No Takers on My Offer of $100? Grayson, Kuster? Anyone?

I am getting all sorts of solicitations from Alan Grayson, ann Kuster, and others, all asking for money.  I don't have much money, but I have enough to offer the first 10 candidates who say yes a hundred dollars each.  As before, here is the deal:

I know, a hundred bucks is a drop in the big corporate bucket, but if the 35,000+ souls who signed the Educator Roundtable petition would make a similar commitment, then we could be talking some serious contribuing power.

The new PDK/Gallup Poll is out, and it has some good information for any politician who cares about what the public thinks.  We know that the Oligarchs don't care--they would not be trying to privatize public education and the teaching profession if they cared what the public thinks.

Here is the deal that I will make with the first ten politiicans aspiring to win or retain a U. S.  House or U. S. Senate seat who are willing to support the following positions.   An email from your office with your signature in support of these postions gets a $100 check from me.  Ready?

 
SCHOOL TURNAROUNDS
While only 13% of Americans surveyed would choose to close a poor-performing school in their neighborhood and reopen it as a charter school, 54% would "keep the school open with existing teachers and principal and provide comprehensive outside support."  Would you work to advance federal education policy that is consistent with these positions?

NATIONAL CURRICULUM AND STANDARDS
While 28% and 19% of Americans surveyed would have the federal government set education standards and decide what is taught, respectively, 69% and 80% would have education standards and what is taught decided at the state or local levels.  Would you work to advance education policy that is consistent with these positions?

NCLB
While only 22% of Americans surveyed view No Child Left Behind as helping the public schools in their communities, 73% believe NCLB is hurting their local schools or making no difference in their local schools.  Would you work to advance education policy that is consistent with these positions?

SUPPORT FOR LOCAL PUBLIC SCHOOLS
While 23% of Americans surveyed would grade the school they know most about, the one their oldest child attends, with a C, D, or F (only 1% F), the corporate reformers who run the U. S. Department of Education have declared an education crisis that requires turning public schools upside down or privatizing them.  Even so, 77% of Americans would give the public school their oldest child attends an A or a B.  Would you work to advance education policy that is consistent with these positions?

HOW SCHOOLS COULD EARN AN "A"
While only 6% of Americans surveyed view the implementation of standardized testing/grading as the way school could earn an "A," 34 percent believe the best way for a school to earn an A is to improve teaching. Last year in 2009, when the PDK poll asked Americans if they believed in "relaxing  teacher education and certification plans so more people could qualify to teach these subjects," 71% said NO.  Would you work, then, to advance education policy that is consistent with these positions?

VIEWS ON TEACHING AND TEACHERS
In 1990, 51% of Americans surveyed would like to have a one of their children to become a teacher in the public schools. In 2010 that 67% of Americans would like to have a child "take up teaching."  Today 71% " trust and confidence in the men and women who are teaching children in the public schools."  Despite the fact that the corporate education reform machine that runs ED spends overtime bashing teachers, criticizing their professionalism, and trying to embarrass them, would you work to advance education policy that is consistent with these positions offered by the PDK/Gallup survey?

TEACHER EVALUATION
While only 13% of Americans surveyed see the primary purpose of evaluating teachers as "establishing their salaries based upon their skills," 60% of Americans believe the primary purpose of teacher evaluation is "helping them improve their ability to teach." Would you work to advance education policy that is consistent with these positions?

PAYING STUDENTS
The vast majority of Americans, 76% reject the notion of paying students for good behavior or grades.  Would you work to advance education policy that is consistent with these positions?

CHARTER SCHOOLS
The history of public attitudes in the PDK poll toward charter schools has been up and down and then up again. This year support has edged up to 68%.  Even so, what the public knows about charter schools remains wildly uncertain.  Last year in the 2009 PDK survey, for instance, a majority of 51% believed that charter schools are not public schools and 57% thought that charter schools charged tuition.  Almost half (46%) believed charter schools are free to teach religion.

So it is clear from what Americans say that there is widespread confusion about the nature and function of charter schools.  That being the case, would you work to educate the public about charter schools and how they affect public school funding, and would your advance education policy that is consistent with the most reliable research findings on the value of charter schools when compared to student performance in public schools and when the negative social and pedagogical effects (segregation and test prep) of charter schools are taken into account?

Click chart from 2009 PDK survey to enlarge.

Challenging the Corporate Media on Education Coverage

"In Extra!, I find all the news that the Respectables find unfit to print.
It is great therapy for me; it keeps my blood pressure down and my skull from going numb."
—Studs Terkel

Extra! September 2010

Tea Party vs. U.S. Social Forum
Mass movements that matter for media—Round 2
By Julie Hollar

First, Bash the Teachers
Media find a scapegoat for educational failure
By Peter Hart

Right-Wing Tilt on Sunday Morning
The conservative records of talking-head lawmakers
By Jim Naureckas and Alyssa Figueroa

Articles only available in print:

Teach for America’s Opaque Agenda
Journalist Barbara Miner confronts a media darling
by Janine Jackson

‘A Deeper Truth Than Newspapers and Networks Are Likely to Provide’
Jonathan Kozol on media and education

‘Race to the Top’ and the Bill Gates Connection
Who gets to speak about what schools need?
by Susan Ohanian

Media’s Favorite School ‘Reformer’
D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee
by Zein El-Amine

Right-Wing Tilt on Sunday Morning
The conservative records of talking-head lawmakers
by Alyssa Figueroa and Jim Naureckas

August to June

 

From the website:

A 95 minute documentary that celebrates values we are on the brink of losing in the single-minded pursuit of higher test scores.

Come inside a public school happily and purposefully going against current trends!  Join 26 8-10 year olds, their teacher, and their parents for a year bursting with opportunities for curiosity, creativity and compassion.

"…a flat-out gorgeous, beautiful movie, a brilliant poem of childhoods in motion over time.  …here it's impossible to lose sight of the kids or forget them after the film stops.  They have signed the air with an individual presence that honors both the film and the education they are getting.”~ Joseph Featherstone, author Schools Where Children Learn, and Dear Josie, emeritus faculty leader Michigan State University’s acclaimed teacher education program.

Gates Donates $3.6 Million to Broad Residency

From a recent press release:

Record Number of Broad Residents Take on Local, State, Federal Roles Managing Education Reform

Published: Wednesday, Sep. 8, 2010 - 5:13 am

By The Broad Center for the Management of School Systems

LOS ANGELES, Sept. 8 -- Broad Residency Receives $3.6 million Grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to Help Execute Teacher Effectiveness Initiatives

This donation from one billionaire to another billionaire's corporate training program is tied, at least in part, to the $290 million Gates Foundation investment in pay per test score programs coming to three cities and a consortia of LA-based charters.

Here's the rest of the press release:

LOS ANGELES, Sept. 8 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The Broad Residency in Urban Education announced today it has placed its largest class of 42 early career executives into 28 public education systems across the country, expanding for the first time into state departments of education.

