edison)? By asking teachers to work 10 hour days for 5 days, 5 hours more on Saturdays, and 1 extra month in the summer (KIPP)?

3) higher expectations of students - while having high expectations of students is certainly a key factor that shapes educational outcomes, these high expectations must be balanced with the reality of these kids' lives. Poor kids go to school poor and come home poor. Nothing that happens at school changes that. We can expect all we want of students that have little to no pre-K experience, inadequate healthcare, inadequate nutrition, and inadequate parental support. But to suggest that "we can ensure that all of our nation’s children have the opportunities they deserve" simply by expecting more from them is to completely overlook the role that poverty plays in shaping reality. Yes, some kids can overcome the odds and make it despite the desperate conditions they are mired in. But why not do everything we can to increase the odds that more kids will make it, not just the kids who "deserve" it? Why must poor kids work so hard to make it, while their affluent peers have to do so much less? This is the most important social justice issue of our time.

Of course we should hold kids to high standards and encourage them to excel. But how do we achieve this goal? Why not have higher expectations of local, state, and federal governments in improving educational outcomes?

TFA must take a strong public stand on all the issues that contribute to the achievement gap, not just teacher quality, school leadership, and expectations of students. These latter issues that TFA focuses on are critically important, no doubt. But if we really want to close the achievement gap, we have to do more. The analogy I use is to think of a high-jumper. To get ready for the Olympics, her trainer tells her to do 800 sit-ups a day. While doing 800 sit-ups a day is certainly a good idea, it's not enough. She needs to do other things to improve her vertical leap, her stamina, and her acceleration. If she did all of these things together, the odds of her winning a gold medal would increase greatly. But if she only does 800 sit-ups a day, her chances are pretty slim. Same with the achievement gap: focusing on school reform (teacher quality, school leadership, and expectations of students) is certainly a good idea, but it's not enough. If we did all the things we need to do (including school reform), the odds of closing the gap would increase greatly. So why put all your eggs in one basket? Why not do everything we can to increase the likelihood that no child will be left behind?

If we're serious about leaving no child behind -- really serious -- we have to wrestle with this question: how can every child gain access to a free, high-quality education? To cast the net as wide as possible and to increase the likelihood that more poor kids will make it, we have to level the playing field. Poverty is not an excuse. It's a reality.

In the end, TFA can be a vocal participant in doing more or it can lend tacit support to the status quo. However, I'm not holding my breath. Kopp is married to Richard Barth, who was at Edison before he went to KIPP. He's now the CEO of the KIPP Foundation.

I can only imagine the dinner-table conversations . . .

Trusting Texas Testing

Down in the heart of Texas, everything is big--big sky, big land, big gambles, big lies, big cheating. Now the governor, Rick Perry, has kicked up the heat under the testing pressure cooker a notch, offering as much as a 25% raise to teachers for the right test scores.

Another one of those unproven reforms embraced by ED, whose insistence on evidence is limited to those reforms they would prefer not to prove, Perry could make a national reputation for himself if Texas can produce big test score gains without getting caught cheating. With a possible White House run in the offing, choosing the right auditing outfit for Texas schools will be critical. Wonder if there are some former Arthur Andersen guys hanging out around the courthouse looking for something to do?

Here are a couple of stories on the beginning of the new Texas mirage.

Spellings and Her PR Field Trips

Out of one side of her mouth, Spellings says that her trips to Afghanistan, England, Egypt, France, India, Italy, Japan, Jordan, Russia, Greece and Spain are intended to learn from other countries so that she can apply those ideas at home. From the other corner, she indicates that her mission is to tout the accomplishments of U. S. schools in educating the masses.

In either case, it would seem that Spellings' learning has been disconnected or disabled, since most of the foreign countries she has on her itinerary are trying to escape the pressure cooker testing trap that Maggie is trying to set at home (when she is home). On the other hand, one must wonder if Spellings is describing the same Amerian school system when she is doing her touting abroad as the one she is constantly demonizing and threatening when she is at home.

Will Spellings' apple polisher and media lapdog, Ben Feller, ever notice these inconsistencies? I don't think so, as long as he is getting his passport stamped as well.

SRI Report on Bay Area KIPP schools

The full report can be found here.

Here are some interesting excerpts:

--1--

"Almost half the Bay Area KIPP teachers come from the Teach for America program; their median teaching experience prior to joining KIPP is 2 years. They tend to be young and without children; few match the ethnicity of the majority of their students. Thirteen of 17 teachers stayed in the job from 2003–04 to 2004–05, similar to national attrition estimates. However, three out of four teachers indicated that the demands of the job may limit their willingness to stay more than a few years. "

--2--

"By the start of the 2005–06 school year, Bay Area KIPP schools were beginning to use lotteries and waiting lists to select students. KIPP principals and staff still conduct home visits but after students enroll rather than for recruitment purposes. Given increasing interest in KIPP schools on the part of parents and students, some principals expressed concern about “creaming” already high-performing students from local schools when there remains a large number who are low-performing and underserved. One principal expressed dismay with the school’s struggle to enroll Title I students, whom she considers to be her target population. KIPP principals purposively took steps to recruit lower-performing students by targeting specific feeder schools or the local Boys and Girls Club. Also, two of the principals who believe that exposure to diversity is important are trying to recruit students from a range of neighborhoods. One principal recalled, “[We] tried to recruit in [the Latino region of the city] but had no luck—kids maybe felt it was out of their jurisdiction.” Another principal, targeting the Asian community, said it was difficult to get people to participate in KIPP and is now making efforts to make more connections with this group."

--commentary--

From this, one could argue that KIPP success is based on the fact that KIPP students have motivated parents who push them in ways that other underprivileged kids don't. Also, it seems that at least some KIPP students are already succeeding at other schools. Given these two factors -- motivated parents and already successful students -- how much credit can we reasonably ascribe to KIPP?

Also, KIPP schools are made up almost entirely of black students. KIPP's success undergirds the recent law passed by the Nebraska legislature, allowing for segregated schools in Omaha. In other words, looking at KIPP as an example, the argument could be made that while segregated schools might seem bad, they actually "work." Of course, what they work at doing is the question.

Why KIPP Is Not a Model for Urban Education

KIPP schools are designed for black and Hispanic kids from inner-city ghettos. The success of these schools proclams, "Here is how you raise the achievement of poor minority kids." In fact, most of the press I read about them says this explicitly.

I'm concerned that KIPP, Edison, and other "back to basics" approaches operate under the implicit assumption that the best we can hope for (re: the achievement of black and Hispanic children) is to give them nothing but the basics. Yes, KIPP, et al, might improve test scores, but at what price? Less social studies? Less art, foreign languages, and music? Yes, KIPP might offer a trip to Central Park as a reward for good behavior, but middle-class white parents such as me cringe at the idea that our children would be taken on field trips only as a reward for good behavior. Middle-class whites assume that it is the duty of schools to provide our children with a high-quality education and that every child, regardless of whether he or she is deemed "good" or "bad," has a right to such an education. Student behavior might influence the kinds of options that white middle-class children are exposed to, but good or bad behavior is not the sole determinant of these options.

Why, then, should poor black and Hispanic parents not have the same assumptions? Why should poor black and Hispanic students not have the same rights and the same options? Ultimately, it appears that approved behavior is the key to success at KIPP. I can think of no middle-class white school that makes this kind of bargain with its students except for military academies.

By "docile" I don't (necessarily) mean "quiet" and "inactive." Students may be noisily and actively engaged in practices that (1) confirm their own thoughts concerning their self-perceived racial and intellectual inferiority and (2) fail to interrogate or critique systems of government that produce institutionalized racism. For example, "skills-based" programs like Open Court, Direct Instruction, and Success for All are -- by definition -- created for low-achieving populations of students. "These programs have proven to be especially effective for students who come from disadvantaged backgrounds, have limited proficiency in English, or have special needs. Lesson plans are highly structured." (from The McGraw-Hill Companies "2005 Investor Fact Book") If you've read the Report of the Subgroups from the National Reading Panel, you know that this claim is completely groundless. Nevertheless, poor children are given strict instruction in unproven literacy and numeracy programs because they are poor children. The curriculum itself -- designed for "disadvantaged children" -- creates an artificial ceiling on achievement and, thus, a self-fulfilling prophecy.

How many wealthy districts use these programs? What kinds of ceilings are imposed on the achievement of wealthy children?

As for interrogating and critiquing socio-historical systems that produce the status quo, I'd be willing to bet that the name "Malcolm X" is not uttered at KIPP schools. I'm sure there's not enough time to cover everything. But, then again, what do they cover in the time they have? Surely black children should know not just who Malcolm X is, but why he believed what he believed and how he conducted his activist work.

I don't mean to suggest that these kinds of racist practices are intentional. They are not. They are undertaken with the best of intentions. But they start with the unexamined premise, "This is how you teach these kind of children." Simply by asserting that "these kind of children" exist empirically and that "they" have certain a priori needs and inherent limitations on what they are capable of achieving as reflected in the curriculum and the structure of the schools (with their heavy emphasis on "the basics" and large doses of rewards and punishments), KIPP schools contribute directly to the educational achievement gap between wealthy whites and poor blacks. Yes, it may appear that this gap has been closed by these same poor black children scoring higher on standardized tests. But I would seriously question these gains as anything other than illusory, especially when these gains are made at the expense of these children knowing about themselves and their oppression as well as at the expense of their intellectual potential.

Here's the troubling thing: KIPP schools appear to work. But what they work at remains in question. What does it mean for a school to "work"? Some would say that KIPP works because it produces high test scores and gets kids into elite prep schools and then on to college. But others would say that KIPP fails because it does not produce democratically-engaged, independently-minded critical thinkers. In its worst form, KIPP represents a failure of imagination and an abdication on the part of educators who are convinced, albeit with the best of intentions, that this is the best "these kids" can hope for.

But would the KIPP approach be welcomed by a mostly white, affluent school? After all, if KIPP works so well to get black kids into good schools, then why don't the best elementary and middle schools -- both public and private, black and white -- immediately adopt its approach?

Are KIPP schools serving as surrogate parents for their students, given the amount of time students spend at school? To what extent does the apparent success of each KIPP school serve to mask the underlying problems of the neighborhoods where KIPP schools are found? In other words, is KIPP a way to treat the symptoms of the achievement gap, with its insistence on personal triumph over adverse conditions, and turn attention away from the more pernicious causal factors at the root of the achievement gap?

KIPP works because it brings a kind of suburban, middle-class milieu to an urban, working-poor milieu. But let's imagine the implications of this for a moment. KIPP schools are basically charged with raising these children. That in itself may or may not be a good thing, e.g., should a publicly-funded educational institution overseen by the state be charged with unofficially raising children? Maybe yes, maybe no. But if yes, what kinds of parents are these KIPP schools? And whose interests do they have in mind? Biological parents have an investment in the well-being of their children that differs on several different orders of magnitude from the interest that a state-controlled parent might have. In some instances, the KIPP parent might actually be better than the biological parent. But in other cases, the biological parent might do a better job inculcating in the child the values that are important to his/her family, race, religious tradition, and practices of ethnic origin.

If we leave it to KIPP to raise poor black children, how will they raise them? With what outcome in mind? As many social dominance theorists have suggested, the most stable societies are those in which historically oppressed groups accept the legitimacy of the hierarchical structure, thus internalizing their oppression by rationalizing to themselves their place in the order of things.

Left to choose its own priorities, surely the state (through the mechanism of KIPP) will choose stability over something else. The effect and impact of this choice can only be guessed at, but I'd venture an educated guess and say that stability means more phonics and less Malcolm X. Again, this is by no means a consciously-constructed plan to exert racial dominance. It is, in a word, efficient. And, according to the KIPP people, what these children need.

