Teacher Pay Bonuses Based on Test Scores Dead in Texas

From Dallas Morning News:

AUSTIN – House members rejected the pleas of leadership and voted late Thursday to scuttle the nation's largest teacher merit pay program, putting the money instead into across-the-board raises of about $800 a year for teachers and other school workers.

The surprise rebuff of Republican leaders during debate on the state's two-year budget was a victory for teacher groups, who say merit pay is divisive and no substitute for bringing Texas teacher salaries up to the national average.

Proponents said merit pay is needed to persuade top teachers to go to the state's lowest-performing campuses.

"Big step backwards," Rep. Dan Branch, R-Dallas, said of the rejection. "We were leading a movement of performance-based incentive pay. It's back to the old 'spread a little around' approach."

Democrats said the state should use some of its big surplus to boost educator pay. . . .

So Much Supplemental Tutoring Corruption, So Little Time

From the Boston Globe:

CONCORD, N.H. --Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Rodham Clinton on Friday criticized the Bush administration for outsourcing teaching to private tutoring companies, arguing that many firms have close ties to Republicans.

"This is Halliburton all over again," the New York senator said.

The 2002 No Child Left Behind Act requires school districts to provide free tutoring in math and reading to poor children in schools that repeatedly fail to meet state testing standards. Clinton said that amounts to $500 million a year being paid to tutoring companies and other supplemental service providers that aren't held accountable.

"Nobody's looking over their shoulder. And we're not really seeing results," she members of the National Education Association's New Hampshire chapter.

"Why would we outsource helping our kids to unaccountable private sector providers?" she said. "They don't have to follow our civil rights laws, their employees don't even have to be qualified, they aren't required to coordinate with educators, there's a grand total of zero evidence that they're doing any good."

Many of the providers have close ties to the Republican Party and President Bush, she told reporters later.

"It's not enough that there are no-bid contracts that are taking money away from our troops not delivering services to them in the field, now we have these contracts going to these cronies who are chosen largely on a political basis, and we have nothing to show for it," she complained.

Clinton, who voted for No Child Left Behind, said she had concerns with the bill from the start but thought it was worth taking a risk to see a greater investment in education. . . .

Will she apologize for her vote? No more than she did about her Iraq vote. Will she vote to reauthorize the corrupt NCLB profiteering and privatization scheme? Will you, Hillary?

So Much Reading First Corruption, So Little Time

I am glad to see the news media finally starting to pay attention the fact that Reading First is the most corrupt education program in American history:

WASHINGTON — A billion-dollar-a-year federal reading program that ran into scathing criticism over conflicts of interest now has a new one: The government contractor that set up the program for the Education Department is also part of the team hired to evaluate it.

Reading First — part of President Bush's signature No Child Left Behind education law — has been under scrutiny following a string of federal reports that found it rife with conflicts of interest and mismanagement. The program provides intense reading help to low-income children in the early elementary grades.

RMC Research Corp. was the contractor hired to establish and implement the program starting in 2002, under three contracts worth about $40 million.

Recently, the Department of Education inspector general reported that RMC failed to keep the program free of conflicts of interest. For example, RMC did not screen subcontractors for relationships with publishers of reading programs.

Now, Reading First is in the midst of a five-year evaluation under a 2003 contract with a team that includes RMC, which is based in Portsmouth, N.H.

Congress required the review, spelling out that it must be an "independent evaluation."

That didn't mean for the contractor that set up the program to have any role in reviewing it, said Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Edward Kennedy, who chairs the education committee.

"It's a classic case of the fox guarding the chicken coop," Kennedy said Friday.

Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., chairman of the House education committee, raised similar concerns when notified Friday of RMC's role in the evaluation.

"RMC played a significant role in the implementation of Reading First and, according to the inspector general, a sometimes flawed role. If it's true that RMC was also hired to evaluate the effectiveness of the very program it was hired to help implement, then the conflict of interest could not be any clearer," Miller said.

Both lawmakers have been investigating Reading First, and Miller announced Friday he would hold a hearing on the issue April 20. . . .

Segregated Assemblies and Racist Cheerleading

From PEN Weekly Newsblast:

STUDENTS SEPARATED BY RACE FOR SCHOOL ASSEMBLIES
With schools under increasing pressure to improve test scores, one high school has resorted to a new way to motivate students: by race. Mount Diablo High School in Concord, Calif., recently held separate assemblies for students of different ethnicities to talk about last year's test results and the upcoming slew of state exams this spring. Jazz music and pictures of Martin Luther King greeted African-American students, whereas Filipino, Asian and Pacific Islander students saw flags of their foreign homelands on the walls. Latinos and white students each attended their own events, too, complete with statistics showing results for all ethnicities and grade level. Teachers flashed last year's test scores and told the white crowd of students to do better for the sake of their people. Several parents told Shirley Dang of the Contra Costa Times that the meetings smacked of segregation resurrected. "Why did they have to divide the students by race?" said Filipino parent Claddy Dennis, mother of freshman Schenlly Dennis. "In this country, everybody is supposed to be treated equally. It sounds like racism to me." Principal Bev Hansen said she held the student assemblies by ethnicity this year and last year to avoid one group harassing another based on their test scores. Jack Jennings, president of the National Center on Education Policy, called the racially divided meetings potentially illegal and dangerous. "It's segregation by race, whatever the motivation," Jennings said, noting that he had never heard before of a school or district doing such a thing. He described the assemblies as a unique byproduct of the intense focus on testing.
http://www.contracostatimes.com/mld/cctimes/16792877.htm

The Gap That the Rich Would Rather Ignore

From Raw Story:

New York- The income gap between rich and poor in the United States has increased significantly, The New York Times online edition reported Thursday.

According to the report, new analyses of 2005 tax data shows that the top 300,000 Americans collectively enjoyed almost as much income as the bottom 150 million Americans.

Let's see. Our meritocratic social system is based on the objectivity of color-blind and income-blind test scores, right. Right. And we expect the same high performance from kids in DC, where they drink lead-laced water at school and die from untreated absessed teeth, as we expect from the rich kids in Chevy Chase who drive their own BMWs to school, right? Right. And if the latter do better on the color-blind and income-blind tests, then it is former's fault for not trying hard enough. Guaranteed advantage, guaranteed failure, and guaranteed despair. Oh, yes--and guaranteed shut down of the public schools so that we can offer all the failures a Bible in their backpacks, a uniform to wear, and a voucher that the right-wing fundamentalists can cash in order to pay for their own proselytizing.

Per person, the top group received 440 times as much as the average person in the bottom half earned, nearly doubling the gap from 1980.

The report cites Internal Revenue Service data analyzed by economist Professor Emmanuel Saez of the University of California, Berkeley, and Professor Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics.

If the economy is growing but only a few are enjoying the benefits, it goes to our sense of fairness," the report quoted Professor Saez as saying. "It can have important political consequences," the professor said.

While total reported income in the US increased almost 9 per cent in 2005, the most recent year for which such data is available, average incomes for those in the bottom 90 per cent dipped slightly compared with the year before, dropping 172 dollars, or 0.6 per cent.

According to the report, the gains went largely to the top 1 per cent, whose incomes rose to an average of more than 1.1 million dollars each, an increase of more than 139,000 dollars, or about 14 per cent.

The top 10 percent, roughly those earning more than 100,000 dollars, also reached a level of income share not seen since 1928, according to the report. . . .

Hmmm--1928. A year before, what was that big noise in 1929?

Karen Hughes Selling American Ed to India

I came across this quote from Bush's education envoy Karen Hughes who is on a mission to recruit Indian students . Here's an excerpt:

KAREN HUGHES: We believe we have the highest quality of educational experience available. We also know that India has a very young population — more than 50 percent of the population is under the age of 25, and so India has a growing demand.

MIRANDA KENNEDY: More students from India attend American universities than from any other country, and the U.S. government wants to expand those numbers further, because educating foreign students is big business. Today Karen Hughes said the U.S. is simply playing to its strengths.

KAREN HUGHES: We believe we have the highest quality of educational experience available. We also know that India has a very young population — more than 50 percent of the population is under the age of 25, and so India has a growing demand. During her visit, Hughes met India's prime minister to talk about another way to meet that demand: U.S. schools setting up satellite campuses in India.

----------------------------------------------------------

Someone should tip off Bush and Spellings before they blow a good business opportunity in India.

This is from the Department of Education web site:

MARGARET SPELLINGS

Finally, we need to improve accountability at our colleges and universities. We expect clear information and transparency about nearly every big investment we make, from choosing a doctor to buying a car or house. And we have now come to expect accountability from K-12 education through No Child Left Behind.

But despite ever-increasing tuitions at colleges and universities, we do not have a very good idea about what we are getting for all that money. The Federal government has invested hundreds of billions of taxpayers' money and consumers deserve accountability and clear information. Colleges and universities must be more transparent about things like cost and graduation rates so that students and parents can make informed choices about postsecondary education.

Family and Student Testing Protection Act

I am neither attorney nor legislator, but here are some ideas that need to be included in any state bill that takes a moral stand against the most socially-corrosive education policy in history. Use what you want of it--no charge, no copyright.

Updated March 30, 2007

The Paul Wellstone Memorial Family and Students Testing Protection Act, in Honor of the Experience, Insight, and Courage that Enabled Him to See What His Peers in Congress Could Not—the Ultimately-Disastrous Consequences of High-Stakes Testing*

WHEREAS, high-stakes standardized testing of children constitutes the year-round focus in public schools classrooms; and

WHEREAS, the over-reliance and continued emphasis on high-stakes tests has a corrosive effect on preparing children for citizenship in a representative democracy; and

WHEREAS, many high stakes standardized tests administered to children are neither reliable nor valid; and

WHEREAS, emphasis on testing math and reading has resulted in the de-emphasis and disappearance of other important subjects and learning activities; and

WHEREAS, high-stakes testing of young children is inappropriate and harmful to their emotional and intellectual health; and

WHEREAS, results on a single test have been used to justify retention policies that ignore scientific evidence regarding the harmful effects of such practices, and

WHEREAS, poor, non-English speaking, and special education students bear the brunt of disproportionate failure on standardized tests; and

WHEREAS, the preponderance of high stakes standardized tests has neither closed the achievement gap, nor has it altered the economic and social factors that are responsible for those gaps in achievement; and

WHEREAS, failure to meet unrealistic testing targets undermines public support for their schools, thus opening the door to privatization; and

WHEREAS, the institutional stress of high-stakes testing undermines the supportive and challenging school climate required for children to learn and grow; therefore be it


RESOLVED, that schools will develop and use multiple forms of assessment to make high-stakes decisions regarding students, teachers, and the curriculum; and be it further

RESOLVED, that all standardized tests administered to school children will be psychometrically valid and reliable; and be it further

RESOLVED, that standardized tests will not be used as the sole criterion to make student promotion or retention decisions or as determinants of the curriculum and/or the operations of the public schools; and be it further

RESOLVED, that student scores on standardized tests will be used to help to help teachers address student knowledge gaps; and be it further

RESOLVED, that all testing of children will strictly follow ethical guidelines of the education profession and the professional recommendations of licensed psychologists and pediatricians; and be it further

RESOLVED, that standardized tests will be used to measure individual student gains over time, rather than arbitrary target scores that ignore the disadvantages that accrue from poverty, disability, or language status; and be it further

RESOLVED, that no test results will be used to justify punitive sanctions against individuals or schools; and be it further

RESOLVED, policymakers, classroom teachers, school officials, and parent representatives will constitute the appropriate body of stakeholders to make and to modify testing policies for schools; and be it further

RESOLVED, that school systems will have funded public awareness programs to gather public feedback and to disseminate information on the purpose and limitations of assessment programs.

*Use of Paul Wellstone's name in association with this effort approved by the Wellstone Action Network.

Reasons Right-Wingers Love Charter Schools

The final installment in a 3-year study of Delaware charters shows three of the reasons:

charters encourage increased segregation by income and race

Project director Gary Miron noted the differences among some charters that serve predominantly black students, and others mainly made up of white and Asian students.

Schools also are segregated by low-income and affluent students, and the schools of the more affluent also seem to be better at leveraging private funding. The poorer, predominantly minority schools' students also performed worse on state tests while the white, higher-income charter schools did well.

"There are differences. They are not equal," Miron said.

charter schools hire more compliant teachers who have not been corrupted by liberal teacher education programs that focus on equity and social justice

Teacher qualifications and salaries were other issues. Some charter school teachers have less education and experience, or are less likely to be certified than those in traditional schools.

charter schools offer less pay and fewer benefits

Teacher salaries averaged $42,281, lower than the state average of $52,486. But this too differed greatly among schools.

Legislatures Waking Up to Fraudulent Charter Schools

Another clear signal that Americans are waking up to the systematic and planned destruction of their public schools. HT to Media Transparency--commentary from the Star Tribune:

By Nick Coleman, Star Tribune

If there remains a "sacred cow" in public education -- an issue that can't be criticized or challenged -- it is not teacher unions, the failings of inner-city schools or the empty achievements of the No Child Left Behind Act. All those topics and more have been debated vigorously in the discussion over education.

No, the last sacred cow is the charter-school movement and the notion that charter schools will reform the schools and that no limit should be placed on their number, despite mounting evidence that they, too, are beset by problems.

That last sacred cow just got gored. And high time, too.

The Minnesota Senate's education spending package includes a long-overdue proposal to limit the number of charter schools in Minnesota to 150, a cap that could mean no more charter schools would be approved after 19 schools slated to open next fall or next year are added to the existing 131.

A cap may be gaining traction: Despite protests from charter-school supporters, an attempt to remove the cap from the education bill was defeated by voice vote in a Finance Committee subdivision Wednesday.

Logically, a cap makes sense. It wouldn't mean charter schools couldn't grow or accept more students; it would only mean that 150 charter schools are enough.

The need for a cap is clear: Charter schools, authorized by the 1991 Legislature (and limited, at first, to eight schools) have wildly outgrown their original intent, suffer from a lack of rigorous financial controls (several have gone bankrupt, others have been robbed by their managers), and have not significantly outperformed traditional public schools (according to the Minnesota Association of Charter Schools, 44 percent of the state's charter schools did not make adequate progress last year, including the school where Minneapolis City Council member and public school critic Don Samuels sends his children).

"There are too many of them that suffer from really bad management, financial improprieties or sweetheart deals" involving charter-school sponsors who contract for services to their schools, says Charles Kyte, executive director of the Minnesota Association of School Administrators. "It's time to put the brakes on, and take a hard look to figure out what's right or wrong." . . .

Let's Have Some Accountability for the Slave Masters

Yesterday the Washington Post carried a story on the new and improved high standards that Janey and Fenty have cooked up in DC, with the help of closet fascists at Achieve, Inc. More tests for grade promotion, more "mastery," more rigor. In other words, let's focus closer on the goals inspired by wishful thinking so that we don't have to do anything to make these goals achievable. The only thing that is likely to track with the trajectory of these high standards is the higher poverty rates in DC.

And here is a story from the Times today that brings all of these diversions into focus. It shows the bitter reality that remains in communities even after all the awards are handed out and all the rhetoric of high standards and academic accomplishment fades. To Janey and Fenty: take note of the real problems that your diversion simply mask.

During the spring of his sophomore year in high school here, Jeffrey Johnson took the standardized tests that Florida requires for promotion and graduation. He scored in the 93rd percentile in reading and the 95th in math. That same semester, he earned straight A’s.

Two years later, in May 2006, Jeffrey was about to graduate summa cum laude, having received a full college scholarship. Days before commencement, at the age of 17, he was shot to death at a party during an argument about his car. His graduation mortarboard was found near his body.

For Paul Moore, who had taught Jeffrey in an advanced social studies class at Miami Carol City Senior High School, a terrible question began to emerge. It all turned on the concept on accountability. Jeffrey had proved accountable to the state by passing the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test. But what about the accountability the state had to keep Jeffrey alive?

Jeffrey was the third Carol City student shot to death during the 2005-6 academic year. By the first semester of this year, two more had been killed in gun violence. It was then that Mr. Moore decided to do something more than deliver eulogies, visit weeping parents and initiate class discussions about all the senseless death.

He drafted a petition, expressing his righteous anger. (“Anger” indeed was the word, for it derives from the Norse “angr,” which means grief at the wrongness in the world.) The petition appealed to the newly elected governor, Charlie Crist, to “make Florida’s schools and the communities around them ‘measurably’ safer” and it concluded, “You are accountable to us for it!”. . . .

Oakland California Teachers Buck the NEA

This is one of those stories that might take a little while to get into the mainstream media but as opposition to NCLB grows and the NEA seeks watered down changes in the law, the teachers union in Oakland, California should be making headlines with their courageous stand against NCLB. If the story does eventually get out, perhaps more teachers and union members across the country will take a stand that will finally abolish the punitive high stakes testing madness that is destroying public education.

The Educator Roundtable is pleased to announce a new partnership with the Oakland Education Association. The OEA's principled stand against NCLB may be the beginning of a grassroots movement inside the California Teachers Association (CTA), the California affiliate of the nation's largest union, the National Education Association (NEA). NEA leadership seeks to modify NCLB, but the OEA believes more is needed. OEA supports federal funding for public education, but insists that it be without NCLB 's punitive measures, emphasis on high stakes testing, and embrace of privatization and profiteering.