The Broad Residency is a management development program that places talented executives with private and civic sector experience and advanced degrees from top business, public policy and law schools into two-year, full-time, paid positions at the top levels of urban school districts, state and federal departments of education and leading charter management organizations. Broad Residents work to improve central office management practices so that more money reaches the classroom, teachers receive effective support and students receive a quality education. During their two-year "residency," participants receive intensive professional development and access to a nationwide network of education reform leaders, which enables them to actively share their successes and experiences as they work to improve the delivery of quality education.

The Broad Center has received a $3.6 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to recruit and train as many as 18 Broad Residents over the next four years to provide management support to school districts and charter management organizations addressing the issue of teacher effectiveness. Broad Residents will help school systems dramatically improve the recruitment, selection, training, placement, and evaluation of teachers. The Gates Foundation grant is the first multi-million-dollar grant The Broad Residency has received from a funder other than The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation.

Also, for the first time since The Broad Residency began in 2002, two Residents will be working at the state level, for the Delaware and Louisiana departments of education, in which significant reforms are underway. For the second year, Broad Residents will be working at the U.S. Department of Education, supporting states and school districts in their efforts to improve student achievement.

"We are pleased that these bright managers will help large education systems – including state departments of education – use limited resources to better support teachers and deliver results for students, parents and communities," said Eli Broad, founder of The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation.

To date, 215 Broad Residents have been placed in 32 school districts and 23 public charter school management organizations nationwide. Nine out of ten Broad Resident graduates have stayed in the field of urban education.

The 2010-2012 Residents will be working in the following school districts:

• Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, N.C.
• Chicago Public Schools
• District of Columbia Public Schools
• Denver Public Schools
• Detroit Public Schools
• Fulton County Schools, Ga.
• Hillsborough County Public Schools, Fla.
• Houston Independent School District
• Knox County Schools, Tenn.
• Memphis City Schools, Tenn.
• New Haven Public Schools, Conn.
• New York City Department of Education
• Pittsburgh Public Schools
• Prince George's County Public Schools, Md.
• Providence Public Schools, R.I.
• Washoe County School District, Nev.

In addition, 2010-2012 Residents will work in the following charter school management organizations:

• Achievement First, New York
• Alliance for College-Ready Public Schools, Los Angeles
• Aspire Public Schools, Oakland, Calif.
• Green Dot Public Schools, Los Angeles
• KIPP, Houston
• LEARN Charter School, Chicago
• New Schools for New Orleans, New Orleans
• The College-Ready Promise, Los Angeles
• Uncommon Schools, New York

For a list of this year's Broad Residents, bios, photos and quotes, please visit http://broadresidency.org/residents/2010-2012.html. For examples of specific, quantifiable outcomes Broad Residents have achieved to improve operations and teaching and learning across the country, please visit http://www.broadresidency.org/about/results.html.

All Broad Residents have M.B.A.s or other advanced degrees. Seventy-four percent of this year's class, selected from a candidate pool of more than 2,500 applicants, come from leading business and law schools such as Harvard University, Duke University or the University of Michigan. Participants have an average of 10 years of experience, typically from a Fortune 500 or other major company. Fifty-two percent are people of color. The Broad Residency continues to be far more selective – at 2 percent – than the highest-rated M.B.A. programs.

The Broad Residency (www.broadresidency.org) pays 50 percent of each Resident's salary the first year, and 25 percent the second year, with the partner organization paying the balance, except where a Resident is already employed by that organization. The Broad Center also covers the full cost of professional development sessions for all Residents.

The Broad Center for the Management of School Systems, which operates The Broad Residency, is funded by The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation (www.broadeducation.org), a national venture philanthropy established by philanthropist Eli Broad to advance entrepreneurship for the public good in education, science and the arts.

SOURCE The Broad Center for the Management of School Systems

The Gates Foundation also released their annual report yesterday.

Some recent grants:

• $275,000 to the Center for Education Reform "to support development of a new awareness tool, "The Bullpen", that will offer and analyze real time education news"
• $3.4 million to Stand for Children Leadership Center "to support education reforms, training, technical assistance, and tools designed to increase teacher effectiveness"
• $1 million to the Center for American Progress (sic) "to fund Empowering Effective Teachers advocacy grantees and an additional leading organization to communicate the importance of reforms and support progressive states to implement them".

Former TFA/KIPP Teacher: "Why I don't believe in 'reform'"

An interesting blog post from Education News Colorado:

Why I don't believe in "reform"

By: Marc Waxman

September 7th, 2010

Marc Waxman has been an educator for 17 years, including 12 in New York City, and the last two in Denver.

I don’t believe. I wish I could believe. I am supposed to believe. But, I don’t. I don’t believe in education “reform” in our country.

I don’t believe charter schools are a panacea, I don’t believe that linking student achievement to teacher evaluation will significantly impact education, and for that matter, I don’t believe student achievement” should be the ultimate goal of education in our country.

I am supposed to believe in all this, especially if you look at my resume and follow the major media discussion of education “reform.” Let me explain.

When I graduated from college in 1994 I joined Teach For America. I taught two years in Paterson, NJ (made famous by Joe “Batman” Clark from Eastside High School – which was just across the street from the 1,000-student K-8 school where I taught. After my two years of TFA service I became one of the first teachers and administrators at KIPP in the South Bronx. After three years at KIPP, I spent the next nine years co-founding and co-directing a new school in Harlem which started as a school-within-a school, was part of a take-over of a failing school that was closed, became an official New York City public school, and then converted to become one of only five conversion charter schools in NYC.

[Continued here]

The rest is certainly worth reading. Mr. Waxman presents the following Dewey quote before concluding by asking readers, "what's your vision of a good education?":

What avail is it to win prescribed amounts of information… if in the process an individual loses his own soul: loses his appreciation of things worth while, of the values to which these things are relative; if he loses desire to apply what he has learned and, above all, loses the ability to extract meaning from his future experiences as they occur?

The next lightbulb that may come on for Mr. Waxman (and let's hope it does) is that the supporters of the reform movement he sees as leading us astray push their agenda because they're incapable of viewing education from this point of view: the conservatives (and so-called "liberals" or "progressives" like Whitney Tilson) who shun anything Dewey or go so far as to label his book one of the most dangerous pieces of work out there; the assorted neoliberal reformers (which includes New Democrats, neocons, and Libertarians) that use business rhetoric and practices to minimize and eventually eliminate the possibility of anything but testing dungeons (or "Dickensian prisons"); and the Tea Party-slash-religious right that irrationally fears public schools would teach communism/socialism, anti-American values, and, in general, enter into territory that only the church or family should venture if public schools were to operate in a more Dewey-esque manner. To these folks, all that really matters is test scores. A section of this crowd masquerading as "progressives" (ie the New Democrats, DFER crowd, and Gates/Broad foundations) may incorporate, like Duncan, some of the rhetoric about a well-rounded education, art classes, small classes, strong teacher-student relationships, and the disdain for fill in the bubble tests, but their actions consistently point in the opposite direction. It's really a rhetorical coup, and one the right wing is happy to watch silently unfold over the past 20 years (although they'll slip up and show their approval of the reform crowd every now and then, as Checker recently did here).