Until we look at the totality of education reform and stop insisting that education reform should be exclusively about school reform, we will never come close to closing the gap. Even a best case scenario with KIPP -- where KIPP schools flourish across the country -- can only hope to educate an extraordinarily small percentage of poor urban kids. So in praising KIPP, we actually lose sight of the bigger issues and the bigger challenges. And, with KIPP, we say, "This is good enough for them" while we send our kids to private schools or the best suburban schools.

Education and Free Thought Under Siege: The Dots Connected

If you read nothing else this weekend, read this piece published yesterday at Inside Higher Ed on the linked path from Leo Strauss to Margaret Spellings--and more. Please pass it on, and on, and on:

Connecting the Dots

By Alan Jones

By all objective measures, the dawning of the 21st century should be a golden era for American higher education. A recent issue of The Economist described America’s system of higher education as “the best in the world” and provided convincing documentation for its claim. A recent review article by Jonathan Cole, provost at Columbia University, meticulously documents the preeminence of U.S. higher education in the world today as an established fact.

Perhaps sensing the current domestic political climate, however, Cole uses his analysis as the basis for sounding a strong cautionary note. “The United States paid a heavy price when the leaders of its research universities in the 1950’s failed to defend the leader of the Manhattan Project J. Robert Oppenheimer; the double Nobel Prize chemist Linus Pauling; and the China expert Owen Lattimore. But a wave of repression in American universities today is apt to have even more dramatic consequences for the nation than the repression of the Cold War.”

This broad-based and even global acclaim for higher education in the United States is strangely at odds with the concentrated political attacks that Cole warns us about and that the academy is currently experiencing. It is particularly out of step with the dark and dysfunctional picture of the academy painted by David Horowitz and his Center for the Study of Popular Culture. If Horowitz were simply a disaffected political crank, as many have hitherto regarded him, then his views on the academy could be easily dismissed. Such dismissal would seem to be all the more in order following his disastrous testimony before the legislative subcommittee in Pennsylvania in which he was forced to recant as unsubstantiated several of the cases that he had been widely circulating as documentation of alleged malfeasance in the academy.

Oddly, however, his campaign goes on. Horowitz, with assistance from Karl Rove and the former House majority whip, Tom DeLay, has briefed Republican members of Congress on his Academic Bill of Rights campaign and DeLay has even distributed copies of Horowitz’s political primer The Art of Political Warfare: How Republicans Can Fight to Win to all Republican members of Congress. Rove refers to Horowitz’s pamphlet as “a perfect pocket guide to winning on the political battlefield.”

In a more recent development, last fall, Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings appointed a Commission on Higher Education. Spellings, described as a protégé of Rove, gained considerable attention as the principal architect of President Bush’s controversial “No Child Left Behind” initiative. Among the proposals being discussed by Spellings’s new commission is one that calls for scrapping the current system of accreditation, which is done by independent regional bodies, in favor of a National Accreditation Foundation that would be created by Congress and the president.

The current system of institutional review through independent accreditation boards is one of the hallmarks of American higher education and is one of the most important structural safeguards of the academy’s ability to ensure academic quality and intellectual excellence. The introduction of oversight by an inherently partisan political body in lieu of the currently independent accreditation process is a peculiar remedy if the perceived ailment in the academy is political bias. Carol Geary Schneider, president of the American Association of Colleges and Universities, has said that “the commission is sending out firebolts, one after another.” To chair this extraordinary committee Secretary Spellings chose Charles Miller, a former chairman of the University of Texas Board of Regents and, historically, a large contributor to the President’s election campaigns.

The question of why the academy is under such focused and persistent attack by individuals like David Horowitz and his political supporters despite the fact that it appears to be an extraordinarily successful enterprise and an unrivaled resource for the nation is a question that many Americans are asking. In understanding the origins, scope and staying power of this attack it is crucial to understand not only the political relationships that Horowitz enjoys, but the sources of funding that created and sustain his Center for the Study of Popular Culture and its Academic Bill of Rights campaign. It is also critical to understand that the same funding sources that brought Horowitz’s organization into being, also created and sustain a large and integrated network of ideologically defined think tanks and centers both outside of and within the higher education establishment.

When Michael S. Joyce died in February 24, his death received scant attention in the mainstream press. Although very few people in academic circles are familiar with his name, he was, nonetheless, one of the foundational pillars of the current ideological attacks on the academy. A tribute to him by Peter Collier was published in FrontPage, Horowitz’s Web site. Joyce and his intellectual muse — the late University of Chicago political philosopher Leo Strauss — would have been pleased by the level of anonymity that he maintained during his lifetime. Joyce’s ability to maintain such anonymity despite the enormous influence that he wielded in shaping and developing the infrastructure of the neoconservative movement in this country is quite remarkable.

Although The Atlantic Monthly, as early as 1986, was describing Joyce as “one of the three individuals most responsible for the triumph of the conservative political movement,” he nevertheless adhered rigorously to the secretive and profoundly antidemocratic principles advocated by the enigmatic Strauss. As characterized by Jeet Heer in The Boston Globe, Strauss held that “the best regime is one in which the leaders govern moderately and prudently, curbing the passions of the mob while allowing a small philosophical elite to pursue the contemplative life of the mind. Such a philosophical elite may discover truths that are not fit for public consumption.... For Strauss the art of concealment and secrecy was among the greatest legacies of antiquity.”

In 1979, Michael Joyce entered the world of large-scale philanthropy with assistance from his mentor Irving Kristol, when he assumed the reins of the John M. Olin Foundation from the retiring president, William Simon. At Olin, one of Joyce’s first projects was to organize support for the launching of the Federalist Society. Joyce’s work in creating and fostering the development of the Federalist Society is instructive and foreshadows the role that he has played in current efforts by neoconservatives to restructure American higher education. The Federalist Society, with Joyce’s ongoing support, not only fostered the development of ultra-conservative legal scholars and politicians such as Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Robert Bork, Samuel Alito, John Ashcroft, Alberto Gonzales and Kenneth Starr (all of whom are members) but organized them into a powerful force for reshaping American jurisprudence in support of a larger neoconservative agenda.

Also significant in this regard is a report by Jerome Shestack, former president of the American Bar Association, that the Federalist Society is being increasingly being used as a platform from which to launch ideological attacks on the mainstream legal community. Through the device of the Federalist Society publication, ABA Watch, the society has launched a vicious attack on the ABA. In a special edition of the Watch, U.S. Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), co-chair of the society, announced that he would no longer invite the ABA to participate on a pro forma basis in the Senate judicial confirmation process. Employing rhetoric eerily parallel to that being used in the current attacks on the academy, Justice Clarence Thomas openly denounced the ABA, declaring “I am doubtful that the ABA can ever reform itself.”

In her testimony before Pennsylvania’s Select Committee on Academic Freedom in Higher Education, which convened in Philadelphia, Anne Neal, president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, expressed a similar sentiment as to the ability of the academy to reform itself. “Faced with growing legislative pressure on this issue, the higher education establishment issued the American Council on Education statement, figured it would pretend to have a quick conversion, endorse intellectual diversity, get those yahoo legislators off their backs and go back to business as usual. DO NOT LET THEM GET AWAY WITH THIS CHARADE.”

In 1985, Michael Joyce left the Olin Foundation to assume the presidency of the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, in Milwaukee. During this time, he not only built the Bradley Foundation into the largest and most influential right-wing foundation in the country, he also forged a formidable alliance among a small group of the nation’s largest, far right-wing foundations so that their resources could be more strategically deployed in support of the developing neoconservative agenda. Included in this alliance are the Koch Foundation (either directly or through its subsidiary the Claude Lambe Foundation), the Castle Rock Foundation (Coors) and the Sarah Scaife Foundations (either directly or through its subsidiaries the Carthage Foundation and the Alleghany Foundation) which, together with Olin and Bradley, have collectively financed the rise of the neoconservative movement in this country and have done so with an impressive display tactical precision.

It is a telling marker of the ideological cohesiveness and extremism of this core group of philanthropies that three of the five founding members, Joseph Coors, David Koch and Harry Bradley, were members and financial supporters of the John Birch Society. The Scaife foundations, headed by Richard Mellon Scaife, are also involved, albeit in less direct ways.

In the past 20 years this core group of funders has, by many reports, built and strategically linked an impressive array of almost 500 think tanks, centers, institutes and “concerned citizens groups” both within and outside of the academy. It is particularly telling to observe the funding sources of these organizations during the first 10-15 years of their existence, when their ideological identities were being established. A small sampling of these entities include the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, the Manhattan Institute, the Hoover Institution, the Claremont Institute, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, Middle East Forum, Accuracy in Media, and the National Association of Scholars, as well as Horowitz’s Center of the Study of Popular Culture.

The absence of formal organizational linkages between the entities within these networks creates an illusion of independent analytical voices reaching similar conclusions about strategic policy issues, a technique known in the public relations industry as “astroturfing.” This network has developed an enormous capacity to generate “data” consistent with the targeted political agenda and world views of its core group of funders to quickly and redundantly represent these issues in the mainstream press by what appear to be the voices of independent analysts and to translate these viewpoints into public policy that serves the focused ideological agenda of this core group of funders. The Bradley Foundation under Michael Joyce’s leadership has even established a publishing house, Encounter Books, to ensure that grantees like Horowitz have a quasi-academic outlet for their viewpoints.

The degree of interconnectedness within this network of organizations is considerable but almost invisible to the casual observer. For example, when ACTA’s president, Anne Neal, introduced herself to the Select Committee on Academic Freedom in Higher Education in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, she presented ACTA as “a bipartisan network of college and university trustees and alumni across the country dedicated to academic freedom.”

Full disclosure should have required some mention of the fact that ACTA (see funding sources above), which changed its name from the National Alumni Forum in 1998, was established by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute in 1994. The Intercollegiate Studies Institute in turn evolved from William Bennett’s Madison Center for Educational Affairs and the Institute for Educational Affairs founded by Irving Kristol, Michael Joyce’s mentor, and William Simon, the first president of the John M. Olin Foundation. Bennett and Kristol also sit on ACTA’s Board of Directors. The remarkably consistent record of funding across all of the incarnations of this organization and the high degree of redundancy with Horowitz’s own, highly partisan Center for the Study of Popular Culture is not consistent with Neal’s definition of ACTA as an independent, non-partisan organization.

Another example illustrative of the quietly incestuous nature of this network is presented by an article by the Boston Globe columnist Cathy Young. The article is entitled “Liberal bias in the ivory tower” and by all appearances is an independent opinion piece written by a regular Globe columnist. At the end of the article Young identifies herself as “a contributing editor at Reason Magazine.” What is undisclosed in the article is that Reason Magazine is the publication of the Reason Foundation, whose funding sources are virtually the same as those funding Horowitz’s “Academic Bill of Rights” project and Neal’s ACTA.

Young’s premise for the article is stated in her opening sentence: “Yet another study has come out documenting what most conservatives consider to be blindingly obvious: the leftwing tilt of the American professoriate.” The study that she references was conducted by Stanley Rothman, now emeritus professor at Smith College; S. Robert Lichter, emeritus professor at George Mason University; and Neil Nevitte of the University of Toronto, and was published in the online journal Forum. This study was also cited by Neal in her testimony in Pennsylvania. Young does not inform her readers that Rothman is director of the Center for the Study of Social and Political Change, a center with funding sources that are remarkably redundant with Horowitz’s Center for the Study of Popular Culture. Lichter is also president of the Center for Media and Public Affairs, which again has funding sources that are redundant with those referenced earlier.