As a result of all three of the above, NCLB has decimated inner city schools, caused wholesale school closures that qualitatively increase instability in inner city areas, and hit hardest at poor and minority schools, students and families.

OEA says that removal of these sanctions is a prerequisite for real improvement and achievement in our nation's public schools. "At the same time that public schools are being shut down, our school district is approving new charter schools. There are now more than 31 charter schools in Oakland. People in Oakland see this as a takeover….Schools that were anchors in their neighborhoods are shutting down, increasing the instability in those neighborhoods," explains OEA executive board member Jack Gerson.

There is no evidence supporting the claim that "charter schools" educate any better than public schools, nor is there any research supporting NCLB's requirement that schools use supplemental educational services. There is plenty of evidence showing that NCLB has forced thousands of school districts across the country to outsource public education. Oakland is not alone. In California 700 schools face restructuring this year.

In recent days, CTA locals in San Diego, Hollister and Kings/Tulare counties have taken stands similar to Oakland's. Oakland is the first local teacher's union to to publicly endorse the Educator Roundtable's position. We are confident more will soon follow.

The Good and Kaminski DIBELS Gravy Train

might soon be coming to a grinding halt. From the Washington Post:

Monday, March 26, 2007; B02

In Montgomery County public schools, the Dynamic Indicators of Basic Early Literacy Skills test, or DIBELS, is used as a screening tool for kindergarten through second grade students, said Ann Bedford, K-12 curriculum development director.

In Anne Arundel County public schools, DIBELS is used from kindergarten through second grade "as a predictor and as a benchmark to see how kids are doing," said Kim Callison, coordinator for elementary reading and language arts. Teachers use it "for instructional decision-making."

The different purposes point to a heated debate among testing experts about the validity of DIBELS, which is given annually to about 2 million schoolchildren in the United States -- sometimes as often as three times a semester.

The test was created at the University of Oregon and has become prominent in the era of President Bush's Reading First program, which seeks to ensure that every child is able to read well by the third grade.

DIBELS has been championed as "scientifically valid" by administration officials seeking to advance the teaching of reading through an emphasis on phonics.

According to the DIBELS Web site ( http://dibels.uoregon.edu), the test is a set of standardized, individually administered measures of early literacy development. They are designed to be one-minute "fluency measures used to regularly monitor the development of pre-reading and early reading skills."

Early childhood expert Samuel J. Meisels, president of the Chicago-based Erikson Institute, a graduate school in child development, said DIBELS has "very, very weak validity," and numerous other critics have gone further.

"It is an absurd set of silly little one-minute tests that never get close to measuring what reading is really about -- making sense of print," wrote Kenneth S. Goodman, a professor at the University of Arizona who is a past president of the International Reading Association, in his book "The Truth About DIBELS."

Goodman and others say the mini quizzes focus on only a few specific skills that do not encompass everything needed for comprehensive reading instruction. The emphasis on speed, they say, is misplaced in reading development.

The quizzes include one in which students are supposed to read made-up words as fast as they can, called the Nonsense Word Fluency measure. Another asks students to read short passages out loud as fast as they can.

Critics also say DIBELS is being used as a curriculum guide in many classrooms where teachers, whose jobs may depend on student test scores, are eager to improve their charges' DIBELS scores.

Tests are supposed to have one purpose, but Goodman, Meisels and others say the fact that different classes are using it for different things means many of the results are invalid.

The Poor Testing Companies

Some testing companies are struggling to keep up with the requirements of No Child Left Behind and are suffering from lost revenue and scoring errors. Perhaps Senator Edward Kennedy who charged today in the Washington Post to "stay the course" on this bi-partisan education reform can introduce new legislation to leave no testing company behind and protect them from"buckling under the weight" of NCLB.

Not to worry though about the poor teachers, administrators, students and parents across the country who find themselves in an ever-tightening noose of measuring every child every year in this one-size-fits all anti-intellectual drive to compete for jobs that do not exist. Hmmm...perhaps those Citicorp workers who are about to be laid off can be retrained to be psychometricians or scorekeepers at Harcourt.

CHICAGO - To motivate juniors on last April's assessment exams, Springfield High School offered coveted lockers, parking spaces near the door and free prom tickets as incentives for good scores.

But the incentives at the central Illinois school went unclaimed until this month, when Illinois finally published its 2006 test scores - more than four months after they were due.
Critics pounced on Harcourt Assessment Inc., which lost most of its $44.5 million state contract over delays - caused by everything from shipping problems to missing test pages and scoring errors - that made Illinois the last state in the nation to release scores used to judge schools under the federal No Child Left Behind Act.

But experts say the problems are more widespread and are likely to get worse. A few companies create, print and score most of the tests in the United States, and they're struggling with a workload that has exploded since President Bush signed the education reform package in 2002.
"The testing industry in the U.S. is buckling under the weight of NCLB demands," said Thomas Toch, co-director of Education Sector, a Washington-based think tank.

The New Urban School Solution: Working the Least Advantaged the Hardest

One of the most cherished elements of the KIPP "Work Hard, Be Nice" chain-gangs is the extra time that these kids put in to learn less than the Seths and the Caitlins out in the burbs. From 7 to 5 on week days and then school on Saturday. Work hard, be nice, indeed.

Rising test scores in some of these urban work houses, the ones that have chased out the lowest performing students, leads some to conclude that if you ignore poverty long enough and if you work children hard enough, then you can actually see enough results to justify your continued blindness to the reasons behind the achievement gap to begin with.

It is not surprising, then, to see the KIPPster time schedule start bleeding into the rest of the urban schools. It is so interesting that liberals and conservatives, alike, would not think of having different test targets for these children disadvantaged by poverty, even though poverty has assured the failure of millions of the urban poor.

When it comes to demanding extra work time, however, everyone, including the good liberals, are onboard that train. After all, the sooner these kids learn that they have to pay more for less, the sooner they will be educated in the realities of ghetto living and ghetto working, which is all that is planned for these children schooled in failure from the earliest grades.

Oh, did I say that there is not a single research study to show that it works? The story from the Times:

FALL RIVER, Mass. — States and school districts nationwide are moving to lengthen the day at struggling schools, spurred by grim test results suggesting that more than 10,000 schools are likely to be declared failing under federal law next year.

In Massachusetts, in the forefront of the movement, Gov. Deval L. Patrick is allocating $6.5 million this year for longer days and can barely keep pace with demand: 84 schools have expressed interest.

Gov. Eliot Spitzer of New York has proposed an extended day as one of five options for his state’s troubled schools, part of a $7 billion increase in spending on education over the next four years — apart from the 37 minutes of extra tutoring that children in some city schools already receive four times a week.

And Gov. M. Jodi Rell of Connecticut is proposing to lengthen the day at persistently failing schools as part of a push to raise state spending on education by $1 billion.

“In 15 years, I’d be very surprised if the old school calendar still dominates in urban settings,” said Mark Roosevelt, superintendent of schools in Pittsburgh, which has added 45 minutes a day at eight of its lowest-performing schools and 10 more days to their academic year. . . .

Making Sure Civics Education Is Not Left Behind

From WKRN.com in Nashville:

Iain Macpherson cares deeply about teaching civics, explaining to his fifth-graders how government works, what the Bill of Rights protects and what it means to be an American citizen.

To make the lessons real, the 61-year-old Scottish immigrant arranged for a federal judge to perform his own citizenship ceremony at his school, Freedom Intermediate in Franklin.

"I wanted them to know what the experience is like," Macpherson said.

Macpherson and other social studies teachers say they have to shoehorn civics lessons into their regular classes because Tennessee and most other states don't require civics to be taught separately.

Since the federal No Child Left Behind law was passed in 2002, schools have focused on reading and math, and that has squeezed out other subjects like arts, music and civics, educators say. So lawmakers in Tennessee and other states have proposed bills this year to save civics.

A bill from state Sen. Rosalind Kurita would require the Tennessee Department of Education to create a separate civics course in at least one grade between fifth and eighth grade.

"We have responsibilities to our community and to other people to be good citizens," said Kurita, D-Clarksville."And I think that civic classes are a way to teach how comprehensive this responsibility really is."

Kurita says teaching students about voting and citizenship rights is just as important as math and English. Ted McConnell, director of the Campaign to Promote Civic Education, an initiative of the Center for Civic Education, agrees.

"Study after study shows that when our youth are exposed to effective civic education courses, they're not only more likely to vote, but they're more likely to get involved in their communities and work toward solutions to societal problems," he said.

Attention to civics in the classroom had been declining over thepast 20 years, McConnell said, but the "decline was dramatically accelerated after the implementation of No Child Left Behind."

He cited a study done last year by the Washington-based Center for Education Policy that showed 71 percent of school districts surveyed said they have had to reduce instructional time in at least one other subject to make room for increased attention to math and reading because of NCLB.

"We find that the first target of those cuts is usually social studies, which often includes civic learning," McConnell said.

The Center for Civic Education said several other state legislatures are considering civics bills: California,Hawaii, Illinois, Kentucky, Maryland, Massachusetts, Oregon, Vermont, Virginia and Washington.

The West Virginia House of Delegates passed a resolution earlier this month to encourage the creation of a council that would make recommendations on improving civics education.

The Tennessee bill stalled in committee last week so a study commission could make suggestions, but Kurita remains optimistic about its chances.

"To inform students about government, how the legal community and how society works, is critical to education," said state Sen. Jamie Woodson, a Knoxville Republican and chair of the Senate Education Committee. "It's as important asmath and science."

Les Winningham, chairman of the House Education Committee that is scheduled to hear the companion bill, said he also supports the idea of a separate class for civics. "It's such an essential part of our way of government," said Winningham, D-Huntsville.

McConnell said civics classes should be offered as early as possible. He said some states don't teach civics until a student's senior year, "which is too late."

"It's best to get this information to the students sooner where they're more likely to be engaged than their senior year," he said.

Bruce Opie, legislative director for the Tennessee Department of Education,said Kurita's legislation is being given serious consideration.

"There's a lot of room for improvement on teaching civics," said Opie, who once taught social studies. "If it's the will of the Legislature to require a stand alone course, obviously we'll abide by that."

___

On the Net:

Center for Civic Education: http://www.civiced.org/

___

The full text of bill SB1333 can be read on the General Assembly's Web site at http://legislature.state.tn.us

Help Save Public Schools in Utah

From the Tribune:

By Roxana Orellana The Salt Lake Tribune Salt Lake Tribune

Article Last Updated:03/21/2007 11:42:04 AM MDT

The Granite Board of Education on Tuesday approved a resolution in support of a referendum petition that, if successful, would force a public vote on Utah's new school voucher program. "That is something that is good for us to do," said Board President Sarah Meier, adding that board members are actively gathering signatures for the petition. Board members approved the resolution unanimously. The resolution states that "vouchers divert attention, commitment and dollars from public schools to pay private school tuition for a few students." Further, it forces taxpayers to support two school systems, creating a new cost to taxpayers, the resolution reads. The voucher program is scheduled to be implemented this fall. The program will offer public funds to pay private school tuition to parents of all public schools children regardless of income level. According to the Granite resolution, vouchers leave behind many disadvantaged students because private schools may not accept them or offer the special services they need. Granite's resolution in favor of the referendum drive is similar to one approved earlier this month by the Jordan Board of Education. The Salt Lake Board of Education also has spoken out against vouchers. The PTA, Utah Education Association and other opponents of the voucher program are working to collect 92,000 signatures statewide by April to delay the program's implementation until a public vote can be taken.

Lessons in Repression at Wilton High School

Here is the perfect test case to re-establish the fact that students do not leave their First Amendent rights at the schoolhouse door. This could, and should be, another Island Tree case if school officials persist in censoring this play:

WILTON, Conn., March 22 — Student productions at Wilton High School range from splashy musicals like last year’s “West Side Story,” performed in the state-of-the-art, $10 million auditorium, to weightier works like Arthur Miller’s “Crucible,” on stage last fall in the school’s smaller theater.

For the spring semester, students in the advanced theater class took on a bigger challenge: creating an original play about the war in Iraq. They compiled reflections of soldiers and others involved, including a heartbreaking letter from a 2005 Wilton High graduate killed in Iraq last September at age 19, and quickly found their largely sheltered lives somewhat transformed.

“In Wilton, most kids only care about Britney Spears shaving her head or Tyra Banks gaining weight,” said Devon Fontaine, 16, a cast member. “What we wanted was to show kids what was going on overseas.”

But even as 15 student actors were polishing the script and perfecting their accents for a planned April performance, the school principal last week canceled the play, titled “Voices in Conflict,” citing questions of political balance and context.

. . . .

In response to concerns that the script was too antiwar, Ms. Dickinson reworked it with the help of an English teacher. The revised version is more reflective and less angry, omitting graphic descriptions of killing, crude language and some things that reflect poorly on the Bush administration, like a comparison of how long it took various countries to get their troops bulletproof vests. A critical reference to Donald H. Rumsfeld, the former defense secretary, was cut, along with a line from Cpl. Sean Huze saying of soldiers: “Your purpose is to kill.”

Seven characters were added, including Maj. Tammy Duckworth of the National Guard, a helicopter pilot who lost both legs and returned from the war to run for Congress last fall. The second version gives First Lt. Melissa Stockwell, who lost her left leg from the knee down, a new closing line: “But I’d go back. I wouldn’t want to go back, but I would go.”

On March 13, Mr. Canty met with the class. He told us “no matter what we do, it’s not happening,” said one of the students, Erin Clancy. That night, on a Facebook chat group called “Support the Troops in Iraq,” a poster named GabriellaAF, who several students said was their classmate Gabby, posted a celebratory note saying, “We got the show canceled!!” (Reached by telephone, Gabby’s mother, Barbara Alessi, said she had no knowledge of the play or her daughter’s involvement in it.) In classrooms, teenage centers and at dinner tables around town, the drama students entertained the idea of staging the show at a local church, or perhaps al fresco just outside the school grounds. One possibility was Wilton Presbyterian Church. . . .

Those Bush Boys

First it was W's Presidential Library that couldn't find a home at Southern Methodist U., and now it seems the the Education Governor of Florida has been denied an honorary degree by Gater U. Interesting.

University of Florida President Bernie Machen says he was "tremendously disappointed" with the school's Faculty Senate vote to deny former Gov. Jeb Bush an honorary degree.

The Senate voted 38-28 Thursday against giving the honorary degree to Bush, who left office in January.

"Jeb Bush has been a great friend of the University of Florida," Machen said Friday, adding that the Senate's action is "unheard of."

Some faculty expressed concern about Bush's record in higher education.

"I really don't feel this is a person who has been a supporter of UF," Kathleen Price, associate dean of library and technology at the school's Levin College of Law, told The Gainesville Sun after the vote. . . .

Captain Waldo Burford Ready to Sink, er, Save the Charter Ship

More on the "submarine" audit of the wonderful charter ship of Waldo Burford:

. . . . The audit found that Gorman Learning Center officials misreported how many full-time teachers they employ and how much of the budget is spent in the classroom, resulting in $7.7 million in overbilling to the state.

Auditors found that the school lacked proper accounting controls, faulted the board for a lack of oversight and said Executive Director Waldo Burford paid his daughter and son-in-law $32,637 for 21 hours of work evaluating student writing.

However, some parents and students Thursday called Burford a visionary and the Gorman center a lifesaver, especially for students at the Pomona campus.

Others said that as district officials enjoyed luxuries, students lacked instructional materials.

"I am absolutely shocked by this finding. These people hid it very well. They hid it from the whole school," said Mosher, of Yucaipa, who said she has three children in the district.

Parents called on Burford and Human Resources Director Sondra Green to step down. The audit found the school paid $18,000 in rent for an apartment for Green from 2002 through 2004.

Burford called the audit a "submarine attack" by discontented staffers and characterized it as an attack on homeschooling.

"I'm ready to do the fight and ready to defend homeschooling again as the captain of your ship," he told parents.

Los Angeles County schools officials hired MGT of America Inc. in July to investigate allegations first made in October 2005 to the California Department of Education, said Kenneth Shelton, assistant superintendent of business services.

Shelton said the audit has been forwarded to district attorneys in San Bernardino and Los Angeles counties.

"The audit findings show that public trust has been badly abused by officials running the Gorman Learning Center," state Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell said in a statement.

State officials will seek repayment from the Gorman center, O'Connell said.

As some parents and students cried while speaking to the board Thursday, parent Pamela Duvall, of San Dimas, worried that Gorman would have to close its doors.

The school offers a good educational program and gives parents many choices of classes, Duvall said.

Still, Duvall said a cleanup at the school's administrative offices is needed.

"If you have three agencies and (Burford's) only defense is that they're doing it to attack homeschooling -- I'm sorry, but he needs to answer the claims," she said.

Mississippi Memories

So many memories. During the Freedom Summer of 1964, three civil rights workers went missing. Their bodies were eventually found on August 3, 1964 near Philadelphia, MS. They had been beaten and shot to death. They were " James Chaney, a 21-year-old black man from Meridian, Mississippi, Andrew Goodman, a 20-year-old Jewish anthropology student from New York, and Michael Schwerner, a 24-year-old Jewish social worker also from New York."