It may also strike Mr. Waxman that looking at education from a critical perspective - who gets what kind of education and why - opens up a bag of questions that the backers mentioned above cannot and will not ask themselves or society as a whole. That suits the prostisuits in various sectors just fine, leaving it to parents, a handful of advocacy groups, teachers, and children to advocate for a system of public education that philosophers like Dewey dare to ask.

A final question - and one I certainly do not have an answer for - is this: how do we build a coalition to counter those pushing us in the wrong direction? I look at it this way: We don't have the backing of billion-dollar philanthrocapitalists, hedge fund managers, political leadership in either political party, or the mainstream media outlets, but we may have to mimic some of their techniques, strategies, and methods. We may have to pull in non-educational groups to forge alliances. We certainly need to use social media to make connections and strategize. But I'm at a loss at how to go about doing such work, and this is hardly an exhaustive list of what it'd take to push back against those thrusting us in the wrong direction (including, unfortunately, the first President in a long time with a chance* of actually doing something good for education).

* President Obama's rhetoric in the Presidential campaign gave us every indication that he'd do what he's doing now: push charters, merit pay tied to test scores, competition, and the rest of the stuff his administration has done. Still, it was possible that he was just using that as a rhetorical tool to neutralize McCain's "reform" friendly agenda and convince centrist that he wouldn't walk hand-in-hand with the unions.

What Makes Mike Petrilli An Expert on Anything, Particularly Anything about Teachers?

The NYTimes has an interesting piece on schools run by teachers, and who is the first neolib sludge tanker to condemn it.  That's right:

. . . . They say that most teachers have neither the time nor the expertise to deal with the inner workings of a school, like paying bills, conducting fire drills and refereeing faculty disputes.

“Ever try to plan a vacation with a large extended family? That’s what it’s going to be like,” said Michael J. Petrilli, a vice president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an education policy group in Washington. “It’s a good idea in theory, but there are just a handful of teachers who can pull it off.” . . . .

Well, at least Petrilli has a BS in Political Science, and look where where those bona fides got Margaret Spellings.  Oh, yeah, he taught in a corporate training camp and he is pals with Checker Finn.

Ever been in a real school?  Ever taught a real class? Ever knew a real teacher?  Good questions for any ed reporter to ask while jotting down the wisdom of Mikey, don't you think.

Duncan Announces Plan for Year-Round Testing

The flood of easy money to advance the corporate education "reform" agenda shows no signs of drying up, with $330,000,000 now being paid out to two consortia to develop national tests to go with the national curriculum that no federal legislator has had any voice in choosing or approving.  Quite a stunning display of federal policy making without either of the legislative branches involved. 

Here is Monty Neill's assessment of the plan:

Monty Neill
Deputy Director, FairTest
The proposals from SBAC and PARCC are far more similar than different. That is in large part because of the overly constraining requirements imposed by the Department. The Consortia are both likely to produce improved standardized tests, which will not be hard to do. The underlying question, however, is whether after 4-plus years and hundreds of millions of dollars, the nation will end up with the assessments it and its children deserve and need. After reading the two lengthy submissions, my conclusion is, no.

First, continued misuse of high stakes will continue to distort the system. While Duncan’s rhetoric is on helping students learn and on tests that (finally) assess higher order skills, the system remains trapped in its punitive use of tests to evaluate students, schools and now teachers, with resulting narrowing and dumbing-down of curriculum and instruction to beat the test. The accountability structure must change. I agree with Diane: the nation should halt the use high-stakes uses of tests as sole or major stand-alone hurdles for teacher evaluation (being pushed hard by Duncan), school evaluation (per NCLB), and in many states for high school graduation or grade promotion.

Second, the Consortia focus on a limited number of statewide tests, to include one (PARRC) or a few (SBAC) performance tasks, some administered during the year. That is an inadequate number of performance tasks to make a real difference in the ways assessment dominates teaching. It is an insufficient approach to multiple measures. It also is not a system, it is still just a few tests. Both, especially SBAC, talk about ‘formative’ assessments, but true formative assessment – assessment for learning – is teacher controlled, not externally controlled, and tied to specific curriculum and specific students, not generic. While SBAC may create some good tasks for teachers to use, and their support for assembling libraries of high-quality tasks is a good idea, they are not proposing to ensure the development of true classroom and local assessments on which a healthy system would have to rest. Overall, despite some potential improvements in the instruments, the Consortia provide a conceptually and practically inadequate approach to assessment.

Third, the Consortia place enormous reliance on computer and internet technology, SBAC more so than PARCC. The technology is not likely to be ready for prime time by 2014. The Wyoming computer-adaptive testing system totally collapsed this year (as had Oregon’s previously) and a trial of new computer tests in Florida also resulted in many problems. That’s with far less complex technology requirements than the consortia propose.

Fourth, there is likely to be a great expansion of commercial ancillary testing. Teachers will continue to have to assess far more than the few consortia tests. As is now happening, this perceived gap will be filled by a vast flood of new tests, mostly paraded as ‘formative’ and ‘interim,’ many if not most of poor quality, marketed to schools and districts desperate not to fail on the new tests. They will be imposed on teachers, either increasing the amount of testing or replacing classroom-rooted teacher tests (now of uneven quality) with commercial junk. These various shortcuts may or may not boost scores, but they will further corrupt teaching and learning.

Fifth, control over teaching and thus learning is increasingly centralized. Who will control the multi-state consortia in the future is quite uncertain (as Checker has often pointed out). Mistakes will be harder to fix, while people’s sense of any ability to influence education will further diminish, and with it meaningful democracy. In addition, central offices are likely to use commercial mini-tests to more intensely micro-manage teachers, a tendency already growing in some cities, and further de-professionalize teaching.

These last two are, it will be argued, not the fault of the Consortia or the Department. However, the Department has set in motion the development of a system of expanded and intensified testing. The dangers are obvious – but are in no way structurally addressed by the Department or the Consortia. Indeed, the dangers would appear to be ‘benefits’ to the Department.

The federal government could have taken a very different approach to improving assessment, as I outlined in a June Education Week commentary (available at http://www.fairtest.org/better-way-assess-students-and-evaluate-schools). It could have emphasized gathering and evaluating evidence of learning out of actual student work; low-stakes of using a very limited amount of standardized tests; and a school quality review process. The feds could foster such a system and help fund the extensive professional development on which it would have to rest. But, not surprisingly, the Obama-Duncan administration has proposed changes that don’t change enough from the destructive approaches of NCLB and that present all-too-predicable major problems.