In addition, a recent article in Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting is highly critical of Lichter’s research methodology. Another example of such conflicted interests is provided by Professor Thomas Reeves. When Reeves writes in strong support of Horowitz’s proposals on the History News Network, he fails to note that he is a spokesman for the California Association of Scholars, a branch of the National Association of Scholars (see funding sources above) and that he is director of the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, which was, again, brought into being by the Olin and Bradley Foundations.

This manufactured drumbeat against “academic bias” is amplified by Stanley Kurtz of the Hoover Institution (see funding sources above), Heather MacDonald, a John M. Olin fellow at the Manhattan Institute (see funding sources above), and Brian C. Anderson, editor of the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal and a former research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (see funding sources above).

The relentlessness with which columnists and experts with direct funding relationships with Olin, Scaife, Bradley, Koch and Coors level charges of academic bias and assert the need for legislative reform of higher education is remarkable. The goal of this narrowly focused and ideologically driven public relations campaign can only be understood in terms of its fostering of a political climate in which federal regulatory “reform” of what is universally recognized as the finest system of higher education in the world, will be tolerated.

Indeed, as has been discussed, such regulatory oversight may already be in the offing. The academy stands today as one of the last spaces in America where the democratic ideas that shape the social, economic and political fabric of the nation can be openly and independently debated on the basis of their merits and without coercion or distortion from vested economic and political interests. It is certainly in the national interest that it remain such.

Alan Jones is dean of the faculty and professor of psychology and neuroscience at Pitzer College.

8,900 Left Behind

New state tests mandated under NCLB and a change in the exam schedule have New York City officials scrambling to explain a drop in test scores that could make them look bad. While these "education officials" argue over test results, 8,900 fifth graders are about to be branded failures because of the stupidity and hubris of know-nothing politicians who refuse to recognize the sham of high stakes testing. As the adults argue over explanations for the poor test results, these kids will be scarred forever by a system that continues to leave them behind.

What a mess.
-------------------------------------------------
More at Risk of Repeating Fifth Grade
By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN
Published: June 17, 2006

More than 8,900 New York City fifth graders are in danger of being held back because of failing scores on annual reading and math tests, city education officials said yesterday. That contrasts sharply with last year when a big rise in scores led Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg to say that his effort to end social promotion had improved student achievement.

City third graders posted better results with the number in danger of repeating the grade declining for a third year in a row. And there were gains among seventh graders, who were subject to the mayor's promotion policies for the first time this year.

Students who fail to make the cut on the annual exams are urged to attend summer school. They must retake the exams in August, and if they fail again, they must repeat the grade.

While the results were mixed, it was the fifth grade numbers that drew attention because the most stellar increases on city exams last year were in that grade.

In interviews, city education officials offered many explanations for the poorer fifth grade results, which saw the number failing to earn promotion rise to 8,921, or 15.2 percent of students subject to the mayor's promotion rules, from 5,450 students, or 8.6 percent last year.

The officials said that new state tests were used this year in place of citywide exams and that the tests were given in the winter instead of the spring. The changes, they said, made it unfair to compare year-to-year results.

Class Differences and Achievement Differences

WestEd is offering a free pdf of a policy perspective offered by Richard Rothstein, a longtime advocate for a realistic and systemic approach to improving life for residents in poverty areas as the linchpin to improving schools and closing achievement gaps:

Without complementary investments in early childhood education, health care, housing, after-school and summer programs, and other social and economic supports, the academic achievement gap between lower- and middle-class children will never be closed. In this new Policy Perspectives paper, Richard Rothstein, Research Associate of the Economic Policy Institute, outlines a series of reforms, in addition to school improvement, that could help narrow the achievement gap. As Rothstein writes:

“If as a society we choose to preserve big social class differences, we must necessarily also accept substantial gaps between the achievement of lower-class and middle-class children. Closing those gaps requires not only better schools, although those are certainly needed, but also reform in the social and economic institutions that prepare children to learn in different ways. It will not be cheap.”

Janitors, Popcorn Salesmen, and Other FCAT Graders

An editorial from St. Petersburg Times on the growing scandal that has to make Jeb wish that his family were not in bed with the McGraw-Hill empire:

Janitors and popcorn salesmen have graded the most important test in Florida's public schools, and Education Commissioner John Winn is suddenly tongue-tied about the revelations that required a lawsuit to uncover. He is absurdly complacent, even though wrongly graded tests can lead to teachers being fired and students losing diplomas.

How can he just shrug his shoulders?

Winn followed the well-worn bureaucratic path of resistance and denial when asked in March why Kelly Services was advertising for $10 temps to grade the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test. He locked arms with CTB/McGraw-Hill, the company being paid $86-million to oversee the FCAT, and refused requests to turn over the qualifications of the people who grade the written answers. He called it a "political fishing expedition."

Along the way, Winn also made repeated categorical assurances about the graders: "Never in 14 years has a scorer not met the standard." The testing contract is "the most closely monitored contract in state government." "We have checks and double checks and triple checks ad nauseam."

Oops.

Monday, after the South Florida Sun-Sentinel reported the preliminary findings of two legislators who sued and got access to the graders' qualifications, Winn offered a more humble assessment: "There was less than satisfactory implementation of this contract."

Winn's oversight of the contract generously could have been called "less than satisfactory" if he hadn't gone to such lengths to hide the information and made such ill-informed public claims. Now his department's role is flatly indefensible.

The contract requires CTB/McGraw-Hill to hire graders with college degrees and expertise in the areas they grade. But an initial review by Democratic state Sens. Skip Campbell of Tamarac and Les Miller of Tampa uncovered as many as half who don't qualify. Some applicants cited degrees from universities that don't appear to exist. In less than 10 days, Campbell uncovered more about grading deficiencies than the department found in seven years.

In an era of high-stakes school accountability, the least accountable agency may be the Department of Education. It has misspent legislatively appropriated funds, bungled grants for technology, churned through staff in key programs and botched a plan for teacher performance pay. The voucher program was so rife with fraud and mismanagement that it attracted critical attention from law enforcement, state auditors and legislative committees.

In response to the unqualified FCAT graders, Winn displayed a smugness that has become all too typical. "Even on political fishing expeditions," he told reporters, "sometimes you catch a few fish." The point here is that DOE is supposed to be catching the mistakes, not leaving the work to others. High standards need to apply to more than just the teachers and their students.

[Last modified June 15, 2006, 05:57:58]

Bush vs. Bush: AYP vs. FCAT

With Jeb's voucher solution for the public schools ruled unconstituional earlier this year by the Florida Supreme Court, and with his efforts rejected to change the Florida State Constitution in order to neutralize the decision, Jeb's folks are unexpectedly left without an alternative to the public schools they planned to shut down with a voucher in every pocket. Now as the assured failure juggernaut of NCLB grinds on toward them, it is interesting to watch Bush and his lieutenants squirm. Suddenly, Jeb gives much more weight to Florida's own FCAT to detemine the quality of schools in Florida than to Big Brother's AYP numbers. Interesting:

A record number of Florida schools earned A and B grades this year, but an increasing number also failed to meet federal standards, according to data released Wednesday.

The disconnect isn’t new.

But for the first time since the state and federal grading systems began clashing four years ago, Gov. Jeb Bush said Florida’s system is a better gauge than the one that anchors the education agenda of his brother, President Bush.

Asked at a Tallahassee news conference whether parents should pay more attention to the state’s school grades than the federal report card, Bush said, “Absolutely.”

“With no disrespect to anyone in Washington, D.C.,” he said, “I believe our system is the most comprehensive system of measuring how schools are doing based on student learning, by far.”

Two hours later, Education Commissioner John Winn went a step further. He said he didn’t foresee the state planning for the takeover of hundreds of schools next year, which is one of the options prescribed for schools that continue falling short of the federal “adequate yearly progress” standard.

“We have schools that are doing very well that are closing the achievement gap and achieving at high levels and still not making AYP,” Winn said in a teleconference. “I’m going to be hard-pressed to put the federal sanctions ahead of our state accountability system.”

How bad is the disconnect between the Federal story of failure and the State sunny picture of success? According to NCLB numbers,

This year, 72 percent of Florida schools failed to make adequately yearly progress, up from 64 percent last year. More than 500 of them are high-poverty schools that failed to meet the federal standards for a fourth year in a row, which means they will be in line next year for a potentially dramatic shakeup.

The State's more sunny appraisal:

Some 2,074 Florida schools, or 75 percent statewide, earned A’s or B’s this year, up from 1,843 schools and 67 percent last year. Most dramatically, 87 percent of middle schools landed in the top tier, up from 63 percent a year ago.

This is the kind of mess the chubby brother will leave Florida citizens to deal with when he exits in January. Nonetheless, the Jeb is hopeful. Why shouldn't he be--he does not have to deal with the failure he created:

After the news conference, Bush said he believes the success of the FCAT and the school grading system will shield it from attack after he leaves office in January 2007.

Frist/Bush or Bush/Frist? Can you think of anything better for America?

Book Banning to Protect One World View

2006, United States of America. New York Times:

MIAMI, June 15 — A children's book about Cuba will be removed from Miami-Dade County school libraries because a parent objected to its contents, saying it contains deceptive information and paints an idealistic picture of life in Cuba.

The Miami-Dade School Board voted 6 to 3 on Wednesday to ban the book, "Vamos a Cuba," and its English version, "A Visit to Cuba," from its libraries, against the recommendation of two review committees and the school system's superintendent.

Chile's School Privatization Case

Here are a couple of clips from the Christian Science Monitor's piece on Chile's 30-year old school privatization venture. If Grover and Maggie are really looking for evidence for what they call school choice, have a look here on how privatization addresses the achievement gap they claim to be so concerned about:

SANTIAGO, CHILE – "A country's development is expressed by the quality of its schools, not by the quality of its highways." The hand-painted sign hung outside a Santiago high school last week, one of hundreds that have been paralyzed in recent weeks by massive student demonstrations calling for education reform in Chile.

The sign sums up the pent-up frustrations in one of Latin America's most stable economies, whose modern sewage plants, envied subway system, and automated-toll superhighways are icons of Chile's rapid economic growth. Meanwhile, many of the country's public schools are in dire need of new infrastructure, resources, and better-trained teachers.

Chile's education system has reached this state after years of neglect and outdated teacher training, says Rodrigo Vera, an education expert with the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO). "Even church ceremonies have changed more than our classrooms," says Vera.

He also blames what he calls a misguided faith in privatized services: "We've had a neoliberal-system way of trying to organize health and education, and after 30 years of this model we find that the market has produced differences and not equity."

. . . . Almost 15 percent of Chilean high school kids study in fully privatized schools, 35 percent are in municipal public schools, and the remaining 50 percent attend cheaper private schools with state subsidies. But according to Vera, only a handful of subsidized schools manage to achieve the results of those in the private system. He says almost 90 percent of students in fully privatized schools will go on to university, whereas only 10 to 15 percent do so from subsidized or fully public schools. On national exams, the average scores for students in Chile's public schools are almost half that of their counterparts in private schools. . .

NCLB and The Yellow-Brick Road

Check out Mike Winerip's allegory from the Times. Could the Wizard be a female?

Lisa Graham Keegan Makes The Peoria Times

In a NOW segment aired March 26, 2004 that introduced the Bush cronies who had just been handed $77,000,000 in ED funds to seed school privatization ventures, Lisa Graham Keegan, head of the Education Leaders Council, gushed to reporter, Michelle Mitchell:

You don't think anybody's making money off of education? Big secret, it's happening. People make millions.