The day before the 16th anniversary of the unearthing of their brutalized bodies, Ronald Reagan chose Philadelphia to kick off his presidential campaign, delivering what civil rights attorney, J. L. Chestnut remembers as a racist speech to let the people of the South know where he stood on the issue of race:

The Reagan rally took place in the town square on the unkempt Main Street, and I would guess that every racist nut in the town was crowded into the square. This writer and only one other black person were present, and he was pushing a gray haired old white man in a wheelchair who appeared already dead. Reagan delivered the most racist speech I had heard since Wallace's "segregation today, tomorrow and forever "foolishness. Hiding behind the Reagan smile, he proclaimed that without a doubt the South will rise again and this time remain master of everybody and everything within its dominion." The square came to life, the Klu Kluxers were shouting, jeering and in obvious ecstasy. God bless America."

Reagan went on to win every Southern state except Georgia, Jimmy Carter's home state. And upon assuming the Presidency, Reagan set out to shut down the Dept. of Education that Carter started, crush the teachers' (and everyone else's) union, and to end the "public school monopoly." If Reagan were alive today, he would, no doubt, be happy to see the spread of corporate (for profit and non-profit) welfare charter schools in his home state of California, where principals hire and fire at will, and where black and brown children are told lies about their bright future chances while their past is hidden from them.

Which brings us to another Mississippi memory, one that precedes the three civil rights murders and Reagan's pre-empting of its commemoration 16 years later. It was 1955, and a boy named Emmett Till came into town (Money, Mississippi) to buy candy with his cousins. Some boys said they heard Emmett whistle at the white female store owner's wife that day. That same night Emmett was taken by masked men from his bed and later tortured, brutalized, and shot in the head. Before his 14-year old body was dumped in the Tallahatchie River, the murderers tied a broken industrial cotton gin fan to his neck with barbed wire so that he would sink to the bottom.

Last week in one of those charter schools where teachers can be hired and fired at the whim of a principal, two teachers, Marisol Alba and Sean Strauss, were fired for signing a student petition to protest the censoring of a Black History Month remembrance of the lynched boy, Emmett Till. It seems that remembering the past does not fit the charter school mission of preparing these children to compete in a global economy, an economy that has no place for the reality of their struggle to achieve personhood, and no place for a poem by seventh graders called "A Wreath for Emmett Till," a wreath intended to replace that broken fan and barbed wire that took Emmett Till to his watery grave.

From the L. A. Times:

Administrators at a Los Angeles charter school forbade students from reciting a poem about civil rights icon Emmett Till during a Black History Month program recently, saying his story was unsuitable for an assembly of young children.

Teachers and students said the administration suggested that the Till case — in which the teenager was beaten to death in Mississippi after allegedly whistling at a white woman — was not fitting for a program intended to be celebratory, and that Till's actions could be viewed as sexual harassment.

The decision by Celerity Nascent Charter School leaders roiled the southwest Los Angeles campus and led to the firing of seventh-grade teacher Marisol Alba and math teacher Sean Strauss, who had signed one of several letters of protest written by the students.

The incident highlights the tenuous job security for mostly nonunion teachers in charter schools, which are publicly financed but independently run. California has more than 600 charter schools, and their ranks continue to swell. According to the California Teachers Assn., staff at fewer than 10% of charter schools are represented by unions.

"I never thought it would come to this," said Alba, who helped her students prepare the Till presentation, in which they were going to read a poem and lay flowers in a circle. "I thought the most that would happen to me [after the event was canceled] is that I'd get talked to and it would be turned into a learning and teaching experience."

School officials refused to discuss the particulars of the teachers' firings but said the issue highlights the difficulty of providing positive images for students who are often bombarded by negative cultural stereotypes.

"Our whole goal is how do we get these kids to not look at all of the bad things that could happen to them and instead focus on the process of how do we become the next surgeon or the next politician," said Celerity co-founder and Executive Director Vielka McFarlane. "We don't want to focus on how the history of the country has been checkered but on how do we dress for success, walk proud and celebrate all the accomplishments we've made." . . . .

"Work hard, be nice" as the KIPPsters like to say.

Eugene Hickok Forced to Pay $50,000 Settlement

While Eugene Hickok was Deputy Secretary of Education under Paige, tens of millions were shoveled out the door to outfits that he had helped paste together in the months before becoming Deputy Secretary. The Education Leaders Council, which vanished with millions in discretionary grants, and the phony teacher prep outfit, ABCTE, are two prime examples. These, however, are only two of the get rich quick schemes set up to drain the Treasury while funding education privatization efforts. You know, use the government to destroy the government.

Now after Hickok has moved on to become a kingpin in Dutko Worldwide, where he can share his expertise on making the private sector rich with public dollars, we find out that Hickok has been operating under a cloud that now shows that, despite official advice prior to his confirmation as Deputy Secretary, he held on to Bank of America stocks that constituted his largest personal asset during his tenure in Washington. Never mind he was making federal lending decisions that involved Bank of America and Wachovia

If there is anything good to come of this, Hickok has sworn off working in government ever again. And, of course, he blames big government for the "error."

From the Patriot-News:

Former state Education Secretary and former top-ranking U.S. Department of Education official Eugene Hickok has agreed to pay $50,000 to settle a conflict-of-interest matter investigated by the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia.

The settlement stems from Hickok's failure to sell 836 shares of stock he owned in Bank of America during his tenure as undersecretary and deputy secretary of the federal education department from 2001 to 2005, even though that bank participates in the federal student loan program.

The settlement, signed on March 15, releases Hickok from any criminal charge or further liability for failing to divest bank stock. Channing Philips, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney's office, said criminal charges were considered but "at the end of the day, we decided the civil resolution was the way to go."

Hickok is a former Dickinson College political science professor who served as the state education secretary under Gov. Tom Ridge from 1995 to 2001. He lives in Richmond, Va., and is a senior policy director with Dutko Worldwide.

He could not be reached yesterday for a comment.

The settlement agreement states that a week after Hickok's 2001 confirmation as undersecretary, he was informed by an ethics official that the stock he and his wife Kathy owned in Bank of America, Citigroup, Key Corp. and Wachovia "poses a problem" in connection with his duties.

He was given a waiver to participate in general policy discussions initially, but in January 2004, while awaiting confirmation to deputy secretary -- the second-highest-ranking position in the department -- Hickok was advised to sell the bank stock holdings.

In June of that year, Hickok's wife sold her shares, the agreement states. He held on to his shares of Bank of America stock, which he listed on documents as his largest personal assets. His wife in the fall of 2004 repurchased stock in banks that participate in the student-loan program.

On Jan. 15, 2005, he signed a statement affirming they sold their bank stock. He resigned from the federal department the next month.

We can only wonder how U. S. Attorney Phillips came to decide that criminal charges were inappropriate--or how 50 grand would ever pay for the damage done. Well, he probably has bigger fish to fry, like those black and brown people who are trying to vote without the proper IDs. You remember, that voter fraud business that Gonzales likes to have his remaining attorneys pursuing.

David Broder Retirement Watch

Proof positive that there is something that David Broder knows even less about than foreign policy: domestic policy.

Webb and Warner Introduce Bill to Counter Abusive ED Thugs

Warner and Webb are making tough by putting both of their pinkies in the failing dam that promises to swamp public schools with a sea of planned failure unless the idiotic requirements of 100% proficiency are not changed in NCLB. These two Senate toughies are introducing legislation to give Virginia another year to comply with the thugs at ED who have been put in charge of the privatization plan for American schools. This is, at best, a band-aid on a throat slashing:

Virginia Sens. John W. Warner and James Webb introduced legislation yesterday to protect the state's schools from Bush administration threats to withhold millions of dollars in aid in a clash over federal testing rules.

The bipartisan measure addresses a controversy that has swelled in Virginia over testing requirements for students with limited English skills.

School systems in Fairfax, Arlington and Loudoun counties have begun in recent months to push back against what they call unrealistic mandates of the federal No Child Left Behind law. They plan to defy a federal directive to give thousands of students who are beginning to learn English reading tests that cover the same grade-level material as exams taken by students who are native speakers. . . .

WAKE UP, CONGRESS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Thank you for Your Courage, Jack Dale

NCLB: Inspired by ideologues, executed by crooks and incompetents, and pushed forward by idiots. From WaPo:

By Marc Fisher
Thursday, March 22, 2007; B01

Jack Dale is no anti-testing zealot, shielding the little ones from the reality of a competitive world. He's not out there with the activists who believe the No Child Left Behind revolution in American schools has turned education into a grim, mechanistic culture.

But the superintendent of Fairfax County schools, who presides over one of the highest-achieving systems in the land, has taken a stand at the schoolhouse door: "The last thing I'm going to do is subject some third-grader to tears because someone's standing over them saying, 'You must complete [this standardized test], you must complete.' That's not happening. Let them fire me for it."

In the next couple of weeks, either Dale or the U.S. government will blink. Until then, threats and counterthreats are flying across the Potomac. Dale, backed up by his school board and several other Northern Virginia superintendents, insists he will not require newly arrived immigrant children to take the same reading test that other kids take. And the feds reply: Oh, yes, you will -- and if you don't, you'll lose $17 million in federal dollars.

This is not about accountability; Dale's all for that. In fact, the children at issue are already tested twice a year on their English skills. When they reach a decent level of proficiency in their new language, they take the same test everyone else takes. But Dale refuses to make a kid who has just arrived in the country sit at a desk and be humiliated by a test that can only make him feel like a moron.

The federal approach to No Child Left Behind is what you might expect from an administration whose response to a failing strategy in Iraq is to throw good bodies after maimed ones. "We need to stay the course," Raymond Simon, the U.S. deputy secretary of education, told The Washington Post's Amit Paley. "The mission is doable, and we don't need to back off that right now."

No Child Left Behind is built on a mirage. At some point that's always just over the horizon, the law assumes, all children in the nation will miraculously read and compute at grade level, simply because they have been tested and tested and tested again. The theory is that somehow, when told the exact number of children who are lagging in achievement, teachers will agree to render the magic that they have thus far withheld and -- poof! -- those kids will become smart, cooperative and productive.

As we get closer to that utopia, it's becoming ever more clear that Some Children Remain Behind and that, gadzooks, Not Every Child Is the Same. Oh, and this: Staking everything on a test doesn't produce a flowering of inspired teaching, but rather what Dale, a former math teacher, calls an "obsessive focus on tests."

"You focus obsessively on multiplying two-digit numbers," he says, "as opposed to how to apply that knowledge in the real world and how to play with mathematics in a creative way."

The flaws in the nation's new education regimen continue to elude the Bush administration. Dale has met twice with senior officials in Washington to push for enough flexibility so schools are not condemned as failures -- even if 500 kids took and passed the tests, "two Hispanic children or two special education children didn't pass, and the rules say that makes the school a failure." Both times, senior Education Department leaders told Dale there would be no exceptions to the rules. (Virginia's two U.S. senators jumped in on Dale's side yesterday, filing a bill that would force the feds to give Fairfax schools and others a year's reprieve.)

In most of the country, the children in classes for non-English speakers were born in the United States, and Dale agrees that by third grade, they should be tested in English, as the law requires. But in Fairfax, 63 percent of children in such classes were born in other countries. Those children, Dale says, deserve a little time to soak in the language before they are subjected to high-stakes tests in English.

What this is really all about, the superintendent thinks, is an unresolved debate over whether there should be national education standards. Remember, the same people who now mandate Testing Uber Alles were pushing two decades ago to abolish any federal role in education. Under the No Child law, designed by a purportedly conservative administration, the amount of time that a superintendent such as Dale must spend satisfying the federal bureaucracy has skyrocketed from hardly any to hours and hours each week.

No Child Left Behind is built on a lie. Not every kid will go to college, no matter what you do. So you can either lower the standards enough to pretend that everyone is succeeding, or give up on the lie.

But the feds won't talk about that; they just repeat "Stay the course," and any school system that balks is threatened with punishment.

"I've been warned that to speak frankly in this area is not wise personally or professionally," Dale says. But he's speaking anyway, because, as a good teacher, he knows that "we don't succeed well when we go punitive. You need standards, but they should be aspirational; it needs to be about incentives, not punishment."

Public Education in Fight of Its Life

Republicans and Democrats in Congress are gearing up for battle as the fiasco created by the No Child Left Behind Act is finally coming to light. As rebellion mounts from coast to coast over the ridiculous reform legislation that is ruining public education in the United States, the ideological battle at the heart of this war on public schools is just heating up.

This article in today's Christian Science Monitor indicates that the battle lines are being drawn between those who want to abolish the federal role in education and funding and the national level and those who continue to support it. Republicans call it the A-Plus Actis and ironically, if they have their way, this Federal involvement in education will legislate public education right out of existence by paving the way for vouchers.

On the House side, 52 Republicans, including minority whip Roy Blunt, are cosponsoring the A-Plus Act, introduced by Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R) of Michigan. Thirty-three Republicans voted against the NCLB bill, most of whom are cosponsoring the Hoekstra bill. This bill, along with a companion bill in the Senate, revives a formula that drove GOP education policy in the 1990s: that the best route to accountability is through local control and parental choice, not a bigger federal footprint on education.

"We must move education decisionmaking out of Washington closer to where it belongs – with parents and teachers," said Sen. John Cornyn (R) of Texas, a cosponsor of the Senate version of this bill and typically one of the strongest supporters of the Bush administration in the Senate.

Meanwhile, the Democrats are moving towards abolishing the impossible 100 prociency targets and replacing them with "growth models" for measuring student progress. What appears to be missing from the discussion, however, is any real or meaningful talk of reducing class size, building construction, raising teacher salaries, equitable funding mechanisms, health care and employment opportunities that might reduce poverty rates and lead to better test scores.

Democrats also aim to revise aspects of how the law is implemented, including revising strategies for turning around low-performing schools. Of some 90,000 public schools, about 9,000 have been targeted by NCLB as needing improvement. "We want to make turning around our most struggling schools a priority in this reauthorization," says Roberto Rodriguez, senior education adviser to Sen. Edward Kennedy (D) of Massachusetts, who chairs the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions. That panel is considering shifting to alternative measures of "adequate yearly progress," including models that account for the improvement of individual students over a school year, rather than whether they meet target proficiency standards.

As long as the Business Roundtable and the politicians continue to talk amongst themselves and ignore the voices of educators and the experts or professionals in education, the ideologically driven war over education will continue to leave American students behind. Both Democrats and Republicans have been blinded by a testing mania that has dominated the discourse on education because it is now entrenched in the corporate takeover of schooling and a multi-billion dollar testing industry with a stake in the outcome and deep pockets for election campaigns.

While "the role of the federal government" in education will be hotly debated when NCLB comes up for reauthorization the Democrats and Republicans must be made to understand that more money for testing and accountability should not come at the expense of meaningful reform. If this nation does not start investing wisely in children and teachers, in civics, history, art, and literature along with math and science, the next generation of students will look back on public education as a relic of the past and democracy as a dream for the future.

65 Million Tax-Deductible KIPP Dollars

The KIPP chain-gang model for urban education offers a great example of corporate welfare at its worst. Corporations and rich individuals get tax deductions for supporting the destruction of the public school system, the wresting away of public control of schools, the destruction of the teaching profession, and the crushing of the union. In the meantime, students are brainwashed by the "work hard, be nice" mantra and the flagrant propaganda of KIPP that ignore poverty and racism as the culprits responsible for the achievement gap that students are blamed for not closing. And the public swallows the whole package with the help of reporters like Jay Mathews who are entirely complicit:

The charter school movement, begun 16 years ago as an alternative to struggling public schools, will today make its strongest claim on mainstream American education when a national group announces the most successful fundraising campaign in the movement's history -- $65 million to create 42 schools in Houston.

The money, which comes from some of the nation's foremost donors, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, would make the Knowledge Is Power Program the largest charter school organization in the country. KIPP, which runs three schools in Washington, has produced some of the highest test scores among publicly funded schools in the District and has made significant gains in the math and reading achievement of low-income students in most of its 52 schools across the country.

The announcement, several school improvement experts said, raises the charter school movement to a new level of influence, financial strength and public notice. The number of independently run, taxpayer-supported schools has grown rapidly, to nearly 4,000, since the movement began in 1991. But that counts for only about 5 percent of public schools, and most have been small and overlooked. With the KIPP announcement, experts said, donors will be looking for more ways to expand the most successful models and build large systems, as KIPP plans to do in Houston. . . .

Business Roundtable Unrolls Its New Sacred Document

Go here and click the document! Harold McGraw or John Hancock?

I'll tip my hat to the new constitution
Take a bow for the new revolution
Smile and grin at the change all around
Pick up my guitar and play
Just like yesterday
Then I'll get on my knees and pray
We don't get fooled again.
--The Who

Well, the Business Roundtable would fool us over and over and over. Now led by Harold McGraw (how appropriate), the BR is pushing once more to create an oversupply of scientists, engineers, and technicians so that American corporations can pay the best ones dirt and have the rest drive taxis like they do in India. Here is the latest BR Press Release, which, interestingly, shows them now lobbying for the Pentagon:

Washington, DC - Tapping America's Potential (TAP), a coalition of 16 of the nation's leading business organizations, today joined U.S. business and higher education leaders to unveil "The American Innovation Proclamation," which urges Congress to act now on an innovation agenda to maintain U.S. competitiveness. The proclamation, which was delivered to every Capitol Hill office and presented to Members of Congress during a press conference held today, calls for action on four key policy priorities aimed at promoting and sustaining U.S. innovation leadership. More than 270 American business and higher education leaders signed the call to action on innovation.