Karen Lewis and Lois Weiner on Democracy Now

Right-wing = neo-liberal and/or neocon:

"Irrepressible" Bloggers vs. the Borg

Jay Mathews is the insider's insider on corporate education reform issues, serving as the media mouthpiece for the psychological sterilization movement of KIPP and the KIPP knock-offs.  The Elder himself, Bill Gates, carries a supply of Jay's KIPP book to hand out to anyone interested in the Oligarchs' choice of a final solution to educating the poor and the brown of urban America.

At the same time KIPP is becoming the urban model for corporate ed reform, the movement is in the process of pivoting from the the phony campaign under Bush ostensibly to close the black-white achievement gap, with the same high expectations for all, thus avoiding "the soft bigotry of low expectations," blah-blah, to a new phony campaign of assuring that poor children have the same access to high quality teachers and schools because education is now the "civil rights issue of our generation."  Blah, blah, blah.  While the pivot leaves in place the high-stakes standardized testing that declared 30-40 percent of public schools failures and charter targets under the last 9 years of NCLB,  the pivot demands a shift in what is measured by the tests and how it is measured.  The achievement gap has left the stadium, ladies and gentlemen, while growth models have taken the stage.  Now that the urban school systems have been blown up, thus clearing the way for the corporate charterites,  the canyon between test scores of the rich and poor is no longer of interest.  Indeed, the achievement gap has become a "mindless measure," to use the words of Jay Mathews.

The focus now is on "a year's worth of individual student growth" for a year's worth of teaching (much more on this later, with a feature on the Wizard of Oz, Bill Sanders).  In short, the new target of corporate ed reform is to blow up, or disrupt, the teaching profession by measuring effective teaching on how much test score growth a teacher can oversee.  And as the new CEO-led KIPP chain gangs are to replace urban public schools, so then an endless stream of non-union white missionary temps are being prepared to replace the professionals who now staff the urban schools.  Test score gains, or lack thereof, will be used to justify the firing of professionals and the use of temps from TFA and the TFA knock-offs that Arne fondly calls alternative teacher certification programs.

When I challenged Mathews for his commentary in WaPo supporting the pivoting away from the achievement gap, he responded with the piece quoted in its entirety below.  You will notice that the first thing he does is not respond to the challenge but, rather, to change the subject and, instead, to challenge Ira Socol's insightful piece that I recently posted. 

As you will see from the comments, Jay bit off more than he could chew when he challenged Socol, who is not impressed with nor intimidated by the fact that Mathews has the full backing of the Billionaire Boys' Club and all the "thinking" that their tanks can buy.  A good number of other comments, including my own, are left out of the edited comment section below.  I wanted to focus on the back and forth between Jay, the hapless interrogator, and Ira, the intelligent respondent.

Jim Horn of the Schools Matter blog, one of my favorite hecklers, posted a critique of my recent column, "Forget about the achievement gap." He says:

Obviously, Jay has joined other bold reformers such as the recently-fired Bret Schundler of New Jersey whose efforts to remake New Jersey schools in the corporate image led him to denounce New Jersey Public Schools as a “wretched system” and the state’s #1 national rankings on the NAEP in both 4th and 8th grade reading and math as “irrelevant.” For bold reformers like Jay and Bret, or Arne and Michelle, if the facts don’t support your desired results anymore, those facts no longer matter. Poof.

Jay and the the new generation of reformers doing the same thing as the last generation (when will they become the status quo?) would rather look at test score growth over time, especially when big achievement gap closing claims by your favorite politicians do not materialize. Focusing on individual gains makes the disparity between the haves and the have-nots much easier to ignore, since this new value-added universe is not even interested in those troublesome group comparisons any longer that are based on the poverty chasm. Unless, of course, the reformers need to shut down your neighborhood school and turn it into a corporate-styled testing madrasah, i. e., charter school. Then your percentile ranking becomes a crucial tool in deciding who is in that bottom five percent that just keeps replenishing itself as the last group is scraped off to become charterized.

I am not sure I fit well with the important present and former policymakers he cites, but it is always good to be noticed by Jim. He is a great writer, and validates my existence on the planet.
In his most recent post he also hands me some ammo to fire back at him. He quotes an online letter to President Obama from a reader, Ira Socol. Socol is critical of the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), as an example of the kind of charter school the president admires, and compares KIPP unfavorably---too rigid, too uncreative, too imperialist---to the Sidwell Friends School which Obama's daughters attend. This is reminiscent of a point made by the late, great Gerald W. Bracey at the beginning of the Obama administration.

Sadly, Socol makes the same mistake Jim has made many times. He cites as evidence for his views of teaching at KIPP and Sidwell some descriptions he found on their Web sites. Any good teacher would tell you that is no way to judge a school. Socol gives no indication he has ever spent time inside a KIPP school, or Sidwell. Neither has Jim, unless I have missed something. They are among the many KIPP critics who consider it sufficient to judge schools by what they read on the Internet.
I think they should visit the schools they write about and tell us what they see. All of the KIPP schools I know have an open door policy. There are 99 KIPP schools in 20 states and D.C., including one in each of the 20 largest cities except Phoenix. I have visited many KIPP schools and Sidwell. I think Socol, and Jim, will be surprised, once they get inside, at how little difference there is between the great teaching going on at both places.

By Jay Mathews  |  September 1, 2010; 2:00 PM ET
  

Comments

Well Jay, let me recommend a few journalism tricks. One would be to read further - that is by using Google to look for my other writing on the subject. Another would be to email or call the subject of one of your columns to confirm what you are about to write.

So yes Jay, I have been in KIPP schools. That was not the point of this particular blog which was focused on philosophies expressed to the Obama Administration. I have been in KIPP schools (3) and - personally - I have found them terrifying.

But more than that Jay, I have some really extensive experience in the types of communities KIPP seeks to serve. I know these kids, and I know what they could do if they were offered the kind of educational opportunities available at Sidwell (or Cranbrook, or St. Ann's or etc).

And I know one more thing. Barack and Michelle would never send their daughters to a KIPP school, nor tolerate KIPP-style education in any school their daughters attended. As I've said, KIPP is the way the white and powerful want the poor of color to be educated. But they aren't suggesting it because that's a path to equality. They are suggesting it for just the opposite reason - they don't want the competition for their own children.
- Ira Socol

Posted by: irasocol | September 1, 2010 3:23 PM | Report abuse

Ira---Too impatient to wait, I have searched google for your writings on KIPP. I am far from an expert Web surfer, but the pieces I found that mentioned KIPP did not cite any personal experiences or observations. So I am doubly eager to give you a chance to do that here. We had one KIPP visitor who was critical of the school she saw, and I ran her comments in full, but it was a comment she posted here anonymously and she declined to respond to my request that she identify herself and tell us more. Since you have visited three KIPP schools, you could give us a much deeper critic's view of what you saw.