This admission came even as Mitchell was reporting that an audit had showed that the $16,000,000 that ELC had squeezed from ED (with the help of former ELC chief, Gene Hickok) was going to pay big salaries that Lisa and her friends were doling out to one another.

It wasn't long after that, however, until Keegan took her cut and split, leaving a big mystery as to what happened to the other millions that ELC had received for the impressive-sounding programs pumped on ELC's spiffy website, before it went black last year.

Now it seems Keegan is back, this time looking for more federal infusion for her version of virtual education. On the website for her company, e2020, Inc., it appears that e2020 is a form of on-demand teacher in a box, marketed heavily to urban areas where high schoolers find it too dangerous to go to school. One might think of e2020 as the Iraqi model for education: keep the students and the teacher in their virtual green zones, where they are free to learn all they desire to know.


One can expect, too, that there will lots of federal dollars to fund this new kind of powerful school choice--and, of course, to close the achievement gap. You know.

You can read about Lisa's new adventures in today's Peoria Times.

McGraw-Hill, Kelly Girls, and Bush's FCAT

On April 26, I put up this post on CBT/McGraw-Hill's hiring of Kelly Girls at 10 bucks an hour to score Florida's high stakes test that children must pass to move to the next grade. A closer look by the State has now uncovered deeper problems than first reported:

Hundreds of the thousands of part-time workers who scored part of the FCAT didn't have college degrees related to sections of the test they were assigned to grade, state Education Commissioner John Winn said Monday.

The problem was discovered when the state reviewed the qualifications of the short-term workers hired by testing company CTB/McGraw-Hill.

Winn said all graders have bachelor's degrees as required by the state's contract with the company.

But some of the workers have no experience as teachers or lack degrees directly linked to the subjects they graded.

The state requires that graders' degrees be matched with the subjects they are scoring on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test.

CTB/McGraw-Hill and its subcontractors "did not fully implement the requirement of the related degree fields to a degree that we would like," Winn said. "I am not happy."

Legislative aides have examined about half — 1,255 of more than 2,500 — of the job applications. So far, 674 graders appear to have no experience as educators, or have degrees unrelated to the subjects they are grading.

Applications from the other 581 indicate they have an education background, teaching experience or related skills, but 353 failed to provide evidence to support their claims.

The state will come up with a list of acceptable pairings of graders' degrees with subject areas. Officials will have to decide many details, such as whether a grader with a degree in business administration who has taken several statistics classes is qualified to grade the math questions. . .

The rest of the story here.

FairTest E-Examiner

FairTest has just published the first issue of its E-Examiner, the online version of the Examiner, which has been around since 1987.

You can't be fully informed on the issue of eduucational testing without reading the Examiner.

Choices on the New Orleans Menu, or Choking Down Charter Schools?

Hurricane Katrina brought Americans face to face with how the poor and the black are treated in an emergency situation. If you were appalled by the surrealistic neglect that you saw on TV in the immediate aftermath of a hurricane, think a moment about how these people might have lived their daily lives in the poor districts of New Orleans when there was no emergency to bring attention to their invisibility. Malignant neglect was and is a way of life. And except for the FBI raids to expose corruption and to develop a case for the takeover by private management, New Orleans Public Schools were no exception. Until Katrina, that is, when the overnigt demise of the school system offered the privatizers at ED a grand emergency that could be exploited to push vouchers and charters on a scale that, heretofore, had been unheard of.

Attention by ED came in a hurry. By the middle of September, the White House had proposed Katrina education relief in the form of $488,000,000 for private school vouchers. There was, too, $20,000,000 of ED cash for charter schools, enough seed money to get the State's attention and to guide their "decision making," just in case they didn't the email. Did this education disaster relief offer to pay any of the $300,000,000 in debt run up by the New Orleans Public Schools prior to Katrina? Or was there any relief for the $180,000,000 shortfall for underinsured damaged buildings that FEMA would refuse to pay? Not a dime for either.

Even the politcally-tone deaf ideologues at ED, however, realized they had overplayed the voucher rescue, and by early fall, the La. State Dept. of Education were meeting to develop a final solution for public schools in New Orleans that would curry favor in Washington. The first step was to wrest control from the Orleans Parish School Board. Easy. The Louisiana Legislature passed a law handing over control to the State for any New Orleans school that fell below the State average for test scores. If this law were applied statewide, it is simple arithmetic, of course, to see that the State would end up controlling that half of the schools falling below the average. In New Orleans, however, it would mean that the State-controlled Recovery School District would control 112 of the 131 public schools that were below State average in school performance scores when Katrina struck.

Being above average has its benefits, besides the more obvious ones associated with wealth and whiteness. Teachers in the surviving 19 schools not taken over by the State will continue to have collective bargaining rights, even though there is not much of a collective when the other 112 schools, once converted to charters, will be governed by building-level decisions on hiring, firing, benefits, and even hours of operation.

Following Spellings' new infusion of yet another $24,000,000for more charters on Monday, the New Orleans solution appears headed for the creation of a system of charter schools, even as the evidence we have tells us that charters are no better and sometimes worse than the schools they replace. If anyone besides ED, itself, put forward such a risky scheme for public schools, ED’s insistence on scientific research to back it up would place any such proposal on the garbage heap. Spellings, however, and her band of union buster will propose anything, scientifically based or ideologically sealed, to chase down any opportunity, disaster or otherwise, to impose their choice and call it someone else's.

Spelling knows that the charter solution that she has in mind will place curriculum and personnel decisions in the hands of school principals, without any of the troublesome union interventions or school board interventions that get in the way of the de-skilling and de-professionalizing of the teacher corps, or the instituting of the scripted boot camp curriculum so popular today as the educational solution for those whose lagging aspirations and loose morals will require constant policing in the future. As Bush's chief domestic policy advisor, Karl Zinsmeister, has said,

. . . in a "soft, often amoral, and self-indulgent age," . . . some children "will be ruined without a whip hand."

Work hard, be nice.

Privatizers Stung By Ohio Voucher Snub

What do you do if you offer a school choice that nobody chooses? Well, you just keep trying to force your school choice by offering a new deadline, just as the Ohio Department of Education (R) has done after an anemic response to their voucher deadline last Friday:

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — State school officials will give students at some of Ohio’s most troubled public schools a second opportunity to sign up for vouchers this summer after the first chance at free money for private education generated lukewarm interest.

As Friday’s midnight deadline approached, only about 1 in 20 eligible students had signed up for the scholarships of up to $5,000 — despite mass mailings, advertisements in minority and mainstream media, and community meetings paid for by the state, said J.C. Benton, an Ohio Department of Education spokesman.

However, the state doesn’t view the 5 percent to 6 percent participation rate — about 2,450 students — as a disappointment, Benton said. The state’s goal is for 14,000 students to enroll, 30 percent of those who are eligible.

“We didn’t expect the first year to hit 14,000 students. That was not a realistic expectation,” he said.

Benton referenced a report that noted much lower first-year participation rates in similar programs across the country, including a 0.7 percent rate in the first year of a Milwaukee program; a 0.3 percent rate in Florida’s McKay voucher program; and a 1.7 percent rate in the first year of Washington, D.C.’s voucher program. Participation is those programs has grown over time.

The Ohio Legislature voted this year to expand the school voucher program by including students from poorly performing schools that don’t yet carry the worst academic rating.

Critics argue that interest in the scholarships is low because, under the program’s rules, participating private schools can turn away students they don’t want.

Benton conceded that a few families have complained to the state about not being able to afford private school application fees or that their children were unable to pass a private-school admission test.

Meanwhile, as enrollment lagged last week, the state saw a surge in private-school families enrolling their children at eligible public schools they had never attended in an attempt to qualify for the voucher scholarships — $4,250 for younger children and $5,000 for high school students.

“It is, by design, creating a new privilege rather than a new set of opportunities,” said Tom Mooney, president of the Ohio Federation of Teachers, a teachers’ union. “These elite private schools aren’t going to admit anyone they don’t want to. It’s not opening doors to students that might not already meet their standards.”

Benton said any barriers that the Education Department identifies will be raised when it submits its report to the Legislature suggesting future improvement to the program. Thus far, he said, admission criteria at private schools have not proven to be “a huge hindrance.”

He said it is possible that public school students are satisfied with the schools they are attending, many that programs and help tailored to the challenges they face.

The second signup period will be July 21 to Aug. 4.

The fact is that the best private schools don't want these black, brown, and poor children, and even if they did, these vouchers would not come close to paying the tuition. It's like Kozol said: When conservatives are willing to offer every poor black and Hispanic child a 25 thousand dollar voucher to go to Exeter, that is the day I will become a Republican.

If the Supreme Court of Ohio were not presently paid for by the Republican Party, we might expect the constitutionality of these vouchers to become an issue, as it did in Florida. Of course, if the lack of enthusiasm continues, court action will not be necessary to send the privatizers home once more.

The Real Numbers of Engineers: Rising Above the Gathering Lies

Last Fall when Rising Above the Gathering Storm appeared, I offered this skeptical appraisal of the neocons' factionalized scare document aimed at garnering support for federalizing R&D for American corporations. An appropriate use of government, Norquist might say.

Hiding behind the stamp of approval by the National Academy of Science, the neocons and their duplicitous goons in the White House, we now find out, simply made up numbers to pump the need for more engineers and more scientists. Now that the real numbers are out, the National Academy appears contrite, if not shocked, but nobody in the corporate media seems to care. From Inside Higher Ed:

The Disappearing Chinese Engineers

Pop quiz: What is the significance of 600,000, 350,000, and 70,000?

As anyone who has attended one of the many recent Congressional hearings on American science education or economic competitiveness knows, those are the numbers of engineers who graduated last year from institutions of higher education in China, India and the United States, respectively.

The numbers were included in a hugely influential report, titled “Rising Above the Gathering Storm,” on the future of the American economy, which was released in October by the National Academies.

The hearings — along with press releases from politicians and news articles, including a recent feature in Newsweek, that use the numbers — have combined to pound out a steady drum beat of doom and gloom for the future of American science and engineering.

But the numbers, though oft repeated, are no longer embraced by the National Academies.

In February, after the report had already helped push President Bush to announce a major plan for science education during his State of the Union Address, according to senior government officials, the National Academies changed the numbers in the report.

Where 600,000 engineers once represented the number produced in China, now stand “about 350,000 engineers, computer scientists and information technologists with 4-year degrees,” the revised report reads. Those 350,000 are compared to a new number for the U.S.: 140,000.

The new numbers don’t seem to have gained quite as much traction. That’s perhaps because “there’s political utility in [the original] numbers,” according to Eric Iversen, manager of outreach for the American Society for Engineering Education. “The Bush administration has signed on to the American Competitiveness Initiative,” he said, referring to the plan announced in the State of the Union.

The number change came in response to a report issued by researchers at Duke University. The report found that, not only were the numbers simply wrong, they were comparing full-fledged engineers in the United States to Chinese workers who are the equivalent of motor mechanics. . . .

These are the same hoodlums who made up their scary lies to get the Iraq war they wanted. Why should we expect them to do anything different when it comes to the small task of defining policy for the future of American education?

SAT Scores for Sale to the Highest Bidder

With Manhattan test prep boutiques promising as much as a 400 point bumps on Caitlin's and Carter's SATs, Upper East Side parents are coughing up as much as $25,000 for tutoring. That right, 25k. Here's a couple of clips from a fascinating blog entry by Eliot Shrefer, tutor, at Huffington Post:

In New York City, a year of SAT tutoring can carry a price tag of $25,000, all to secure a competitive edge over middle class America.