"American innovation fuels the U.S. economy and helps to enhance our ability to compete in the 21st century global marketplace," said Susan Traiman, Director of Education and Workforce Policy at Business Roundtable, a TAP founding member. "It is vital that Congress move ahead this year on legislation that will allow us to continue our rich tradition of ingenuity."

In addition to the press conference to unveil the proclamation, today's events include a House Science and Technology Committee hearing on innovation and competitiveness. Testifying at that hearing is Harold McGraw III, Chairman, President and CEO of The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc., and Chairman of Business Roundtable. In his prepared remarks, Mr. McGraw stated:

"It is worth noting that the forces driving economic integration and global competition were all invented here. More than any other country, the United States created the conditions for global economic growth driven by accelerated technological innovation. America is in the best position to take advantage of the changing competitive landscape as long as we recognize the challenges we face and make the investments required to succeed in the new environment."

The proclamation calls for Congress to act now to renew America's commitment to discovery by:

• Doubling the basic research budgets at the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the Department of Energy's Office of Science, and the Department of Defense;
• Improving student achievement in math and science through increased funding of proven programs and incentives for science and math teacher recruitment and professional development;
• Welcoming highly educated foreign professionals, particularly those holding advanced science, technology, engineering, or mathematics degrees, especially from U.S. universities, by reforming U.S. visa policies; and
• Making permanent a strengthened R&D Tax Credit to encourage continued private-sector innovation investment.

In July 2005, the U.S. business community formed the TAP campaign in an effort to ensure that America develops the talented and capable workforce that is needed to meet the growing demands of the ever-changing global marketplace. They set the goal of doubling the number of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) graduates by 2015, and TAP members have actively worked since that time to advance their agenda with policymakers in Congress and the Administration.

For live Web casts of the press conference and hearing, visit the House Science and Technology Committee Web site at www.science.house.gov. To learn more about TAP and the proclamation, visit www.tap2015.org.

# # #

TAP is composed of 16 prominent business organizations that represent the largest and most innovative companies in America. They have set the goal of doubling the number of U.S. science, technology, engineering and mathematics graduates with bachelor's degrees by 2015.

Do we need that many engineers and mathematicians?

From the Occupational Outlook Handbook, 2006-07:

Employment of mathematicians is expected to decline through 2014 . . .

Overall engineering employment is expected to grow about as fast as the average for all occupations over the 2004-14 period. Engineers have traditionally been concentrated in slow-growing manufacturing industries, in which they will continue to be needed to design, build, test, and improve manufactured products. However, increasing employment of engineers in faster growing service industries should generate most of the employment growth. Overall job opportunities in engineering are expected to be favorable because the number of engineering graduates should be in rough balance with the number of job openings over this period. However, job outlook varies by specialty, as discussed later in this section.

Competitive pressures and advancing technology will force companies to improve and update product designs and to optimize their manufacturing processes. Employers will rely on engineers to further increase productivity as investment in plant and equipment increases to expand output of goods and services. New technologies continue to improve the design process, enabling engineers to produce and analyze various product designs much more rapidly than in the past. Unlike in other fields, however, technological advances are not expected to limit employment opportunities substantially, because they will permit the development of new products and processes.

There are many well-trained, often English-speaking engineers available around the world willing to work at much lower salaries than are U.S. engineers. The rise of the Internet has made it relatively easy for much of the engineering work previously done by engineers in this country to be done by engineers in other countries, a factor that will tend to hold down employment growth. Even so, the need for onsite engineers to interact with other employees and with clients will remain.

Compared with most other workers, a smaller proportion of engineers leave their jobs each year. Nevertheless, many job openings will arise from replacement needs, reflecting the large size of this profession. Numerous job openings will be created by engineers who transfer to management, sales, or other professional occupations; additional openings will arise as engineers retire or leave the labor force for other reasons.

Many engineers work on long-term research and development projects or in other activities that continue even during economic slowdowns. In industries such as electronics and aerospace, however, large cutbacks in defense expenditures and in government funding for research and development have resulted in significant layoffs of engineers in the past. The trend toward contracting for engineering work with engineering services firms, both domestic and foreign, has had the same result.

It is important for engineers, as it is for those working in other technical and scientific occupations, to continue their education throughout their careers because much of their value to their employer depends on their knowledge of the latest technology. Engineers in high-technology areas, such as advanced electronics or information technology, may find that technical knowledge can become outdated rapidly. By keeping current in their field, engineers are able to deliver the best solutions and greatest value to their employers. Engineers who have not kept current in their field may find themselves passed over for promotions or vulnerable to layoffs.

The only two areas of engineering that are expected to exceed average job growth: environmental engineering and biomedical engineering. Is BR advocating more research in these areas? Didn't think so.

Bush Would Stay the Course for Testing 4 and 5 Year-Olds

The President has his own team of developmental scientists to tell him about the virtues of administering standardized tests to toddlers. Read it and weep in WaPo:

Congress is moving to end a standardized test backed by the Bush administration and given to hundreds of thousands of preschool children in Head Start programs each year, amid complaints from early childhood experts that the exam is developmentally inappropriate and poorly designed.

The National Reporting System, a set of mini-tests said to measure verbal and math skills, has been given in Head Start programs each fall and spring since 2003.

Bush administration officials say the test is necessary to help determine how well the nearly 2,700 Head Start programs in the country are progressing. Before the national test was introduced, each Head Start program used its own assessments to monitor student progress.

Critics question whether the test accurately measures how much a child learns and cite a 2005 report by the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, that raised concerns about the way the test has been implemented.

This spring, the test is scheduled to be administered to 410,000 4- and 5-year-olds unless Congress moves to end it. On Wednesday, the House Education and Labor Committee voted to end the test in a vote on the reauthorization of Head Start, a preschool program started in the mid-1960s to improve the lives of at-risk children and their families. The full House is expected to vote on the measure as soon as this week.

A Senate subcommittee passed a bill with the same measure last month, and the full Senate is to take up the bill soon. It is expected that members will vote to suspend the test.

The Bush administration promoted an overhaul of Head Start, especially the National Reporting System, as part of the president's major early-childhood initiative, a follow-up to his K-12 No Child Left Behind program, which emphasizes standardized tests. It was also seen as an attempt to shift Head Start's focus from nurturing children's social and emotional development to emphasizing literacy.

Wade Horn, assistant secretary for children and families at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees Head Start, said that although the test was rushed into implementation in 2003 -- it was important to start the process, he said -- it has been improved and is valid.

"Some of the criticism is criticism that we agree with, and some of it is rather silly," Horn said.

The controversy over the assessment underscores a key but often ignored component in the national debate about standardized testing: How is it determined whether a test measures what it is intended to measure? Experts say that one way is to do extensive field testing before an assessment is implemented, which was not done for the National Reporting System.

Another concern of early childhood experts is the practicality of testing young children.

Samuel J. Meisels, president of the Chicago-based Erikson Institute, a graduate school in child development, said that young children are generally poor test takers because of their limited abilities to stay focused and comprehend assessment cues.

Critics also say that the Bush administration offered different reasons for imposing the test, all of which required different assessments.

Administration officials said test scores would be used to improve individual services to specific children and to target teacher training assistance. Officials also said that it was important to establish a way to monitor student progress nationally to help -- and close, when necessary -- Head Start programs.

The test created and given to children beginning in 2003 did not specifically address those issues, Meisels said, nor did it measure how much a preschooler knows or has learned. Meisels said that even if the test were able to capture what a child has learned, it would only measure a small part of what the federal program was created to do.

Horn's department recently issued a memo that said the test is "strongly predictive of many of the academic skills and knowledge that are important for children's success in elementary school." The memo was written by Westat, an independent company the government hired to develop and oversee the National Reporting System.

But Meisels and other assessment experts said Westat's analyses used insufficient samples and the correlations said to be drawn in the research showed poor validity.

Horn said the Bush administration is continuing to try to improve the test and recently added a section designed to measure children's social and emotional development.

Last month, a government-appointed panel recommended more refinements. The key suggestion, panel head Susan Landry said, was aimed at clarifying the test's main purpose: The commission said that it should be used strictly to identify places that need professional development and technical assistance. The test should have no punitive use, she said.

Yale University psychology professor Edward Zigler, who is referred to as the "father of Head Start" for his role in creating and sustaining the program, questioned the Landry panel's independence from the Bush administration while it conducted its work.

Landry, a pediatrics professor at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, worked for Bush when he was governor of Texas.

Landry said the commission members who were picked by Bush administration officials were experts in their fields and operated with independence.

Faith-Based Discrimination Kept Out of Head Start Hiring

From the Associated Baptist Press:

WASHINGTON (ABP) -- For the first time under Democrats' new majority in Congress, a House panel refused March 14 to add language to a bill that would have allowed religious organizations receiving federal funds to discriminate in hiring on the basis of religion.

On a 24-13 vote, the House Labor and Education Committee rejected a Republican attempt to amend a bill reauthorizing the federal Head Start program. The amendment would have changed long-standing rules in the popular early-childhood education program by explicitly allowing churches and other groups receiving funds to take religion into account when hiring teachers and other employees.

Advocates of such rules argue that it violates the religious freedom of such social-service providers by expecting them to follow the same rules as secular groups when they are receiving government funds. But many civil-rights groups and church-state separationists contend that it is equally wrong to allow federal dollars to fund job discrimination.

Republican leaders repeatedly attempted to alter federal social-service programs by adding similar language to a host of bills in the past decade. While they often succeeded in the House, the Senate often stymied their efforts.

Such provisions were an integral part of President Bush's faith-based initiative -- an attempt to loosen the rules for churches and other religious charities seeking government funds for providing services to the public. While the initiative was largely a failure in Congress, Bush has implemented many of the changes necessary to implement it through executive orders.

The House's new Democratic leaders are generally opposed to such explicit employment-discrimination provisions, although some are supportive of the concept of making it easier for faith-based groups to receive tax dollars.

The National Head Start Association -- representing thousands of Head Start programs nationwide -- was also among the groups that opposed the amendment.

The original Head Start bill, without amendment, then passed the committee 42-1. It is expected to pass the full House as well.

Millstones and Blockheads

Editorial from the News Leader of Staunton, Virginia:

| Our View |: Remove this millstone

President George W. Bush's signature legislation — the rigidly inflexible education reform package called No Child Left Behind — has been a millstone around the neck of America's public education system since it was signed into law in 2002. Everyone seems to "get" this — except President Bush and his rigidly inflexible Secretary of Education, Margaret Spellings. Lawmakers from all 50 states belonging to the National Conference of State Legislatures — Republicans as well as Democrats, including our own Sen. Emmett Hanger Jr., who chairs the NCSL's Budgets and Revenue Committee — have declared Bush's education edict unworkable and called for 40 changes to fix it. State after state has mounted challenges to NCLB, only to be ignored or given an arrogant "my way or the highway" answer by the Bush administration's Department of Education. Bush's home state of Texas — also home to Margaret Spellings — has had it with NCLB. The attorney general of Connecticut has sued the federal government over the unfunded mandate aspects of NCLB. Similar lawsuits have been filed by the largest teachers' union in the nation, the National Education Association, as well as school districts in Michigan, Texas and Vermont. Earlier this year, the entire Virginia House of Delegates — including our local legislators, Del. Steve Landes, R-Weyers Cave, Del. Chris Saxman, R-Staunton, and Del. Ben Cline, R-Lexington — unanimously signed onto a bill asking to have Virginia waived from some of the requirements of NCLB.

Despite all this, Bush's band has played merrily on. One hundred percent pass rates — even from severely disabled children and those who do not speak English — are demanded and expected. No money is forthcoming to fund these expectations, however — not that it would matter; the demands made by NCLB are impossible, unworkable and inflexible. The law is a shining example of only one thing — why it is so inadvisable for the federal government to dictate decisions that should be made only at the state and local level.

Since the federal government has so cavalierly ignored the multiple cries for help from Republicans and Democrats in every state in the union, perhaps they'll listen to a few of their own kind. After all, what Congress giveth, it can also take away.

This past week, more than 50 Republican members of the House of Representatives and Senate broke ranks with the president by introducing legislation that would severely undercut Bush's signature legislation by allowing states to opt out of its testing mandates.

That would certainly be good news for Virginia, which has been in a double bind trying to meet and reconcile the requirements of its own Standards of Learning program — in place years before NCLB — with the demands of the federal program.

It would be good news for the entire country's public education system, which finds itself being punished for things over which there is no control — like the aforementioned 100 percent pass rates for the severely handicapped and children who do not speak English. It would be good news for the quality of education in the United States. Schools across the nation have had to scuttle programs for the gifted and talented, the arts and anything that does not "teach to the test" in order to meet NCLB's demands.

Please, Congress — make it so.

Opinions expressed in this feature represent the majority opinion of the newspaper's editorial board, consisting of: Roger Watson, president and publisher; David Fritz, executive editor; Cindy Corell, local editor; Jim McCloskey, editorial cartoonist; Dennis Neal, community conversations editor; and Macon Rich, production director.

The Business Roundtable Takeover of New Jersey High Schools

New Jersey's Commissioner of Education, Lucille Davy, has been a long-time devotee of Achieve, Inc. and the Business Roundtable's agenda to remake American high schools in the corporate image. She did work with Achieve, Inc. before being named Commissioner, and New Jersey was part of the original 13 states signed on to the American Diploma Project (ADP), which grew out of the big high school summit hosted by Bill Gates in February of 2005. Now two years later, a slick PR campaign by Achieve, Inc., BR, and the New Jersey Chamber of Commerce is moving across the state of New Jersey (and 25 other ADP states) to scare an unconvinced public into an anti-democratic reformation of New Jersey high schools that will look like NCLB on steroids. The plan was operationalized in September 2005 with no research or empirical data to substantiate it, and the political pawns are now in place to move the game forward.

Here is a clip from a recent news story in the Atlanticville on the meeting at Long Branch Middle School, attended by less than a hundred citizens. Interestingly enough, Jay Doolan (in Atlanticville photo at left) notes in this clip that plan was finished long before any public input was sought:

Input gathered will be included in a series of recommendations presented to Gov. Jon Corzine and other members of the state Legislature to be implemented in high schools throughout the state.

The first step of the Department of Education's plan would be to ensure that the standards for language arts, math and science in each school are aligned to the state and national benchmarks.

"That work is finished," said Doolan, "and we're ready to take it to the state Board of Education. After it is adopted, we will work with educators in the state to implement it."

Doolan said that the second step in the process of reorganizing high schools statewide, will be to restructure requirements for students.

"We still believe that all students should take four years of English," he said, "but we need to better define what is English I, English II and so on."

Now we find that Commissioner Lucille Davy has moved with blitzkrieg speed to reorganize the Department so that Achieve's corporate plan can move forward. This comes despite skepticism and resistance from the Legislature, which "explicitly authorized up to $750,000 for an independent review of the Department by outside experts." A central part of that reorganzation, to be sure, is to abolish the separate Abbot Division and to ditch the Special Review Assessment (SRA), whereby more than a third of Abbot 12th graders graduate from high school each year, along with large numbers of ELL, special ed, and general ed students.

Here is a chunk of the latest newsletter from the Ed Law Center in Newark:

Disregarding public objections and the state legislature’s call for an independent review of the NJ Department of Education (NJDOE), Commissioner Lucille Davy pushed through a "reorganization" of the DOE at a March 7 meeting of the NJ State Board of Education. The "reorganization" abolishes the separate Abbott Division and replaces it with an "Office of Abbott Implementation" under a newly formed "Division of District and School Improvement."

In December, the legislature had refused to act on legislation, supported by Commissioner Davy, directing her to develop a new reorganization plan for NJDOE. Instead, citing widespread dissatisfaction with NJDOE performance, the legislature explicitly authorized up to $750,000 for an independent review of the Department by outside experts. The independent review is intended to assess the Department’s staffing patterns, technical resources, and overall capacity to fulfill its growing obligations under Abbott, No Child Left Behind, and related responsibilities.

The joint resolution passed overwhelmingly, 73-7 in the Assembly and 35-1 in the Senate and was signed by Governor Corzine on January 29. But to date no action has been taken to solicit bids and hire qualified experts to conduct the evaluation.

In a March 6 letter to Commissioner Davy, the Our Children/Our Schools campaign encouraged her to delay any reorganization until the independent review ordered by the legislature was completed and until the public had a chance to respond to the proposed elimination of the division charged with overseeing implementation of New Jersey’s landmark Supreme Court Abbott decisions on educational equity.

Instead, after months of rumors that changes were in the works, the Commissioner’s presented her plans to the State Board with no prior public notice or review. Despite gaps in her organizational chart and many uncertainties about the implications of the reorganization plan, the State Board approved Davy’s requests. As part of the reorganization, Willa Spicer, a former Assistant Superintendent in South Brunswick and longtime consultant to the NJDOE on assessment issues, was named Deputy Commissioner. Penelope Lattimer, former DOE chief of staff, was named Assistant Commissioner to head the new Division of District and School Improvement, which will include the Office of Abbott Implementation whose director has not yet been named. Other Assistant Commissioner positions included in the reorganization plan are Jacqueline Jones, early childhood; Barbara Gantwerk, student services; Jay Doolan, academic and professional standards; and William King, field services. . . .

Will New Jersey citizens and the citizens of other states allow Achieve, Inc. and the Business Roundtable take over their high schools and to crush the limited prospects of the youngsters who have been cheated by the poverty and racism that these crazed ideologues simply ignore?