Posted by: Jay Mathews | September 1, 2010 4:15 PM | Report abuse

Mr. Mathews:
I visited KIPP schools with "invited observation teams" in 2007 and 2008. KIPP Ascend Charter School (Chicago) in 2007, KIPP Lead College Prep (Gary, IN) and KIPP Indianapolis College Preparatory School in 2008. I am not willing to say who brought me in, that might threaten a person's job.

What concerned me? An absolute lack of tolerance for mental, learning, and behavioural diversity, in classroom after classroom, corridor after corridor. Of course I come from a Special Education background, so this was far more disturbing than it might be to others. I also found the brutality of teacher-student, and especially in Indianapolis, administrator-student communication fairly shocking. If you would send your grandchildren there, you're a different kind of parent than I am.

I also found the educational philosophy quite flawed. Though there was substantial "one on one" time in all three schools, I saw almost no pedagogical or curricular differentiation, which is the heart of creating success for the diversity of students in any school.

But I will not deny that I am, philosophically, anti-colonial. I do not think that we have to "force these kids to be white." Nor do I believe that "gazing at the teacher" is anything but a power-relationship statement. If you follow the links my blog post offered, you would have found these conversations. If the first step offered poor children of color is being made to become "white" - and then they are expected to catch up, obviously they never will.

I do see a great many schools each year in my multiple roles. I see great schools, I see lousy schools. I see great charters, I see lousy charters. Great schools in my sense of the word empower students to build their own identities, their own toolbelts, their own skillsets, which they can carry through their lives. They prepare students to be themselves within the wider world. And I believe that every child can experience that kind of school.

I will not accept the idea that (a) we compare KIPP to the worst schools in America (that is NOT the change we believe in), or (b) that we accept that rich kids get one kind of education and poor kids get another (that's not new, we already have that).

But just one question Mr. Mathews, I've seen lots of KIPP demographics. Where, exactly, are all those middle class KIPP parents you speak of?
- Ira Socol

Posted by: irasocol | September 1, 2010 4:29 PM | Report abuse

Ira---Thanks very much for your comment. I would still like to run a more detailed post by you that tells us exactly what you saw and heard at which schools that led to the conclusions you draw. Some readers might interpret the same events differently. It would help everyone to get clearer sense of what moved you. I visited the Indianapolis school in 2008 also, if my memory is correct, and I saw things there I had not seen at any other KIPP schools, particularly students insulting each other in the hallways. The principal was not there that day for me to ask about this. I visited KIPP Ascend and KIPP Lead in 2009 and did not see anything that bothered me. They seemed to be productive and happy places to learn, similar to the 38 other KIPP schools I had visited. 

I know you are not a reporter, and prefer to get right to the point. But I think it would help the rest of us to read what you saw and heard, and see what the KIPP people at those schools have to say about that. Let me know. mathewsj@washpost.com

Posted by: Jay Mathews | September 1, 2010 5:11 PM | Report abuse

Ira--- I forgot to answer yr last question. The college educated middle class KIPP parents I spoke to were in Atlanta and LA, and I am told there are some in DC whom I havent met yet. Since about 10 percent of KIPP students nationally are not low-income, I suspect there are a few middle class kids in nearly every school. One of our reporters told me she was trying to choose between KIPP and a regular DC school in an affluent neighborhood, Janney. I told her I thought KIPP was the better bet. But I believe she chose the regular school.

Posted by: Jay Mathews | September 1, 2010 5:23 PM | Report abuse

Ira Socol: I will add a couple of things: First, I'm not sure it is possible for a reporter, certainly a national education reporter, to visit a school and see much more than the best "Potemkin Village" the school can construct. The same goes for politicians, especially celebrity politicians. And it might go for "invited educational observers" as well. However, the "tech guy," universally viewed as somehow "unimportant," sees and hears a lot. I'm not targeting KIPP here. At universities and K-12 schools I have seen and heard amazing things, including way more confidential information than should ever be disclosed.

That said: Let me offer you a couple of scenes.

In Chicago I saw a young teacher working one-on-one with a series of students who needed reading help. A few things stood out. The students who came to him were all, quite obviously, struggling with different aspects of the reading process. One had essentially no phonological awareness, one was really struggling with the symbols (he could not, as an example, associate the lower case letters with the equivalent upper case letters), a third read fluently but with almost zero comprehension.

The teacher, very clearly untrained in any of this, repeated the same efforts with all the kids. He was clearly operating from a script. And as his efforts inevitably failed, he became angry with the students, repeatedly blaming them for "not trying hard enough." The child with no phonological awareness was called "lazy" repeatedly. KIPP only phenomenon? Of course not, but I saw similar scenes throughout all the buildings.

In Gary I saw more than one teacher encourage students to belittle and demean students who were struggling to stick with the "SLANT" program. As I believe most WaPo reporters would struggle if these rules applied in staff meetings. The encouragement of "pack cruelty" was something else I observed in all three schools.

In Indianapolis I saw appalling student-to-student behaviour, but honestly, I thought it fairly closely mimicked the communication system between the school's adults and the children. That school (and there were echoes of this in the others) was all about "top down power" - yes - very old-school British in the "hidden curriculum" - which is, in every school, the curriculum which really matters.

What I saw almost none of in any of these schools was student-led, or student-centred learning, much less any student-generated context. These classrooms are training followers, not leaders, and not collaborators.

Now, sure, I have no doubt that there are parents who want this system. There have been military-style schools and reductionist hyper-discipline schools forever. But that is not the way the American elites are trained. They get very different environments. And they get those because that top of the American economic pyramid has always been about creativity and flexibility and rapid adjustment. Never about compliance. Never about staring at your superiors.
- Ira Socol

Posted by: irasocol | September 1, 2010 5:40 PM | Report abuse

For Ira, also if you could recall the actual words the Gary teacher said, that would help.

Posted by: Jay Mathews | September 1, 2010 6:10 PM | Report abuse 

Mr. Mathews:
I have no intention of giving the actual quotes of the teachers in Gary in this forum, and I will explain why.

If I provide the actual words, the KIPP/TFA machine will "fire up" and claim that I am mistaking "peer mentoring" and "cohort building" and "positive pressure" for bullying. They will focus on the words themselves and not the faces of the children being tormented, nor the question, "is bullying good educational policy?

Suffice it to say that in KIPP classrooms I have seen teachers encourage children to humiliate others. And this is done with the "pack" using the same words, as if scripted. You may see that as positive, I see it as hazing, and perhaps a significant reason for KIPP's rather stunning attrition rate. http://epicpolicy.org/newsletter/2010/06/new-kipp-study-underestimates-attrition-effects-0 A rate the KIPP Foundation seems to go to great lengths to obscure.