In my business – SAT tutoring – you get used to sighs. A client’s mother frets over the sheer amount of work her daughter has to do to get her score up until she reaches the resigned moment, when she will sigh and observe that no one thought you could prepare for the SAT back when she took it – it was “untutorable.” Bemoaning all the work her child is going through to prepare, she’ll assume the change is generational, that today’s youth are under more pressure to achieve on the test, that there now exists a $310 million-a-year test prep industry where there was none before. . . .

But tutoring doesn’t raise scores just by dint of the hours the tutors spend at their students’ desks and dining room tables. The top tutoring firm also requires its students take a practice SAT each weekend of their spring semester, at a charge of $115 an administration. The firm rents out a high school and administers an authentic SAT under real conditions – accurate timing, breaks, a proctor in the room. Students ideally take between thirteen and seventeen tests during their junior year, and at 3.5 hours an administration that means cramming a total of a hundred extra hours into a junior spring already overburdened with college essays and advanced placement exams. . . .

Students raised on Park Avenue are born into family situations in which overachieving merely maintains the status quo, and therefore the market is primed for anyone offering services that provide an edge on local peers. Tutoring follows the lucrative philosophy of advertising: if you can manufacture a need, people with disposable resources will find ways to fill it. In zip-codes as wealthy and competitive as Manhattan’s, it isn’t hard to figure that someone would eventually find a way to quantify college admissions, and turn that numbers game to a profit. But the wealthy aren’t competing only against the wealthy, but also against those with less disposable income: the rest of us. The extent upper-crust Manhattan goes to in order to get top-college spots for its students is largely unknown to the rest of America – one can only wonder at the outrage that slumbers in the rest of the country, waiting to be uncovered.

Any more questions about the fairness of the SAT?

New Diversions by Education (Mis) Trust

As the deadline has now past for states to fulfill the impossible NCLB requirement for 100 percent of teachers to be highly qualified by 2006, the Orwellian chutzpah of The Education Trust, (aka public relations firm for the Department of Miseducation) has reached a new low. Ed Trust’s privileged sorority girls for the underprivileged have issued a new report, which combines some of their earlier “research,” some very selective reporting from the Illinois Education Research Council (IERC) (whose main points they ignore), and some re-interpretation of both in order to come up with something that parrots the pre-digested talking points of Margaret Spellings.

The main thrust of the report, Teaching Inequality: How Poor and Minority Students Are Shortchanged on Teacher Quality, is to point to an obvious and unpleasant reality, attribute a cause to that reality that is not so obvious or even true, and to make recommendations to change that reality that are not the least obvious and that are the most obfuscating. Using correlations to attribute causation is an old, yet obviously undiscovered, research problem for the wizards at Ed Trust.

Like all the other reports that I have read from Ed Trust, this one begins and ends with the assumption that poverty and racism can be ignored as variables in educational attainment if enough attention is focused on threats, sanctions, manipulations, and other tactics that only skirt the underlying reasons for poor performance in poor schools—poverty and racism. In short, Ed Trust has long ago concluded that if enough prescriptive institutional interventions can be put in place, then the underlying racism and classism of our society can be ignored on our way to, otherwise, ending the achievement gap. Just take a look at the language in the first paragraph of Ed Trust's press release on the report to get a sense of what I mean:

A report out today from the Education Trust provides new information on the impact of teacher quality on student achievement and offers specific steps states should take to remedy the persistent practice of denying the best teachers to the children who need them the most.

In short, if we can force enough good teachers into poor, run-down, and under-resourced schools in communities where children need flak jackets to get to school safely, and where lack of opportunity has withered away hope for community or individual improvement, then we can somehow close the achievement gap. This blindness is much more damaging than the old overt racism of blaming the victim of racism for her plight: the new racism does not even acknowledge that there is a victim, or that racism is a problem that goes way beyond the decisions made by state departments of education. Somehow, this new color blindness contends that if we turn our wishful thinking into enough tactical maneuvers to treat the symptoms (weak educational achievement), then we can continue to ignore the underlying illness (poverty and racism). Ed Trust, then, would solve the problem they have ignored by funneling and forcing more high-performing teachers into high poverty environments that will continue to grind them up just like the current 50 percent of teachers that we lose in high poverty environments within the first five years of teaching.

So what are Ed Trust's recommendations for dealing with the fact that poor schools have the weakest teachers?

The Ed Trust report recommends a range of strategies to end the unfair distribution of teacher talent, including:

• Scaling back prerogatives that allow experienced teachers to pick their assignments.

• Providing salary incentives to attract high-quality, experienced principals to work in schools that serve high concentrations of poor and minority students and linking their pay to improved conditions and improved achievement.

• Identifying effective teachers and paying them more to teach in schools with shortages.

• Taking a cue from professional sports and start using a “draft strategy,” which would put high-poverty, struggling schools at the head of the hiring line, allowing them to have the first pick of teaching talent.

• Giving teachers who work in the poorest communities fully paid sabbaticals.

• Reserving tenure for those teachers who demonstrate effectiveness at producing student learning.

• Banning unfair budgeting practices that allow the most advantaged schools to “buy” more than their share of the most highly paid teachers.

Now for a reality check from one of the many newspapers that picked up the Associated Press story:

Tom Mooney, president of the Ohio Federation of Teachers Union, said having all highly qualified teachers in Ohio is difficult partly because half of those hired leave the profession within five years. That rate is higher in urban areas, he said.

"You can't force people to work where they don't want to work," Mooney said. "We don't really have a recruiting problem as much as we have a retention problem.

So instead, then, of trying to Stalinize the teacher supply, or pretending that we can turn teacher recruitment into an NFL draft, even focusing on what states must do to satisfy those at ED who have made it impossible to do so, what if we did something different, something that even recognizes the refusal of today’s racists to acknowledge that racism exists. What if we take the information seriously that is presented in the charts here from the IERC’s Examining the Distribution and Impact of Teacher Quality in Illinois (Full Document).


What we can see graphically represented here in the chart (click to enlarge) is what happens to teacher quality when the percentage of children with free and reduced-price lunch is kept under 50 percent, which is very similar, in fact, to what happens when the minority population is held under 90 percent. Teacher quality in schools with less than 50% poor or with less than 90% minority do not have the teacher quality issues of urban schools that do not meet these criteria.

Here, then, is a vital clue as to what could be undertaken as a state or national priority for really affecting teacher quality, as well as the quality of instruction, resourcing, and the greater need to integrate our schools and society.

Economic integration is already happening in a number of localities around the country, as reported in this post and in this story from the Times last Fall, which focused on Wake County, NC:

Since 2000, school officials have used income as a prime factor in assigning students to schools, with the goal of limiting the proportion of low-income students in any school to no more than 40 percent.

The effort is the most ambitious in the country to create economically diverse public schools, and it is the most successful, according to several independent experts. La Crosse, Wis.; St. Lucie County, Fla.; San Francisco; Cambridge, Mass.; and Charlotte-Mecklenburg, N.C., have adopted economic integration plans.

In Wake County, only 40 percent of black students in grades three through eight scored at grade level on state tests a decade ago. Last spring, 80 percent did. Hispanic students have made similar strides. Overall, 91 percent of students in those grades scored at grade level in the spring, up from 79 percent 10 years ago.

What if ED were really interested in leaving no child behind, rather than using the phrase as a form of doublespeak to conceal their true efforts to shut down public schools and to lobotomize poor and brown children through the creation of chain gang charter schools in urban centers? What if we had as a national goal that by 2014, instead of insuring the failure of the public schools with impossible federal demands, that we have in place a working national plan to economically integrate America's public schools. No doubt much work would remain after 2014 to close the achievement gaps, but at least we would be on our way to doing so, rather than on our way to making sure those gaps remain gaping chasms while we create a generation of lost learners and compliant drones.

Jim Horn and Judy Rabin

NCLB Transfer Mandates Killing Performance and Diversity in Portand

I wrote an opinion piece for NSBA Newsletter on this topic back in September, citing examples from Portand that now part of the focus of year-long audit on Portland school transfers:

Portland Public Schools' well-used student transfer system has reduced school diversity, weakened neighborhood schools and might decrease student achievement, the county and city auditors' offices say in an audit to be released today.

The rest of the story here.

NCLB and the Teacher Shortage Train Wreck

Just as the law's title, No Child Left Behind, represents a pure case of doublespeak, so, too, does that part of the Law that promises a highly-qualified teacher in every classroom. The longer this law stays on the books, in fact, the bigger that lie becomes and the more likely schools will accept new definitions of highly-qualified that translate into less qualified teachers. See the vultures at ABCTE waiting in the wings.

As teacher autonomy and the joy of seeing students learn are quickly disappearing in this late age of the testing hysteria, many of our best veteran teachers are retiring as soon as they can. Many of the best younger ones, likewise, are finding other careers, rather than becoming complicit in the "cognitive decapitation" of children that results from today's scripted curriculums and direct instruction teaching. From the CSBA (tip from PEN):

That glimmer at the end of California’s once-celebrated “teacher pipeline” isn’t daylight, it’s an oncoming train, freighted with accidents waiting to happen:

• One hundred thousand new teachers will be needed over the next 10 years as baby boomers retire and younger teachers leave the ranks for other pursuits; a shortage of 27,000 fully credentialed K-12 teachers is projected in 2007-08.

• The “highly qualified teacher” requirement of the No Child Left Behind Act takes effect June 1. Ten thousand teachers in California schools didn’t qualify at the start of the 2005-06 school year.

• The number of undergraduates enrolled in teacher credentialing programs dropped 11 percent in two years, from 76,000 in 2001-02 to just 67,500 in 2003-04.

The pileup will culminate in the mid-2010s, when school districts’ scramble for teachers will be the most desperate. K-12 enrollment is projected to climb from 6.3 million today to nearly 6.5 million in 2013-14; approximately 317,000 teachers will be needed to instruct them, compared to the 306,000 working today, according to the Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning, or CFTL.

“This is not an urban problem. In fact, it’s an issue that every district in the state is likely to face,” said CFTL Executive Director Margaret Gaston.

It’s also a national trend. The National Center for Education Information says 40 percent of America’s public school teachers plan to leave the profession in the next five years. That’s the highest rate since at least 1990. Retirement is the main reason, with 42 percent of the nation’s teacher corps reaching age 50 or older last year. By 2015, the National Center for Education Statistics estimates that 2.4 million new teachers will be needed throughout the country.

“The numbers are stark,” said Chris Reising, Director of the Teacher Recruitment and Support Center at the San Diego County Office of Education. “It’s just stunning.”

The number of candidates who took the California Basic Educational Skills Test, the initial threshold to the teaching profession here, has fallen precipitously – from more than 129,000 at its peak in 2001-02 to fewer than 78,000 in 2004-05, according to the Commission on Teacher Credentialing.

“Now, you do the math,” Reising said. “CBEST is the initial indicator. It’s the very front of the pipeline.”

The rest, here.

Progress Anyone?

If, as Marquard noted, the far left is constituted by antiquarians who are turned to face in the opposite direction, then we might think of the far right as futurists doing same. For some specific examples of what progress means for the far right, check out this post at a new blog, Make Schools More.

Globalization, of Cheating

No, the teacher here in the photo (from the Christian Science Monitor) is not screening for weapons, but for wires. The first two items on my Google retrieval this morning were these (here and here) news items, one above the other, on the continued flattening of the testing world by universal access to sophisticated cheating methods that now go hand in hand with sophistocated testing methods. Whether Hunan Province or Houston County, Texas, from Beaumont to Beijing, everyone is getting deeper and deeper into the cheating action. Higher and higher stakes requires higher and higher security, it seems--and testocrats cannot keep up with the ways that humans will react to a world where learning has been replaced by testing and where testing determines the social and economic hierarchy.