Saving P. S.s in Utah, One Signature at a Time

From the AP:

SANDY, Utah -- At the Gingerbread Antiques shop, a solid stream of customers have one thing on their minds -- and it's not antiques.

"I don't think we should be using tax money for (education) vouchers," said Joann Sorensen, who has grandchildren in public schools and signed a petition at the store seeking to repeal a new law giving parents between $500 and $3,000 per child for private school tuition. "It would be better if the money went to public education."

Utah's school voucher program is the only universal school voucher program in the country. Even affluent families qualify. Voucher programs in other states target low-income families or students attending poorly performing schools.

Nearly every education organization in the state opposed the measure, saying lawmakers should focus on improving public schools instead of funding private ones. Utah has the nation's largest class sizes and spends less per student than any other state.

Shortly after the legislative session ended Feb. 28, public education advocates filed a petition seeking to put the school voucher issue before voters. They have until April 9 to collect about 92,000 signatures, and are doing it one neighbor, one customer and one parent at a time. At the Gingerbread Antiques shop, owner Penny McLaughlin barely has time to run her store because so many people are coming in to sign a petition as word about the referendum spreads.

"I'm not able to get anything done," she said, as two more customers asked to sign.

Voucher proponents contend McLaughlin and others are wasting their time. That's because the Legislature amended the bill the public education advocates are seeking to repeal. Confusion exists between the two groups whether the school voucher program could exist if the original bill is repealed. But it may not matter.

If enough signatures are collected, money for the voucher program wouldn't be available until the issue is decided next year, effectively neutering the program and denying families the ability to use vouchers this fall. . . .

The Magical Gorman Learning Center and the Wonderful World of Waldo Burford

Waldo Burford thought he had it made until the State of California decided to check up on his meet-when-you-will independent study "nonclassroom" charter school outfit. Wonder how many public schools would be allowed to have their students come in on an occasional basis to pick up work and to turn in their ditto sheets? From the L. A. Times:

The Gorman Learning Center charter program overspent millions, a state report alleges, including $20,000 for an office aquarium.

By Joel Rubin, Times Staff Writer
March 17, 2007

An unorthodox charter school operation bilked the state of more than $7.5 million, engaged in blatant nepotism, and spent tens of thousands of dollars on personal travel, expensive meals and assorted luxuries — including a $20,000 aquarium — according to the results of an audit released Friday by the Los Angeles County Department of Education.

The audit focused primarily on the finances of the Gorman Learning Center, an independent-study program that opened in 2000 and now serves about 2,200 students. It is operated out of churches in several counties including Los Angeles, Orange and San Bernardino.

Waldo Burford, Gorman's executive director, acknowledged that mistakes were made in applying for state funds and conceded that bookkeeping and oversight were lax during the school's rapid expansion. But he denied any intentional wrongdoing and said improvements have been made in overseeing the finances of the program.

. . . .

The main finding of the audit, which examined three years of the school's finances through 2006, was that Burford's operation over-claimed $7.7 million when applying to the state for operating funds.

To maximize the amount of taxpayer money they receive, "nonclassroom" charter schools like Burford's — where students complete most of their studies independently and meet infrequently with a teacher — must prove that they spend a certain amount of the funds each year on teacher salaries and other education-related expenses.

The Gorman Learning Center failed to report hundreds of thousands of dollars in noneducation expenses and filed faulty and incomplete information on teacher salaries, the audit concluded.

In a written response that was released along with the audit, Gorman officials promised to resubmit funding applications for past years. Regarding teacher salaries, however, school officials wrote that the audit's findings were "premature."

Much of the rest of the audit focused on questionable expenses paid with school funds. For example, Burford, who received at least $190,000 in salary and bonuses in 2005, treated himself to perks such as an $1,800 office chair and $2,500 treadmill, the audit found.

Public funds also were allegedly used to pay $18,000 in rent for the school's human resources director over a 21-month period.

One of the more eye-catching details of the report was the $20,024 paid for the purchase and upkeep of an aquarium. . . .

"charter school movement in Ohio has been a dismal failure"

If you see what looks like a 10-gallon frisbee flying across the Ohio skies, it is likely David Brennan's big white hat that just blew off his big fat head. From the Cincinnati Post:

COLUMBUS - Gov. Ted Strickland crossed the state Thursday to promote his $53 billion spending blueprint as anger flared among advocates of education choice over his plan to scrap the state voucher program outside Cleveland and cut off state funding to for-profit charter schools.

Strickland surprised many Wednesday when he said in his State of the State speech that he would stop students in other cities at low-performing schools from receiving the vouchers to pay for tuition to attend private and parochial schools.

The new Democratic governor also said his budget will prohibit for-profit companies from running state-funded charter schools, as he seeks to funnel more resources to public education within a cash-strapped state budget.

His spending plan increases state spending at just 2.2 percent a year on average, a rate barely lower than the last budget under GOP Gov. Bob Taft and less than any budget in the past 42 years.

"The charter school movement in Ohio has been a dismal failure," Strickland said during a Thursday stop in Cleveland.

"What I'm asking for in terms of charter schools is simply that they are held to the same standards of fiscal and educational accountability that we are expecting out of our public schools." . . .

Strickland to End Ohio Voucher and Charter School Corruption

Look out, Mr. White Hat--you now have a governor that is not for sale. From the Toledo Blade:

Gov. Ted Strickland’s State-of-the-State promises to increase school funding, slam the brakes on new charter schools, and effectively kill Ohio’s school voucher program drew praise yesterday at Toledo’s Keyser Elementary — one of several stops he made throughout the state to generate grass-roots support for his budget proposal.

Toledo Board of Education members, school union leaders, and teachers emphatically thanked Mr. Strickland for changes he proposed to Ohio’s public education system.

“The one thing that has bothered me about school funding more than anything else has been the inequity in the system,” the governor said.

“The fact that with the reliance on the local property tax, as we have, and as the [Ohio] Supreme Court said is inherently unfair, we’ve had a system where some schools have all the money they need to do whatever they want to do, and other schools do without,” the governor said.

Among the promises made during Wednesday’s State-of-the-State speech, Mr. Strickland said he would increase per-student funding by 3 percent each year to $5,565 in fiscal year 2008 and $5,732 in fiscal year 2009.

He also promised to increase “poverty-based assistance” by 22 percent and parity-aid funding by 8 percent. Poverty-based assistance and parity aid are two funding sources allocated per student for districts with a high percentage of poor students.

The state’s total appropriation for kindergarten through 12th-grade education would increase more than $294 million to a total of more than $6.65 billion in fiscal year 2009.

State Sen. Teresa Fedor (D., Toledo), Toledo Board of Education President Deborah Barnett, and Toledo Federation of Teachers President Francine Lawrence took turns greeting and thanking the governor as he entered Keyser Elementary.

“I’ve been sky-high since yesterday afternoon, since the State-of-the-State,” Ms. Lawrence said, clutching Mr. Strickland’s hand. “We are jubilant.”

The governor toured the school on Hill Avenue — popping into classrooms with an entourage of reporters, staff members, and local officials. He spoke briefly with students, took time to shake the hands of every first grader in one classroom, and later read stories from a book created by a second-grade class.

Third-grade teacher Regina Parker thanked Mr. Strickland for his proposal to provide health insurance coverage to every uninsured child and young adult up to age 21 by raising income eligibility limits for existing programs and allowing low-income working families to buy into Medicaid.

The governor told reporters his budget proposal would be a tough sell for the Republican-controlled House and Senate.

“I expect a big fight,” he said. “It doesn’t have to be mean-spirited.”

He also added: “The budget I unveiled today will only pass if the grass-roots folks in Ohio, the moms and dads who live in these local communities, get behind it and let the legislators know this is important to the future of Ohio.”

The state’s urban school districts like Toledo Public have been hit hard financially through the loss of students to charter schools and the voucher program.

The district expects to lose $50.5 million in funding this school year to charter schools and another $1 million to the voucher program.

Students had been eligible to apply for a voucher worth $4,250 through eighth grade and $5,000 for high school toward tuition at a private school if they attend a public school that has been rated on academic watch or academic emergency status — the equivalent of a D or F grade — for two of the last three years. There are 19 such schools in Toledo.

Mr. Strickland said he would call for a moratorium on the creation of new charter schools and for a prohibition against them being run by private for-profit companies.

“We hope to hold charter schools to the same standards,” he said.

“The fact is that during that moratorium, we are going to develop standards of accountability: fiscal accountability and educational accountability, because these schools are receiving public tax dollars and some of them are being operated by for-profit managers who are getting millions of [tax] dollars,” the governor said.

He said many charter schools, which are public in Ohio, receive failing grades from the Ohio Department of Education.

The governor and several of his staff members traveled yesterday to Cleveland, Toledo, Dayton, Cincinnati, and finally back to Columbus to discuss his proposed two-year budget.

From Preserving Democracy to Preserving Test Scores

Here is a chunk from Bracey's latest post at Huffington:

The whole proficient-or-left-behind dichotomy is, of course, phony. Achievement, reasonably defined, is a continuum, not part of an either/or. If we set the standard for "proficient" as a score of 80, would a student who scores 79 be "left behind?" To say so would be absurd, but that's how NCLB operates.

Moreover, the whole debate focuses on the wrong thing. From Jefferson's time through the 1940's the schools' function was civic. Jefferson argued that all governments degenerate and to prevent this, the people themselves needed to be educated. It is only in the post-Sputnik years that the focus has shifted, mistakenly, from education as necessary to preserve democracy test scores uber alles as necessary to get a job and keep America competitive in the global economy.

But test scores tell us little in the long run. A 1974 paper from the American College Testing Program stated, "We conclude that academic talent as measured by test scores, high school grades and college grades is not related to significant adult accomplishment. Though a certain level of academic talent may be necessary to complete medical school, for example, the grades of medical students appear unrelated to later success as physicians."

Thus, high-stakes testing as represented in NCLB, Texas' TAKS, Virginia's SOLs, Florida's FCAT, etc., is demoralizing and corrupting teachers and administrators by gun-barrel emphasis on something that is, in the long haul, trivial. One can only hope that some day in the future we will look back and ask "What were we thinking?

And that outcome will only remain possible, of course, if we remain able to think.

Reaping the Reagan Revolution

Now almost 30 years after California's Prop 13, we can see the devastating effects of starving the public schools while pursuing the idiocy of fake accountability through non-stop testing. Too bad the current movie star governor remains in denial. From San Jose Mercury News:

With student achievement lagging far behind other states, California must overhaul public education and infuse billions of dollars more every year into schools, according to the first part of a much-anticipated, comprehensive study unveiled Wednesday.

The report, commissioned by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and top lawmakers, said fundamental and deeply rooted problems plague public education - but money is only part of the solution.

Researchers at 32 universities and institutions, led by Stanford University professors, documented an under-funded, overly complex, inflexible, inequitable - and ultimately ineffective - system.

The study suggests changing the way the state finances and runs schools, easing up on rules, giving educators more flexibility - including making it easier to fire ineffective teachers.

Among the problems cited:

Compared with other states, California offers teachers tenure more quickly - after two years.

The state follows a complex and irrational system for distributing money to districts.

California lacks a data system that tracks students, learning, teachers or resources.

The state imposes too many mandates on schools, which spend money to meet regulations rather than to serve students.

California has higher ratios of students to teachers and students to administrators than other states.

"Our education system needs serious structural reform," Schwarzenegger said Wednesday as lawmakers, researchers and leaders of foundations that paid for the report gathered in Sacramento. How much will it cost to enable students to meet state achievement goals? One estimate in the rest of the report to be released today says the state would need to increase annual education spending by at least $23 billion - or 40 percent of what it spends today.

Schwarzenegger proposes spending $56.8 billion in 2007-08 - about 40 percent of the state budget - on education.

Yet that funding is distributed in a byzantine system, varying wildly among districts, with the gap between rich and poor widening when parent volunteer time is factored in.

In 2005-06, per-pupil spending in Santa Clara County ranged from $6,621 in the Evergreen School District in San Jose to $13,089 in Palo Alto. In the tiny Lakeside Joint School District in the Santa Cruz Mountains, which had 77 students, spending was $15,434 per student.

Governor's agenda

Schwarzenegger said Wednesday that he hopes to make 2008 the year of education reform. But that could be politically dicey.

Making it easier to dismiss lackluster teachers and reward others could run afoul of the powerful California Teachers Association, a key Democratic constituency. Republican Schwarzenegger, meanwhile, has promised not to raise taxes, which makes increasing school funding complicated. The dollar amounts involved make everyone skittish, and all sides worry they could detract from the other findings.

"Even though we are making all these great investments in our kids, it's the system itself that must be fixed," Schwarzenegger said.

The governor deflected questions about rescinding Proposition 13 - the landmark 1978 initiative that limits property taxes - or substantially boosting education funding. "The problem is the way the money is being distributed," he said.

Somewhat ironically, the report points out that California excessively regulates schools, including parallel reporting regimens to meet state and federal testing rules. . .

Educator Roundtable in Atlanta Today

Educator Roundtable (sign the petition) folks are in Atlanta today building support and developing strategy for bringing a halt to the NCLB insanity. Dr. Kovacs was asked by the Journal-Constitution to post to their blog this morning:

By Philip Kovacs | Friday, March 16, 2007, 08:00 AM

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

The 28 years I spent in Georgia schools had a profound effect on who I am and how I think. I am the product of tremendous public schools and amazing teachers. But now I see the federal No Child Left Behind Act undermining both.

NCLB was supposed to narrow the “achievement gap” between black and white students. According to Harvard’s Civil Rights Project and recent national test results, it has not done so. In fact, it may be exacerbating the situation as highly qualified teachers leave failing schools, unwilling to work in unrewarding, high-stress environments.

In our frantic race to ratchet up test scores we have turned schools into oppressive institutions that dehumanize and miseducate. Many young students are learning to hate learning.

As school districts across the country jettison history, civics, science, the arts and foreign languages, they are doing away with subjects that lead students to better understand who they are and where they are going. The ultimate price: a society of hard workers but shallow thinkers.

Shouldn’t America treat its most precious resource better?

Today’s guest blogger, Philip Kovacs, is an assistant professor of education at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. Kovacs grew up and attended public schools in Fayette County, earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Georgia and a master’s and doctorate from Georgia State University. Also chairman of the Educator Roundtable, a grassroots group pushing for the repeal of NCLB, Kovacs will be at GSU Saturday hosting a one-day conference on the federal law.

NCLB Tutoring Corruption in Billions

And the picture just keeps getting clearer and clearer. From U. S. News:

A key provision of the 2002 No Child Left Behind law–its mandate that struggling schools offer low-income students free after-school tutoring–has gone almost completely unmonitored, a study released by the Center on Education Policy finds.

Private tutoring companies have jumped to take advantage of the law's "supplemental education services," or SES, provision, which divvies up a pot each year estimated to be as large as $2.5 billion. But though companies produce rosy reports, very few states and districts have any idea whether the tutoring is actually helping students learn. More than two thirds of states told CEP they have a tough time monitoring SES programs for quality and effectiveness, and three said they are "not at all" able to monitor them.

The flowing federal money paired with very little oversight is "a recipe for disaster," says Jack Jennings, CEP's president.

"You have people's tax dollars that are going out the door, and nobody knows how much is going out the door, and nobody knows whether it's resulting in any good," Jennings says.

In fact, two states and at least two school districts have studied the programs, but their findings have not been encouraging. A 2006 study by the Los Angeles Unified School District found that SES programs improved test scores minimally, but just in elementary and middle school students, and most significantly (though still very little) for students attending a district-provided program that no longer exists.

The Chicago public schools study, conducted in August 2005, found similar results; tutored students showed reading score gains of just 1.09 points, compared with an average 1.06 points gained citywide (1.0 is a full year's growth). Tutored students' math scores grew less than a full year's expected gain, and less than the citywide average. . . .

GOP Heeds Cries From Buffy & Biff

We've been saying for a long time that politicians don't listen to the poor. It's taking parents from the affluent suburbs of Scarsdale and Potomac to get the attention of GOP lawmakers who voted for No Child Left Behind:

Some Republicans said yesterday that a backlash against the law was inevitable. Many voters in affluent suburban and exurban districts -- GOP strongholds -- think their schools have been adversely affected by the law. Once-innovative public schools have increasingly become captive to federal testing mandates, jettisoning education programs not covered by those tests, siphoning funds from programs for the talented and gifted, and discouraging creativity, critics say.

None of this mattered when the victims were the poor, the brown and the black kids in the chain gang schools of the inner city. Those canaries were quite expendable in this dark mine.

"So many people are frustrated with the shackles of No Child Left Behind," DeMint said. "I don't think anyone argues with measuring what we're doing, but the fact is, even the education community . . . sees us just testing, testing, testing, and reshaping the curriculum so we look good."

Parent unrest in places such as Scarsdale, N.Y., and parts of suburban Michigan could affect members of Congress. Connecticut has sued the government over the law, while legislatures in Virginia, Colorado and heavily Republican Utah have moved to supersede it.

Seth, Caitlyn, Buffy and Biff will sleep better tonight.

Slavin Knows a Spellings Lie When He Hears It

(Photo by Doug Mills, New York Times)
Reading First has been pumping a billion dollars a year to the Oregon Mafia for five years now, and the Lyon-Carnine-Good bosses now own the vast majority of the reading curriculums across America. Such sweeping change could not have been accomplished legally, as repeated reports from ED's OIG now show.

The victims of this crime wave are, of course, the children and the taxpayers. Learning to read for children across America, especially the neediest ones, has been turned into a behavioral chain gang that is more about shaping children's minds to mouth meaningless syllables than about instilling a love for books and for learning. This, of course, is a necessary component in the the third-worlding of America, where poor children are trained from an early age to accept any meaningless job they are destined to inherit under the directions of the oligarchs. The world is flatter and flatter, indeed!

Finally, finally, a little light of day is shining under the big slimy rock of Reading First. Yesterday the Cherry Blossom queen bowed, or is that cowered, before a Congressional committee looking into the sleaze, corruption, and law-breaking of Maggie's Reading First managers. She was there to make nice and assure Congress that she had cleaned up the entire mess.

It was left up to Dr. Robert Slavin, owner Success for All, to point out to those present that Spellings's assurances were simply more lies:

After Ms. Spellings left the hearing, Robert Slavin of Johns Hopkins University, whose Success for All reading program was shut out of many states under Reading First, said he did not think the secretary’s promises went far enough. “I haven’t seen the slightest glimmer of even intention to change,” Dr. Slavin said.

Because schools had already chosen their readng curriculums, promises to clean up Reading First now meant little, he said. He compared them to finding eight innings into a baseball game with a score of 23 to 0 that the opposing team had been playing with cork bats.

“Then they say, ‘From now on, we’re using honest bats.’ ” Dr. Slavin said. “I’m sorry, it’s 23 to nothing. You can’t just say, ‘From now on.’ ”

Reading First was required by law to finance only reading programs backed by “scientifically based reading research,” and the Education Department was prohibited from mandating or even endorsing specific curriculums. But the program has been plagued by accusations that states were steered toward a handful of commercial reading programs and testing instruments.

With only two Education Department employees in charge of the vast program, the administration relied largely on private contractors to advise states on their applications for grants, screen products for scientific validity and weigh applications. The inspector general found that several of these contractors wrote reading programs and testing instruments that were competing for money, and that they gave preference to products to which they had ties.

Ms. Spellings has maintained, and said again under questioning Wednesday, that the problems with Reading First occurred before she became education secretary.

She denied accusations from a former political appointee at the department, Michael Petrilli, who said she had essentially run Reading First from her post as domestic policy adviser at the White House. [Petrelli knows something] Mr. Petrilli is now a vice president at a nonprofit education research foundation. Asked about Madison, Wis., where educators gave up $2 million in Reading First money because they would have had to drop a so-called balanced literacy reading program that they said had been successful for the district, Ms. Spellings said she was unfamiliar with the particulars of Madison’s reading program. But she defended Reading First’s ground rules under her predecessor, Rod Paige, saying the program did not exclude specific reading curriculums, but intended only to ensure that they were backed by research.

Are His Lips Moving?

We know what that means. He also has a war to tell you about that we are winning. From Ed Week:

Is the No Child Left Behind Act working?

President Bush says it is, pointing to student-achievement results from a single subsection of the National Assessment of Educational Progress and tentative Reading First data. But the evidence available to support his claim is questionable.

“Fourth graders are reading better,” the president said during a March 2 visit to a school in New Albany, Ind. “They’ve made more progress in five years than the previous 28 years combined.”

In mathematics, he said, elementary and middle school students “earned the highest scores in the history of the test.”

The data Mr. Bush cited at that event are from just the “long-term trend” NAEP in reading and math, researchers say. All available data, they add, show modest improvements that can’t be attributed to the 5-year-old law. Instead, progress in achievement is more likely a continuation of trends that predate the law.

“There’s not any evidence that shows anything has changed,” said Daniel M. Koretz, a professor of education at Harvard University’s graduate school of education. . . .

NCLB: 0% Chance of Meeting Proficiency Targets

One cannot imagine a more explicit message to Congress. It comes most recently from Bob Linn, former President of AERA, who has been saying the same thing for 4 years with no one listening:

"There is a zero percent chance that we will ever reach a 100 percent target," said Robert L. Linn, co-director of the National Center for Research on Evaluation, Standards and Student Testing at UCLA. "But because the title of the law is so rhetorically brilliant, politicians are afraid to change this completely unrealistic standard. They don't want to be accused of leaving some children behind."

And how do the pols respond to this rude reminder of reality? Just as in the other assured failure, Iraq, the Administration responds with "Stay the course."

How about the Dems like Kennedy and Miller, who took us down this tragic road by signing on in 2001? Do they acknowledge now that the impossible targets were intended all along to undercut support for public schools and to replace them with corporate welfare charters and private school vouchers?

"The idea of 100 percent is, in any legislation, not achievable," said Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), chairman of the Senate education committee. "There isn't a member of Congress or a parent or a student that doesn't understand that."

Kennedy added that the law's universal proficiency standard served to inspire students and teachers. But "it's too early in the process to predict whether we'll consider changes" to the 2014 deadline, he said.

Did not Bob Linn say, ever: "There is a zero percent chance that we will ever reach a 100 percent target." What does it take, Mr. Kennedy, to get through to you and your fellow followers?

It is time to write your Congressman, call your school board, sign the petition at ER, keep your children home on test days, and plan your own form of civil disobedience. These rubber stamps in Washington have no intention of doing anything different until forced to do so.

A Nation at Risk, for Real

There is more than a little irony in the fact that the over-the-top rhetoric of the 1983 scare document, A Nation at Risk, has now spawned a testing craze that, in fact, puts the nation's children, and thus our future, truly at risk. This from David Berliner and Sharon Nichols is in Ed Week:

In his 2007 State of the Union address, President Bush claimed success for the federal No Child Left Behind Act. “Students are performing better in reading and math, and minority students are closing the achievement gap,” he said, calling on Congress to reauthorize this “good law.” Apparently, the president sees in No Child Left Behind what he sees in Iraq: evidence that his programs are working. But, as with Iraq, a substantial body of evidence challenges his claim.

We believe that this federal law, now in its sixth year, puts American public school students in serious jeopardy. Extensive reviews of empirical and theoretical work, along with conversations with hundreds of educators across the country, have convinced us that if Congress does not act in this session to fundamentally transform the law’s accountability provision, young people and their educators will suffer serious and long-term consequences. If the title were not already taken, our thoughts on this subject could be headlined “A Nation at Risk.”

We note in passing that only people who have no contact with children could write legislation demanding that every child reach a high level of performance in three subjects, thereby denying that individual differences exist. Only those same people could also believe that all children would reach high levels of proficiency at precisely the same rate of speed.

Validity problems in the testing of English-language learners and special education students also abound, but we limit our concerns in this essay to the No Child Left Behind law’s reliance on high-stakes testing. The stakes are high when students’ standardized-test performance results in grade retention or failure to graduate from high school. The stakes are high when teachers and administrators can lose their jobs or, conversely, receive large bonuses for student scores, or when humiliation or praise for teachers and schools occurs in the press as a result of test scores. This federal law requires such high-stakes testing in all states.

More than 30 years ago, the eminent social scientist Donald T. Campbell warned about the perils of measuring effectiveness via a single, highly consequential indicator: “The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decisionmaking,” he said, “the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.” High-stakes testing is exactly the kind of process Campbell worried about, since important judgments about student, teacher, and school effectiveness often are based on a single test score. This exaggerated reliance on scores for making judgments creates conditions that promote corruption and distortion. In fact, the overvaluation of this single indicator of school success often compromises the validity of the test scores themselves. Thus, the scores we end up praising and condemning in the press and our legislatures are actually untrustworthy, perhaps even worthless.

The scores we end up praising and condemning in the press and our legislatures are actually untrustworthy, perhaps even worthless.

Campbell’s law is ubiquitous, and shows up in many human endeavors. Businesses, for example, regularly become corrupt as particular indicators are deemed important in judging success or failure. If stock prices are the indicator of a company’s success, for example, then companies like Enron, Qwest, Adelphia, and WorldCom manipulate that indicator to make sure they look good. Lives and companies are destroyed as a result. That particular indicator of business success became untrustworthy as both it and the people who worked with it were corrupted.

Similarly, when the number of criminal cases closed is the indicator chosen to judge the success of a police department, two things generally happen: More trials are brought against people who may be innocent or, with a promise of lighter sentences, deals are made with accused criminals to get them to confess to crimes they didn’t commit.

When the indicators of success and failure in a profession take on too much value, they invariably are corrupted. Those of us in the academic world know that when researchers are judged primarily by their publication records, they have occasionally fabricated or manipulated data. This is just another instance of Campbell’s law in action.

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We have documented hundreds of examples of the ways in which high-stakes testing corrupts American education in a new book, Collateral Damage. Using Campbell’s law as a framework, we found examples of administrators and teachers who have cheated on standardized tests. Educators, acting just like other humans do, manipulate the indicators used to judge their success or failure when their reputations, employment, or significant salary bonuses are related to those indicators.

The law makes all who engage in compliance activities traitors to their own profession. It forces education professionals to ignore the testing standards that they have worked so hard to develop.

We found examples of administrators who would falsify school test data or force low-scoring students out of school in their quest to avoid public humiliation. We documented the distortion of instructional values when teachers focused on “bubble” kids—those on the cusp of passing the test—at the expense of the education of very low or very high scorers. We found instances where callous disregard for student welfare had replaced compassion and humanity, as when special education students were forced to take a test they had failed five times, or when a student who had recently suffered a death in the family was forced to take the test anyway.

Because so much depends on how students perform on tests, it should not be surprising that, as one Florida superintendent noted, “When a low-performing child walks into a classroom, instead of being seen as a challenge, or an opportunity for improvement, for the first time since I’ve been in education, teachers are seeing [that child] as a liability.” Shouldn’t we be concerned about a law that turns too many of the country’s most morally admired citizens into morally compromised individuals?

We also documented the narrowing of the curriculum to just what is tested, and found a huge increase in time spent in test preparation instead of genuine instruction. We found teachers concerned about their loss of morale, the undercutting of their professionalism, and the problem of disillusionment among their students. Teachers and administrators told us repeatedly how they were not against accountability, but that they were being held responsible for their students’ performance regardless of other factors that may affect it. Dentists aren’t held responsible for cavities and physicians for the onset of diabetes when youngsters don’t brush their teeth, or eat too much junk food, they argue.

Teachers know they stand a better chance of being successful where neighborhoods and families are healthy and communicate a sense of efficacy, where incomes are both steady and adequate, and where health-care and child-care programs exist. So the best of them soon move to schools with easier-to-teach students. This is no way to close the achievement gap.

Dozens of assessment experts have argued eloquently and vehemently that the high-stakes tests accompanying the implementation of the No Child Left Behind Act are psychometrically inadequate for the decisions that must be made about students, teachers, and schools. Furthermore, the testing standards of the American Educational Research Association are being violated in numerous ways by the use of high-stakes tests to comply with the law. The law, therefore, makes all who engage in compliance activities traitors to their own profession. It forces education professionals to ignore the testing standards that they have worked so hard to develop. We wonder, would the federal government treat members of the American Medical Association or the National Academy of Sciences with such disdain?

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In reauthorization hearings for the law, members of Congress should abandon high-stakes testing and replace it with an accountability system that is more reasonable and fair.

What might such a system look like?

A move to more “formative” assessments and an abandonment of our heavy commitment to “summative” assessments would be welcome. Assessment for learning, as opposed to assessment of learning, has produced some impressive gains in student achievement in other countries, and ought to be tried here. Likewise, the use of an inspectorate—an agency that sends expert observers into schools—has proved itself useful in other countries, and could also help improve schools in the United States.

End-of-course exams designed by teachers, as some states are now offering, increase teachers’ commitment to the testing program and, if the teachers get to score the tests, can also be a great professional-development opportunity. There are other alternatives to high-stakes testing, as well.

Our research informs us that high-stakes testing is hurting students, teachers, and schools. It is putting the nation at risk. By restricting the education of our young people and substituting for it training for performing well on high-stakes examinations, we are turning America into a nation of test-takers, abandoning our heritage as a nation of thinkers, dreamers, and doers.

David C. Berliner is the Regents’ professor of education at Arizona State University, in Tempe, and a past president of the American Educational Research Association. Sharon L. Nichols is an assistant professor of educational psychology at the University of Texas at San Antonio. They are the co-authors of Collateral Damage: How High-Stakes Testing Corrupts America’s Schools, published this month by Harvard Education Press.

NCLB Town Hall Meeting

Jersey Shore Chapter Phi Delta Kappa International Program of Events 7 PM March 15, Wilson Hall Auditorium Monmouth University, West Long Branch, NJ

Town Hall Meeting

No Child Left Behind: Renewal, Renovation, or Repeal?

A distinguished panel of educators will offer opening remarks, to be followed by an extended opportunity for parents, educators, students, and other interested citizens to share views and to ask questions of the panelists.

Panelists:

Dr. Celia Oyler, Associate Professor, Teachers College, Columbia University

Stan Karp, Retired Teacher; Director, Secondary Reform Project, Education Law Center; Editorial Board, Rethinking Schools

Moderator:

Dr. Jim Horn, Assistant Professor, MU School of Education

And yes, you will have a chance to ask your question or to make your point. Come join us on March 15.

College Ranking 101

The President of Sarah Lawrence College takes on U.S. News and World Report's college ranking system along with the SAT's. In an Op-Ed in Sunday's Washington Post she explains why Sarah Lawrence stopped using SAT scores in the admission process and how the American public continues to be duped by meaningless numbers and meaningless tests.
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Like most college presidents, I have seen many prospective students and their parents show up on campus in recent months, clutching their well-worn copies of U.S. News & World Report's rankings issue. U.S. News has smartly tapped into students' need to sort out colleges and universities in a rational way. Parents, who face increasing college costs, understandably want to know where best to make that expensive investment.

U.S. News benefits from our appetite for shortcuts, sound bites and top-10 lists. The magazine has parlayed the appearance of unbiased measurements into a profitable bottom line.

The problem is that the U.S. News college rankings are far from reliable.

Turns out that some of their numbers are made up. I know that firsthand. Two years ago, we at Sarah Lawrence College decided to stop using SAT scores in our admission process. We didn't make them optional, as some schools do. We simply told our prospective students not to bother sending them. We determined that the best predictors of success at Sarah Lawrence are high school grades in rigorous college-prep courses, teachers' recommendations and extensive writing samples. We are a writing-intensive school, and the information produced by SAT scores added little to our ability to predict how a student would do at our college; it did, however, do much to bias admission in favor of those who could afford expensive coaching sessions.

But this principled decision has put us in jeopardy. I was recently informed by the director of data research at U.S. News, the person at the magazine who has a lot to say about how the rankings are computed, that absent students' SAT scores, the magazine will calculate the college's ranking by assuming an arbitrary average SAT score of one standard deviation (roughly 200 points) below the average score of our peer group.

In other words, in the absence of real data, they will make up a number. He made clear to me that he believes that schools that do not use SAT scores in their admission process are admitting less capable students and therefore should lose points on their selectivity index. Our experience, of course, tells us otherwise.

The School Culture of Control

For fascists, policing is the preferred alternative to trusting. As the Business Roundtable and Achieve, Inc. re-write, state by state, the curriculum for the American high school, complicit state legislators and the teachers' organizations sit on the sidelines collecting their contributions and promissory notes and nodding assent to the hostile takeover of American education by the anti-democratic and cut-throat culture of un-checked corporate corruption.

In the meantime, high school administrators are getting their minds right for the looming learning lockdown that will undoubtedly accompany the brave new world of teaching by testing that Achieve, Inc. has put together. Today, the Washington Post reports that a culture of control has begun to permeate the school climate in Maryland high schools. While students are encouraged to watch the ever-present idiot boxes hanging from the classroom and cafeteria walls pumping out Maury Povich and MSNBC's endless stream of prisoner-tainment, the same students are no longer allowed to have iPods or to have the unapproved kinds of spirit days. As trust recedes from the public sphere, policing assuredly advances:

At Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring, students can't just randomly stroll out to their cars to fetch a textbook or some other forgotten item. They need a pass because authorities worry about what might be stashed in the parking lot.

At McKinley Technology High School in the District, students are banned from listening to iPods during lunch. But much to their mystification, they are allowed to watch ESPN or "The Maury Show" on the television hanging from the cafeteria ceiling.

"We can watch people fight on TV about who's the baby's father, but we just can't listen to our music. That's kind of weird," said Letia Childs, 15, a McKinley sophomore. "When we listen to our iPod, that's our world. It's calming. Everyone gets rowdy when they watch Maury. Sometimes, in our own way, we just want to do our own thing, but we're limited."

A culture of control has Washington area campuses in an ever-tightening grip, many students say, extending beyond the long-standing restrictions on provocative clothing, cellphone use and class-time bathroom visits. Akin to the omnipresent "helicopter parents," these students say, are helicopter administrators who home in on their smallest moves, no matter how guileless or mundane.

Some administrators acknowledge that the list of rules meant to ban, limit or deter potentially inappropriate or dangerous actions is steadily growing.

"Where to start? It's getting huge," said Linda Wanner, a Blair assistant principal. "The word of the day is prevention. We're on high alert all the time." It's a result, experts say, of the many pressures on those who lead a modern campus with anywhere from 1,000 to 3,000 teenagers and the potential for violence or a lawsuit around every hallway corner.

But teenagers, nothing if not skilled in the art of asserting their adulthood, say the accumulation of these little laws can be the most frustrating part of their high school experience. They feel micromanaged and nitpicked at every turn.

The rules are especially maddening when one school prohibits something that another allows. Or when the rules contradict themselves and students can't tell which one they should obey. Jerome DeMarchi, a McKinley assistant principal, said iPods are forbidden because they are easily stolen valuables.

At Forest Park Senior High School in Prince William County, students sought to rejuvenate Spirit Week with funky themes. They were over Twin Day, so they proposed Bling Day, which gave school officials visions of property -- i.e., pricey necklaces -- getting snatched at school. So that idea was a bust. Then students dreamed up Salad Dressing Day -- cowboy garb for ranch, togas for Caesar, Hawaiian shirts for Thousand Island.

Yes, even Salad Dressing Day was cut, for reasons that remain mysterious to some students. . . .

Ever wonder why Dewey's Democracy and Education is on the 10 Most Harmful Books List of conservatives? Policing freely advances in the absence of trust, and trust is the only dependable lubricant for democracy to work.

Marion Brady's Unanswered Letter to the Aspen Fools

September 18, 2006

To members of the Aspen Institute’s Commission on No Child Left Behind

My name is Marion Brady, and I live in Cocoa, Florida. I’ve spent the last seventy-four years in education as a student, high school teacher, college professor, county-level administrator, publisher consultant, writer of journal articles, textbooks, professional books and newspaper columns, and visitor to classrooms across America and abroad.
You may or may not be surprised to hear me say that No Child Left Behind is an educational train wreck.
I’m no defender of pre-NCLB public education. When the legislation took shape, although the education train was still on the track, it was barely moving. What it had going for it was mostly potential. Thoughtful educators were pointing out that General Systems Theory as it had emerged from World War II, and research clarifying how the brain organizes information, could, together, move student intellectual performance to levels not previously thought possible. The train was creeping, but it was going in the right direction.
The unduly alarmist 1983 publication “A Nation At Risk” stopped it cold. Fearful leaders of business and industry pushed educators aside, took control of “reform” and, working through politicians, set the train in motion. Backwards. Really fast.
A wreck was inevitable. Picking through the present pileup as it settles into place, questions for those now in charge arise:
Question: Management experts say poor institutional performance almost always indicates a “system” problem. NCLB doesn’t blame poor performance on the system but on teachers and kids. Are the experts wrong?
Question: NCLB demands “standards and accountability” for school subjects. Wouldn’t it make more sense to key standards and accountability to ends rather than means, to kids’ ability to fuse and actually use what they’ve learned?
Question: Some researchers say that pre-natal and early childhood care, environmental contamination, parental attitudes, family income, language facility and many other factors affect student performance. In well-run NCLB schools, are these irrelevant?
Question: NCLB relies on market forces to shape schools up. Does this mean that learning is unnatural and won’t happen unless teachers and kids are threatened or bribed?
Question: NCLB is rapidly pushing “frills” out of the curriculum. Has research now established that art, music, physical activity and so on have nothing to do with scientific and mathematical reasoning ability?
Question: Nationwide, hundreds of thousands of kids are being held back because of poor reading and math skills. Is the ability to interpret symbols the only way the young learn, and therefore sufficient reason to flunk them?
Question: NCLB’s avowed aim is to “close the achievement gap.” The tools for measuring that gap are tests of symbol-manipulation skills. Don’t these skills track relative wealth and privilege, therefore tending to maintain the gap? And aren’t the tests incorrectly but nevertheless widely seen as indicators of intelligence, bringing into play gap-perpetuating self-fulfilling prophecies?
Question: NCLB goes a long way toward cutting local educators and school board members out of the decision-making loop. Does the history of top-down, centralized control suggest this change strategy works well?
Question: Education is supposed to teach kids to think for themselves, not just recall what they’ve been ordered to remember. Are the centerpieces of NCLB (corporately produced, machine-scored tests) able to judge the relative quality of complex thought processes? If so, why aren’t they already doing that?
Question: NCLB assumes the “core” curriculum (the mainstay of present schooling) is as appropriate today as it was when it was adopted in 1892. Is it?
Question: If there are problems with the traditional, same-thing-for-everybody curriculum, don’t “raising the bar” and “rigor” just make them worse?
Question: Will manipulating the curriculum to “maintain America’s competitive position in world trade” be more likely to ensure America’s future well-being than helping kids love learning because it lets them pursue their interests and talents wherever they lead?
Question: Frantic to avoid the test-triggered “failing” label, most schools use myriad strategies to “game” the system. For example, knowing the worst kids will never make the cut on high-stakes tests, and the best will do so without help, the “marginal middle” gets most of the attention. Is it possible to track and counter all the ingenious strategies emerging in response to naive policies?
Question: Many educators (maybe most) now assume that NCLB is a clever strategy less concerned with closing the achievement gap than with undermining confidence in public education and laying the groundwork for privatizing the institution. Are they wrong? And if they are, how can their cynicism be countered and morale restored?

How matters stand

There’s an old rural joke the punch-line of which is “You can’t get there from here.” It’s applicable. At the deepest level, what ails the nation’s schools and universities is the failure to recognize and capitalize on the seamless, systemic, mutually supportive nature of knowledge. Until that problem is addressed, even the best institutions will continue to waste student potential at a prodigious rate.
A brief list of specific problems with the present approach to the general education curriculum may help underline its unacceptability. From about the fourth grade on through the university, students have imposed on them a regimen which has no clear, overarching aim, directs information at them at intellectually unmanageable, fire-hose velocities, ignores the brain’s need for order and organization, has no criteria for determining the relative importance of what’s taught, relates only tangentially to real-world experience, disregards fields of study of critical importance, has no built-in self-renewing capability, overworks short-term memory at the expense of higher-order thought processes, is little concerned with moral and ethical issues, doesn’t move smoothly through ever-higher levels of intellectual complexity, penalizes rather than capitalizes on student differences, doesn’t encourage novel, creative thought, ignores the basic process by means of which knowledge expands, vastly underestimates student intellectual potential, and, of course, ignores the holistic, systemic nature of reality and the seamless way humans perceive it.
Yes, of course today’s specialized studies are essential. But sense making (surely the main point of schooling) requires a grasp of the whole as well as the parts. A simple metaphor may help: Assembling a jig-saw puzzle, it’s the picture on the lid of the box which makes sense of the individual pieces (and identifies the missing ones). Western-style education has no “picture on the lid of the box.” Indeed, it sends kids the false but powerful message that the subjects they’re studying aren’t supposed to fit together, much less be parts of a comprehensive, coherent, integrated structure of knowledge.

What now?

Coming to grips with the fundamental nature of knowledge and the brain’s way of coping with vast amounts of random information was where education was headed back in the 1980s when today’s “reformers” took over. Many of those reformers believed then, and still believe, that educating is a relatively simple matter of “distributing information.” They believed then, and still believe, that what teachers and kids need is mostly good old-fashioned boot camp-style discipline. They believed then, and still believe, that those who disagree with them are whiners, incompetents opposed to standards and being held accountable, and resisting change by hiding behind tenure, unions, and other self-serving defenses.
American education’s bureaucracies within bureaucracies within bureaucracies are extremely resistant to change and, absent external permission and pressure, will resist it mightily. But the naive, reactionary, conventional-wisdom-driven approach of NCLB is a disaster. It isn’t just failing, it’s making a bad situation far worse, taking schools back to the 19th century educational world of Charles Dickens’ “Mr. Gradgrind.” And left in place, its simplistic conceptions of standards and accountability will keep them there. Permanently.
Incidentally, it doesn’t take much reading between the lines to see an intent to replace fifty state K-12 NCLB-generated fiascos with one national NCLB-generated fiasco, then move on to attack America’s colleges and universities with some version of the same.
If America’s future well-being is more important than dumping an economic theory on education to see what happens, I have some suggestions. I’m no change expert, but here’s one of many possible alternatives to the continued micro-managing of America’s classrooms from Washington:
1. Call for another national conference like the one that kicked off the present thrust of reform. Invite the usual power players, but this time, include some respected, straight-talking educators (yes, there are some) and actually listen to what they have to say. Keep the conference in session until there’s consensus on the overarching aim of education. (From inside or outside the conference, I’ll be campaigning for “helping kids make more sense of experience,” with something like “cultivating a life-long love of learning” as runner up. And yes, these aims are hard-nosed enough to allow progress to be measured.)
2. Simultaneously, back off high-handed, punitive actions against the States, and tell them to do the same internally. Recall that it wasn’t threats and bribes that motivated the teachers you most respected. Indeed, those would likely have driven them out of the profession.
3. Treat the States as R&D labs, (a much more legitimate application of market forces) supporting and rewarding those having the most success pursuing the agreed-upon overarching aim.
4. Simultaneously, to avoid trauma while #3 is being operationalized, continue handing out federal money, but do so on some simple (perhaps per-pupil) basis.
Given the bipartisan political capital invested in NCLB, given the necessity for saving Congressional face, given the educational naivete of its advocates and defenders, given the kind of money now changing hands, given the culture’s near-religious faith in the ability of market forces to cure all ills, given the sincere belief of many that NCLB is “99.9% pure,” that it just needs a bit of touching up, significant change seems unlikely.
However, futile though protest may be, let those in the future who look back on this era in disbelief, know that at least some professional educators resisted. Sure, what we had before NCLB was incredibly messy. Sure, it needed major, major attention. But that messiness at least allowed sufficient autonomy for patches of greatness to emerge, stimulated creativity and productivity envied by much of the world, brought America far and away more international prizes and recognition than any other society, and attracted here education officials from other countries looking for reasons why their sometime-higher test scores didn't translate into patents and Pulitzers.
What we had was a foundation upon which to build. There’s not much left of it. “Human history,” said H.G. Wells, is “a race between education and catastrophe.” No Child Left Behind makes catastrophe a sure thing.

Marion Brady
4285 North Indian River Drive
Cocoa, Florida 32927

mbrady22@cfl.rr.com
321-636-3448
http://home.cfl.rr.com/marion/mbrady.html

Cc: All media willing to pay attention

Bush's War on Reading in the Limelight

Some educators who are concerned with teaching children how to read, understand and gain the critical thinking skills necessary to become lifelong learners, haven't bought into the Bush Administration's push for Reading First, a phonics-based instruction program that is now the subject of a Congressional investigation at ED.

It may have cost this district in Madison, Wisconsin, (as reported in today's New York Times,) $2 million in funding, but teachers are doing what they, as professionals, believe is best for their students. It appears the press is finally catching on to what most educators have known for years, the Reading First scandal is just another example of Bush & Co. cronysim that has been reported on by Schools Matter and other education watchers. The American public is now finally getting an education on how things at ED work when it comes to "the best interest" of our nation's children.
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Surrounded by five first graders learning to read at Hawthorne Elementary here, Stacey Hodiewicz listened as one boy struggled over a word.

“Pumpkin,” ventured the boy, Parker Kuehni.

“Look at the word,” the teacher suggested. Using a method known as whole language, she prompted him to consider the word’s size. “Is it long enough to be pumpkin?”

Parker looked again. “Pea,” he said, correctly.

Call it the $2 million reading lesson.

By sticking to its teaching approach, that is the amount Madison passed up under Reading First, the Bush administration’s ambitious effort to turn the nation’s poor children into skilled readers by the third grade.

The program, which gives $1 billion a year in grants to states, was supposed to end the so-called reading wars — the battle over the best method of teaching reading — but has instead opened a new and bitter front in the fight.

According to interviews with school officials and a string of federal audits and e-mail messages made public in recent months, federal officials and contractors used the program to pressure schools to adopt approaches that emphasize phonics, focusing on the mechanics of sounding out syllables, and to discard methods drawn from whole language that play down these mechanics and use cues like pictures or context to teach.

Federal officials who ran Reading First maintain that only curriculums including regular, systematic phonics lessons had the backing of “scientifically based reading research” required by the program.

But in a string of blistering reports, the Education Department’s inspector general has found that federal officials may have violated prohibitions in the law against mandating, or even endorsing, specific curriculums. The reports also found that federal officials overlooked conflicts of interest among the contractors that advised states applying for grants, and that in some instances, these contractors wrote reading programs competing for the money, and stood to collect royalties if their programs were chosen.

Education Secretary Margaret Spellings has said that the problems in Reading First occurred largely before she took over in 2005, and that her office has new guidelines for awarding grants. She declined a request for an interview.

Madison officials say that a year after Wisconsin joined Reading First, in 2004, contractors pressured them to drop their approach, which blends some phonics with whole language in a program called Balanced Literacy. Instead, they gave up the money — about $2 million, according to officials here, who say their program raised reading scores.

In New York City, under pressure from federal officials, school authorities in 2004 dropped their citywide balanced literacy approach for a more structured program stronger in phonics, in 49 low-income schools. At stake was $34 million.

Across the country — in Illinois, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Maine and New Jersey — schools and districts with programs that did not stress phonics were either rejected for grants or pressured to change their methods even though some argued, as Madison did, that their programs met the law’s standard.

“We had data demonstrating that our children were learning at the rate that Reading First was aiming for, and they could not produce a single ounce of data to show the success rates of the program they were proposing,” said Art Rainwater, Madison’s superintendent of schools.
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Lisa Schiff of San Francisco explains why the Reading First scandal is just symptomatic of a larger education policy that is based on private business and profits.

Other than its very existence, one of the biggest scandals regarding No Child Left Behind (NCLB), our federal education legislation, has been the Reading First program. Reading First is another one of NCLB’s typically myopic efforts to improve educational outcomes. In this instance, the approach has been to promote mechanical solutions to the development of literacy skills for K through 3rd graders through programs based on “evidence-based research” and “scientific data.”

Having a sound basis for using a certain method makes sense, but the absolute reliance on the ability to describe outcomes quantitatively is suspect, since meaningful assessments of literacy skills require more than that. As with some other programs NCLB has introduced, such as supplementary tutoring, a primary purpose of the Reading First component seems to have been to create a fast-track to funnel state dollars used to purchase literacy education materials into the coffers of just a few producers of those same materials. Language such as “scientific” and “evidenced-based” simply served to provide the authoritative cover under which to hide this intention.Many might argue that since NCLB is sufficiently scandalous in the way it reduces education to standardized curricula and tests, narrows the subjects taught and the pedagogical methods employed that there is no need to look further.

While there is a certain truth to this, the flagrant and sustained corruption that occurred with Reading First is particularly important to expose. The impropriety not only clearly breached ethical norms, it serves as a clear example of the privatization goals of NCLB and of the underlying philosophy that profit making is of greater importance than educating our society’s kids.

Where's the Accountability at ED?

For a Department of Education whose mantra is accountability for teachers, students and schools across the country, especially the poor ones that is, and no excuses, is Ms. Margaret going to be held accountable for the conflicts of interests bordering on illegal and criminal activity in her majesty's queendom?


In fact, just how long is it going to take for Congress to wake up and admit that the entire educational policy built into the No Child Left Behind Act is one huge conflict of interest as the $2.6 billion testing industry and private companies and corporations tied to the Bush administration hang their hats on expanding NCLB to high schools and colleges. It's nice to see the New York Times reporting the "conflict of interest" in the student loan scandal and the Reading First scandal, but how long will it take the New York Times and others to start reporting on the conflict of interest between Bush & Co. and McGraw Hill. Hmmmm.....I suppose we'll have to leave that one to the bloggers. The sheep in the media will catch on eventually. Looks like Reading First and NelNet are just the tips on this iceberg that's melting fast.


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Lawmakers from both parties are pressuring the Education Department to explain why it let a student loan company keep $278 million in subsidies that an audit found improper.

The pressure indicates that both parties are focused on the increasing costs of higher education.
The loan company, Nelnet, received the payments through a subsidy program that guaranteed a 9.5 percent interest rate on student loans. In an accord reached in January, the department allowed Nelnet to keep the $278 million it had received but suspended future payments of more than $800 million until a future audit could determine whether the company was eligible for the money.

Ten Democrats on the House Education and Labor Committee, as well as a separate bipartisan group of 10 members of Congress, sent letters to the department in the last two days seeking an explanation of that decision.

Last week, Senator Edward M. Kennedy, the Massachusetts Democrat who is chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, asked the department for copies of all communications with the company since last August on the decision not to seek recovery of the money.

A spokeswoman said Mr. Kennedy planned a full investigation into the case.
“I am interested in the rationale underlying your decision to reject the recommendation by the department’s inspector general that the chief operating officer for Federal Student Aid ‘require the return of the overpayments’ made to Nelnet,” Mr. Kennedy wrote.

He asked the department to provide the documents by March 31.
In a follow-up letter, Mr. Kennedy asked yesterday whether the department had received a necessary approval from the Justice Department before reaching the agreement.
A spokeswoman for the Education Department, Katherine McLane, said the agency was reviewing the letters.

The letter from the 10 Democrats on the House committee was sent on Wednesday to Education Secretary Margaret Spellings. It also asked for a description of actions that the department might take toward other companies that might be receiving similar payments.
“The Nelnet example represents a serious misuse of federal funds, and it is likely that this is not an isolated case,” the letter said. “It is critical for you to conduct full oversight.”

In their letter sent on Tuesday, the bipartisan group of lawmakers — seven Republicans and three Democrats, none of whom signed the Wednesday letter — criticized the decision to settle with Nelnet, of Lincoln, Neb., as fiscally irresponsible and warned that it set a poor precedent.
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Oh, and btw, let's not forget about Reading First.

Senator Kennedy sent letters to Education Department officials and contractors involved in Reading First, a $1 billion-a-year program in which he demanded to see all correspondence and contracts between Reading First and the White House, the department and other entities.
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Who is going to be held accountable?

States Forfeiting Education to Business Agenda

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, with its increasing control over state curriculum, released a report last week "Leaders and Laggards" (Education Week, March 7, 2007).

"Leaders and Laggards," released last week, gives letter grades to states on indicators related to student achievement, teacher quality, and school management. A "return on investment" grade rates states on students' performance for dollars spent to educate them, controlled for poverty.

For the chamber, the grades and policy platform further a concerted new effort to shape education policy. Last year, the Washington-based federation of more than 3 million businesses launcehd and Institute for a Competitive Workforce in part to study the issue. In September, it joined other national business groups in advocating renewal of the federal No Child Left Behind Act.

What these new "standards" mean for teachers, students and schools has begun to play out in place like Denver, Colorado as the new reality of a business driven education agenda leaves more children behind. What can we expect from an education policy that is based on a "business model" -- if Achieve Inc. and the Chamber of Commerces all across the country are given a free ticket by this Congress and the American people, the consequences of this misguided and shortsighted education policy will continue to erode the very foundation of our democracy.

As the legislature considers requiring more math and science before Colorado students can graduate from high school, local school districts fear that the new rules could be expensive and leave many students behind.

The question is, how long will it take before the damage being done becomes obvious and where are the leaders and politicians with the courage to stop this madness?

Educators and politicians across the country are considering ramping up math and science standards, said Sandra Boyd, vice president of Achieve, Inc., a Washington, D.C., organization created by the nation's governors in 1996 to raise academic standards in high schools.

Colorado is not among the 12 states identified by Achieve as having a college-ready curriculum in high school. All of those states require at least three years of science.

Colorado is one of a handful of "local control" states, meaning the constitution says local school boards control instruction. But the legislature has the power to act on matters of statewide education concern.

Under the math-science proposal, school districts still would have a say in what kind of courses they offer.

Grandview High School in the Cherry Creek School District, for example, offers a course in "discrete math." It's geared toward students not seeking math or science careers who need "real-world applications of math," said Joanie Funderburk, who taught the course for six years. Students tackle such problems as figuring out the winner of the presidential election or the most efficient route for a traveling salesman.

Golden High School has a "science process class," where students do experiments and get math or science credit, assistant principal Steve Anderson said.

Denver Public Schools in June enacted what board members called the toughest standards in the state, requiring four years each of math and English and three years each of science and social studies.

In the Boulder Valley School District, where students must take two years each of science and math, Samantha Messier, the district's K-8 science coordinator, is concerned that additional years would mean more textbooks, labs and safety showers.

If Rep. Michael Merrifield, D-Colorado Springs, has his way, the math-science bill - Senate Bill 131 - will die in his House Education Committee.

The former music teacher said it's wrong to "force every single child into the same curriculum as if there were no difference in desire, in interest, in capability."

"Just imagine what it's going to do to the dropout rate," he said.

Graduation requirements are a popular topic at the legislature.

Another proposal, Senate Bill 73 from Romer, would require students to prove competency in English to get diplomas.

A third bill is more flexible - it requires the state Board of Education to establish different graduation guidelines for college- bound students, those headed to trade school and kids going straight to work, said Rep. Nancy Todd, the Aurora Democrat who is sponsoring House Bill 1118.

House Speaker Andrew Romanoff favors a proficiency requirement instead of dictating the number of years a student must study a subject.

"Everybody agrees that a high school diploma ought to mean something," he said. "I don't know that there is a split on the goal, but a split on the means."

Sen. Bob Bacon, a Fort Collins Democrat and former teacher, said support from several fellow Democrats for the math-science legislation is troubling.

Instead of requiring standards that some kids won't meet, lawmakers should find ways to "help them with their lives outside of school" so they succeed in the classroom, he said.
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LEAP and the 2-Star State

Since 1999 Louisiana has been using the Louisiana Education Assessment Program to terrorize poor children in the state, to teach them to accept their failure at an early age, and to abandon hope for anything different. In the meantime the prison and parole industry in the state has been ramped up to receive those failures as they approach young adulthood with years of despair and rage built up as a result of being blamed for their own failure. What kind of social cauldron is being heated by this educational genocide, only time will tell. It will certainly provide a never-ending video stream of incarcerated humanity for the MSNBC's of the modern police state.

The 4th graders at Alpha Elementary are getting ready this morning for another jolt of failure. In 2000 when I started my research there, 70% of 4th graders were held back for not passing the LEAP. This year only 35% of them will fail. Quite a leap, yes. After 7 years of non-stop testing, Alpha's school performance score hovers near 75, which makes them a 1-Star school in a 2-Star state.

What will Alpha need to do by 2014, along with the rest of the public schools in the State? They must reach 120. COL! (crying out loud). What my research has shown without question is that this kind of labeling could have been accomplished without all the expense of testing. These failure lists could have been just as easily generated by checking family income and the free and reduced-price lunch rolls. But then that would not have personalized the failure that only individual testing can accomplish for the brown, the black, and the other poor. From a state press release carried by KFOL:

School districts in Louisiana are also given DPS labels or “Stars” annually, indicating their level of performances. The chart below defines each label.

Label DPS Ranges
Five Stars 140.0 and above
Four Stars 120.0 – 139.9
Three Stars 100.0 – 119.9
Two Stars 80.0 – 99.9
One Star 60.0 – 79.9
Academically Unacceptable Below 60.0

Overall, the state received a label of Two Stars.

Giving Students "The Whole Truth" on Climate Change

John f.Borowski, a public school teacher for 26 years, urges teachers to preface Al Gore's An Inconveninet Truth with Oil on Ice and explains why the two films can complement each other as a powerful educational tool to spark enivornmental activism.

This week, Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” won a much deserved Academy Award for his riveting documentary on climate change science. Many teachers, including myself, are obligated to use Mr. Gore’s carbon dioxide graphs and stunning visuals of glacial melting and climate change exacerbated hurricanes to educate the nation’s 55 million students. But know this, teachers and caring parents, if we want to move climate change knowledge from facts to action, I strongly suggest a “one-two punch strategy”: show “An Inconvenient truth” after showing the best environmental education film I have ever watched; “Oil on Ice.” This documentary not only outlines the folly of drilling for oil in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, it contains an incredible array of climate change solutions intertwined with the cultural need to create a “sustainable energy society” here in the United States. Couple this showing with a subsequent viewing of Mr. Gore’s work and you will have a populous of young adults questioning our insatiable addiction to fossil fuels and demanding that the adults who hold power right now implement realistic solutions that could reduce carbon dioxide by 80-90% immediately: not the preposterous and woefully inadequate calls for “reasonable” reductions many decades out.

Having taught for 26 years, I have only encountered a handful of “environmental education” films that have interwoven the needed ingredients that produces a visual that captures the attention and hearts of young adults. Oil on Ice has that rare recipe: spectacular wildlife scenes that tug at the heartstrings throughout, hard data-well explained and factual with a riveting narration. Today’s students, their attention spans conditioned by “MTV style” quick pace productions often lose interest in “talking heads,” and the “talk over” strategy in Oil on Ice employing memorable scenes kept my students attentive and in rapid fire order, asking numerous questions. Barely, over 40 minutes long, it took me three days to show the visual, stopping often to “take notes” and engage in lively debate (what teachers fondly refer to as that “teachable moment”). While “An Inconvenient Truth” depicts our climate dilemma in brilliant science, teachers must “massage” the film when it overstays long scenes of Al Gore and references to his political history. Some students asked why Mr. Gore talked so much about his own life and his loss in the 2000 election. It is crucial for good teachers to “connect those dots” for students without detracting from the science. Critics have claimed that Gore used this production as a vehicle to remain politically viable. Some decry no mention of the Clinton/Gore Administration’s environmental failures: from failure to implement the Kyoto Protocol to allowing “carbon storehouses” our national forests to be clear-cut at unconscionable rates. I defend the film for its scientific integrity, the beautifully illustrated graphs and excellent visuals on Arctic and Antarctic melting. What data that is left missing in Gore’s film, be it intentional or not, makes using Oil on Ice as a preface undeniably valuable. The union of the two films strengthens the message of “An Inconvenient Truth” and gives students the “whole truth.”

Governor Doyle Rejects DoE's Gag Rules

The Gestapo tactics of this Department of Education, and the gag rules being imposed on educators when it comes to sex education, is finally being met with stiff opposition as Governor Jim Doyle of Wisconsin leaves $600,000 on the table.

Gov. Jim Doyle has turned down about $600,000 in federal abstinence education money because new rules would limit how much recipients could talk about contraception or sexually transmitted diseases this year.

Doyle asked the Department of Health and Family Services to notify federal authorities of his decision, department spokeswoman Stephanie Marquis said last week.

Wisconsin becomes one of a handful of states to reject money from the Title V abstinence program, with a national budget of $50 million, for the current fiscal year.
As many as 12 other states are considering leaving the program, said Bill Smith, vice president for public policy for the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States, which promotes comprehensive sex education.

"It seems to me there is some sanity returning to the notion that sexuality education is about public health and not about hyper-moralism and ideology," he said.

Although the program's funding recipients had more discretion in making their own programs in the past, new rules this year require the programs to teach that sexual activity outside of marriage could have harmful physical and psychological effects, Marquis said.

Bush's Bubble Youth

W is on the campaign trail to preserve what he believes is one of his greatest accomplishments, the No Child Left Behind Act. But like most of the delusions and destructive policies that characterize this administration, reality is playing out all across the country and even down the road from the White House in the Maryland suburb of Rockville.

At a funraiser in Louisville, Kentucky,W. said "watering down" the No Child Left Behind Act "would be doing thousands of children a disservice."


"It's working," Bush said. "We can change parts of it for the better, but don't change the core of a piece of good legislation that's making a significant difference in the lives of a lot of children."

You see, here's how it works at schools like Earle B. Wood Middle School in Rockville, Maryland where teachers and administrators agonize over leaving children behind. The winning strategy has become a laser beam focus on what are referred to as "the bubble kids" and getting them to pass the test.

"We were told to cross off the kids who would never pass," one staffer said. "We were told to cross off the kids who, if we handed them the test tomorrow, they would pass. And then the kids who were left over, those were the kids we were supposed to focus on."

The next week, teachers regularly began pulling selected students from social studies, science, gym, art and other elective classes to work in small groups to prepare for the test. They used test-prep workbooks and sample material from the state education department's Web site.

They're not teaching the material," Cullison said. "They're teaching them how to take a test, which is a huge disservice to these kids."

Pledging Allegiance

A new and important book:

"Should be welcomed by anyone who is concerned that the values of peace, of democracy, be held high by the coming generation."—From the Foreword by Howard Zinn, author of A People’s History of the United States

"A valuable sourcebook for those who are uncertain about what patriotism is and, even more, for those who are certain that they know."
-Howard Gardner, Harvard University, author of Five Minds for the Future.

"Opens to critical scrutiny the very idea of loyalty to a country."
-Alfie Kohn, author of The Schools Our Children Deserve and What Does It Mean to Be Well Educated?

"A fine and thoughtful collection of essays that probe the perhaps inevitable but nevertheless deeply problematic role of patriotism in a democratic society."
-Frances Fox Piven, author of The War at Home and Challenging Authority

"Strong reflections and perspectives on the fundamental stories about our country that we tell our future citizens."
-Paul Loeb, author of Soul of a Citizen

Table of Contents

Once Upon a Time When Patriotism Was What You Did, Gloria Ladson-Billings

No Black in the Union Jack: The Ambivalent Patriotism of Black Americans, Charles M. Payne

Educators in the War on Terrorism, Pedro Noguera and Robby Cohen

"Children Are the Living Message We Send to a Time We Will Not See", Delaine Eastin

The Psychology of Patriotism, Michael J. Bader

Second Fiddle to Fear, Denise Walsh

On Patriotism and the Yankees: Lessons Learned From Being a Fan, Deborah Meier

Patriotism, Nationalism, and Our Jobs as Americans, James W. Loewen

Another Way to Teach Politically Without P.C.: Teaching the Debate About Patriotism, Gerald Graff

Pledging Allegiance, Walter C. Parker

Patriotism Is a Bad Idea at a Dangerous Time, Robert Jense

Patriotism Makes Kids Stupid, Bill Bigelow

Celebrating America, Diane Ravitch

Teaching Patriotism-with Conviction, Chester E. Finn Jr.

Hearts and Minds: Military Recruitment and the High School Battlefield, William Ayers

Weapons of Fatal Seduction: Latinos and the Military, Héctor Calderón

A Small Space of Sanity, Studs Terkel

Is Patriotism Good for Democracy?, Joseph Kahne and Ellen Middaugh

I Solemnly Swear, Joan Kent Kvitka

Patriotism and Ideological Diversity in the Classroom, Diana Hess and Louis Ganzler

Toeing the Line and the Law: First Amendment Rights in Schools, karen emily suurtamm with Edwin C. Darden, Esq.

"Patriotism, Eh?" The Canadian Version, Sharon Anne Cook

Patriot Acts: This Isn't the First Time, Cecilia O'Leary

Patriotism's Secret History, Peter Dreier and Dick Flacks

Politics and Patriotism in Education, Joel Westheimer

Poetry and Patriotism, Maxine Greene

Patriotism by the Numbers, Cindy Sheehan

The Yoke of Constant Testing

If our elected officials were interested in listening to anyone outside the Business Roundtable or the US Chamber of Commerce, they might see that constant testing has no advantage over beating children into a submissive acceptance of their third-world-in-a-first-world fates. In fact, I think you would find large numbers of children quite willing to forego occasional floggings if they could find relief from the drudgery that has turned their schools into militaristic exercises in futility and failure.

It looks as though the British are on the verge of withdrawing here, too:

Thursday, 01 Mar 2007 09:40

The Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL) has called on the government to remove the "yoke" of national tests.

Commenting after the publication today of the results for key stage three national tests, general secretary Mary Bousted said: "This latest round of yet more statistics from the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) does not help solve the fundamental problems with schooling in England."

She added: "We have become wearily accustomed to this government's 'never mind the quality, feel the width' approach to education."

A review of the curriculum is taking place and government ministers argued it will improve attainment and close the gender gap

Dr Bousted said: "The key stage three review, if allowed to blossom freely, will make schools more interesting for pupils, but would do it far more successfully if the government removed the yoke of constant testing."
Thursday, 01 Mar 2007 09:40 The Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL) has called on the government to remove the "yoke" of national tests.

Commenting after the publication today of the results for key stage three national tests, general secretary Mary Bousted said: "This latest round of yet more statistics from the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) does not help solve the fundamental problems with schooling in England."

She added: "We have become wearily accustomed to this government's 'never mind the quality, feel the width' approach to education."

A review of the curriculum is taking place and government ministers argued it will improve attainment and close the gender gap

Dr Bousted said: "The key stage three review, if allowed to blossom freely, will make schools more interesting for pupils, but would do it far more successfully if the government removed the yoke of constant testing."

"blackmailed by the federal government"

Resist the educational genocide or go along with it in order to keep the school doors open? These are the decisions faced by poor school districts such as Manasssas, Virginia, where school boards must choose whether or not to advocate for children's rights or to accept the money that assures the crushing failure that Spellings's institutionalized child abuse offers these children. From WaPo:

Thursday, March 1, 2007; B05

The Manassas City School Board, which oversees a small system with a large concentration of students who have limited English, this week reluctantly abandoned an effort to defy a controversial federal rule for testing those students.

On Tuesday, the board agreed to comply with the mandate of the No Child Left Behind law to give grade-level reading tests to about 350 elementary- and middle-school students who are not yet fluent in English. Previously, the board had considered resisting the rule through a resolution similar to those adopted recently by school boards in Fairfax and Arlington counties.

Manassas officials said they were swayed by a federal threat to cut off aid for disadvantaged students, a loss that could have been nearly $700,000 in the next school year, according to a U.S. Education Department letter made public yesterday.

"We are being blackmailed by the federal government," Manassas School Board member Curtis W. Wunderly said. Like many other Virginia education officials, Wunderly said that students should not be forced to take tests they can't understand and are all but certain to fail.

U.S. Education Department spokesman Chad Colby replied that the testing is necessary to help teachers identify the academic needs of students with limited English. Most school systems across the country, federal officials say, are following the law.

The action in Manassas was notable because about 35 percent of the estimated 6,500 students in the city's public schools have limited English proficiency. Only Harrisonburg, in the Shenandoah Valley, has a higher percentage of limited-English students among Virginia public school systems, state data show.

A letter from U.S. Deputy Education Secretary Raymond Simon, released by Virginia officials, spelled out how much federal aid for disadvantaged students school systems might lose if they fail to comply with the law: about $2.6 million in Arlington; about $3.1 million in Alexandria; about $1.3 million in Loudoun County; about $6 million in Prince William County; and about $17.5 million in Fairfax County. So far, only Fairfax and Arlington have declared their intention to resist the federal rule. Prince William has said it will reluctantly comply. Loudoun and Alexandria have not taken action.