I do want to add one other question: Who, Mr. Mathews, paid for your traveling to all these KIPP schools around the country? And why? There is an awful lot of "Vioxx Research" in education these days, with people who profit from one reform project or another funding studies which often hype the positive and gloss over the "side effects." (The Washington Post Company is one company which does profit directly from current Obama Administration educational policies http://voices.washingtonpost.com/college-inc/2010/08/higher_ed_community_focuses_on.html ).

I'm just curious. How many urban Montessori schools did you visit on those trips? How many "free" schools? How many public schools? I'm just trying to get a sense of the purpose of your research.
- Ira Socol

Posted by: irasocol | September 1, 2010 10:40 PM | Report abuse

Ira Socol's points fall into two categories; on the issue of individual abuses at particular KIPP schools, I have no reason to doubt his assertions, though some of them are a matter of interpretation. But it would be helpful if Mr. Socol would, in criticizing the educational philosophy that KIPP schools follow, specify other schools that use a different philosophy -- a more Montessori-type philosophy, perhaps, and that are open admission at the same level as KIPP (i.e. free, minimal paperwork for admission, etc) and that produce learning gains that are better than KIPP's.

Posted by: jane100000 | September 2, 2010 9:21 AM | Report abuse

jane100000:
I can point you to many schools making great gains with far more "open" environments. Most of these are, in fact, "traditionally financed" public schools built on inclusive models, but they are working with the kind of systemic change necessary - creating districts which, when possible, cross community boundaries, providing equalized funding, including high levels of professional development. These are the areas where there is little or no pressure for KIPP. One example I might offer is Michigan's Godfrey-Lee District, with demographics closely matching those of KIPP, this public school draws in many "school choice" students, and though it might not match the test scores of East Grand Rapids, its graduates do very well in life.
Which raises the question: How Jane, do you measure schools? http://education.change.org/blog/view/evaluate_that_-_schools_for_children
- Ira Socol

Posted by: irasocol | September 2, 2010 10:04 AM | Report abuse

Ira, not just by test scores, for sure. Altho the Godfrey-Lee NAEP scores aren't very encouraging especially for minorities and low-income children. My benchmark is how well students do after they finish their schooling -- not something you can tell from a website, unfortunately. I'm curious as to why this particular school district is your comparison for KIPP, as 75% of the students are Anglo or Asian?

Posted by: jane100000 | September 2, 2010 11:00 AM | Report abuse

"Thanks very much for your comment. I would still like to run a more detailed post by you that tells us exactly what you saw and heard at which schools that led to the conclusions you draw."
Sorry Jay, Ira's blog posts are already more detailed, and better substantiated with both research and direct observation, than your articles, or your books.

Posted by: mcstowy | September 2, 2010 12:45 PM | Report abuse

Jane:
Lowest "resources" (tax-base) in Michigan. Very high poverty. Over 60% non-English speaking at home. (There is one Asian family that I know of.) About 65% of district adults have no high school diploma. http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/sdds/singledemoprofile.asp?county1=2616080&state1=26 Great NAEP? No. But many kids on to college, and other post-secondary success. With a very involved, very creative, administration and staff http://www.mlive.com/news/grand-rapids/index.ssf/2010/02/west_michigan_school_district.html I see them as a model of a district which takes in everyone, sends no one away

Posted by: irasocol | September 2, 2010 1:09 PM | Report abuse

... [hit enter too fast], and yet treats students as fully human, and as fully capable of handling sophisticated learning.
- Ira Socol

Posted by: irasocol | September 2, 2010 1:14 PM | Report abuse

for ira --- I think if you tell us what was said, the KIPP people will be put in a real bind if it is as compelling as you feel it is. They might come up with some excuse, but the blog is not for them, but for readers, and readers would see your point even if KIPP tried to shrug it off. 

As for yr good question on my travel, which has been asked before here and answered, all of my travels to KIPP schools have been paid by me. I have been a reporter for more than 40 years and know that you kill yr credibility if you take money from a source. I did a lot of traveling to KIPP cities while writing my book about KIPP, Work Hard. Be Nice, and then did some more traveling, often to KIPP cities, to promote it. My wife can verify that all the money came from the family bank account, altho we were able to write much of it off as a business expense. I am very cheap. That worried some people. Particularly when I described the Executive Inn and Suites in Houston, where the clerk at the main desk gave me the TV remote since, he said, they couldn't afford the loss of keeping them in the rooms.
For Jim, tfteacher and others---my apologies for my last post. The headline on that online version, "Forget about the achievement gap,' certainly left the impression I wanted people to henceforth ignore the gap. The column itself was more balanced, thank goodness. They shouldn't let that blogger write his own headlines.

Posted by: Jay Mathews | September 2, 2010 2:48 PM | Report abuse

Mr. Mathews,
I appreciate the answer on the expenses. What was the intent of this trip? That is, why KIPP? Did you look at the other schools in each community? Trying to get a sense of what drove your research in this direction.

As for the quotes: I was not doing an "approved" study. I did not ask anyone if I might quote them. And again, I do not think language is the issue. I know these positions seem odd to a journalist, but I work from differing standards.
- Ira Socol

Posted by: irasocol | September 2, 2010 5:07 PM | Report abuse

Ira---if you read the book, which I hope you do, it explains in the first couple of pages why I decided to do a book about KIPP. Since a book I wrote in the 1980s about Jaime Escalante and his school, Garfield High, I have been investigating schools that have found ways to significantly increase the academic achievement of low-income students. I heard about KIPP in 2001, did a lot of reporting, and realized they had compiled a better record than any other organization for taking low-income kids to a new level, and had done it through wonderful teaching and more time, which was reassuring. The standard rap about KIPP being a drill and kill enterprise, everybody memorizing the answers, was as far from the truth as it could be. The schools were being started by some of the most creative teachers I had ever met, and they were hiring for their staffs people just like them, and like the two founders, Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin, whom the book is mostly about. I think it is a very important story and have continued to cover it on this blog, and will probably do another KIPP book when the big Mathematica study of KIPP---the largest randomized study every of a charter network--is completed.

Posted by: Jay Mathews | September 2, 2010 5:21 PM | Report abuse

I continue the conversation here http://speedchange.blogspot.com/2010/09/on-kipp-and-question-does-philosophy.html
- Ira Socol

Posted by: irasocol | September 3, 2010 9:09 AM | Report abuse

For Ira---for most school visits I must call the school district PR office and get permission. For schools where I have developed a relationship with the principal, I call that person and ask what would be a good time. Three of my books were focused on specific high schools, where I visited for 2 or 3 years, and I just showed up whenever I wanted without calling ahead since the principal had approved the project and I had the run of those places--Garfield High in East LA, Mamaroneck High in Westchester, NY,and Mt. Vernon High in Fairfax County, Va. For KIPP schools, which have an open door policy, about half the time I call ahead and make an appointment with the principal and half the time I just show up. When I visited that Indianapolis KIPP school, I was just showing up without an appointment.
If there is breaking news, or if we (the Post) have been frustrated in all attempts to visit a school where we think there is news, we will show up and try to slip in, or stand outside and interview students as the leave at the end of the day. We can get their parents numbers that way, and parents often have teacher home numbers.