If who has the power is determined by who controls the knowledge, and if who controls the knowledge is determined by who has the money, and if who gets the money is determined by who access to the knowledge, and if access to the knowledge is granted by who gets the highest test scores, then we might expect that those without the money, without the power, or without the knowledge would do whatever is necessary to get the test scores without which they and their children will continue to have none of the above. And we might expect, too, that those with the money, with the power, and with the knowledge will do the same in order to protect their positions from those who are scrambling to replace them in the high stakes hierarchy.

Will there be a meltdown, a Chernobyl, for the education-by-testing model in the early 21st Century? Or will the poisoning and the rotting away be so gradual that the discovery of the condition will come too late to save this impaired version of the consumer civilization?

NCATE Caves on Social Justice

Inside Higher Ed reported June 6 that Arthur Wise, President of NCATE, ended the discussion on the role of social justice in teacher preparation by simply capitulating before the real debate could begin. A case of pure cowardice, neocon hardball politics, or a deadly mixture of both? To commemorate NCATE's shameful acceptance of the racist claim that the goal of social justice is a liberal ideology, I offered this bit of commentary back in December when the stink began in earnest. I posted that opinion as a comment to the IHE story yesterday, to which this response came from someone identified as DRB:

Jim Horn,

I’m having a hard time understanding your point. I think it’s that only people who think like you should be allowed to teach, but I could be wrong. So far as I can tell, none of the “neo-cons” or anyone else is suggesting that people who hold far-left views should be barred from the teaching profession. The only point is that teaching has to be open to people of different political persuasions: politics has nothing to do with the ability to teach.

As for the notion of “Dispositions” in general — well, I suppose that it makes sense to screen prospective teachers for certain personal qualities such as enthusiasm and honesty, and for primary school teachers, maybe even kindness and empathy. But it’s very difficult for me to see why political views, such as whether and to what degree the Government should support poor people, or what the proper level and distribution of taxes ought to be, or whether the Government should adopt affirmative action programs, or whether the Government should recognize homosexual marriages, have any bearing on a person’s qualifications to teach.

Consider the opposite: How would you (and Mr. Socol) feel if the accrediting bodies determined that to be qualified as a teacher one had to believe that homesexuality is immoral, that gun ownership is a key civil right, and that racial classifications are inherently demeaning and unequal? I think you’d object, and rightly so. Why, then, are you so surprised when moderates and conservatives object to far-left litmus tests for teacher accreditation?

DBL, at 10:30 am EDT on June 8, 2006

And my rejoinder (I always get the last word):

Dear Mr. or Ms. DLB, or is it Dr. DLB,

You are absolutely correct in your interpretation that I am insisting that those who teach should agree with me. Where you are wrong, of course, is in your characterization of what I believe.

I believe that a free society requires that free people allow others to be free, but that allowance does not extend to the point of using that freedom to limit others’ freedom. To allow that kind of freedom would be a direct challenge the notion of freedom, itself. Dr. King said it much better, when he said that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

I believe that justice can only be achieved when we acknowledge that profound fact, and I believe that anyone who does not acknowledge that fact and who is unwilling to act accordingly, has no place in a classroom of children whose learning of that fact will determine the future of our democratic aspirations to be a free people.

We may distinguish, too, between legal justice and social justice. The goal of social justice was around long before legal justice arrived, and it will still be here long after legal justice leaves the arena. For instance, educational discrimination based on race was antithetical to social justice long before Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeks, and it will remain antithetical to social justice even as the Brown decision has been and continues to be eviscerated by court decisions and legislative actions aimed at protecting the rights of the majority. This is part of the historical reality of living with racism today, just as the struggle to end racism will remain central to the struggle to create a free, democratic society.

Yet I am not naive enough to expect that such freedom will be freely given: the struggle for social justice will remain a struggle. As Dr. King said, too, “freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.”

That demand for freedom, then, can only begin when that oppression is acknowledged and understood by the oppressed. And that, of course, is why Dewey, King, Freire, and anyone else aimed at unlocking the chains of ignorance are castigated and demonized by those who have much more to protect than they have to give.

Nobody said it was going to be easy, Mr. or Ms. or Dr. DLB.

Sincerely,
Jim Horn

Their Will To Be Done?

From dark humor to just dark:

Fresh Air from WHYY, May 11, 2006 · Journalist Michelle Goldberg, a senior writer for the online magazine Salon, and covers the Christian Right. In her new book, Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism, she writes that Christian nationalists believe the Bible is literally true -- and they want to see the nation governed by that truth.

Here's the link to listen to the interview.

Left Behind

A bit of mid-week dark humor . . .

Came across news of a real-time computer strategy game based on the Left Behind series of books:

"Left Behind Games was founded on October 23, 2001 for the purpose of developing Video & PC Games based upon the world renowned “Left Behind” Series, which continues to be one of the top selling fiction series of all time. Having sold more than 63 million books, Left Behind books have been translated into more than 30 languages and new releases continue in the Novel Series (14 books), the Kid’s Series (40 books), the Graphic Novels (10 releases), the Audio Drama Series, and more." (http://www.leftbehindgames.com/)

From what I understand about Left Behind, the apocalypse arrives, all those who are saved ascend into heaven, and all the rest are . . . you guessed it: Left Behind.

From what I understand about No Child Left Behind, the AYP apocalypse arrives, all those who are wealthy enough ascend into private schools, and all the rest are . . .

You can read more about the game and see video of it here. The good guys (the Christians) earn two points for converting each bad guy (the non-Christians). The good guys are also allowed to shoot and kill the bad guys. But they have one point deducted for each person they murder.

TAH Grants, AIHE, and ED's Traditional History Project

The coming of the neocons to ED has meant that subjects other than reading, math, and behavior control have been shoved aside by a plalanx of testing pushed by the ed industry, the testing/textbook industry, and the politicos at the Business Roundtable. Let's not forget, too, the know-nothing politicians who use the testing hysteria as an opportunity to appear tough by punishing schools and children, while turning their backs to the criminals and con men who are carrying off the federal treasury. And, of course, there are the high-placed functionaries such as Spellings, who uses her appointed position as chief steward for American public education to bully, threaten, and squeeze funds from public schools to stuff the pockets of the corporate socialists at Kaplan, Catapult, Princeton Review, etc.

But please don't think that the teaching of American history has been forgotten by this band of capitalists-gone-wild christocrats who are running ED. Imprinting a preferred version of the past on the malleable minds of the young is too important to leave to chance or even to legitmate historiography. The neocons, in fact, have committed almost a $120 million just this year, money that is now being distributed to schools in 38 states in the form of discretionary grants that usually run just under a million each (124 of them this year). These grants are aimed at providing three years of professional development and curriculum materials for cohorts (usually 40-60) elementary and/or high school history teachers at a time.

This year's grants were aimed at elementary and high schools that are not making AYP, which, of course, is the most effective way at targeting brown and black populations, who are in need of a good dose of traditional American history. None of that multicultural crap, but good old-fashioned Greek-inspired white Protestant man history. This new traditional history came front and center when Mrs. Cheney, having given up her fling with writing lesbian historical fiction, took on the more serious mantle of preserving real white male Protestant history beginning in the late 80s.

Was it penance for her prurience that Mrs. Cheney was to become the poster lady for the arid Aryanism that is now playing catch-up to that gloomy multicultural history that dared to remind us that the Founding Heroes were mostly owners of other human beings (who they did not consider entirely human). Whatever it was, it spawned a 10-year tantrum by Mrs. Cheney over the National History Standards issued in 1994. Her hissy fit culminated in 2004, when she successfully lobbied ED to burn 300,000 booklets intended to help parents teach their children about American history. Thank you, Mrs. Cheney for helping to keep us on the sunny side of our white heroes.

Today to help quell the uppity multicultural history that became vogue in the 1990s, there is an outfit called the American Institute for History Education (AIHE) that has a turnkey system that seems to have the inside track on getting and implementing the Teaching American History (TAH) grants. AIHE even offers grant-writing consultation and the "scientifically-based" assessments that will show that the brown and black children of America are learning this new traditional history. Kevin Brady, (photo from the John Fenwick Liberty Fellowship Faculty page) President of AIHE, clicked off ten sites where AIHE is partnering with cohorts to bring AIHE materials and their teaching methods and their tests to poor schools across America.

Method of instruction? It's called Binary Paideia (really, it is). From what I can glean from the AIHE CD-ROM Series, which contains tons on the Puritans but not much on the Indians, lots of Hamilton but no Jefferson, plenty of focus on the roles of Hobbes and Calvin (not Calvin and Hobbes) but nothing on Rousseau and not much on Locke, Binary Paideia is a pedagogical process of memorizing dumbed-down false dichotomies that are drawn between different cultures and/or political systems. Lots of bright line contrasts, but little in subtle comparisons or nuanced similarities. A very popular way to approach the world these days, and, of course, exactly consistent with the kind of thinking that Dewey railed against as the most dangerous to social stability and cohesion.

I am betting that the American Institute for History Education is going to do very well during the next couple of years.

Update June 7, 2006: This morning I was able to talk again with Kevin Brady, who doesn't seem to understand how his CD contents could be viewed as conservative. Otherwise, he seems to be a very nice man. Dr. Brady estimated that AIHE, Inc. is partnering with 28 TAH grants, and consulting on an unspecified number of others.

200 Organizations Fight Abstinence Only

Now if these 200 organizations would also get on board to fight NCLB....

NEW YORK, June 6 /U.S. Newswire

Today, more than 200 organizations, representing all 50 states and the District of Columbia, launched a nationwide No More Money campaign in an effort to stop federal funding for abstinence-only-until-marriage programs. Since 2001, when federal spending in these programs began to ramp up, a significant body of evidence has accumulated showing that abstinence-only-until-marriage programs are ineffective and potentially harmful. The medical community has never supported these programs and polling consistently shows that the American people reject them as well. Support for these programs on Capitol Hill has even waned, as a more comprehensive and medically accurate approach is being sought by lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.

"For the past five years, the deck has stacked-up against abstinence-only-until-marriage programs," said William Smith, vice president for public policy at the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the U.S. (SIECUS). "Now that it is clear that there is no sound research supporting these programs, no support in the public health community, and no support by the American people, we are asking Congress to stop funding these harmful programs," Smith continued.
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Check out the website and TAKE ACTION at http://www.nomoremoney.org/

Home Schooling is Not Just for Zealots, Anymore

As the rich get richer, a growing number of home schoolers are not taught by moms and dads, but rather by full-time private tutors. A clip from the NY Times:

The United States Department of Education last did a survey on home schooling in 2003. That survey did not ask about full-time in-home teachers. But it found that from 1999 to 2003, the number of children who were educated at home had soared, increasing by 29 percent, to 1.1 million students nationwide. It also found that, of those, 21 percent used a tutor.

How Would Jesus Scam a Free Voucher?

Apparently ethics or the intent of the law does not matter to some Christian parents in Ohio, who will do anything to cash in on the new voucher law, including the last-minute switching of schools to make their children eligible next year for a free ride to a Christian Taliban training camp of the parents' choice. Until the last few days, these parents wanted nothing to do with the dirty government schools, but now these same parents have no problem taking the dirty government school's money in order pay for them to choose a hateful, anti-democratic indoctrination for their children, who, by the way, will never get a choice in the matter. Part of the story:

MANSFIELD -- Some parents of Mansfield Christian School students enrolled their children in Mansfield City Schools for the last few days of the school year in hopes of getting the state to pay their tuition at Mansfield Christian next fall.

Sound rather complicated? Read on.

Under the new Ohio EdChoice Scholarship Program, any child enrolled in a school that has been on state-designated Academic Emergency or Academic Watch status for three consecutive years is eligible to transfer to a private or parochial school at state expense.

Four city schools -- Malabar and Simpson middle schools and Brinkerhoff and Sherman elementaries -- are in the sub-academic performance category.

The state will offer 14,000 EdChoice scholarships for 2006-07; if the number of eligible applicants exceeds that number, scholarships will be awarded by lottery.

The unexpected, last-minute transfers from Mansfield Christian in recent weeks has created paperwork headaches for city schools staff and -- along with similar transfers elsewhere -- triggered a legal review by the state. . . .

The Fight Against Unhealthy Futures

Along with the emotional and intellectual genocide being perpetrated on the next generation through the abuse of standardized testing is the sexual genocide being promoted by organizations like Healthy Futures who are the beneficiaries of the latest fear mongering by right wing ideologues to impose their neocon agenda on the rest of us:
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Massachusetts has received federal funding for abstinence-only education since 1998, but in the past it has been used to fund public information campaigns rather than for the classroom. Romney announced a change in that practice April 20, announcing that he would award the abstinence-only education provider Healthy Futures $300,000 in FY06 and $500,000 in FY07 in federal funding to provide abstinence-only education to schools throughout the state.
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The battle raging over abstinence only sex education in state legislatures and school districts across the country is just a microcosm of a the larger cultural wars being fought over reproductive rights and health as the right wing religious fundamentalist neo-cons attempt to impose their version of moral hypocrisy on the next generation.

While the controversy over abstinence only sex education is not new, what is new is the ferocity with which federal dollars are being channeled away from a well-rounded health education curriculum into a religious and ideologically driven agenda of the right wing to turn the clocks back on reproductive health.

What's happening in Massachusetts illustrates the power of this well-funded orchestrated campaign to undermine reproductive rights and freedom as well as the health and well-being of the nation's youth:
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HIV/AIDS advocates are hoping to block an amendment that would allow Gov. Mitt Romney to use federal funding to fund abstinence-only sex education programs. The Senate budget proposal from the Ways and Means Committee contains a provision preventing the state from using state or federal funds for abstinence-only education, but Sen. Steven Baddour (D-Haverhill) filed an amendment to the budget that would remove that provision.

Sophie Godley, AIDS Action’s deputy director of programs, said federal funding to companies providing abstinence-only education curricula would allow those companies to offer schools their services free of charge. Godley said schools have seen their state funding for health classes plummet, and given the choice between no sex ed or free abstinence-only sex ed, she expects many schools will take the latter option. She said many of the companies providing these curricula specifically advocate abstinence-only until heterosexual marriage. Abstinence-only curricula would also exclude all information about how to protect oneself from STDs by practicing safer sex. “There will be more offerings of these anti-gay unscientifically based [curricula], there’s no evidence that these programs work, and they’ll be pushed into more school districts,” said Godley.
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How does what's going on in schools mirror what's happening in the world of adults?

As this illuminating article published in the New York Times Magazine a few weeks ago by Russel Shorto titled Contra-Contraception reveals, the indoctrination of young people into the unhealthy and scientifically-incorrect mindset of abstince until marriage is just another trick being used by those who want to not only outlaw and ban abortion but outlaw all forms of contraception.
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To the dismay of many public-health officials, and following the will of conservative Christian organizations, the Bush administration has steadily moved the federal family-planning program in the direction of an abstinence-only-until-marriage program. Some conservative groups and some Republicans in Congress have waged a campaign against condoms in recent years, claiming they are less effective than popularly believed in preventing pregnancy and protecting against sexually transmitted diseases.
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By turning the clocks back on sexual education these political hacks are playing a dangerous game with the lives of children who are already reeling from the deprivation of a curriculum that refuses to acknowledge their rights as whole human beings struggling to navigate the treacherous waters of adolescence.

Despite the war on sex, however, intelligent, concerned parents are fighting back and finding ways to counter yet another big lie by this Administration and its fascist cronies to stamp on the most basic and fundamental rights of its citizens to pursue happiness. One woman's crusade to stand up to these bullies has resulted in a documentary film Abstinence Comes to Albuquerque.
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The documentary Abstinence Comes to Albuquerque is a case study of abstinence-only sex education in one school district in Albuquerque, NM — and the controversy it engendered. This is just one example of what is happening across the country as a result of the federal government spending millions of dollars on unproven abstinence-only education programs.
The film begins in 2005, when Susan Rodriguez, outraged that a faith-based group is running a mandatory abstinence-only sex education program at her daughter's public high school, brings her concerns to the Albuquerque school board.

Rodriguez was dismayed that the sex education curriculum used in the Albuquerque school district was full of inaccuracies similar to those identified in the landmark December 2004 report commissioned by Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA). The Waxman report found that more than two-thirds of government-funded abstinence-only programs distort information and mislead young people by giving them false information about abortion and contraception, particularly about the effectiveness of condoms.

What happened in Albuquerque is just one example of what is happening across the country. Charles Stuart, the filmmaker, explains that Abstinence Comes to Albuquerque comes at a crucial time. "There are controversies all over the U.S. where abstinence-only money is coming into the communities and the school systems," he says. "And there are many, many places where this is happening because 47 states take some form of federal abstinence dollars."

Ohio's Vouchers More Popular with Privatizers Than Parents

As the number of failing schools inevitably escalates in NCLB's school failure race to 2014, Ohio will have in place the perfect school privatization law, which offers vouchers to any parent, regardless of income, whose child attends a public school in the lowest two state performance categories. These publicly-funded vouchers may be used to send children to secular or religious schools, it matters not. With the White Hat for-profit charter team in place, Ohio will have (unless David Brennan is indicted in the meantime) a one-two punch that will effectively eviscerate the public education system in the state.

That is, if they can get any customers for their new voucher giveaway, besides the ones who want to enroll their private school children in the publics for the last few weeks of this school year so that they can get the voucher money in the coming fall when they re-enroll their children in their church schools (see story here).

Meanwhile, The Toledo Blade reports this past week that only ten applications have been received in Toledo for the new voucher program so far. The deadline is June 9. Maybe parents in Ohio know more than the manufactured crisis mongers give them credit for.

As Ohio politicians try to get a replacement for public education started, Milwaukee continues find more bad apples in the voucher bin. From Milwaukee's Journal-Sentinel May 26 on the Upper Excellerated Academy:

The school, which has received upwards of $700,000 in voucher payments from the state over the last two years, was featured prominently in a Journal Sentinel series on school vouchers last year.

In an article on the more questionable schools in the program, the newspaper reported that Clifford Zigler, the administrator of the school, had an expired license as a substitute teacher. Sa'Rai Nance, the principal, said she had worked as a teachers aide in Milwaukee and Chicago before taking the reins at Sa'Rai and Zigler.

In an order kicking the school out of the program, state officials said they noticed in March that student applications submitted by the school appeared to have forged signatures. The voucher program gives low-income families tuition vouchers to attend private schools. Sa'Rai and Zigler is finishing its second year in the program.

Hope Exits With California High School Exam

When my foundations students find out that California (and other states) used IQ tests, written in a language that many children could not read, to sort children during the 20s and 30s, they are appalled. To use a test that children cannot even read to place them in dead end jobs doesn't sound like the American Way that their dumbed-down, 30-pound high school history text talked about.

Well, we now have a chance to introduce current events, boys and girls, with California joining 25 other states who use the same racist practices that we were using in the 1920s to make sure the brown and the black and the poor stayed in their places. While the lawsuit filed by Californians for Justice to stop the exit exam has been kicked into the 1st District Court of Appeals, 47,000 seniors have been denied diplomas, and 80% of those are English-language learners. Imagine that.

This racist social policy assures the continuing poverty and crime and generally debased living that liberals wring their hands about and for which conservatives nod knowingly. So embarrassing in America--why can't these people put out a little effort, show a little gumption, develop some backbone! And, of course, California's decision comes just in time for the newest crisis that is not new at all--the epidemic of school dropouts and pushouts.

“It is a full-fledged epidemic,” concluded researchers after following 25,000 eighth-graders for 12 years. Basing its conclusions on the National Educational Longitudinal Study 1988, Jobs for the Future, a Boston-based non-profit co-founded by former Clinton adviser Hilary Pennington, found that dropouts generally value education, with most attempting to earn a diploma or General Educational Development certificate. Its April 2006 report, “Making Good on a Promise,” identifies social and economic factors – rather than ethnicity or minority status – as the best predictors of who eventually drops out and who persists in trying to finish their education. “Although these young people may give up on their high school, most do not give up on their education,” said the researchers.

Solving the problem of dropouts is not as simple as telling students to buckle down and work harder. Educators, researchers and social scientists have long identified a student’s innate ability, family background, peer pressure, instructional quality, available resources and the culture of a school as factors that impact how well he or she does in school.

As Faulker said, the past is not dead--it's not even past.

ABCTE Research Shapes The Past

I have resisted a response to the simultaneously infuriating and laughable piece of research that the uninspired frauds at ABCTE recently circulated at their National Press Club gathering on May 11. Despite a free lunch for reporters and despite press releases on Yahoo and PR Newswire, not a single reporter could be duped into doing a story on what must be the first ever study to bother to confirm that teachers who know more about the art/science of teaching and about the subject matter they teach do better on tests that ask questions about teaching and the subject matter they teach. The best that ABCTE propagandists could do to generate interest was this sadly-uninformed commentary in the Rocky Mountain News by someone who argues that ABCTE is a superior credential to the one offered by NBPTS. Oh, well.

For those who have not been following my rantings about ABCTE, this outfit is the brainchild of the union busters and John Dewey haters at ED who foresee a corps of American teachers, highly qualified by virtue of passing a subject matter test and a test of “professional teaching knowledge.” In short, no professional university degree required, please. Embraced by ed industry shill, Rod Paige, as a legitimate avenue to full certification before either of the ABCTE miracle tests was even developed, Paige put Gene Hickok in charge of doling out $40 million in taxpayer dollars to ABCTE , whose Board of Directors contains all the usual suspects in the continued fleecing of federal education budgets and the continued demonization of public education--Finn, Carnine, et al. There could never be a more appropriate use of the old metaphor of foxes being put in charge of the henhouse.

Now if this “study” were simply content to confirm the obvious, as it clearly does, I would not be bothering to respond to its remarkable launching and simultaneous sinking. Yet it is not the obvious that this slickly-packaged propaganda piece (pdf) purports to demonstrate, but, rather, it is to establish a correlation where there is none and then to call that phony correlation a cause:

This study, Student Achievement and Passport to Teaching Certification in Elementary Education, provides evidence that the ABCTE certification process works. As you will read, the research demonstrates that teachers who would have passed the ABCTE examinations in elementary education and professional teaching knowledge produce higher student learning gains in the classroom than teachers who would have failed (p. 2).

The key phrase here is “who would have passed,” because none of the 77 teachers in this study was certified to teach as a result of passing ABCTE’s miracle tests. And none of the 55 teachers who teach multiple subjects in a self-contained elementary classroom was given an opportunity to use the test preparation materials that ABCTE sells (brought to you by Kaplan) to its “Passport” candidates when they plunk down their $500 to take the tests. So the 13 teachers who passed the two ABCTE tests, one in multiple subject matters and the other in teaching knowledge, did so as a result of what they obviously learned in their teacher preparation programs, their own professional development, and in their other subject-related coursework at university. The fact that these lucky 13 had higher student gains, then, on the state tests should come as no surprise, but to claim that this tiny sample validates that ABCTE’s phony-baloney testing works to create academic gains is nothing less than an outright lie.

One still has to wonder how many of the 59 failing teachers would have passed the ABCTE tests if they had been offered the study materials that all ABCTE candidates are urged to buy to prepare for the tests. But, then, if they had passed, that would have destroyed the bogus correlation that these academic prostitutes set out to establish in the first place.

One final bogus correlation should be noted here, and it is the one drawn by the report’s authors that there is some connection between value-added testing methodology and what these pretenders-to-research are doing in this fraudulent report. Even though the authors associate themselves with value-added assessment, there is not a clearer demonstration of the principles of value-added assessment being ignored than the one they offer. The core principle of value added is the measuring of academic gains over time and the examination of how multiple variables affect those gains. The variable introduced here, the ABCTE test, is not examined over any dimension of time, short term or long term, but in fact the tests are are only introduced only after a single set of results was obtained. This legitimacy-by-association-after-the-fact might work in political circles, but going down to Tennessee, where Sanders started value-added assessment, will not add any value to this worthless piece of dreck passed off as “scientifically-based research.” It only shows what a charade and a fraud this enterprise really is.

Finally, Andy Rotherham recently congratulated ABCTE folks for being "admirably restrained in touting the study" that they have manufactured. As an insider who helped launch this outfit and to land their 40 millions, such faint praise by the Eduwonk might be intended to help these frauds get their lead balloon back to the ground without entirely crashing and burning. After all, modesty is the only assailable route when appropriateness calls for something entirely non-aggressive. Try an apology.

John Stossel is a Pathological Liar

From David Sirota at Huffington Post in its entirety:

John Stossel Is A Pathological Liar

Webster's Medical Dictionary defines a "pathological liar" as "an individual who habitually tells lies so exaggerated or bizarre that they are suggestive of mental disorder." Next to this definition should be this picture - a photo of a self-important, smarmy looking, all-too-coiffed ABC News "reporter" named John Stossel.

You may have noticed that Stossel is out hawking a book called "Myths, Lies, and Downright Stupidity" purporting to debunk those things. Instead, what we see is that Stossel is spewing them - and using his media platform as a megaphone of dishonesty. Stossel, in many ways, is exactly why I wrote my new book Hostile Takeover - to strip bare the opportunists, shills and half-wits who dominate our political debate and show them for what they really are: pathological liars.

Here's what I mean. According to the right-wing, Scaife-owned Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Stossel appeared on ABC's "The View" to talk about his book's assertion that the minimum wage supposedly hurts low-income workers. The host was surprised that someone could make such a ludicrous claim. "Why does raising the minimum wage -- this one I don't get -- actually hurt poor people?," she asked Stossel. "I don't understand that one at all."

Stossel replied with a straight face: "The truth is that people on the margins lose jobs when minimum wages go up. We used to have people washing windshields at gas stations. We don't anymore because of the minimum wage. There's no opportunity for kids, for entry-level workers."

Mind you, Stossel is making this claim at the very same time President Bush is claiming we need a guest worker program because there are actually too many entry-level, low-wage jobs that aren't being filled. But beyond that, the actual data exposes Stossel's pathological lying. As I note in my new book's section on this very lie about minimum wages supposedly hurting the job market:

"In a comprehensive 2004 study, the nonpartisan Fiscal Policy Institute reported that since 1997, states that had boosted their minimum wage above the federal minimum actually created jobs faster than those that did not. In higher minimum wage states, employment grew by 50 percent more than it did in states still at the pathetic federal level. Even in tough economic times, the minimum wage doesn't hurt jobs: Princeton University economist David Card found that even the minimum wage increases during the 1990-91 recession 'were not associated with any measurable employment losses.' As Republican Sen. Arlen Specter (PA) once noted, "history clearly demonstrates that raising the minimum wage has no adverse impact on jobs."...In Oregon, for instance, the state raised its minimum wage in 1998, and the average earnings of newly-employed welfare recipients climbed by 9 percent, while the percentage of welfare recipients who found a job actually rose."

Stossel's latest pathological lie followed one from a few weeks ago when he used ABC's Good Morning America to claim that it is a "myth" that "women earn less" than men for "doing the same work." Yet, as Media Matters noted, the Bureau of Labor Statistics' (BLS) 2004 wage data shows definitively that women earned on average 80.4 percent of men's weekly median earnings in virtually every occupation listed regardless of job title. Again, Stossel used ABC's airwaves to peddle a pathological lie.

This all may seem surprising. After all, how could one of the major networks employ a person with such disdain for the truth and then call him a "journalist?" It's a good question - but Stossel has made a nice career behaving this way. For instance, Stossel has tried to deny the scientific consensus surrounding global warming, despite 928 peer-reviewed scientific papers on global warming published between 1993 and 2003 all concluding that global warming is real, and human-caused.

It was Stossel who penned a column during the Hurricane Katrina energy crisis entitled "In Praise of Price Gouging." Instead of being a "consumer watchdog" as he is regularly billed, Stossel was using his platform to publicize all sorts of reasons why we were supposed to believe that oil companies' use of a natural disaster to profiteer was somehow patriotic and heroic.

Similarly, as I note in my book, Stossel has self-righteously used the airwaves to rail against people who file lawsuits. "We all have pain and suffering in our lives," Stossel has said. "And if each time we hang onto it until we get some kind of compensation, society can't work." Yet, it was Stossel who filed a high-profile case himself in which he sued a wrestler for $200,000 for slapping him during an interview. "I asked for as much as I could get," Stossel told newspapers, apparently too downright stupid to see just how much of a hypocrite he was showing himself to be.

For his patholgical lying, Stossel is now regularly honored by fringe-right-wing groups like the Heritage Foundation - you remember, the group repeatedly nailed (here and here) for publicly trumpeting deliberately inaccurate data as fact. And yet, despite these accolades from hyper-partisan lie machines, Stossel retains the veneer of journalistic credibility/objectivity thanks to ABC's continued willingness to let him pollute the airwaves with his "myths, lies and downright stupidity" - without giving so much as a smidgeon of airtime to experts who would actually challenge this pathological liar with the facts.

Because of his unfettered access to the airwaves and the refusal of his media sponsors to actually question his factually inaccurate assertions, Stossel's book has risen up the bestseller list, with consumers led to believe it is a beacon of truth-telling that will show us the world as it actually is. The right-wing apparatus that fetes Stossel is undoubtedly promoting his book as a supposedly virtuous, sincere look at the facts, thus fueling even more sales, furthering other media buzz about him and furthering Stossel's reach. Meanwhile, Stossel's campaign to turn his pathological lies into assumed fact goes on, increasingly debasing our political debate, intensifying the disconnect of the media discourse from actual facts. It is a sick cycle, indeed - and it highlights why American politics seems more and more divorced from reality: because the media debate that frames American politics presents pathological liars like Stossel as credible voices.

Stossel urges us on the cover of his book to "get out the shovel" - he's right, you'll need one to dig out from the steaming piles of dishonest B.S. this ABC News "reporter" is leaving in his wake.

June Second

June Second

Between banks
of peach-leaf willow
overhung by white oaks,
sunlight plays on the
green cursive current.
In an eddy, as if blinked
there, a pike hovers
like a struck tuning fork,
his ruby eye revolving
with the tight circles
of a captive wasp,
still buzzing as the surface
breaks and quickly mends,
tracing into shaded shallows
an almost playful panic.

No Records are Safe Except

Except, of course, the ones the White House orders off limits. The Times has this story on the Kafta-esque nightmare of four librarian from Connecticut, who were muzzled by Justice Dept. thugs to keep them from testifying about federal mining of library records during hearings on the Patriot Act. Part of the story:

. . . . "The fact that the government can and is eavesdropping on patrons in libraries has a chilling effect, because they really don't know if Big Brother is looking over their shoulder," he added.

Being free to speak now, weeks after the Patriot Act was reauthorized for several more years, was "like being allowed to call the Fire Department after the building has burned down," he said.

Barbara Bailey, a librarian from Glastonbury, and Janet Nocek, a librarian from Portland, appeared with Mr. Chase and Mr. Christian. Ms. Bailey and Ms. Nocek both serve with Mr. Chase on the executive committee of Library Connection's board.

The librarians described many surreal moments from the nearly yearlong legal battle. When a judge heard arguments on their case in Bridgeport, they said, they had to watch a television hookup from Hartford because federal lawyers did not want them at the hearing. Mr. Christian described having to remain silent when his son Ben asked him why he was dodging calls from reporters.

And when John Doe was given an award in absentia at a meeting of the Connecticut Library Association, Ms. Bailey was in the audience and felt odd but compelled to join a standing ovation to avoid tipping anyone off. Mr. Christian said that he and the other leaders of library consortiums in Connecticut had discussed hiring a lawyer to lobby against provisions of the Patriot Act but had accepted government assurances that there was little risk of federal investigators seeking library records. "We trusted them but apparently we shouldn't have," Mr. Chase said, noting that his organization would continue to resist other aspects of the government's demand. . . .

Trust this Regime? Do so at the risk of your Constitution.

Hickok Still Henchman of Ed Industry

(Chart from People for the American Way (pdf)--click it to enlarge)

Gene Hickok, Asst. Secretary of ED under Paige, was the inspirational leader of numerous scams to dump public money into the laps of neocon hacks and cronies, some of whom (Lisa Keegan included) slipped away into the shadows as Congressman Miller's dimly-lit investigation flickered in their direction. Hickok was also the point man at ED for vouchers and any other privatization alternatives to public schools, the public schools for which he had been hired to steward, rather than deconstruct. Hickok dished out millions left and right in discretionary grants, even to his old buddy and high roller, Bill Bennett, whose K-12 virtual venture sucked away $14 million before Hickok, himself, hit the door without getting his arm got stuck in the cookie jar.

There was the Education Leaders Council (ELC), whose Following the Leaders project disappeared from public view with its millions in ED funds long before ELC's website was scrubbed or before Lisa Keegan, whose CEO salary became an embarrassment to Andy Rotherham's political climb. And the ELC begat the National Center for Teacher Quality, which begat ABCTE, which, of course, begat dozens of millions for all the ed industry insiders who earn their keep sitting on the Boards of these federal fund sumps, churning out their phony reports to further demonize the public education sector that provides their sustenance.

All of this rehash is to provide the context for the re-emergence of Hickok as the hit man for the tutoring industry. His commentary in WaPo has been picked up by a number of other papers, so it is time shine a little light on Hickok before he slides back under his rock at Dutko International.

What Hickok's accusatory piece does is to suggest that those lazy, corrupt public schools are hoarding Title 1 money that was intended to go for tutoring failing children. What Hickok does not say is that the tutoring mandate, just like the school transfer mandate, are to be funded by existing Title 1 money that, heretofore, has been used to fund programs, supplies, materials, personnel, etc. What the poorest of schools are being faced with, then, are choices of whether to cut existing programs for children to give money to tutoring corporations who offer their entirely-unaccountable and untested services at four times the cost of non-profit tutoring services.

The ed industry wants that 20% of Title 1 funds, and they are willing to pay top dollar for former "public servants" to write their nasty and accusatory opinion pieces suggesting the poorest of public schools are lawbreakers. If there was any true oversight to the Bush crooks, any truly investigative journalism remaining, Hickok's piece today would have as much credibility as a Ken Lay op-ed on the corruption of public utilities.