Posted by: Jay Mathews | September 3, 2010 6:40 PM | Report abuse

It is interesting, as Ira points out, that the only schools that a sour taste in Jay's mouth are those he visited without an appointment.  Hmm.

Yong Zhao on Arne

From Zhao's blog:

Master of Myth: What Arne Duncan Says and Does
3 SEPTEMBER 2010

The great enemy of truth is very often not the lie – deliberate, contrived and dishonest – but the myth – persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic.

—John F. Kennedy


U.S. Secretary of Education has been called the most powerful education secretary in history. With billions of dollars of borrowed money, Duncan has achieved unprecedented changes to American education. “We’re getting more change in 18 months in education than in the previous decade,” said Duncan on a recent trip.

The changes he has been championing, mostly represented by the Race to the Top grant program, are controversial, to say the least. As a Christine Science Monitor article writes:

Ultimately, proponents from all across the political spectrum say, Duncan could help dramatically narrow achievement gaps and even bring the United States back to high standing internationally. Or, as critics such as the irked teachers’ unions see it, he’ll further devastate an already demoralized teaching profession and subject children to more of the high-stakes testing that’s been sucking the soul out of American schools.

But what is surprising is that he has not met many critics during his meetings with the people who should be most critical of him—teachers and students. Recently Duncan was on a bus tour of schools across the nation to “honor the nation’s teachers.” I had expected that many teachers would file complaints about the increasingly poisonous teaching environment imposed by the federal government. I also had expected students to question the excessive burden of testing. But according to a New York Times story:  “Mr. Duncan heard little criticism in the Northeast states he visited.”

Did I miss something here? How is this possible? What happened to all the criticism?

I found the answer in yesterday’s Talk of the Nation hosted by Neal Conan on NPR.

During this one-hour call-in radio program, Duncan took questions from students and teachers in the Washington DC area in the studio and a few callers from around the country. Out of all the questions asked, only one gets close to criticism: “When are we going to start learning how to think and not just how to pass a standardized test?” To which Duncan answered: “It got to happen yesterday.”

That’s the moment of epiphany: Secretary Arne Duncan is a master and all criticism melts away before this great master, master of myth because all critics are told what they want to hear.

If “[I]it got to happen yesterday,” why is he working so hard to push using standardized test scores to evaluate teachers and schools, which has been shown to lead to teaching to the test and narrowing of curriculum?

Using a similar strategy, he “won over” a career and technical education teacher who complained the profession is undervalued, according to a Washington Post story. Duncan’s answer: “We have to think about how to reverse that.”

If he values and will truly think about career and technical education, why does he want to pay only math and science teachers more and why his Race to the Top program rewards only STEM and English language arts?

Duncan has been promoting the myth that he respects teachers, values a well-rounded education, and respects diversity and use the myth to hide the truth that all he promotes is more testing, more standards, narrower curriculum, and his lack of faith in public schools and educators.

More of examples of Duncan’s myth promotion record:

Duncan: And the biggest thing is, we have to give everyone of you a well rounded education. So reading and math, English and math are hugely important, but so is science, so is social studies, so is foreign languages, so is financial literacy, so is environmental literacy. We have to get back to a well rounded curriculum. (NPR Talk of the Nation)

Question: how much money has he and the federal government invested in subjects other than English and STEM?

Duncan: Today in our country, 99 percent of our teachers are above average. (New York Times story)

Question: If so, why do we need such drastic, expensive, and unproven measures such as tie teacher evaluation to student test scores to deal with the 1% of below-average teachers? I have to believe he does not believe his Lake Wobegon inspired statement himself.

Duncan: And one thing I’m always conscious of is that the best ideas in education are always going to come at the local level, never from me, never from Washington. (NPR Talk of the Nation)

Question: If the best ideas never come from him, never from Washington, why has he been dangling money to lure the states to change laws to allow more charter schools, accept national standards, develop common assessments, and base teacher evaluation to test scores?

Secretary Duncan has also been promoting the myth about how bad American education is.

Duncan: A quarter of our students never graduate high school. Many of those who do either don’t enroll in college or fail to earn a degree. (Duncan speech in Little Rock)

Question: Why does the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) say “the status dropout rate declined from 14 percent in 1980 to 8 percent in 2008?” “The status dropout rate represents the percentage of 16- through 24-year-olds who are not enrolled in school and have not earned a high school credential (either a diploma or an equivalency credential such as a General Educational Development [GED] certificate).”

Duncan: In just one generation we have fallen from first in the world to 12th in the percentage of young adults with college degrees. (Duncan speech in Little Rock)

Question: Where is the evidence? I gather Secretary Duncan was relying on a report by the College Board. According to the report, however, the U.S. ranked 4th, NOT first in the percentage of 55- to 64-Year-Olds with an Associate Degree or higher after Russia, Israel, and Canada and the percentage of 25- to 34-Year-Olds with an Associate degree or higher ranks 12th, but the 4 countries immediately above the U.S. (Israel, France, Belgium, and Canada) are about 1% better.

New tests: expensive, harmful, unnecessary

Sent to the New York Times, September 3, 2010

Arne Duncan plans new tests, tightly linked to standards, to be given throughout the year ("US asks educators to reinvent student tests, and how they are given," Sept. 2).

We can't afford it: Test construction, validation, revision, etc. will cost billions, at a time when school are short of funds, when many science classes have no lab equipment, school libraries have few books, school years are being shortened, and teachers are losing their jobs.

The tests will have a devastating effect on teaching: Regular, standards-linked testing means a lock-step uniform curriculum, destroying what little is left of teacher flexibility and autonomy.

They are unnecessary. Research suggests that teacher evaluation (grades) is an excellent measure of student progress and achievement, and we already have a standardized test useful for comparisons: The NAEP, given every few years to small groups of students, with results extrapolated to estimate how larger groups would do.

Stephen Krashen

Some sources: Grades as measures of progress and achievement:
Bowen, W., Chingos, M., and McPherson, M. 2009. Crossing the Finish Line: Completing College at America's Universities. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Geiser, S. and Santelices, M.V., 2007. Validity of high-school grades in predicting student success beyond the freshman year: High-school record vs. standardized tests as indicators of four-year college outcomes. Research and Occasional Papers Series: CSHE 6.07, University of California, Berkeley. http://cshe.berkeley.edu
Original article: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/03/education/03testing.html

Imagine in FL

Here's a head scratcher: Florida recently gave $300,000 to Imagine Schools at South Vero through a state-funded grant program despite expressing concerns (just months ago!) about the relationship between the charter and the for-profit arm of Imagine.

Imagine tried to add a middle school to this elementary school, but their application was denied by the Indian River County School Board. The company appealed the decision, but the Charter School Appeal Commission agreed there were some major concerns with Imagine's application (and their existing governance structure). One particular concern they raise is the distance between Imagine Schools, Inc (expressly for-profit, with 60,000 shares held presumably by the Bakkes) and the LLCs that hold the charter. The problem is that these LLCs are, as the commission says, "an inappropriate legal entity to file a charter application."

Even the Imagine website (linked above) notes the school is owned by a subsidiary or affiliate of Imagine Schools Non-Profit, Inc. And how close is ISNP to Imagine Schools, Inc? I'd wager they're pretty darn close.

Keep in mind this was from March of 2010.

So what has changed in the last few months? Is there an entity - not an Imagine-controlled LLC - that holds the charter and has the capacity to divorce itself from Imagine if it chose to do so? Or, is the governing body just an extension of Imagine, a lame-duck body acting on behalf of the company?

Boycott LA Times

Click to enlarge.

Wake County's Teabagger Five Working to Revive Socioeconomic Apartheid

The enemies of diversity have come up with their initial implementation plan to return Wake County schools to the era of Jim Crow. 

Instead of following the advice of the consultant they hired to present a plan for "controlled choice," the Tea Partiers on the panel have chosen the most divisive and unfair of the four options on the table.  Is anyone surprised? 

After all, the ideological playbook that these teabagger mouthpieces are working from demands the debasement and destruction of public education.  Re-creating a whole bunch of poor, failing schools feeds that effort, while satisfying the racists within Wake County who "want their country back."  It's a real opportunity for the John Birchers and the Koch Brothers to advance their anti-democratic agenda.  A clip from the News & Observer:

. . . .Last month, the student assignment committee told staff to work on four different maps, based on high school attendance lines; transportation zones; regions run by each area superintendent; and, planning regions used for developing school construction bond issues.

Committee members agreed Tuesday to go with a plan with the largest number of zones of those considered by the committee and schools staff.

"From the things that people have said, the high school model seems to have the most positives," said board majority member Chris Malone. "What I would like us to do is begin with that shell."

But the choice of more neighborhood zones goes against the recommendations of Michael Alves, a Massachusetts educational consultant who was invited to explain his "controlled choice" concept to Wake officials this summer. Alves said that such plans, used by dozens of systems nationwide, work best with a smaller number of large zones that each reflect the entire community.

Demographic data shows that the 16 neighborhood school zones have wide disparities in race and in the percentage of children receiving federally subsidized lunches. Committee members stressed that the boundary lines for the 16 zones are still being worked on and could be redrawn in an attempt to minimize these disparities. . . .

Why Does KIPP Not Look Like Sidwell?

Below is an open online letter from Ira Socol to the President.  I have ventured to add a few comments and a couple of video clips.  

Dear President Obama,

I wanted to discuss the things you believe are "innovative in education," just so I might assure you that in this field - in the field of America's future - your administration is doing irreparable harm.

 "Students at both KIPP and Achievement First schools follow a system for classroom behavior invented by Levin and Feinberg called Slant, which instructs them to sit up, listen, ask questions, nod and track the speaker with their eyes." Yes, the first thing KIPP teaches is Calvinist church behaviour. "They all called out at once, “Nodding!"' Yes. Stare at your master. Sit still. Nod to demonstrate your compliance. Speak in unison according to the script.

Mr. President, this is not innovation. We know this formula. It drove the colonialist education systems of Wales and Ireland in the 18th and 19th centuries. It was the hallmark of British Colonial Schools from Lagos to Cape Town to Delhi. It was the path followed by the U.S. government's Indian Schools.

It is the well-worn path of imperial cultures. Force those not born "like" the elite to first convert, and then run in a futile attempt to "catch up."

Mr. President, is that what you would want for your daughters?

The KIPP "SLANT" idea, shown below being introduced by a smug rich guy I cannot identify, is reductionist education which assumes that children of color are incapable of the kind of rich learning available to their wealthy, white counterparts.

[Ira, that old white guy's name is Tom Snyder, who used to develop and market some excellent collaborative learning software before such notions were made irrelevant by the present era of Test and Punish that the Oligarchs call accountability.  No, no, not for the banksters and casino capitalists, but for the fat cat teachers.  But I digress.  Now, however, instead of developing software, Snyder is developing tools for the K-12 corporate classroom like contracts that students and teachers sign based on the KIPP chain gang work model.  Listen again carefully to his intro: "It's not a metaphor, it's an acronym for the KIPP schools, it's the word SLANT, and a lot of you might have read about this.  These are school, the KIPP schools, are working very well in Brooklyn and the Bronx, where, I don't know the kind of districts you guys are from, but these are challenging [knowing nod to communicate black and scary], these are highly volatile, highly poor, highly damaged, and they've been working in Chicago, Louisiana, uh, I don't, off the top of my head I don't know the other cities . . . .]

But let us notice, white kids don't learn that way...

President Obama, I believe that every child in this nation deserves the kind of creative, exciting, and culturally open education your children are getting at Sidwell Friends. And I believe that forcing a traditional concept of attention on children in order to make them "white enough" to be unthreatening second-class citizens is wrong on every level.

Let me quote this from the Middle School at Sidwell: "We seek academically talented students of diverse cultural, racial, religious and economic backgrounds. We offer these students a rich and rigorous interdisciplinary curriculum designed to stimulate creative inquiry, intellectual achievement and independent thinking in a world increasingly without borders.  We encourage these students to test themselves in athletic competition and to give expression to their artistic abilities.  We draw strength from silence—and from the power of individual and collective reflection."

Now let us see how much less KIPP kids get: "KIPP Academy Lynn Charter School will create an environment where the students of Lynn will develop the academic skills, intellectual habits and character traits necessary to maximize their potential in high school, college and the world beyond." "Academic Skills - Calculate accurately - Read fluently - Write effectively - Comprehend fundamental knowledge." "KIPP Academy Lynn will relentlessly focus on high student performance on standardized tests and other objective measures."

What research is it, Mr. President, that Secretary Duncan cites to indicate that the students of KIPP Academy Lynn Charter School deserve so much less - of life, of creativity, of respect, of freedom, than your daughter's classmates at Sidwell?

No Mr. President, KIPP Academies are not innovation. They are the oldest colonialist form of oppression in the school manual. They are institutions of the elite's cultural power, and their purpose is to protect the elites by ensuring that underclass children will never catch up.

But, if you really want to prove me wrong, send your daughters to a KIPP Academy. Your i3 grants mean there should be one coming to the White House neighbourhood soon.

- Ira Socol

Thanks, Ira.  Here are some more of the dangerous black children that Tom Snyder has contracts for, this time learning how to walk the line in the parrot learning chain gangs that became so popular during the Reading First heyday of corruption that was led by the direct instruction gurus at the University of Oregon, the same ones who manipulated Reading First so that 46 states ended up adopting these methods for Title I schools, i. e. poor children:

Notice the invisible straightjackets that the children are wearing later in the clip: