Majority Ready to Dump NCLB

From Scripps Howard News Servic:

Scripps Howard News Service
Wednesday, May 30, 2007

Nearly two-thirds of American adults want Congress to re-write or outright abolish the landmark No Child Left Behind Act that mandates nationwide testing of elementary students to determine if public schools are performing adequately.

Opposition is especially high among people most familiar with the law, according to a survey of 1,010 adults conducted by Scripps Howard News Service and Ohio University.

Controversy about the law has grown in recent months as Congress begins the debate on whether to reauthorize the measure that President Bush has touted is one of the most important achievements of his administration.

"The No Child Left Behind Act has worked for America's children and I ask Congress to reauthorize this good law," Bush urged legislators during his last State of the Union address.

But dissent against reauthorization has developed within his own party. Fifty-two Republican House members and five GOP senators are calling for a repeal of the law in favor of a more flexible system of achievement standards to be negotiated between the Department of Education and individual states.

"This expensive and largely unsuccessful legislation has broadened the scope of the federal government's role in education," Rep. Tim Walberg, R-Mich., said while introducing his bill.

Participants in the poll were told that No Child Left Behind "requires states to test elementary students to determine if schools do a good job teaching. Critics say the law forces teachers to teach to a particular test. From everything you've heard, do you think the No Child Left Behind Act has been good for public schools or not good?"

Only about a third said they think the law has had a positive influence on public education while slightly less than half said it has had a negative impact and a fifth were undecided.

A few respondents volunteered different answers that were generally critical of the law.

"The schools should have more leeway," said the mother of two public school children from Lexington, S.C.

"It was a good theory, but the implementation has been faulty," remarked another mother with three children from Elmhurst, N.Y.

"No Child Left Behind created unfunded mandates which force teachers to teach to the test," complained a single woman from Tonopah, Nev.

"States should have more control over their education programs," said a mother from Houston, Texas.

Respondents in the poll were also asked: "Based upon everything you've heard, do you want Congress to renew the No Child Left Behind law, do you want Congress to make changes in the law or do you want Congress to cancel the No Child Left Behind law?"

Twenty-three percent said they want the law renewed in its current form, 14 percent want it abolished and 49 percent want it amended. Fourteen percent were undecided. Taken together, 63 percent want the law abolished or amended.

About three-quarters of people who said they are "very familiar" with the law also say they want it altered or abolished, compared to less than half of people who say they are "not familiar" with the measure.

Well-educated people, especially college graduates and those who've attended post-graduate schooling, are especially likely to call for changes to the law. People who have public school children at home are somewhat more likely to want the law altered or abolished than are people who don't currently have children in school.

Although much of the criticism in Congress against the current form of the law is coming from Republicans, the poll found that Democrats in the general public were more likely to want changes in the law than were Republicans.

The survey was conducted by telephone from May 6-27 among 1,010 adult residents of the United States who were selected at random. The survey was conducted by the Scripps Survey Research Center at Ohio University under a grant from the Scripps Howard Foundation.

The survey has a margin of error of about 3 percent, although the margin is somewhat higher when estimating support for the No Child Left Behind Act among different subgroups.

Alfie Kohn on NCLB: Appalling and Unredeemable Experiment

From USA Today:

NCLB law 'too destructive to salvage'

By Alfie KohnThu May 31, 6:28 AM ET

It's time to say in a national newspaper what millions of teachers, students and parents already know: No Child Left Behind (NCLB) is an appalling and unredeemable experiment that has done incalculable damage to our schools - particularly those serving poor, minority and limited-English-proficiency students.

It's a stretch even to call the law "well-intentioned" given that its creators, including the Bush administration and the right-wing Heritage Foundation, want to privatize public education. Hence NCLB's merciless testing, absurd timetables and reliance on threats.

Let's be clear: This law has nothing to do with improving learning. At best, it's about raising scores on multiple-choice exams. This law is not about discovering which schools need help; we already know. This law is not about narrowing the achievement gap; its main effect has been to sentence poor children to an endless regimen of test-preparation drills. Thus, even if the scores do rise, it's at the expense of a quality education. Affluent schools are better able to maintain good teaching - and retain good teachers - despite NCLB, so the gap widens.

Sure, it's senseless for Washington to impose requirements without adequate funding. But more money to implement a bad law isn't the answer.

Indeed, according to a recent 50-state survey by Teachers Network, a non-profit education organization, exactly 3% of teachers think NCLB helps them to teach more effectively. No wonder 129 education and civil rights organizations have endorsed a letter to Congress deploring the law's overemphasis on standardized testing and punitive sanctions. No wonder 30,000 people (so far) have signed a petition at educatorroundtable.org calling the law "too destructive to salvage."

NCLB didn't invent the scourge of high-stakes testing, nor is it responsible for the egregious disparity between the education received by America's haves and have-nots. But by intensifying the former, it exacerbates the latter.

This law cannot be fixed by sanding its rough edges. It must be replaced with a policy that honors local autonomy, employs better assessments, addresses the root causes of inequity and supports a rich curriculum. The question isn't how to save NCLB; it's how to save our schools - and kids -from NCLB.

Education writer Alfie Kohn's11 books include The Schools Our Children Deserve and The Homework Myth

KIPP Cuts and Runs in Buffalo

KIPP, the darling outfit of the privatization-by-charter school movement, has maintained its reputation for generating test scores by dumping those students who can't stomach their prison camp methods. Now it seems that the same strategy is in use by the home office in San Fran as one of its stores in Buffalo shows signs of meltdown. When in doubt, pull out.

Wouldn't it be nice if the public schools had the same luxury? Just shut the doors when the going gets tough? I'll bet all public schools would be successful, then!:

Buffalo’s KIPP Sankofa Charter School, considered a promising alternative for inner-city middle school students when it opened in 1993, is plagued by failure and is fighting for its life.

The school, located in the Central Park Plaza, was recently cited by the state’s Charter Schools Institute for low test scores, high teacher turnover, severe disciplinary problems, poor teacher training and failure to use test score data to guide instruction.

The KIPP Foundation, a school management group based in San Francisco, has severed its ties with the school, and Uchenna Smith, KIPP Sankofa’s founder and director, has resigned.

Unless the school shows dramatic improvement by next fall, the state institute said, it will be closed when its charter expires after the 2007-08 school year or, at best, be given a short term renewal rather than a second five-year license.

A reform plan has been put together to turn the school around, said Samuel J. Savarino, a local developer who became board chairman of the school several months ago.

“We anticipate being able to demonstrate that we have aggressively and effectively addressed the problems you noted that have plagued the school since its inception,” Savarino said in a letter to the Charter Schools Institute, which makes licensing recommendations to the State University of New York.

“Our relationship with KIPP has been unsatisfactory — on both sides — and we are using a variety of local, trusted consultants and advisers to guide our renaissance,” Savarino said.

The school will strengthen assessment of individual students, stress its discipline policy and train teachers in classroom management, reorganize its board of directors and shorten the teachers’ current 10-hour work day, Savarino said.

The institute acknowledged those efforts in a letter to the school last month but said “it is unclear whether these and other actions will result in visible and qualitatively discernible results” before the pivotal fall evaluation. An April 20 letter to KIPP Sankofa from Jennifer G. Sneed, the institute’s senior vice president, said the school’s problems are severe and deeply rooted. For example:

• KIPP Sankofa’s top three administrators were so busy serving as substitute teachers that they were unable to perform their leadership duties.

“The school’s eighth-graders have had four English teachers, three science teachers and two social studies teachers,” it said.

• In a school with fewer than 250 students in grades 5-8, there have been from 12 to 25 referrals to the office per day and 178 suspensions as of late March. In addition, two teachers “resorted to violence in response to disruptive students” and were fired.

• Last year, just 37 percent of KIPP’s seventh-graders who had been at the school at least two years were proficient in English and math.

SUNY on Thursday will consider recommendations from the Charter Schools Institute to allow the school to drop the KIPP title from its name, and to require it to increase its reserve fund to $75,000 from $25,000 to cover any costs it might incur if it is forced to close.

Where is that intrepid investigative reporter, Jay Mathews, when a big KIPP story like this emerges?

CTB/McGraw-Hill Scores Big In NYC

If you thought you had gone insane when you heard the Decider announce his plan in 2001 to test children in grades 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8, then hold onto your straightjacket. New York City has just announced that a new contract has been awarded to Bush family friends so that children in grades 3 through 8 will now be tested five (5) times each year (at a cost of $16,000,000 a year) to get ready for the state test that will then determine if they pass to the next grade or if their school will stay open. Oh yes, don't forget that students in grades 9-12 will be tested 4 times a year.

Is this what Spellings meant this week when she said that NCLB was working? Working to enrich friends in the education-industrial complex and to crush public education? From the NY Times:

Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein announced yesterday that the city school system would spend $80 million over five years on a battery of new standardized tests to begin this fall for most of New York City’s 1.1 million public school students.

The contract awarded to the testing giant CTB/McGraw-Hill will involve a significant expansion of exams, known as periodic tests, which monitor students’ progress and are supposed to help predict how students will perform in the annual state exams. Mr. Klein’s announcement immediately rekindled the debate over whether such testing is emphasized too much or is even a useful tool for teachers.

Pupils in Grades 3 through 8 will be tested five times a year in both reading and math, instead of three times as they are now. High school students, for the first time, will be tested four times a year in each subject. In the next few years, the tests will expand to include science and social studies. . . .

Fire Spellings, Hire this Guy

From Time:

Most state education officials grumble that the pressure-packed annual tests and rigid adequate yearly progress (AYP) targets engendered by the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law are flawed means of measuring student proficiency, raising academic standards, holding schools accountable and fostering learning. But since the penalty for defying the law is loss of federal funds, most treat NCLB's prescriptives like bitter medicine they can't afford to spit out. All, that is, except the iconoclasts who run the public schools in Nebraska.

Eschewing the Washington-created remedy, they have developed a homemade model called the School-based Teacher-led Assessment Reporting System (STARS) that has yielded impressive results, been praised by education scholars and attracted interest from Edward Kennedy, NCLB's Senate custodian. "We just told the Department of Education that if they were really trying to [serve] all kids and close the proficiency gap that high-stakes testing isn't the way to do it," says Doug Christensen, state commissioner of education. "We told them we would show them that we had a better way."

Under Nebraska's model, the state sets curriculum standards, but gives teachers free reign on instruction and lets local school districts design their own tests to measure how well students are meeting the grade-level norms. And unlike the vast majority of states, which rely solely on multiple choice exams to measure student achievement and determine yearly progress, Nebraska's students also write essays as part of a unique statewide writing exam. Districts can also include student oral presentations, demonstrations and projects in their battery of assessments. Christensen says the writing requirement gives state officials confidence that the multiple choice test scores are a true reflection of actual learning. Since the system was installed eight years ago, he says, the statewide writing scores on average have lined up "almost perfectly" with results on both math and reading proficiency tests. "Ours is a bottom-up model," Christensen says. "It begins in the classroom with instruction that's aligned to our standards and extends to assessments developed locally that are tied to how well students apply concepts and problem solve, rather than simply memorize facts and figures and dates that they can't remember 10 minutes later."

Overall last year, just over 87% of all elementary students met federal accountability goals in reading, tying Nebraska with Mississippi for the best scores in the country in that subject area. In math, more than 87% of Nebraska primary schoolkids reached their federal goals. Only the subgroup of special education students narrowly missed the targets in reading and math. Among middle schoolers, almost 87% passed in reading and nearly 85% did in math. Special education students and English language learners were the only subgroups in those grades scoring below the federal bar.

For Nebraska officials, high doses of local input and low regard for memorization skills are points of distinction, and pride. And the consistently high scores their students receive reassure them that — despite results on national reading assessments of fourth graders in 2005 that were more than 50 points lower than state-test-score levels, for instance — they are indeed proficient in reading, math and writing.

Adding to their confidence is the fact that the bosses in Lincoln exercise quality control over the testing protocols. Each year the state hires a panel of out-of-state experts to grade each district's assessment plan to insure that it matches the state curriculum standards, reliably measures proficiency and meets other technical criteria. Additionally, teams of in-state teachers and principals interview district officials as part of a peer review of their test-making methods. "What we've got that no one else has is a cadre of teachers in the state who are as assessment literate as any educators on the face of the earth," Christensen says. "They know how to teach to an outcome, to measure the outcome with high technical quality, and they know how to use that information to improve instruction."

The Nebraska model has been praised by the National Council of Measurement in Education, the National Center for Fair and Open Testing and education testing researchers at Duquesne University. Sen. Edward Kennedy met with state officials earlier this month as part of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee's deliberations on revisions to NCLB and was impressed by the results they've achieved, his staff says. And now that the state has added on-site peer reviews to the annual evaluation process, Christensen says the ultimate deciders at the federal Department of Education have assured him that STARS passes NCLB muster. "Nebraska is a place where the concepts of family and community still work," Christensen says. "Our public schools are embedded in those communities and those families. So why wouldn't we first trust those folks? We believe you create the capacity at the local level to do the right thing in the first place, and then you don't need the state or federal government looking over your shoulder."

50 More Years! 50 More Years!

From the Guardian May 30,2007:

WASHINGTON (AP) - President Bush envisions a long-term U.S. troop presence in Iraq similar to the one in South Korea where American forces have helped keep an uneasy peace for more than 50 years, the White House said Wednesday. . . .

From Mother Jones March/April 2003:

. . . As vital as the Persian Gulf is now, its strategic importance is likely to grow exponentially in the next 20 years. Nearly one out of every three barrels of oil reserves in the world lie under just two countries: Saudi Arabia (with 259 billion barrels of proven reserves) and Iraq (112 billion). Those figures may understate Iraq's largely unexplored reserves, which according to U.S. government estimates may hold as many as 432 billion barrels.
. . . .

Anne Joyce, an editor at the Washington-based Middle East Policy Council who has spoken privately to top Exxon officials, says it's clear that most oil-industry executives "are afraid" of what a war in the Persian Gulf could mean in the long term -- especially if tensions in the region spiral out of control. "They see it as much too risky, and they are risk averse," she says. "They think it has 'fiasco' written all over it."

Gorman Learning Centers Shut

Another charter cheat has shuttered its "learning centers." Background here and here.

The Associated Press

Article Launched: 05/30/2007 12:07:24 PM PDT

REDLANDS, Calif.- The financially troubled Gorman Learning Center planned to close all of its campuses by Thursday and move its headquarters to Los Angeles County before September, officials said.

The charter school will continue to counsel students and offer home-schooling support, but intended to shutter the learning centers in seven cities where students used to visit for group-learning sessions, Gorman board President Kim Clark said this week. Those sites are in Redlands, Rancho Cucamonga, Lancaster, Pasadena, Pomona, Saugus and Whittier.

"I'm very pleased with the reconfiguration," Clark said. "I think that it's going to be a more efficient operation and I think we'll emerge as a stronger organization because of it."

The cutback will entail laying off 87 employees, officials said.

The closures came after a state order trimmed 40 percent of the public money the school was anticipating for this year and next.

An audit requested by the Los Angeles County Office of Education found that Gorman had claimed $7.7 million in undeserved state funding over three years.

The school is appealing the audit findings and the funding reduction.

About 2,000 students enrolled in Gorman this year, according to the California Department of Education.

Republican Senator to Spellings: Back Off

Lamar Alexander has been a reliable water carrier for Spellings and the Bush assault on education, but now it appears that even Alexander has had enough. As this piece from Inside Higher Ed makes clear, the former UT President has put a shot close over ED's bow as a warning to back off of what amounts to an attempted federal takeover of higher ed accreditation:

For months, ever since the U.S. Education Department began an aggressive push to change federal rules governing accreditation, higher education lobbyists have been urging members of Congress to rein the department in. Using the federal regulatory process to force accreditors to set minimum levels of acceptable performance by institutions on measures of how much their students learn, and to ensure that the institutions they oversee do not discriminate in their transfer policies against academic credits of students from nationally accredited institutions, exceeds the executive branch’s authority and tramples on Congress’s, college groups have argued.

Although lawmakers and Congressional aides in both parties sent Education Secretary Margaret Spellings an early warning last fall not to overstep her bounds in the process known as “negotiated rule making,” they have remained publicly silent on the regulatory process since then. But that silence was broken on the Senate floor late last week, when Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) said he would introduce legislation that would prevent Spellings and the department from issuing final rules on accreditation until after Congress passes a bill to renew the Higher Education Act.

“The department is proposing to restrict autonomy, choice, and competition,” Alexander said in his Senate speech. “Such changes are so fundamental that only Congress should consider them. For that reason, if necessary, I will offer an amendment to the Higher Education Act to prohibit the department from issuing any final regulations on these issues until Congress acts. Congress needs to legislate first. Then the department can regulate.” . . .

NJ Urban Charter Schools Get 32% Less Than District Schools

As a result of a number of New Jersey court decisions over the past 25 years that are known as the Abbot Decisions, funding discrepancies between poor urban districts and suburban districts have been greatly diminished in New Jersey. Now it would seem that what the Court giveth, the NJ DOE taketh away from children attending the new popular urban chain gang charters.

What, indeed, makes charter schools such a popular choice among neoliberal and neoconservative policymakers, alike, is the fact that they are cheaper, not that they offer any educational benefit over the public schools they would replace. What we get then is the same low quality (or lower) for a much lower price--32% lower in the case of urban charters in NJ. Press release from the Education Law Center in Newark:

NJDOE REGULATION EXCLUDES CHARTER STUDENTS FROM ABBOTT REMEDIES

Newark, NJ – May 24, 2007

Students in charter schools in New Jersey’s urban or "Abbott" districts receive 32% less to fund the basic or "foundational" education program than their fellow students in district schools, according to a report authored by Montclair University Professor Katrina E. Bulkley. The report also pinpoints the cause of the funding gap: a regulation adopted by the NJ Department of Education that excludes charter school students from receiving the remedies mandated for urban students and schools in the landmark Abbott v. Burke education equity rulings.

The report, which examines funding levels in charter schools serving students from Abbott districts, was released today by ELC.

In addition to the substantial disparity in foundational funding, the report also makes several key findings:

• More than 80% of NJ charter schools students reside in Abbott districts, and 78% of all charter schools are located in those districts.
• Abbott Charter schools serve high numbers of poor students and students of color. The percentages are comparable to those found in Abbott district schools.
• In 2004-05, charter schools received an average of $7,648 in foundational education funding per student, which is approximately $3,650 (or 32%) less per pupil than the "suburban parity" amount required by the Abbott rulings.
• Abbott charter schools are precluded from seeking additional state aid, based on need, to provide full-day kindergarten, tutoring and other "supplemental", or "at-risk", programs to address the effects of student poverty.

The inequitable treatment of Abbott charter students stems from the refusal of NJDOE to include charter schools under the provisions of the Abbott rulings, which require parity in funding and other programs to ensure urban school children a "thorough and efficient education." The NJDOE’s Abbott regulations explicitly state that, "an Abbott school district shall not include any charter school" N.J.A.C. 6A:10A-1. The Legislature, however, has never sanctioned this exclusion.

To address this funding gap, and ensure all Abbott students – those in district schools and charter schools – receive the funding and other programs to which they are constitutionally entitled, ELC is recommending:

• The NJDOE immediately remove the charter school exclusion from the Abbott rules, and phase-in Abbott parity funding over the next two years
• The NJDOE promptly assess the "particularized needs" of Abbott charter schools for preschool, full-day kindergarten, tutoring and other "supplemental" programs, and establish a mechanism to provide adequate funding for those needed programs
• The Legislature authorize the NJDOE to directly provide funding to charter schools for its students, and eliminate the current requirement that Abbott districts transfer funding to charter schools
• The NJDOE establish "collaborative networks" of educational leaders in Abbott district schools and charter schools to share data, information and strategies on improving curriculum, instruction and educational outcomes for all Abbott students

Education Law Center Press Contact: David G. Sciarra Executive Director email: dsciarra@edlawcenter.org voice: 973 624-1815 x16

Hemorrhaging of Public Funds the Wild, Wild West Wing

Salon has an nice piece on the end of the "gilded age for the loan industry."
A clip:

May. 28, 2007 | Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings sounded like a reformer when she testified on Capitol Hill earlier this month over recent revelations of waste, fraud and bribery in the $85 billion-a-year student loan industry.

"Federal student aid is crying out for reform," said Spellings, speaking before the House Committee on Education and Labor. "The system is redundant, it's Byzantine, and it's broken."

But education experts weren't buying it -- and neither were Democrats. Spellings glossed over the fact that the Department of Education, which she took over in 2005, had known since the start of the Bush administration about questionable financial practices and had only recently asked lenders to stop them. The committee's new Democratic chairman, California Rep. George Miller, whose attempt to stop the flow of cash had been thwarted while Republicans controlled Congress, rebuked Spellings for her inaction. Either she or her predecessor, Miller said, "could have stopped this hemorrhaging of money that [lenders] were not entitled to." For six years, there had been what one House staffer called a "Wild West atmosphere of no enforcement at the department," and it had cost taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars.

From a 2001 internal Education Department memo warning the incoming Bush administration that lenders might be trying to improperly influence college financial aid offices, to a department whistle-blower, to numerous reports outlining a virtual hemorrhaging of the department's money, for nearly six years there have been signs pointing to something rotten in the state of the student loan industry. But time and time again, according to congressional staffers and Washington education experts, the department leadership and key members of Congress looked the other way.

"The day Bush was elected was the beginning of the gilded age for the loan industry," says Barmak Nassirian, of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers. .. .

On the Passing (and Failing) of Another Testing Season

Aptos High School teacher, Claudia Ayers, has this excellent piece published in the Santa Cruz Sentinel on May 20, 2007:

Anyone who has been moved by the fictional Sylvia Barrett in Bel Kaufman's "Up the Down Staircase," or Sidney Portier's vision of E.R. Braithwaith's teaching experience in "To Sir, With Love," or Frank McCourt's brilliant recent contribution "Teacher Man," will appreciate that teaching is as much art as science.

Anyone paying the least attention to the Bush approach to manipulating public spending to benefit corporations and cronies at the expense of the public should know by now that No Child Left Behind [NCLB] was written by people who have never taught in public schools. School administrators who yearn to "take back their schools" from its mandates or who complain about it being underfunded need to step up and do more to protect their charges by joining forces to expose it for what it is - another law with an Orwellian name that, instead of providing for children, will deliberately leave millions of children and young adults behind while cranking tens of billions of dollars into the coffers of test-writing and for-profit education corporations.

School board members and school administrators know there is a problem, yet they spend entirely too much time working within the confines of the problem instead of doing something that will fix it. Congress must amend this straitjacket of a law by actually supporting school children, authentic learning and teachers.

Today we have accountability mania. Ten or 20 years ago, headlines were made on a slow news day when it was discovered a handful of kids graduated from high school who could not read. Clearly, schools were failing abominably and needed to be held accountable. You know the rest of the story; now we test kids every other day in school, we don't promote them [even though we know this is tantamount to condemning them to becoming dropouts], and we don't let them graduate without passing the High School Exit Exam. We start school in early August to better attempt to finish detailed curricular standards before the tests are given in the early spring [well before the school year is actually over]. All too often we take away art, music and recess because this cuts into test prep time, but we can't afford these programs anyway because paying for all the standardized tests and the test-prep software has used up what few dollars come our way.

None of this has actually improved schools overall, and schools were never as bad as one might think based on the fear-mongering generated by some uninformed politicians. It is now far, far more important that education become more rigorous than it is to make it enjoyable or meaningful.

Kids have their scores right in their faces. These are typically "normed" scores; a 36th percentile score means 35 out of 100 kids scored lower than you did, and 64 out of 100 scored higher. Our kids know that they get "As" when they score 90 percent or higher in their classes, "Bs" for 80 to 89 percent and so on. Of course, a perfectly "normal" child will score at the 50th percentile on a standardized test, and this child will immediately think "I am so-o-o stupid, I failed this test," instead of "Fine, I'm a typical kid, I think I'll go outside and play." I have seen children who burst into tears when they get standardized scores in the 80s because they thought they were "A" students and this proved they were not. These tests, in fact, prove nothing.

One standard deviation from normal is the group in a population that is the "most typical." This accounts for very nearly 70 percent of our children. In other words, the "normal" kids have scores on standardized tests that range from about 15-85 percent. These, if you will, are all typical students. Those above and below this range are two or three standard deviations from normal. They may be English-language learners, students with a learning disability, or, on the other side of the distribution, students with a special talent for successfully whizzing through tests.

What do test scores and grades, for that matter, really tell you? Not much.

Parents, you sabotage authentic learning when you ask how well your child is doing, rather than asking about what your child is learning. Grades, actually, are not motivational, and plenty of studies back this up.

Standardized test scores will not give you a lick of information about your child's ability to stick with a problem, to be creative, to be a good problem-solver, to be a good citizen or a good listener, to speak bilingually, to have and support friendships, to be of high moral fiber, to participate well in democracy, to have artistic or athletic talents, to develop and rely on inner strengths, to care about the world and all living things as an interconnected web, to enjoy reading books, to thoroughly research a topic, to have a good sense of humor, to be self-reliant, or to be a valued participant in your family. These scores will only tell you how well your child takes standardized tests.

If the testocrats are not stopped, millions of kids who have done everything else right will not graduate from the schools where they have spent four years passing classes, because they are not good standardized test-takers. Whether a student is a dropout or is pushed out of high school, the results are the same: They will comprise half of the heads of households on welfare and an even higher percentage of the prison population. It costs society five to 10 times as much to imprison a person for one year as to educate a school-age child.

Let's hold the Bush administration accountable for something and take back the education of our children. Let's work to make school a place where children love to go by completely reforming NCLB. Support authentic learning; take the money back from testing companies, private tutors and publicly supported private schools.

Authentic learners enjoy the freedom to pursuit their passions; children constantly exposed to consequences, rigor, standards and high-stakes tests know only fear. Public policy is correct when it points toward freedom and devastating when it points toward fear. I was once told in a job interview that standardized testing was a necessary evil. I amazed myself by calmly responding that I didn't think evil was ever necessary. I didn't get that job, but I hope I have gotten your attention.

Military-Style Voucher School Serves Children Bread and Water

The privately-owned La Brew Troopers Military University School rakes in a million dollars of public money each year for the poor children whose parents send them there with the school vouchers they receive. While some would no doubt applaud the preparation of the next generation of warriors for the perpetual war, I am wondering if even Chief Choice Officer, Spellings, would tsk-tsk over this abuse and thievery:

The school is known for its "boot camp" regimen, including frequent rounds of exercise and the use of physical sanctions against misbehavior, sometimes including such things as carrying school desks around the block. Students often wear fatigues to school.

The state report lists more than a dozen ways that corrective action was needed in how La Brew handled subsidized lunch and breakfast programs. Records were not kept properly, and the school claimed payment for lunches for 18 children who did not have applications to participate in the program on file.

Now the AP reports that "bad children" regularly are underfed as a form of punishment, sometimes receiving bread and water if the offense warrants.

I am wondering if the right-wing privatizers who are all about choice would choose to send their own kids to this military work house--or if they would own give their own children a choice in the matter. Give the children a choice, and see how much public money would then remain in this hell hole:

The state has ordered a military-style private school to stop punishing students by serving them smaller lunches and is withholding money for food programs until the problems are corrected, according to a letter by the Department of Public Instruction.

The state has halted its share of the money for lunch and breakfast for low-income students until the La Brew Troopers Military University School stops withholding food as punishment, Helen Pesche, child nutrition program consultant for the state, wrote in a letter to the school dated May 21.

The letter said that inspections at the school found students were sometimes punished by being served lunch without either meat or a substitute and a vegetable and fruit.

A DPI report said one day when inspectors visited the school, 24 students were served lunches that did not include a sloppy joe on a bun and canned fruit, like their peers ate. Instead, the report said the children were given a slice of white bread, half a cup of mashed potatoes and a half pint of milk.

The report said students told a DPI employee that when someone is really bad, they only get bread and water.

Withholding food is unacceptable for schools participating in the National School Lunch Program, a federally assisted program that subsidizes school food, the report said.

“This method of discipline must stop immediately,” the report said.

State records show La Brew has 162 students from kindergarten through the sixth grade as of January. The school has participated in the private school voucher program since the 2003-04 school year, and got a little more than $1 million this year in public money.

The report also said the school needs has more than a dozen ways it needs to correct how it handles the subsidized lunch and breakfast programs, to which the state also contributes.

For instance, the report said records were not kept properly, and the school claimed payment for lunches for 18 children who did not file applications to participate in the program.

The school also claimed payment for lunch on two days in February when it was closed due to bad weather, the report said.

Earth to Kristof, Come In Please

Mr. Kristof's family field trip to China is over, and he is back at the Times enthusing over all that his totalitarian Chinese government handlers allowed him to see there. For someone who shared a Pulitzer in 1990 with his wife for coverage of the Tiananmen Square massacres, which the Times now quaintly refers to as "Tiananmen Square democracy movement," Kristof seems to have forgotten about those atrocities as he now embraces the new China that is on the march to erase history as it builds an economic juggernaut based on slave labor and environmental degradation. (If you happen to read this, Mr. Kristof, do not think I am offending the Chinese people, for Yahoo and Google and Cisco have already provided the capitalistic-communist Chinese government with the tools to block this post, or any other "offensive" website from Chinese readers. Don't worry, however--your columns are getting through loud and clear.)

According to Mr. Kristof, China has a lot to teach us in terms of how to deal with the flooding of American markets with Chinese goods produced by throwaway workers earning 30 cents an hour in factories owned by multinational operations such as Wal-Mart. It's too bad Mr. Kristof apparently missed last week's Frontline piece on PBS, The Tank Man (watch it here). If he had watched it, he would have seen that the Chinese economic miracle is the result of a never-ending supply of disposable workers who earn 10-40 cents an hour to make all the draperies, fine bed linens, cutlery, electronic gadgets, and other finished goods that he and his family buy for their Manhattan home. I wonder is the Kristofs visited Tooth Brush City, Tennis Shoe City, or Condom City.

Apparently, Kristof attributes the rise of Chinese economic power to a rise of China's educational preparedness, where, according to Mr. Kristof, peasant schools teach math more advanced than the Daltons or the Horace Manns of Manhattan. It is clear that Mr. Kristof was allowed to visit a peasant village that was lucky enough to still have a school. As shown in The Tank Man, free schooling in China is a thing of the past, and the many peasant children in the countryside can no longer afford to attend. These are the children who grow up and who are starved toward the factory towns to earn slave wages if they are lucky. And health care? Government health care has simply disappeared in many parts of rural China, leaving adults and children to depend on folk medicine or die.

But these are the realties that are kept from the Kristofs of the world, the elites who are wined and dined and promised Olympic tickets in the glittering new urban centers of China, where children who are as coddled as Kristof's own grow up with the privileges of prosperity and wealth, children who become university students eager for a chance to earn their own million. These are the same university students we see near the end of The Tank Man, students who are very, very good at math, but who do not know who the tank man is when handed a photo showing that lone individual standing before the power of a totalitarian dictatorship in 1989. By the way, Mr. Kristof, if you had searched Google or Yahoo pages during your China holiday, you would not have found the tank man. With the help of Google, Yahoo, and Cisco, Chinese Internet Police have eliminated the tank man.

Mr. Kristof closes today's column with this threadbare banality that would seem to impose more Chinese-like schools as the way to staunch the incoming flood of cheap goods and the outgoing flood of American jobs:

So let’s not respond to China’s surpluses by putting up trade barriers. Rather, let’s do as we did after the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik in 1957: raise our own education standards to meet the competition.

Mr. Kristof, sir, do you think it was more math and science in American elementary schools that led to landing a U. S. citizen on the moon just 12 years after Sputnik in 1969, or do you think it could have had something to do with the political and economic will by business and government to focus a national strategy toward a shared national goal? Which is something entirely lacking at this juncture in this country, as oligarchs such as Bill Gates and Eli Broad push on toward our own homegrown totalitarianism headed by corporate socialists, Christian theocrats, and bought political hacks who have their own history to scrub and their own shame and corruption to conceal while torturing the powerless and a creating a social sorting machine that assures the powerless remain so. If today's opinion piece serves as an example, there are plenty at the New York Times whose selective memories now put them the proper orbits to assist. Earth to Kristof, come in please.

"Raise our education standards to meet the competition?" How callow, how hollow, how utterly disrespectful of our intelligence!

A Job Designed to Be Impossible

The following post showed up on the ARN list, and I asked Oakland teacher, Craig Gordon, for permission to post it. Thanks, Craig:

I am also replying rather late to this thread, but the very burnout and overwhelm Scott mentions below has something to do with it. Our job as teachers is designed to be impossible, and that's what I want to emphasize here. So I will start with PD and end with the fundamental issue connecting PD to everything else.

Scott describes well the cycle of failure to sustain high quality professional development rooted in the same cycle of failure throughout public education: systemic underresourcing. I have seen it consistently at every high school where I have taught in Oakland over the past sixteen years: PD is squeezed into an already-packed schedule, usually at the end of an exhausting day, so that even the best type of PD is likely to collide with resentment and competing needs and concerns. And, as Scott notes, the PD is usually planned and implemented in a top-down manner or by a handful of (often hand-picked) teachers, so the work is unlikely to address the most relevant PD needs.

I could go on about the failures, but most of us on this list know them well. The important point is that it all comes down to a systemic lack of resources, which in this case means a lack of time to plan or engage in meaningful, effective professional development. I happen to think the most valuable type of PD is collaborating with other teachers in developing curriculum, teaching classes, and in addressing schoolwide issues. (Addressing schoolwide issues can only be meaningful, though, if we have the power and the resources to carry out decisions.) An English teacher and I have started working this year on interdisciplinary curriculum for our 11th grade students (in English 3 and U.S. History, which I teach). If we had the time to actually discuss goals, methods, specific students, pedagogy, and more, I think it would be the most wonderful PD of my career. I've seen glimmers of this in our brief opportunities to sit and discuss our common work. But for the most part, we have to meet after school and communicate by phone or email in the evening. We're already exhausted by everything else we're doing (he's a new teacher with four subject preps!), so we just catch as catch can.

Our union has proposed to the district through various channels that new teachers be given an additional conference period to plan, observe, get support, and collaborate with veteran teachers. What a wonderful idea, the district (taken over by the state for the past four years) responds, but of course, it's "too expensive." Then we point out that it would not be "too expensive" if the district (and state) would join us in demanding that Oakland's transnational corporations and $33-billion-dollar-a-year Port be taxed appropriately to fund our rapidly disintegrating school district. The district's reply: "This is more of a funding issue, as opposed to a solution."

So around and around we go, chasing our tail in search of solutions in every area from PD to dropout/push out rates, from class size to crumbling facilities: It's the money! It's the money! It's the money!

And why are Eli Broad, Bill Gates, George Bush, and Ted Kennedy all working together to charterize, privatize, and destroy public schools from Chicago to Oakland to New Orleans? It's the money--- and the power, because under capitalism money is power and vice-versa. Destroy public education, milk it for the short term profits and reap the long-term benefits of controlling the skill sets and ideology of future generations. And maintain power by scapegoating one group or institution for systemic problems and then pretending to implement reforms. It's a tried-and-true recipe, with the final instructions being to repeat the cycle every one or two decades.

We won't tinker our way out of this snowballing disaster by improving PD a little here and there. It's not even sufficient--though it's completely necessary--to publicize the malevolent process that is dismantling public school systems in virtually every urban area of the country. We must also point to an alternative process, a solution to the problem; otherwise most people will throw up their hands in confusion and disgust, because so many of the criticisms of public schools today resonate with their experience. It won't matter that the "concern" expressed by Gates and Broad for poor children of color is laughably hypocritical if it's the only visible "alternative" to what is. We have to pose an alternative vision and show that it is NOT "too expensive."

In Oakland, teachers and others recently picketed the Port of Oakland (again, that's a $33 billion dollar annual revenue stream) to stop war shipments to Iraq and demand money for schools and social services. The ILWU unofficially supported us and longshore workers stayed out that day; the operations at a major shipper (Stevedoring Services of America, SSA) were shut down. In Colombia, 280,000 teachers struck this past week to protest a planned cut in the education budget.

We have to start planning and organizing these kinds of actions to break through the endless tail chasing and to capture the imagination of the majority of people in this country who want to see real educational reform, but are offered crumbs and phony "solutions."

Craig Gordon

Updated 9:45 PM

UMass Honors Former War Salesman, Andy Card

See Andy Card, former war salesman, receiving his honorary doctorate at UMass commencement, while hundreds boo and faculty protest on stage. The story at Raw Story.

War Against the Weak: The Sequel

I am as regularly impressed by the amount of education news coverage in Milwaukee as I am by the degree of media blindness to the larger problems of poor people in Milwaukee--problems that cannot be separated out when trying to understand education issues that are, indeed, manifestations of the larger problems that remain invisible to those whose refusal to even acknowledge those problems serves to help rationalize harsher and harsher performance demands placed upon those least able to comply.

When social historians look back in 50 years, no doubt they will see the current education reform regime of punishment, disenfranchisement, and oppression of the weak as a direct descendant of the unfulfilled eugenics agenda of the previous century that was driven by another "scientific," though no less archaic, form of social sorting.

In the meantime, the larger problems go largely unreported or are simply ignored by those who care and those who pretend to care, both of whom are now locked arm in arm in a national crusade to get tough and tougher and toughest in a malicious treatment of the more obvious symptoms of systemic brokenness among the black, the weak, the immigrant, and the poor.

Instead of focusing on the social, environmental, and economic problems that make learning difficult to impossible, the current bit of hand-wringing in Milwaukee is focused once again on the widening academic achievement gap. Education reporters once more cluck and shake their heads as yet another keep-on-the-sunny-side superintendent insists, Decider-like, on staying the course, even as the schools would seem to be on the brink of explosion or implosion, and even as the educators and children in them seem on the verge of a collective nervous breakdown.

The big scoop missed once more by the Journal-Sentinel reporters? As family incomes fall, so do test scores, and all the testing and all the threats that can be piled on the other tests and threats will only serve to push the schools and their children closer to eventual violent upheaval.

First, here is a clip from the Journal-Sentinel, and what follows then are a few very interesting facts from a recent report by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, New Indicators of Neighborhood Need in Zipcode 53206:

Three years ago, the gap between white and black high school sophomores in Milwaukee Public Schools in reading proficiency was 33 percentage points. This year, it was 35 points.

In math, the gap was 36 points three years ago and 42 this year, according to the data released Tuesday by the state Department of Public Instruction and MPS.

Two years ago, 37% of black sophomores in MPS were rated proficient or advanced in reading, based on their performance on the statewide standardized tests. This year, it was 31%. In math, the figure is 18%, down from 20% in each of the prior two years.

The gaps and scores between white and Hispanic sophomores are not quite as bad, but are still large.

In none of five subject areas tested did at least 40% of MPS 10th-graders as a whole rate as proficient this year.

. . . . But the message is clear: When it comes to high school in MPS, raising the achievement levels and closing the huge ethnic gaps in success remains a severe challenge, and overall answers have been elusive. For all the focus on improvement locally and nationally in recent years - it's the driving idea behind the federal No Child Left Behind law and has spawned innumerable reforms in Milwaukee - the results are just plain weak. Flat. Troubling.

. . . .

MPS Superintendent William Andrekopoulos said Monday that the signs of success at lower grades are evidence that the education plans now in place are beginning to work. It is important to stay the course, he has often said in recent months.

. . . .

So what else might be the answer?

More money? Per pupil spending is actually up, but staffing is down at most high schools, which means class sizes are larger in many cases and there are fewer adult figures around. A pinch on what is actually being provided for kids is visible in many schools.

Better safety? Efforts have increased in that area, with some signs that fresh steps are helping. But the problem of student behavior is huge, and the violence of the community keeps seeping into the schools.

Better-prepared kids? The dysfunctional and often just plain awful circumstances of many students' lives are a huge problem for schools. But if the solution starts at home and starts at the earliest ages, what do we do now about all these apathetic and/or angry teenagers who are reading far below grade level when they hit ninth grade?

Better teaching? That's the subject Andrekopoulos is stressing. As a visit to most any high school in MPS shows, the quality of teaching varies widely, from terrific to terrible, and overall efforts, local and national, to raise the quality have been mostly talk and not much action.

More concern? From low turnout at parent conferences to the almost total absence of audiences and speakers at three public hearings on the $1.2 billion MPS budget for next year, people every day are sending messages that they don't care, don't know what to do or don't think the education situation is worth their time. Yet it is hard to dismiss the observation that almost every successful education situation in the country, from suburbs to central cities, is one where there is an energized community around kids and schools.

So many questions. What a mystery this school failure remains!! What, oh what, is to be done!!

Now here are a few selected quotes from UW-M's New Indicators of Neighborhood Need in Zipcode 53206 on the problems that are ignored while we continue to blame the schools for not getting done what the schools can never do alone.

As New Indicators . . . points out in the introduction, "the 53206 ZIP code neighborhood serves as a bellwether for poverty changes in Milwaukee and nationally:"

Income and Poverty

The poverty guidelines provide the federal government’s estimate of the income level families require to meet their basic needs and are used to determine eligibility for federal support programs.

In 2005, the federal government set these guidelines at $12,830 for a two-person family, $16,060 for three persons, and $3,260 for each additional person in the family. These standards were used to determine the number of family tax filers showing income below the poverty line.

Over half of working families have incomes below poverty.

For the 4,824 single parent families with dependents, in zipcode 53206 in tax year 2005 about 48% of single tax filers with one dependent showed adjusted gross income (AGI) below the poverty level ($12,830 for two persons).

Over half (58%) of single filers with 2 dependents showed AGI below ($16,090 for three persons) and 63% (or more) of filers with three or more dependents had income below poverty.

When the number of filers claiming the state and federal earned income credit (EIC) was considered, the percentage of single parent families living in poverty was reduced to about 41% of filers with one dependent and 42% (or more) of filers with three or more dependents.

About 18% of married tax filers with one dependent showed adjusted gross income below the poverty level. About 24% of married filers with two dependents reported AGI below the poverty level, as did 37% (or more) of married filers with 3 or more dependents. When inflation is considered, the real income earnings of residents in zipcode 53206 dropped by 18.5% over the 5-year period.

In 2005, income up 10% [for single filers] from the average of $15,902 in the 2000 tax year. After controlling for inflation the incomes remained nearly flat (with only an 0.5% improvement).

In 2005, income up 2% [for married filers] from an average of $40,447 in the 2000 tax year. After controlling for inflation, the average income for married tax filers showed a 6% decline.

When inflation is considered, the real income earnings of residents in zipcode 53206 dropped by 18.5% over the 5-year period.

Housing

78% of recent housing loans to owner-occupants are subprime or high interest.

Housing prices jumped 50% and more in last 3 years. 60 subprime lenders operating in Zipcode 53206.

Work

90% of Jobs in the Zipcode Are Held by Non-Residents

Majority of Workers at 53206 Jobsites Are White, Resident Workforce Is Black

Public Assistance

The number of families receiving income support (AFDC or “W-2”) in July 2006 was the lowest seen since the W-2 program began and 87% below the 1994 levels.

The number of families receiving food stamp/Food Share benefits dropped from 4,612 in March 1994 to 2,934 in April 2000, or a 36% decline.

Incarceration

Since 1993, the number of individuals being released from state adult correctional facilities in zipcode 53206 has grown dramatically from 201 in 1993 to 879 in 2005, a 336% increase. Many [53%] subsequently return to prison. For most major crime areas, the numbers released each year in 53206 have tripled, although for individuals charged with “drug offenses only” the numbers have increased at an even higher rate (a 493% increase from 1993 to 2005).

For the 30 to 34 year old age group, 21% of the men from 53206 are reported in a state DOC facility, another 42% were previously incarcerated in a state correctional facility, and only 38% were never in an adult state correctional facility.

4% of ex-offenders have a valid driver’s license.

63% are not high school grads.

Jeb's Legacy: Testing Parlor Tricks and Fraudulent Test Scores

From the Palm Beach Post:

By Frank Cerabino

Palm Beach Post Staff Columnist

Friday, May 25, 2007

To: All believers

From: The Jeb Bush Legacy Disaster Response Team

Subject: FCAT under attack!

Bad news, disciples. The FCAT's out of the bag on last year's third-grade reading scores.

In case you haven't heard the news, our historic success in third-grade literacy has been exposed as a testing parlor trick.

What an outrage - that somebody would make this unscripted public disclosure. How dare they attempt to tarnish an education plan that has already been self-graded as an A-plus-plus!

Why do they hate education so much?

This would have never happened if Jeb's team was left in place for legacy protection. But the purpose of this memo isn't to lament about the past. It's to spring into action, so we can protect the future.

The first order of business is to distance Jeb from those fraudulent reading scores from last year.

This won't be easy, because he made a point of citing the bogus results as evidence that standardized testing works. So we'll be busy erasing his tracks on this.

Start by shredding. If we can get rid of all the evidence, it may be possible to pretend that Jeb was never very impressed at all with the inflated results that three-quarters of the state's third-graders were reading at or above grade level.

Begin by rounding up copies of the May 1 press release Florida's Department of Education issued last year. It features Jeb and his Education Commissioner John Winn crowing about the reading gains as "the largest number in state history."

Jeb is quoted: "What an outstanding year of progress for our third-grade students and teachers. They deserve five gold stars."

If we're unsuccessful in destroying evidence of that news release, our fallback position will be spin control.

We can say that Jeb quoted himself out of context. And that what he meant to say was: "They deserve five gold stars if it turns out they actually took a fair test and not one engineered with so many simple questions that satisfactory performance in reading among third-graders jumped up by more than the three previous years combined."

Jeb also credited the dramatic gains in test scores to his statewide reading program, Just Read, Florida!, which began in 2001.

"We're shattering myths again," he said. "I think we're proving we're a state where all kids can learn."

In your revision of the historical record, please amend that last sentence to read "where all kids can learn, or at least be given the appearance of learning through the application of a carefully designed test to show incremental progress."

We also have a photo problem on our hands. Unfortunately, Jeb posed for photos highlighting the fake reading gains.

You'll want to wipe out all those staged photos of Jeb and Winn standing in front of a big poster board that shows the number "46,000" in big red letters, which allegedly was the number of third-graders readers who had been brought up to speed by the magic of the FCAT.

And you'll also want to wipe out that reference to the dramatic gains in third-grade reading in the press release that announces the passage of his most recent education plan. Both houses in the Florida Legislature voted on that plan just three days after Jeb held the news conference to announce the bogus gains in third-grade reading.

Not that there is any connection to the bogus FCAT results being praised three days before Jeb's education bill came up for a vote. That's merely a coincidence.

Now, get to work. And hurry. Because of this mess, there's going to be a first-ever audit of the FCAT. So there's no telling how busy we may be.

The Queen of "Cheery Vagueness"

The only problem with this Dan Brown piece is that, in the end, he seems to suggest there is some reason to only mistrust Republicans on NCLB:

I watched Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings's interview with Jon Stewart on Tuesday night's Daily Show with my jaw on the table. Her cheery vagueness and then double-talk backpedaling when Jon Stewart asked direct and important questions struck me as weird and frightening for someone with so much power over American children's lives.

Stewart cut to the heart of the No Child Left Behind crisis by asking if she observed the problem that the law was "moving the schools just for the [standardized] tests?"

Spellings nodded as if she really understood what he was saying and then recited a non-sequitur talking point: "There is some of that, people saying that we're narrowing the curriculum, but I know that if we're not teaching kids how to read they can't do social studies or history or any of that other stuff."

Earth to Secretary Spellings: teaching to the test and teaching reading are not even close to the same thing! Under NCLB, schools live and die based on test scores, causing administrators and teachers to fixate on test preparation. Kids get force-fed a stultifying litany of test-taking-strategies packets, and many understandably detach from school. Indeed, the content of their school days has no relevance for preparing them for life, only for preparing for a test. This is not a successful formula to teach kids to read, keep them attending school, or "any of that other stuff."

Stewart asked what is the most vexing part of the education puzzle, and if given a magic wand, what would Spellings change with a wave.

The Education Secretary instantly went for the company line: "Low expectations, what the president calls the soft bigotry of low expectations...Seriously, we have to expect more from our kids."

WHO HAS THE LOW EXPECTATIONS? TEACHERS? PARENTS?

Spellings seemed uncomfortable with Stewart's question and replied, "I think a lot of times the system does, especially for kids that have been left behind already... poor kids... and that's what we have to be about!"

What a hollow promise to make to a generation of struggling, at-risk students and their families. The White House clearly sent Spellings on a PR mission to plug No Child Left Behind as it nears renewal, but she either wasn't ready or wasn't willing to actually break down the serious debates on the core of the legislation.

A cursory background sketch on Spellings reveals her never to have earned a degree in education or been a classroom teacher. Her official government bio begins, "As the first mother of school-aged children to serve as Education Secretary, Spellings has a special appreciation for the hopes and concerns of American families." Forget qualifications on how to educate a nation; she's a mom!

The most important detail about Secretary Spellings is that she was the political director for George W. Bush's first gubernatorial run in Texas, and then served as a senior political adviser for him from 1995 to 2000. Get past the charming Texas drawl and you reveal an inner-circle Bush loyalist/ideologue.

America needs to make a racket on fixing No Child Left Behind and demanding a rigorous discourse from our presidential candidates. The government people at the podium right now don't deserve our trust. Imagine the movie preview guy's voice booming: "From the creators of the War in Iraq...From the people who ardently support such American heroes as Alberto Gonzales, Paul Wolfowitz, and Scooter Libby... Comes a bighearted policy that will leave...no...child...behind!"

Watch the Daily Show interview here.

Ohio Charter Founder Gets the Orange Jumpsuit

From the Cleveland Plain Dealer:

The Rev. Mark Olds, who gained a national reputation for helping ex-cons, is headed back to prison himself after a jury found him guilty Wednesday of stealing $1.4 million from the state.

The jury in U.S. District Court needed less than four hours to convict Olds on all 62 counts, including mail fraud, money laundering and tax charges.

The minister at Second Ebeneezer Baptist Church lied about the number of students enrolled at the Cleveland Academy of Math, Science and Technology, a charter school he started in 2002.

Olds claimed he had up to 650 students when he never had more than 150, Assistant U.S. Attorney Arturo Hernandez said. That resulted in an overpayment of $1.4 million from the state. . . .

Another FCAT Blooper and A New "Panel of Experts"

How corrupt and incompetent does it have to get before parents say, Hell NO? Last year's staggering gains would have never been challenged without this year's staggering losses:

State education officials said Wednesday they botched one of last year's FCAT tests, potentially affecting everything from school grades and student retention to whether Florida schools passed federal standards under the No Child Left Behind Act.

As a remedy, they promised that from now on, an independent panel of experts would audit every FCAT each year to make sure there are no future glitches.

"This is going to be a new practice from this point forward, " Education Commissioner Jeanine Blomberg said in a press conference this morning. "We feel like this is one more step in terms of best practices."

Wednesday's announcement overshadowed the release of FCAT scores in reading, math and science and promised to put the FCAT - already unpopular with parents and teachers - even more under the microscope.

Give Sen. Kennedy and the Dems an Earful on NCLB

I got this personalized letter today from my good friend, Senator Kennedy, who is asking my opinion on the important issues of the day. Believe it or not, when you go to the survey, there is a question (and comment box) on "Education Reform." Please take the time to let Senator Kennedy hear from you on NCLB by clicking on the survey link in the letter:

Dear Jim,

One of the most important goals of the Committee for a Democratic Majority is to create on online community that can work together to build on our victories last November.

I also wanted the Committee to give you -- the Democratic Majority across our country -- an opportunity to speak out on the issues that you believe are the most important.

I want to make sure we're doing all we can to achieve our shared goals. To do so, it would also be very helpful to know a little more about you.

Will you let us know what you think we should be doing, and a little more about yourself?

http://www.democraticmajority.com/survey

The Committee for a Democratic Majority should not just represent my views -- but the views of millions of Americans who stood up last year and insisted that our country change direction. From fighting to end the war to reforming our broken student loan system, I think we've made a good start, but I know we can do more.

This survey is meant to help us learn who you are and what you want us to do as we move closer to the 2008 election cycle. I need your frank views as you answer these questions. The more accurate the results are, the better we will be able to focus our efforts.

Please take a minute to answer the Committee for a Democratic Majority survey:

http://www.democraticmajority.com/survey

Thank you for your help in putting America back on track. I look forward very much to your responses.

Sincerely,

Senator Edward M. Kennedy

Boys' Rights and the Gender Segregation Movement

With re-subordination of women one of the chief planks of the right-wing socio-political agenda, it is not surprising to see the use of pop psychologists and huckster-theorists to justify the spread of schools segregated by gender. Take this one line from a long piece in The Detroit Free Press as an example of non-scientific mush that provides the rationale for turning back the gender clock to the 19th Century:

. . . The research Strean cites shows that boys tend to be right-brain dominant, making them better able to deal with spatial thinking and more mechanically inclined. Testosterone tends to make them more aggressive and competitive.

In girls, the left brain, which deals with verbal skills, tends to be dominant. Physiological differences, research shows, also make girls' brains more inclined to regulate anger and aggression and more involved with emotion and memory.. . .

If your crap detector hasn't gone off yet, you'd better check your batteries. According to the emerging orthodoxy, girls are perfectly suited to the testing factories and the intellectual and behavioral chain gangs that we have converted schools into, but boys need environments where their juiced cerebellums can put them into action, rather than passivity.

For an antidote to this stupidity, have a look here at Jaana Goodrich's short piece from American Prospect 10/22/06:

REMEMBER TITLE IX, THE FEDERAL LEGISLATION that guarantees equality by sex in education? It was passed in 1972, on the heels of racial integration, and with a rather similar rationale: Separate was not deemed to be equal either in law or in educational outcomes. By 1995, only three sex-segregated public schools remained.

Fast forward to September 2006, and what do you find? More than 40 totally sex-segregated public schools and another 200 with sex-segregated classes in topics other than sex education or sports. What happened? Have we backpedaled on gender equality in education?

Conservatives would say that we have gone too far in the other direction. Christine Hoff-Sommers regards the coeducational classrooms as battlefields and boys as the losers of these battles. A new movement advocating more single-sex schools explains why: biological determinism. According to pop psychologists Michael Gurian and Leonard Sax, prophets of this movement, girls and boys have such inherently different brains that they must be educated separately. Boys, from Mars, thrive on hierarchical structure, abstract thought, and stress. Girls, from Venus, thrive in relaxed situations (take off those shoes), do best with very concrete examples, and can't take stress. Sax wants teachers to yell at boys and to provide sofas for girls. Because of the blue and pink brains, you know.

Too bad that the scientific evidence underlying these recommendations is unclear at best and nonexistent at worst. Mark Liberman, on the Web site Language Log, takes apart some of the bad science Sax uses in his popular book Why Gender Matters. He also points out that any average sex differences in learning styles are small and swamped by individual variations within each sex. Likewise, Janet Hyde of the University of Wisconsin reviewed 46 meta-analyses of sex differences in cognition and found the two sexes more similar than different, and a recent international study of single-sex schools failed to show them outperforming coed schools for either boys or girls. A study by Education Sector, a Washington-based think tank, found that on average, boys are doing just fine, with increasing test scores and more college degrees, though low-income boys deserve more help.

If this is true, where did the idea of a boy crisis come from? From sloppy research and our discomfort with the idea of girls doing even better, the study answers. Those supporting single-sex schools these days have modeled their campaign on the Title IX effort of three decades ago: They claim that the coeducational school system is discriminatory--but this time the victims are male. Just consider the list of Gurian's recent publications: The Minds of Boys, The Wonder of Boys, The Wonder of Girls, The Good Son, and What Stories Does My Son Need. Sax's new book, to be published in 2007, is Boys Adrift: What's Really Behind the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys. Single-sex schools are expected to solve this so-called boy crisis in education.

So far, the Bush administration has been all too eager to apply itself to this conservative crisis. Thus, in 2004, it proposed changes to the way Title IX can be interpreted within the No Child Left Behind program, and it is also offering funds for school districts wishing to experiment with single-sex education. (States from Louisiana to Michigan have expressed interest.) We are soon to hear more about these new interpretations. If they become funding guidelines, it would be perfectly OK for a school district to offer a single-sex option as long as the other sex is offered something "substantially" equal. As far as I know, nobody knows what "substantially" means here, and that is the worry. Would it be "substantially" equal to offer one gender smaller class sizes and more teachers than the other sex? What about offering the two genders different content in their classes, perhaps based on unscientific stereotypes about boys and girls?

None of this probably bothers the Republican Party's socially conservative base. Social conservatives already view gender roles as innately determined and single-sex schools fit admirably into their sexual abstinence agenda. Neither are conservative anti-feminists likely to be upset over these developments: Anything that pokes a finger in the eye of second-wave feminists with their claims of equal treatment for girls and boys is fun for this group.

No, it's for the rest of us to worry whether separate can ever mean equal. Poor Title IX. How low you have fallen.

For a more extensive smackdown of the "imperiled male theory," see Michael Kimmel's excellent piece in Dissent, who points out that, where education really counts (the Ivys), males still dominate. Here is the heart of Kimmel's argument:

. . . .If boys are doing worse, whose fault is it? To many of the current critics, it's women's fault, either as feminists, as mothers, or as both. Feminists, we read, have been so successful that the earlier "chilly classroom climate" has now become overheated to the detriment of boys. Feminist-inspired programs have enabled a whole generation of girls to enter the sciences, medicine, law, and the professions; to continue their education; to imagine careers outside the home. But in so doing, these same feminists have pathologized boyhood. Elementary schools are, we read, "anti-boy"-emphasizing reading and restricting the movements of young boys. They "feminize" boys, forcing active, healthy, and naturally exuberant boys to conform to a regime of obedience, "pathologizing what is simply normal for boys," as one psychologist puts it. Schools are an "inhospitable" environment for boys, writes Christina Hoff Sommers, where their natural propensities for rough-and-tumble play, competition, aggression, and rambunctious violence are cast as social problems in the making. Michael Gurian argues in The Wonder of Boys, that, with testosterone surging through their little limbs, we demand that they sit still, raise their hands, and take naps. We're giving them the message, he says, that "boyhood is defective." By the time they get to college, they've been steeped in anti-male propaganda. "Why would any self-respecting boy want to attend one of America's increasingly feminized universities?" asks George Gilder in National Review. The American university is now a "fluffy pink playpen of feminist studies and agitprop 'herstory,' taught amid a green goo of eco-motherism ..."

Such claims sound tinnily familiar. At the turn of the last century, cultural critics were concerned that the rise of white-collar businesses meant increasing indolence for men, whose sons were being feminized by mothers and female teachers. Then, as now, the solutions were to find arenas in which boys could simply be boys, and where men could be men as well. So fraternal lodges offered men a homo-social sanctuary, and dude ranches and sports provided a place where these sedentary men could experience what Theodore Roosevelt called the strenuous life. Boys could troop off with the Boy Scouts, designed as a fin-de-siècle "boys' liberation movement." Modern society was turning hardy, robust boys, as Boy Scouts' founder Ernest Thompson Selon put it, into "a lot of flat chested cigarette smokers with shaky nerves and doubtful vitality." Today, women teachers are once again to blame for boys' feminization. "It's the teacher's job to create a classroom environment that accommodates both male and female energy, not just mainly female energy," explains Gurian.

WHAT'S WRONG with this picture? Well, for one thing, it creates a false opposition between girls and boys, assuming that educational reforms undertaken to enable girls to perform better hinder boys' educational development. But these reforms-new classroom arrangements, teacher training, increased attentiveness to individual learning styles-actually enable larger numbers of boys to get a better education. Though the current boy advocates claim that schools used to be more "boy friendly" before all these "feminist" reforms, they obviously didn't go to school in those halcyon days, the 1950s, say, when the classroom was far more regimented, corporal punishment common, and teachers far more authoritarian; they even gave grades for "deportment." Rambunctious boys were simply not tolerated; they dropped out.

Gender stereotyping hurts both boys and girls. If there is a zero-sum game, it's not because of some putative feminization of the classroom. The net effect of the No Child Left Behind Act has been zero-sum competition, as school districts scramble to stretch inadequate funding, leaving them little choice but to cut noncurricular programs so as to ensure that curricular mandates are followed. This disadvantages "rambunctious" boys, because many of these programs are after-school athletics, gym, and recess. And cutting "unnecessary" school counselors and other remedial programs also disadvantages boys, who compose the majority of children in behavioral and remedial educational programs. The problem of inadequate school funding lies not at feminists' door, but in the halls of Congress. This is further compounded by changes in the insurance industry, which often pressure therapists to put children on medication for ADHD rather than pay for expensive therapy.

Another problem is that the frequently cited numbers are misleading. More people-that is, males and females-are going to college than ever before. In 1960, 54 percent of boys and 38 percent of girls went directly to college; today the numbers are 64 percent of boys and 70 percent of girls. It is true that the rate of increase among girls is higher than the rate of increase among boys, but the numbers are increasing for both.

The gender imbalance does not obtain at the nation's most elite colleges and universities, where percentages for men and women are, and have remained, similar. Of the top colleges and universities in the nation, only Stanford sports a fifty-fifty gender balance. Harvard and Amherst enroll 56 percent men, Princeton and Chicago 54 percent men, Duke and Berkeley 52 percent, and Yale 51 percent. In science and engineering, the gender imbalance still tilts decidedly toward men: Cal Tech is 65 percent male and 35 percent female; MIT is 62 percent male, 38 percent female. . . .

ir·rel·e·vant [i-rel-uh-vuhnt]: Jay Mathews High School Survey

Congratulations, Palo Alto Schools, for refusing to join Mathews' self-serving and never-ending promotion of the College Board:

When it comes to being listed among the nation's elite schools, the Palo Alto Unified School District is just saying no.

In declining to participate in Newsweek magazine's annual ranking of high schools, Palo Alto says it hopes to strike a blow against shallowness, student stress and unwanted publicity.

Other schools have declined to answer the survey, which ranks the top 1,200 or so high schools in the nation, based solely on the percentage of students taking advanced-placement or International Baccalaureate tests. But this may be the first time an entire district has dropped out, survey founder Jay Mathews said.

Newsweek's 2007 list was posted on its Web site Sunday and is being published today in its May 28 issue.

This year, 23 local schools made the list. Last year, Gunn High School in Palo Alto ranked 79, and Palo Alto High School ranked 361. But this year, prompted by concern at both high schools, the Palo Alto district refused to send in Newsweek's required forms.

"We don't want to be a part of it," said Gunn Assistant Principal Tom Jacoubowsky.

Said Marilyn Cook, associate superintendent of the district: "It's a very simplistic premise that the quality of a school can be measured by the number of AP tests students take."

Gunn neither ranks students nor chooses valedictorians.

"We're trying to do things to avoid and alleviate student stress," such as reducing pressure to take advanced placement classes, Jacoubowsky said.

Every year after the Newsweek education issue hits the stands, "we get calls from all over the world asking, `How can I get my child into your school?'" Jacoubowsky said.

But the school isn't eager to attract people who want to judge it solely on that criterion, he said.

"It's nice to be on the list," said Nikita Dodani, a Gunn senior and student body president. "But it adds to stress for students" by focusing on the importance of taking Advanced Placement classes. .. . .

/ɪˈrɛləvənt/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation

More Testing = Less Historical Understanding and Knowledge

Last week the academic darling of the Far Right, Diane Ravitch, commented at Huffington Post on what seems to her the inexplicable lack of historical knowledge by today's school kids. As an historian, herself, and big time supporter of the "accountability" madness for the past 25 years that has succeeded in shoving school curriculums into a crushing black hole, one can imagine how Dr. Ravitch would rather ignore and forget her own complicity in the further stupidifying of the American population when it comes to understanding their past.

Well, Dr. Ravitch--here is a concise answer to what puzzles you, more succinct than I could ever say it myself:

Re “Students Gain Only Marginally on Test of U.S. History” (news article, May 17): The idea of a “test” has again hijacked the public debate on education. Because of No Child Left Behind and overzealous states and cities, curriculum and teaching in English and math classrooms have been reduced to test prep, tests, test scoring and test review.

Are multiple-choice tests what we want for the teaching of history? Shouldn’t we clamor instead for policies that support in-depth inquiry, use of multiple sources and rigorous analysis of historical evidence?

In a letter signed by two dozen leading historians, Eric Foner, the Columbia University professor and past president of the American Historical Association, argues: “The use of such testing as a primary assessment tool ... de-emphasizes the analytical reading, writing, and thinking abilities required by the discipline ... Students may not learn to make informed judgments central to the interpretation and understanding of history.”

Testing has become the problem, not the solution.

Ann Cook
Phyllis Tashlik
New York, May 18, 2007
The writers are, respectively, co-chairwoman of the New York Performance Standards Consortium and director of the Center for Inquiry in Teaching and Learning.

Philadelphia Charter Schools On the Ropes

With Paul Vallas on his way to New Orleans with his school privatization schemes and his magic for creating ballooning deficits, it looks like the charter scam in Philadelphia is on the ropes. From The Bulletin:

Philadelphia - School Reform Commissioners last week deferred 11 charter school applications and denied eight others. Three of the deferred charter school applications were on the agenda for approval. Commissioner Martin Bednarek put the brakes on these approvals by wondering aloud if the district could afford new charters when it is confronting a $173 million deficit. According to Gov. Ed Rendell and Mayor John Street, it was the one thing the board got right at its May 16 meeting.

"We commend the objections made by the mayor's appointee, Martin Bednarek, with respect to the deferral approval of new charter schools," the governor and mayor said in their joint press release criticizing the SRC's decision to appoint interim administrators without consulting them.

"This district is facing a minimum of $190 million deficit. Additional charter approvals would only balloon the deficit further. Unfortunately, the SRC must first focus on closing this deficit before it turns its attention to any new options for students."

They added, "Recognizing that a significant deficit has already accumulated under the SRC's watch, we believe that surprise decisions that worsen the deficit are unwise and unacceptable, particularly in light of the requests the SRC is now making for substantial increases in financial support from the city and the state."

The three charter school applications that were on the agenda for approval but were deferred instead were Camelot Charter School, an alternative high school for 750 students, the 700-student Pathways-in-Education Charter High School, and the Philadelphia Community Charter School, a 750 student charter.

UNCF Speaks Out on Loan Company Parasites

Michael Lomax in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

. . . . As president of the United Negro College Fund, the country's largest provider of minority scholarships (we're the "A mind is a terrible thing to waste" people), I have spent my career helping students get college educations. A majority of our students are low-income and the first in their families to attend college. If anyone deserves help in going to college, they do.

Unfortunately, their need makes them the prime targets of a private student loan industry whose business model is to take advantage of their youth, vulnerability and lack of financial literacy to turn an easy profit and saddle these young borrowers with debt that will take them much of their careers to repay.

The sponsored link on Google for Campusdoor.com, for example, tempts students with promises to approve loans of up to $120,000 in 60 seconds and deliver cash within five days. There's no mention of scholarship opportunities like the federal Pell Grants or low-interest, federally subsidized loans.

This is a problem that will only get worse. If current trends continue, tomorrow's students will need to borrow more than today's students and will graduate with even larger debt burdens.

Where can they go to learn to make the prudent financial decisions that will enable them to get the education they need without taking on a debt load that will burden them for years? They need a voice of their own.

The task force that Spellings has announced and the bill the House has passed are good places to start. But the task force needs to look at all the factors that combine to exploit student borrowers, not just the current scandals; and it should include representatives of a range of stakeholders, not just federal employees. We need to give students the financial education they need to choose the financial assistance package that makes the most sense. We need to require that lenders provide balanced advice, not commercials or get-money-fast pitches, to college-bound youngsters.

The financial services industry will discover that what's true in retail is true in lending: The educated consumer is their best customer.

The Bread and Water Curriculum of the Lower Caste

From the ContaCosta Times:

The leather sleeves of his varsity jacket resting on the table, seventh-grader Brandon Wilson copied down the vocabulary words with his left hand. Formidable. Cacophony. Impenetrable.

He wrote out the pronunciation using a guide ("a, as in pad, bat"), and, with a stubby yellow pencil that had no eraser, he copied the meanings of the words from the New Webster's Student Dictionary.

This is one of three language arts classes Brandon takes every day at Adams Middle School in Richmond, and his second with teacher Deborah Brittain.

Across the room from the flat-screen computers where they take their quizzes, adjacent to the classroom's diminutive library, three massive metal pots sit on top of the fridge -- the last vestiges of the room's prior purpose: home economics.

Brandon flipped the pages of the dictionary.

"I wanted to take art or wood shop," Brandon said. "I'll get an elective next year."

Under federal pressure to increase scores on English and math tests, many low-achieving schools in the Bay Area and across the country are loading up students with two or even three periods of math and English and abandoning electives such as art, music and shop.

Most students at Crespi Middle School in Richmond take no history class, teachers say, because they are in multiple remedial math and English courses, casually known as double blocking. Nearly a third of Glenbrook Middle School in Concord takes an extra English or math class during school. . . .

Cutting Subsidies for Loan Profiteers?

A clip from Inside Higher Ed:

Democratic Congressional leaders reached agreement late Tuesday on a 2008 budget resolution that greatly increases the likelihood that lawmakers pass legislation this year that will cut financial support for student loan providers and use the savings to increase financial aid for students. Predictably, the move brought praise from student groups and howls of protest from lenders.

The Congressional action came in a seemingly arcane procedure in which House and Senate leaders, at the urging of the heads of their chambers’ education committees, included what is known as “budget reconciliation” language in the spending blueprint they plan to pass this week. Under that language, the House Education and Labor Committee and the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee commit to developing legislation by September that would produce at least $750 million in budget savings from the mandatory programs under their jurisdiction. . . .

Refusing Federal Call to Dumb Down College

Thank you, Dr. Sullivan:

CANTON, N.Y. (AP) _ The president of St. Lawrence University used a commencement speech on Sunday to champion liberal arts education and criticize federal education officials for an agenda that will "dumb down" U.S. higher education.

Daniel Sullivan reminded the 551 graduates that they came to the upstate New York campus for an education "in the liberal arts," not a "professional education, or technical education, or vocational education _ it is education for life, education that inspires students to be lifelong learners."

Singling out U.S. Education Department Secretary Margaret Spellings, Sullivan went on to say a federal commission's report last year on the future of higher education is a "national embarrassment."

He acknowledged that some of the criticisms from the so-called "Spellings Commission" are valid, but "the medicines proposed for curing the problems will in most cases make things worse."

Sullivan, president of St. Lawrence since 1996, will serve next year as chairman of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, an organization of 1,100 institutions.

Promoting "liberal education" is among the association's initiatives because it has become "more and more necessary for almost all kind of work and life in a modern society like ours," he said.

An association survey of U.S. business leaders cited by Sullivan found they "reject a higher education approach that focuses narrowly on providing knowledge and skills in a specific field" and favor "a balance of a well-rounded education and knowledge and skills in a specific field."

Sullivan said the federal commission report lacks detail on what a "high-quality, 21st Century education" should be, doesn't value faculty and would replace the current college accreditation system with standardized test results _ "a one-size fits all federal government constructed form of accreditation" _ rather than peer reviews.

WaPo and NY Times Hammer Spellings

Before Margaret Lamontagne Spellings had her executive makeover, she operated out a secretive office in the West Wing, almost an invisible yet ever-present force in helping Sandy Kress and Reid Lyon and the other "Mayberry Machievellis" shape the punishing and abusive testocracy that would come to dominate a federal education policy grounded in corruption and cronyism.

She was there when the Oregon Mafia was put in charge of force-feeding to the nation a 19th Century reading program called Reading First that would line the pockets of insiders, and she was there when the bloodsuckers of the private student loan business lined up for their cuts of the billions in guaranteed federal dollars. And she was there when the impossible-to-achieve test targets of NCLB were devised to make sure that the majority of public schools fail, just as she was there when the voucher, charter, and corporate tutoring schemes were operationalized.

It is time to fire this bunch of thugs and thuggettes and to start over. It just took the national media 7 years to figure that out. Better late than never, as they say.

A clip from the Times editorial yesterday:

The United States Department of Education has been rightfully drawn (but not yet quartered) in Congress for failing to prevent the kickbacks, payoffs and self-dealing recently uncovered in the student loan business. Now it turns out that the department also mismanaged the federal Reading First initiative, the cornerstone of the No Child Left Behind Act, which requires states to improve reading instruction in exchange for federal education dollars. . . .

And from the Post today:

. . . . Ms. Spellings and the Education Department, however, could have better investigated and publicized the manner and scale of the collusion that some lenders were engaged in. And why wasn't there a greater sense of urgency when she was an adviser at the White House drafting education policy? Ms. Spellings is right, though, that the system needs a lot of work beyond tightening ethics rules. Student loans have long needed a fundamental reexamination -- and that means doing more than just streamlining "byzantine" procedure.

Why, for example, should taxpayers continue to fund hefty subsidies to private loan companies when the Congressional Budget Office and the Office of Management and Budget have both concluded that the federal government's direct loan program can do the same job at a smaller cost to the federal treasury? Recent misbehavior only bolsters the arguments for lowering or eliminating the subsidies that prop up a public-private arrangement seemingly engineered to waste money.

2007 Teachers of the Year on NCLB

Teachers, Congressmen, Parents, lend your eyes and ears: From YouTube.

NCLB Profiteering History by Mandevilla

Bookmark this page. It is a remarkable feat and should win any major award for blog entry series. Thanks, Mandevilla.

Action Strategies from ER

From the Educator Roundtable Newsletter:

We would like to each of you to send and email to the following news figures:

Kieth Olberman countdown@msnbc.com

Amy Goodman mail@democracynow.org

Arianna Huffington scoop@huffingtonpost.com

Please use the subject heading "Saving Public Education, Saving Democracy." We believe this message will resonate with all 3 individuals, and we believe that 4,014 emails [ER Newsletter recipients] in their inbox will get their attention.

We simply ask that you share your concerns about the legislation, and we ask that you encourage these individuals to read our research and make our national movement a national story.

Please put this on your "to do" list(s)!

We also encourage you to participate in a telephone conversation with your representatives.

March, Write, Boycott, Act Up to End NCLB Child Abuse

As Senator Kennedy and Congressman Miller lead their respective committees in considering right now the future of NCLB, it is imperative that all concerned either call or write a snail mail letter (addresses and phone numbers here) this weekend to these very powerful individuals calling for repeal or at least these changes:

End arbitrary and unrealistic “Adequate Yearly Progress” (AYP) requirements used to punish schools not on track to having all students score “proficient” by 2014. AYP should be replaced by expectations based on real-world rates of improved student achievement. Academic progress should be measured by multiple sources of evidence, not just standardized test scores.

Reduce excessive top-down testing mandates. The requirement that states assess each student every year in grades three through eight (and once in high school) should be reduced to once each in elementary, middle and high school. Over-testing takes time away from real teaching and learning.

Remove counter-productive sanctions. Escalating punitive consequences, which lack evidence of success, should be eliminated. These include requirements to spend money on school transfers and tutoring, as well as provisions calling for the replacement of teachers or privatizing control over schools.

Replace NCLB’s test-and-punish approach with support for improving educational quality. This includes holding schools accountable for making systemic changes through locally controlled professional development and family involvement programs. Federal funding should be more than doubled so that all eligible children receive support.

After that, get some friends together as did Jane Fendelman, and take to the streets in front of your Board of Education or your neighborhood school or your Congressman's district office:

The Arizona Republic
May. 16, 2007 05:10 PM Parents, students and a counselor are protesting in central Phoenix this week decrying high-stakes testing that they claim creates anxiety for elementary school children.

The small group is picketing each day this week at the southeast corner of 12th Street and Indian School asking governing school board members to ban AIMS test and homework for kids younger than sixth grade.

Jane Fendelman, a Valley private counselor and one of the protesters this week, said she sees more young clients than ever stressed over the tests and excess homework.

They are third to fifth grade students who she claims are overwhelmed by all the work. The educator-turned-counselor blames AIMS for turning classrooms into what she calls "jails." . . .

Pearson Testing's Multiple Crashes

Ah, yes--so many dollars to be made and so few hands to gather them up. As publishing/testing behemoth, Pearson, was buying up eCollege.com this week for $538 million in order to prepare for the next generation of real profits in the virtual world of phony education, they could not keep the school testing going down in Virginia, where the State Dept. of Ed. green light was on as students sat idly at their workstations:

. . . .The $2.3 billion-a-year testing industry has been under intense strain because of the increase in testing under the five-year-old law. "The system is buckling under the pressure," Toch said. "The industry isn't keeping up."

Pearson has provided services for Virginia's online testing for several years, but this is the first year that it contracted for paper tests as well, said company spokesman David Hakensen. He said company officials were analyzing the cause of Tuesday's problems.

A flashing green traffic light on the state Education Department's Web site yesterday indicated that the system was operating smoothly. Department spokeswoman Julie Grimes said that by mid-morning, 66,000 online tests were underway with no problems.

Many testing administrators said they were thankful for a glitch-free day, adding that when the online tests work, they work really well. Video-game-trained teens prefer the computer format, they said, and test results come back much more quickly.

But frustrations have emerged in the past week.

At Massaponax High School in Fredericksburg, testing has been interrupted twice in recent days because of troubles with Pearson's online system. Nearly 200 students lost geometry or algebra tests last week, and 19 remain on standby to take an alternative test.

"Can you imagine?" said Massaponax Principal Joe Rodkey. "The whole school prepares for this. The teachers and the kids all year long, and we have all kinds of tutoring sessions just beforehand. . . . And they are all pumped and primed and ready to go, and then bam! the system goes down." . . .

And as we know, if they have to take the test next week, they will surely have forgotten most of what they "knew."

And now this new incident:

An online glitch interrupted state-required testing for 2,400 Virginia students for 20 minutes on Thursday afternoon, the third such mishap within a week, state education officials said.

Some local school officials said they will scrutinize test results to determine whether the series of interruptions took a toll on the scores.

"With a high-stakes test, there's a lot on the line. Kids get understandably upset if things get interrupted," said Wayde B. Byard, spokesman for Loudoun County Public Schools. "Down the road, we will have to look at the academic integrity of these tests."

Students this month are taking Standards of Learning tests that are used to determine whether schools comply with state standards and measure up under the federal No Child Left Behind law.

The federal law requires math and reading tests for students in grades 3 through 8 and once in high school. Schools face sanctions if they don't meet annual benchmarks and improve their scores over time. Virginia laws also require students to pass end-of-year high school exams to graduate.

State officials said technicians from the testing vendor Pearson Educational Measurement, based in Iowa, have worked long hours to respond to the problems. But the glitches have compounded stress for many students who prepare all year for tests and for administrators who must work overtime to schedule and reschedule exams. . . .

They call the test the SOL (Standards of Learning) in Virginia. Pearson has returned that acronym to its original meaning.

Boston Teachers Mobilize to Fight NCLB

Hundreds of teachers, parents and concerned citizens packed the Boston Teachers Union Hall on Tuesday to mark the launch of an action-oriented campaign to end the testing mania of No Child Left Behind.

Monty Neil of FairTest told the audience “we need a new federal law” because NCLB is “disastrously flawed” and masks the deeper problems facing our nation. He urged every person in the room and teachers across the country to make phone and write to Senators Kennedy and Miller as they work over the next several weeks to craft changes to the five-year-old law.

The event was sponsored by Education Action, Jonathan Kozol’s newly formed non-profit organization, and by FairTest. Kozol, the keynote speaker, raged against a policy that turns teachers into “drill sergeants for the state.” He called those who punish poor black, Latino and special education students and hold them accountable for scores on a standardized test “sociopaths and sadists.” Kozol, the author of Shame of the Nation, the Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America, said schools are more segregated today than they were in 1968:

There is something outrageous and unconscionable about senators and congressman holding an 8-year-old girl accountable for passing a standardized test when they don’t provide the same preschool education and health care that they give to their own children.

Kozol characterized the climate in Title 1 schools across the country under NCLB as a “reign of terror” as teachers and administrators are afraid to speak up and are forced to abandon real, meaningful learning to drilling to improve test scores. He said “children are being indoctrinated in the acquiescence of their own subordination, as they are being force fed mini chunks of Balkanized cognition.”

Kozol is taking his fight to Washington and is hoping that parents, teachers and concerned citizens will begin to speak up, and to practice civil disobedience, and make their voices heard as reauthorization of NCLB moves forward.

Josiane Hudicourt-Barnes, a former teacher who participated on the panel, spoke about the injustice and unfairness of NCLB as more failing schools are being turned over to private interests and making way for vouchers. Although teachers and administrators find themselves in a pressure cooker under the impossible mandates of 100 percent proficiency and constantly moving targets, they are afraid to speak up: “Principles of democracy do not apply to public school employees and teachers fear for their jobs.”

Kozol will be releasing his latest book, Letters to a Young Teacherthis Fall at the same time that Education Action will launch its national campaign to end the testing mania. He hopes it will mobilize and inspire a new generation of teachers to reclaim a public education system that has been hijacked by corporate interests and politicians in Washington. These are the politicians and business leaders who continue to scapegoat public schools, teachers and students for the deep-rooted problems brought on by increasing poverty and inequality that plague our nation. Kozol challenged these corporate and political reformers to spend one week teaching in a classroom.

Following Kozol's call to arms, smaller action groups discussed strategies and tactics for political action. Educator Roundtable was among the action group sharing their agendas and collecting signatures for the repeal of NCLB.

ED Issues Non-Denial in Reading First Email Charge

From Raw Story:

The Department of Education is rejecting allegations that its employees illegally conducted official business on private, non-archived e-mail accounts but without issuing an outright denial that such accounts could have been used.

An independent watchdog, Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington, accused the department of violating federal record-keeping laws because employees exchanged e-mails regarding a reading program from accounts not maintained by the department. CREW representatives said a department official and an attorney in its office of general counsel told them about the private e-mail accounts, but a department spokeswoman Katherine McLane released a statement late Wednesday calling the assertion "inaccurate."

"(CREW lawyer Dan) Roth's portrayal of the conversation is simply wrong on very important facts," McLane said in a prepared statement sent to RAW STORY late Tuesday. "...No one at the Department suggested that officials use private e-mail accounts for official business during those conversations."

McLane also noted department policy "does not allow access to most outside web-based email from its computer system," but her statement does not explicitly deny that department officials conducted government business on private accounts. Calls to McLane seeking clarification were not immediately returned Thursday.

CREW was seeking e-mails and other correspondence between department officials, the White House and educational publishers related to the Reading First program that is part of President Bush's No Child Left Behind Act. A Congressional report released earlier this month found conflicts of interest within the program. Government contractors hired to promote the reading program were drawing paychecks from educational publishers whose material they were selling school districts as part of the government initiative, the Associated Press reported at the time. . . .

Reading First's "Less than Candid" Kame’enu Out at ED

From Ed Week:

A former adviser to the federal Reading First program will leave his current position at the U.S. Department of Education at the end of next month, the agency announced one week after a congressional report questioned whether he had gained financially in that previous job by promoting certain commercial products.

Edward J. Kame’enui will resign as the commissioner of special education research at the Institute of Education Sciences, which is a division of the department, at the end of June, the IES said in a May 16 statement.

Mr. Kame’enui had been serving under a two-year agreement at the institute, which was set to expire at the end of next month, and he had already planned to leave the institute at that point, IES spokesman Mike Bowler said. He will return to his faculty position at the University of Oregon, in Eugene, according to the statement released by IES Director Grover J. “Russ” Whitehurst.

Controversy swirled over Mr. Kame’enui’s previous role as a technical-assistance adviser to the $1 billion-a-year Reading First program, which was established as part of the No Child Left Behind Act in 2002 to improve reading instruction in the early grades. A report released May 9 by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., said that Mr. Kame’enui served as a high-level federal adviser to states while promoting a commercial reading program that he had written.

During that time, Mr. Kame'enui was responsible for providing advice to states about the kinds of texts and assessments that would meet Reading First requirements. Between 2003 and 2006, he earned at least $150,000 a year in royalties and compensation from Pearson Scott Foresman, which publishes a textbook he wrote with another university professor, according to the congressional report.

Senate investigators described financial gains acquired by Mr. Kame’enui and three other researchers who served as regional service directors of Reading First. Overall, outside income “soared” for the researchers between 2001 and 2006, when they were serving as consultants to Reading First, according to the report released by Sen. Kennedy, the chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee.

Following that Senate report, Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., who chairs the House Education and Labor Committee, called on Mr. Kame’enui to resign. Rep. Miller said Mr. Kame’enui had been “less than candid” in earlier testimony before his committee in April, which explored alleged improprieties in the implementation of Reading First. . . .

NCLB Corporate Tutoring Shows "Minimal Impact"

From the Chicago Sun-Times:

BY KATE N. GROSSMAN Education Reporter

The Chicago Public Schools spent $50 million in federal money on after-school tutoring for 56,000 students last year but test scores show it got limited bang for its buck.

Tutored elementary students showed only slightly more gains in reading on state tests in 2006 than comparable kids who were eligible for tutoring but didn't get the extra help. Researchers called that a small but "significant'' uptick. There was a "negligible" gain in math, according to an analysis by the Chicago Public Schools released to the Sun-Times.

Low-scoring kids ineligible for tutoring -- because they went to a higher achieving school or came from a higher income family -- made the most progress in reading and math.

CPS officials even wonder whether the tutoring is worth the money. It's mandated by the federal No Child Left Behind law for any low-income school that misses testing goals for three years. The state approves the tutoring firms and can remove them after two years of poor performance.

"It's a minimal impact, at best," said Erica Harris, who oversees tutoring for CPS. "On the micro level, I believe there are kids who need it and it's doing great things. But at the macro level, for the amount of investment, I would want to see more output."

Forty-one private firms, plus CPS -- which won special permission by the feds to tutor -- worked in 324 schools. CPS analyzed data from about 24 firms, mostly the larger ones that tutored at least 30 hours. The small-group tutoring mostly ranged from 30 to 80 hours.

The results varied from firm to firm. Several significantly outperformed the average and many fell far behind. Among the firms, CPS' program ranked in the middle in reading and near the top for math. . . .

ED Illegally Using Private Email Accounts to Conduct Business?

From Raw Story:

A liberal government watchdog group has accused employees in the U.S. Department of Education of illegally using private e-mail accounts to conduct official government business, eliminating the ability for independent oversight through public records access.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington asked the department's inspector general to investigate the use of non-governmental e-mail accounts after it was denied access to e-mails it requested under the Freedom of Information Act. CREW's lawyer was told that department personnel "often use private e-mail addresses," which are not subject to public records requests, according to a press release from the group.

Such use of private e-mail accounts, if the correspondence is not stored by the department, would be in violation of the Federal Records Act, CREW said, although the scope of private e-mail use and the number of employees potentially involved is unclear. The group filed a public records request in March seeking information on the Education Department's Reading First program, according to the release.

A CREW spokesperson told RAW STORY that the organization has "no idea" how many private messages were exchanged among department personnel, because the department was unable to fully comply with their request. The spokesperson said a FOIA official in the department volunteered to CREW the fact that private accounts were used, and a lawyer in the department's office of general counsel confirmed their existance.

CREW requested copies of all correspondence beween the department, the White House and edcational publishers related to the reading program.

"Last month, the American public learned that the White House was violating the Presidential Records Act," CREW's executive director, Melanie Sloan, said in the release.

Sloan was referring to a controversy involving White House political director Karl Rove and other top aides allegedly using e-mail addresses supplied by the Republican National Committee to conduct government business. Congressional investigators have requested copies of the RNC e-mails but the e-mails have not yet been turned over.

"Now we've learned that Department of Education has been violating the Federal Records Act. How many other agencies are knowingly violating federal law?" Sloan continued, "Complying with the law is not optional. One would think that those in charge of the government would understand this, but apparently not."

Disturbing Charter School Facts

Superintendent Jeffrey Lewis on the charter school scam in Ohio:

Jeffrey K. Lewis
Superintendent, Xenia Community Schools

Since the beginning of the charter school movement in Ohio -- in our state they're called community schools -- there have been incredible stories of financial mismanagement, academic mediocrity and ruthless profiteering.

There is also a misperception about what the charter schools. Some of our folks believe they are private schools and therefore exclusive or better. They are actually public schools that have received charters to operate from the Ohio Department of Education.

The sad state of the charter school movement in our state began because charter schools were granted before reasonable accountability systems were put into place. At the same time, many of the "regulations" placed upon traditional school districts have not been expected of the charters. These include teacher licenses and the student testing programs.

Imagine if a typical school district ran its school for the objective of making money. There would be incredible outrage. As much as I dislike the prospect of pounding levy signs in the ground to promote a Xenia levy, I disdain the fact that charter schools bleed some of those funds. Those schools do not have to convince any local group of their need.Ê As parasites, they will take the funding regardless of the levy results.

These schools also have failed in many cases to be good financial stewards. Just recently, the State of Ohio filed a $1.4 million recovery fee against a defunct charter school in Cleveland. That school shut down last fall. In addition, last fall three charter school operators were indicted for defrauding the state out of $2.9 million. The schools, however, are funded very well. In addition to state and local tax dollars, charter schools also receive extensive federal funding. Two years ago, they received more than $44 million in federal funds. The financial impact on districts, primarily urban, is staggering. In 2004-05, Dayton City Schools realized $42 million in reductions for charters, while the Cincinnati's school district amount was $43 million.

There are two basic types of charter schools: brick and mortar schools and electronic or e-schools. Initially created to provide attractive alternatives to traditional programs, some have met the educational objectives and have succeeded in giving parents/students viable alternatives. Most have not. Consider, data from Local Report Cards show that traditional public schools outperform charter schools in each of the 21 proficiency and achievement tests. On the 2005-06 Ohio Report Cards, 30 community schools rated excellent; 16, effective; 87, continuous improvement; 46, academic watch and 81, academic emergency. Because of incomplete data, 35 schools were not even rated.

The electronic schools have become a source of concern and controversy. Estimated that the annual cost to educate a student in these schools is $2,000, the schools earn $5,300 from the State. That's a $3,300 profit. As a result, there are some e-school "leaders" making millions of dollars from this business venture. One of the biggest programs in Ohio, White Hat Management, brought in about $1 million in 2005-06 through its schools. The State Auditor has not completed an audit on this organization, but critics believe the charter schools profit was about $20 million in 2005-06. There is even an e-school based in Canada!

I applaud Governor Strickland's plan to place a moratorium on charter schools in Ohio. Until accountability measures are in place and funding and operational connections alive and well, the mediocrity, corruption and profiting will continue.

Please consider contacting your local legislator to share your opinions and concerns regarding charter schools. It's the least we can do for our communities and our students.

Accountability, Spellings Style

Terri Shaw, just resigned after the Miller Committee shamed her Brownie-esque performance as Head of Student Loans at ED, received big bonuses from her boss for performance befitting a top hack and crook in this Administration. From Government Executive.com:

An executive running the Education Department's Federal Student Aid office took home more than $250,000 in performance bonuses over the last four years, a period in which the office's oversight capabilities have been called into question.

Theresa Shaw, who is stepping down in June as chief operating officer of the office, received the bonuses under a 1998 law aimed at modernizing the organization's management. For fiscal 2003, Shaw took home a $71,250 bonus. She received a $60,000 bonus for fiscal 2004, $65,000 for fiscal 2005 and $65,000 for fiscal 2006, according to the department.

By comparison, for fiscal 2005 -- the most recent year in which numbers have been published by the Office of Personnel Management -- 66 executives in the Education Department received an average $10,652 bonus. Shaw also was given a $20,000 raise when the department increased her base salary of $144,600 to the statutory limit of $165,200 in November 2006.

Shaw, who has headed the student aid office since September 2002, has won accolades for her management improvements, including earning the office's removal from the Government Accountability Office's list of high-risk federal programs and reducing student loan defaults by 40 percent.

But Shaw's office has been under increased scrutiny relating to its oversight of the student loan industry since revelations of improper financial ties among universities, companies and government officials came to light. In one instance, Matteo Fontana, who worked with Shaw at Sallie Mae before both came to Education, was put on administrative leave because he acquired at least $100,000 in stock in a student loan company, a perceived conflict of interest.

"The office of federal student aid under Ms. Shaw's tenure has been characterized by a lack of oversight and negligent administration of the student loan program," said Michael Dannenberg, education policy director at the New America Foundation, a Washington-based think tank. "Her office has cost taxpayers and students hundreds of millions of dollars. To find out that she got a bonus is just stunning."

Dannenberg's calculation is based in part on recent revelations that student loan companies -- most notably the Nebraska-based company Nelnet -- used a loophole to receive a government-guaranteed 9.5 percent rate of return on loans offered to students at much lower interest rates.

In January, Education officials struck a deal with Nelnet that allows it to keep $278 million in federal subsidy payments obtained through this loophole in exchange for not billing an additional $900 million.

In May 2003, Nelnet sent a letter to officials at the Office of Student Aid, including Shaw, detailing the company's plans to use the 9.5 percent loophole. Shaw's office did not stop the company from acting.

An Education spokeswoman did not respond to a request to speak with Shaw. But in a press release announcing Shaw's departure, Secretary Margaret Spellings touted her achievements.

"Her leadership and depth of experience will be sorely missed," Spellings said. "She made performance and results a top priority, establishing performance standards, metrics and reporting at every level. FSA now delivers more aid to more students at a lower operating cost with greater accuracy than at any point in its history."

In October 2005, the House Government Reform subcommittee overseeing the federal workforce invited Shaw to testify about her management accomplishments and how other agencies could emulate them.

Shaw was able to receive large bonuses because in 1998, Congress anointed the student aid office as the first performance-based organization under then-Vice President Al Gore's reinventing government initiative. PBOs were meant to run more like private-sector businesses.

Executives at the agency had to commit to annual performance goals, and were rewarded with hefty bonuses if successful. The chief operating officer is eligible for an annual bonus of up to 50 percent of his or her salary. Executives also were given personnel and procurement flexibilities to meet their goals.

Accountability for Failing Businessmen and Politicians

Our business and government leaders, always at the ready to devise more and more rigorous accountability schemes for those without power, remain immune from the same kind of accountability that they would impose on school children and their teachers. In the meantime, an intellectual and emotional rigor mortis has set in at these schools that businessmen and politicians would, otherwise, make accountable, as joy and trust have evaporated at the same rate that threats and policing have moved into the classrooms.

Isn't it time to devise an accountability system for our own policymakers and employers and accountability experts, the same leaders who ignore the real elephants in their own living rooms as they bash about in pursuit of one they have not yet found? Is it really the fault, for instance, of the American school, first grader or college senior, that more and more of our jobs are exported to overseas markets, or that obesity is an epidemic, or that our country is the lead contributor in the world to global warming?

Here are some benchmarks for the education reformers to meet before they are given any further privileges to continue muckiing around in human affairs for which their own education and experience offer them zero qualifications. By 2014:

• all American citizens will have health insurance coverage that offers equal coverage and facilities for mental and physical health;

• the federal government will have devised a menu of school integration plans from which school systems across America will choose in order to live up the Supreme Court decision of 53 years ago which declared that separate schools are inherently unequal;

• American business and government will deliver to the American people a practical plan for full employment in jobs that offer livable wages;

• All families in America will be offered affordable and quality child care whose cost will be based on income;

• A minimum wage, workmen's compensation, and social security withholding will be provided to all workers, both citizens and immigrants. Businesses that do not comply will be forced to close until they do comply.

• State governments and the federal government will devise a funding structure for public schools that is not dependent upon property taxes.

• Business and government will take the action required to reduce greenhouse emissions of Americans to a level that will sustain a healthy planet.

• A national action plan that includes private and public commitments will be offered to rebuild the infrastructure of America, to offer adequate and affordable housing for all Americans, to reenergize the arts, to enhance our parks.

• Once these things are done, American businessmen and politicians, if they still have the urge to do so, may continue their school reform initiatives--if they are willing to include the public in each and every step of their reformations.

All Special Education Students Must Pass California Exit Exam

The day after Congressman Miller pointed out to the world the corrupt ineptitude of the Bushies at the Dept. of Education, Madame Secretary was off with Laura to announce a new database where high school graduation rates are available to parents and real estate agents. In her nightmare vision for American schools, she would order up more high-stakes testing for high schools and require their dropout rates to be a criterion for making AYP:

Spellings also announced that graduation rates will be incorporated into the federal No Child Left Behind law by 2012 as a measure of adequate yearly progress for every high school, along with test scores and other factors.

Schools will have to meet federal targets for black and Hispanic students and other statistical subgroups, as well, a requirement likely to stir considerable anxiety in low-performing school systems.

This, of course, is another slam-dunk privatization strategy for high schools, for as the high schools become testing factories, more and more students in the poorest schools will simply forego the humiliation and get a dead end job without a diploma, rather than waiting to do the same following graduation.

An example of this phenomenon can be seen in California, which began last year requring high schoolers to pass the state's new exit exam. After one year, the graduate rate dropped to its lowest point in 10 years, with a third of California high schoolers leaving school without a diploma. From the San Francisco Chronicle:

. . . .Attorney John Affeldt of the law firm Public Advocates, who has been lobbying against the exit exam for nearly a decade, said the latest graduation figures were a foregone conclusion.

"This unfortunately is fulfilling the prophecy that I laid out to the Legislature in 1999, which was that if the state did not adequately prepare our students to pass the test, then we would see a significant drop in graduation rates," Affeldt said. . . .

"There are thousands of students who have not been adequately prepared for this exam. The state has not yet earned the right to impose this exit exam penalty on them."

Adding insult to injury to California's special education students, the State Board voted on Thursday to require passage of the exit exam by all students, regardless of disability:

The state Board of Education voted unanimously Thursday to make the high school exit exam mandatory for students with disabilities, rejecting alternatives and risking further litigation from critics who argue that the test does not measure those students' skills.

State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O'Connell recommended that the board reject other options such as breaking up the test into multiple parts or allowing students to present a portfolio of their work instead of passing the exam. . . .

And from the Sacramento Bee:

"If legislation adopts that recommendation, it leaves students with disabilities completely unprotected and it puts them in a situation where they're going to be penalized by the state's failures," said Roger Heller, an attorney with Disability Rights Advocates, which sued the state over the exit exam.

"All they're really doing here is forcing us to return to court."

O'Connell acknowledged that he risked a lawsuit, but said the test will help special education students get the schooling they need by bringing increased resources, expectations and attention from teachers.

"I don't make educational decisions or recommendations based upon what a group of lawyers may or may not do," he said. "We make decisions based upon what's best for kids."

For his part, then, in this latest institutionalized and officially-sanctioned system of child abuse, Jack OConnell, California's State Superintendent, is recognized as the heartless tough guy that his mindless decision demonstrate him to be.

Will the California Legislature earn their recognition, too? Their vote will tell all.

Nebraska Model Assessment System At Risk

State Senator Gail Kopplin has been busy lately. Just last week he was one of two members on the Legislative Education Committee to oppose the reunification of Omaha Public Schools after an embarrassing segregation plan last year that split the schools into white, black, and brown districts. A court challenge by the NAACP led to the new plan, now opposed by Senator Kopplin.

This week he is one of the lead testocrats in the Legislature to support a bill to ditch the state's model assessment system for the same standardized testing madness that is suffocating American public education, making children stupid, and deepening race and class divisions:

LINCOLN - State lawmakers calling for an overhaul of Nebraska's student testing system still hope to pass the changes this session.

Thursday, the Legislature's Education Committee endorsed a plan to establish new statewide tests in reading and math, shifting from an accountability system that differs from district to district.

The committee still must vote the proposal, Legislative Bill 653, to the full Legislature for debate. That is expected to happen Tuesday.

But counting Tuesday, just 11 days remain in the legislative session.

The bill has priority status, and Legislative Speaker Mike Flood has called it a companion bill to the Omaha schools proposal that won first-round approval this week.

Thursday, State Sen. Ron Raikes of Lincoln, the Education Committee chairman, suggested a maneuver that could speed up the testing proposal's consideration.

Raikes said LB 653 is associated with a separate bill regarding educational service units that already has first-round approval. He said the testing bill could be offered as an amendment to the ESU bill.

Even if the proposal comes up for debate, it's unclear how it will fare.

The Nebraska Education Department and the state education commissioner have opposed changes, as have the Nebraska Council of School Administrators and the Nebraska State Education Association.

Pat Roschewski, director of statewide assessment for the Education Department, said today that the proposal would shift the state away from using assessment as a learning tool to one just for accountability.

Roschewski said Nebraska's curriculum would narrow to focus on what the statewide tests cover.

"We don't want to sacrifice the learning piece," she said. "We want to keep learning first." . . .

More on Spellings Testimony May 10

A big clip from Inside Higher Ed:

. . . . Spellings said her decision to begin the rule making process will have “jump-started the regulatory process.” Spellings also noted that she was convening the heads of other federal agencies (like the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.) to look into how the government might better regulate the private student loan market, and for that moment, at least, she argued somewhat persuasively that the department had taken meaningful steps to attack the student loan industry’s problems.

The moment did not last, though. Under the questioning that followed, Miller turned back the clock, asking what steps Spellings (who joined the department in early 2005) and other department officials had taken in response to an August 1, 2003 memo in which the department’s assistant inspector general discussed allegations that Sallie Mae and other lenders had offered possibly illegal “inducements” to colleges in exchange for their student loan business.

The memo said that the inspector general’s review had concluded that “there are bargaining practices between schools and lenders for [Family Federal Education Loan Program] preerred lender status and private loan volume that should be addressed through statutory and regulatory changes or further department guidance.” The auditor encouraged the department’s political leaders to consider proposing a toughening of federal law governing such inducements and to consider whether existing laws and rules applied to the rapidly growing private loan market.

Instead, Miller said, documents his office had collected show that department officials decided to monitor “the higher education and lending communities’ efforts to reach an agreement on lender inducements” and, pressed further by the inspector general, to review agreements between lenders and colleges to “determine to what extent they are inconsistent” with federal laws and regulations.

If the department engaged in any kind of serious monitoring, Miller said, “I just don’t quite understand ... how it was that they didn’t pick up any of these activities” that recent investigations by Congressional leaders and state attorneys general, most notably New York’s Andrew M. Cuomo, have shown to be occurring between lenders and colleges. “Who was auditing? Did they have blinders on?” Miller asked pointedly.

At that point, Spellings got legalistic. Much of the alleged wrongdoing that Cuomo and others have pinpointed — which Spellings said troubled her — had occurred in the private loan program, over which federal law does not give the Education Department authority to regulate, she said. Other federal agencies — the FTC and the FDIC — might have authority over those loans, she said, but not the education agency.

And for the department to prove that some kind of payment or other inducement was illegal, Spellings said, there is a very high “hurdle that must be cleared” to show that there is a “quid pro quo relationship between the awarding of a particular loan and a cruise on New York harbor,” citing one high-profile example of a lender-financed benefit for college financial aid officers that Miller has cited in recent days. (Spellings said there had been a handful of cases, about which she did not provide details, in which the department had pursued legal action against lenders for allegedly offering inducements.)

That argument set off Miller, who said that just because the department might not have been able to prove that illegal activity took place doesn’t mean that its officials shouldn’t have been sounding the alarm about the practices in some other way — at least through the bully pulpit.

It’s not about “proving that in a court of law,” Miller said. How come “nobody from the Department of Education showed up at the front door” of colleges or lenders that might be engaging in behavior that the department thought might be unethical, even if it couldn’t be proved illegal? he wondered. Did department officials contact the trade commission or the Securities and Exchange Commission if its officials thought private lenders were acting badly?

Can the department really claim, he continued, that it has no authority to look into the activities of private lenders when many of them are also participants in the federal loan programs? And, Miller added, when some of the inducements — he especially cited loan funds, known as “opportunity pools,” that Sallie Mae and other lenders had allegedly provided to colleges for their high-risk students — were offered in part to get them to leave the government’s direct student loan program, over which the department clearly has authority?

“Why no Dear Colleague letter, no phone call” to warn colleges or lenders about their possibly inappropriate practices? Miller asked with increasing agitation. “How come nowhere in five years of monitoring did anybody make an effort to call a halt to these practices?”

Miller’s rhetoric seemed to be getting tougher by the minute, but Spellings was saved by the bell. With votes pending on the House floor, the investigative hearing broke up at that point for 45 minutes, and by the time the session reconvened, Miller’s 20-minute question period was almost over. He began a new line of questioning over the department’s decision last year to let the National Education Loan Network keep $278 million in subsidies it had gained improperly through a loophole in federal law, a settlement Spellings said she had reached because she feared the department might face a lawsuit from the lender that could cost it more than $1 billion in additional funds. . . .

Monumental Failures By Spellings

Yesterday our leading Education Embarrassment went before Congress to dodge and weave her way from any responsibility in the looting of federally-guaranteed student loans by companies whose former executives ran the loan programs at ED. Congressman Miller showed enough disdain, according to WaPo, to signal the Secretary may need more than "big girl panties" to save her posterior from being put out to pasture with Rod Paige, who is now doing ads for Randy Best, whose fortune the former Secretary helped secure during his tenure as Secretary.

Can you say, "needs improvement," Secretary Spellings? If the Department she runs were a public school, sanctions for failure would have already been shut it down and reopened as a charter macschool.

The Times has this summary evaluation by Miller:

“When I look at the whole body of evidence that has been amassed about both the student loan and Reading First programs, it is clear that — at a minimum — the Education Department’s oversight failures have been monumental,” he said.

And this from WaPo:

By Amit R. Paley
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 11, 2007; A08

Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, facing aggressive questions about her department's oversight of the $85 billion-a-year student loan industry, offered a vigorous defense of her actions yesterday and called for a multi-agency effort to prevent corruption in the loan system.

"Federal student aid is crying out for reform," Spellings told the House education committee. "The system is redundant, it's byzantine and it's broken. In fact, it's often more difficult for students to get aid than it is for bad actors to game the system."

In a sometimes-tense hearing, Democratic lawmakers accused the Bush administration of failing to clamp down on conflicts of interest and various industry practices that have drawn criticism from Congress and attorneys general across the nation. The House voted this week to increase federal regulation of the loan business.

"The Education Department's oversight failures have been monumental," said Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), chairman of the committee. "Was this simply laziness? Was it incompetence? Was it a deliberate decision to look the other way while these things happened? Or was it a failing more sinister than that?"

Miller disclosed at the hearing that the Justice Department is examining a controversial accounting loophole used by Nelnet, a Nebraska-based lending company, in an attempt to collect more than $1 billion in government subsidies. Spellings decided this year to halt the payments but allowed Nelnet to keep $278 million it had collected.

Ben Kiser, a Nelnet spokesman, said the company is "fully cooperating" with the Justice Department and remains "confident that there are no grounds for any action against Nelnet." The department is looking into potential civil fraud, according to a source who spoke only on the condition of anonymity because of the matter's sensitivity.

Spellings offered her fullest explanation yet of the decision to settle with Nelnet, saying she believed there was a significant chance that the company would have won if it had filed a lawsuit against the government to continue receiving payments.

But Miller, in one of several verbal sparring sessions with Spellings, said the explanation made little sense. "If it's such an easy case for them, why did they walk away from $1 billion?" he asked.

Spellings said the Bush administration has taken significant steps to regulate the student loan industry. She announced that a task force named to create rules forbidding gifts from lenders to universities had made its recommendations, which she pledged to implement.

One of the biggest areas of contention was the department's oversight of companies that offer private loans, a fast-growing section of the market. Spellings said she had the ability to regulate only federally guaranteed loans, but Miller insisted that she could have used her bully pulpit as secretary to stop controversial practices in the private loan business.

"Who was monitoring?" Miller asked. "Did they have blinders on?"

Spellings replied: "It was not a violation of the laws I'm charged with overseeing."

"That's become a crutch," Miller said. . . .

Carnine and Other Reading First Profiteers

A report from the Senate Education Committee yesterday offers details on some of the Reading First profiteering: Douglas Carnine (more than $800,000), Edward Kame'enui (more than $750,000), Joseph Torgesen (more than $50,000) and Sharon Vaughn (more than $1.2 million).

Here is the text of the AP story carried in the Guardian:

WASHINGTON (AP) - Officials who gave states advice on which teaching materials to buy under a federal reading program had deep financial ties to publishers, according to a congressional report Wednesday.

The report, compiled by Senate Education Committee Chairman Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., details how officials contracted by the government to help run the program were at the same time drawing pay from publishers that benefited from the reading initiative.

Kennedy's report added new detail to a conflict-of-interest investigation by the Education Department's inspector general, John Higgens, who earlier had found that the Reading First Program favored some programs over others and that federal officials and contractors didn't guard against conflicts.

The new report focused on four contractors who headed centers that guided states in choosing reading programs aimed at kindergartners through third graders.

It found the contractors ``had substantial financial ties to publishing companies while simultaneously being responsible for providing technical assistance to states and school districts.'' That damaged the program's integrity and illustrated the need for Congress to head off future conflicts, the report concluded.

The report zeroed in on four people who directed the program's regional Technical Assistance Centers:

-Edward Kame'enui, who headed the western technical assistance center based at the University of Oregon. Between 2002 and 2004, while holding positions in which he was evaluating Reading First assessment programs and giving state education agencies technical assistance, Kame'enui entered into three different contracts with the publisher Pearson/Scott Foresman, the report said.

``Due largely to his contracts with Pearson/Scott Foresman, Dr. Kame'enui's income soared in the period following the implementation of the Reading First program,'' the report said, adding that the majority of his royalties were derived from products used by states and districts in conjunction with Reading First.

Kame'enui, who now works as a commissioner at the Education Department's research arm, earned hundreds of thousands of dollars in royalties from Pearson/Scott Foresman between 2001 and 2006, the report said. He also received tens of thousands of dollars in consulting fees from Voyager, another publisher of products used by states under Reading First from 2000 to 2003.

Scott Foresman also tapped Kame'enui to travel to education conferences and workshops on the company's behalf while he was the western center director, the report said. Kame'enui did not respond to requests for comment.

-Douglas Carnine, who replaced Kame'enui as the western center's director in 2005, when Kame'enui left to take up his federal position. Previously Carnine had other roles related to Reading First.

Even as he headed the western center, Carnine worked with and continues to work with numerous publishers, the report said. He earned hundreds of thousands of dollars in royalties from publishers that did well under Reading First, such as Houghton Mifflin Company from 2002 to 2006.

However, Carnine said in an interview Wednesday that his royalties from Houghton Mifflin and other publishers were for educational programs that had nothing to do with K-3 reading, the focus of Reading First.

-Joseph Torgesen, who directed the eastern regional district at Florida State University from 2003 until the present. Torgesen is co-author of a McGraw Hill reading program that can be used under Reading First. The study found that from 2002 to 2006, Torgesen earned thousands of dollars in royalties and other payments from companies such as McGraw Hill and Pearson and Sopris West, which later was acquired by Cambium Learning.

In one internal e-mail, Torgesen questioned whether he should seek special permission from the department to review the new Scott Foresman curriculum for Maine. ``I had a discussion with some folks in Washington yesterday who rightly pointed out that we might want to think about rewarding Pearson (/Scott Foresman) for significantly strengthening their program,'' Torgesen wrote.

Torgesen, in an interview Wednesday, said a review for the state of Florida had initially identified a Scott Foresman reading program as weak. However, Torgesen said Scott Foresman subsequently made significant improvements to the program, after which education officials in Maine asked Torgesen's center to review the program again.

``That prompted my e-mail to the folks in Washington, who suggested perhaps we might make an exception to re-reviewing Scott Foresman, since they had worked so diligently to improve their program,'' Torgesen said.

-Sharon Vaughn headed the central technical assistance center at the University of Texas-Austin from 2003 to 2005. She received tens of thousands of dollars in royalties from Pearson Education Inc. and ``other income'' from Voyager Expanded learning, two programs used under Reading First.

Vaughn's lawyer, Gaines West, said it was noteworthy that the report did not say that Vaughn was improperly influenced by her relationship with publishers while she was the center's director.

The report concluded by recommending that Congress adopt new restrictions to safeguard against financial conflicts in federal education programs.

``Individuals serving on advisory committees or in the peer review process for the department should be prohibited from maintaining significant financial interests in related educational products or activities,'' the report said.

Education Secretary Margaret Spellings is scheduled to testify in Congress on Thursday on the Reading First program and problems in the student loan industry.

Spellings said in an Associated Press interview Wednesday that she had not yet thoroughly reviewed Kennedy's report but that any new findings of wrongdoing would be addressed by the department.

She said, however, that it would be impossible to run department programs without relying on some people with ties to the private sector. ``We want and need expertise as we make policy and do this work,'' she said.

Spellings COO for Student Loans Resigns

Reports are piling up that Theresa Shaw, COO of the student loan division at ED, is resigning just in time for Maggie's new round of testimony before Congress in one of the numerous catastrophes that she oversees:

Theresa Shaw is stepping down as head of the U.S. Department of Education’s student-aid office, a position she has held since 2002.

Shaw resigns at a time when the government’s $68 billion student loan program is falling under intense scrutiny. The department said Shaw’s resignation is in no way related to Inspector General John Higgens looking into possible conflicts of interest involving deparment employees and lenders.

She previously worked for SLM Corp. [ticker: SLM], along with several other Education Department officials, and owns shares in student lenders Wells Fargo & Co. [ticker: WFC] and JPMorgan Chase & Co. [ticker: JPM]. Shaw headed the same office as Matteo Fontana, a student-loan official who was put on leave after it was revealed he had at least $100,000 of stock in a student lender.

Higgens’s investigation was spurred by Attorney General Andrew Cuomo’s probe into the student loan industry, through which he has uncovered the rampant use of payments by lenders to schools and aid officials in exchange for competitive marketing and lending advantages.

From 1980 to 2000 Shaw worked for Sallie Mae, rising to the position of CIO in 1999. Small world!!

Now speaking of holding shares at JP Morgan Chase, the Chronicle of Higher Ed is reporting new hanky panky between JP and some made officials at a number of higher learning institutions. So much corruption, so few investigators:

College officials at five institutions have received consulting fees from the lender J.P. Morgan Chase, Rep. George Miller, a Democrat of California, revealed today.

The officials — Melissa Smurdon of Butler University, Lynette Viskoski of Centenary College of Louisiana, Mark Martin of Lawrence Technological University, Louise Strauser of Lyon College, and Tyrone Thornton of Xavier University of Louisiana — signed contracts with J.P. Morgan Chase from 2005 to 2007 under which it provided technology support, conference presentations, and software installations, among other services, documents provided by Mr. Miller’s office show. All of the individuals except Mr. Thornton — a controller — work in their colleges’ financial-aid offices.

Mr. Miller also released documents showing that Chase had spent more than $70,000 on a luxurious harbor cruise in New York City for 200 attendees of the 2004 conference of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators.

Mr. Miller, who is chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives education committee, has been conducting an investigation into conflicts of interest in the student-loan industry. His committee will hear testimony on Thursday from the secretary of education, Margaret Spellings, about the department’s oversight of the student-loan programs. —Kelly Field

WPI Will No Longer Require SAT

It's too early to suggest the SAT is in its death throes, but today a prestigious quantoid university, Worcester Polytechnic, announced it will no longer require the SAT for admission. Could it be that the SAT will take its last breath about the same time that this generation of children has been entirely stupidified by testing? From Inside Higher Ed:

This fall, WPI will no longer require the SAT — joining a movement of 700-plus colleges that has been growing in recent years. That trend has been most evident among liberal arts colleges. WPI will become the first competitive science and engineering focused institution to make the leap — which is being hailed by critics of the SAT.

“The significance of the WPI announcement is that even a school with a heavy emphasis on quantitative skills — arguably among those best measured by the ACT/SAT — can do high-quality, competitive admissions without requiring test scores,” said Robert Schaeffer, public education director of the National Center for Fair & Open Testing. He called the announcement “a strong rebuttal to those who suggest test-optional policies only can work at small, liberal arts colleges.”

Like most of the colleges that have dropped SAT requirements, WPI will still accept the scores, and Tichenor predicted that most applicants would continue to submit them. Those who wish not to will take what the institute is calling its “Flex Path” in admissions. They will be required to submit examples of academic or extracurricular work that shows their skills in organization, creativity or problem solving. Examples include written descriptions of science projects, robotics design concepts, research papers, Eagle Scout projects, entrepreneurial projects, or actual inventions.

Pep Rallies, Barf Bags, and A Palpable Hysteria

Ten years from now, the survivors will look back on these late days of testing child abuse and shake their heads. From South Carolina--a new job for the librarian--faculty cheerleader:

. . . .Percentages of students scoring “proficient” or “advanced” on PACT exams are used to determine adequate yearly progress results required by the federal No Child Left Behind education law. PACT scores also are key components in annual report cards rating South Carolina public elementary schools, middle schools and school districts.

But testing primarily is about students, not about how test results reflect on schools or teachers, said Mr. Smith, a Greenville resident and former educator.

Calhoun Academy of the Arts in Anderson and Honea Path Elementary School were the sites Friday, along with other campuses, of pep rallies designed to raise student excitement about PACT.

“If (students) are truly motivated … then they can do a lot better,” said Penny Tritt, a guidance counselor at Calhoun Academy.

The rallies were partially a chance to pass along last-minute reminders to students about the importance of sleeping enough before each testing day and eating a good breakfast on exam days.

Honea Path Elementary Principal Mark Robertson said this week he is trying to say something positive to students over the school intercom system each testing day.

Palmetto Middle Principal Barry Knight said students have worked hard the entire school year, and he would hope their mindset during testing week would be “one more of ease and relaxation.”

“This (testing) should only be a minor bump in the road, and nothing nearly as major as some folks try to make it out to be,” Mr. Knight said.

This year is the first since science and social studies testing began in 2003 that only students in grades 4 and 7 are to take exams in both those subjects. Students in grades 3, 5, 6 and 8 are to be tested in either social studies or science.

Regular PACT testing is to last through May 16. Some field testing, or exams for which scores don’t count, and make-up testing is to continue through May 22.

School Reform, Corporate Style

A review at Education Review of a new history by Dorothy Shipp, School Reform, Corporate Style: Chicago, 1880-2000.

Promoting NCLB Repeal and Educator Roundtable

Justine Villaneuva, communications student at Montclair State, has this brief interview about the Educator Roundtable petition with yours truly at YouTube.

Science Testing Will Hasten Privatization Agenda

On Sunday WaPo had a story on the extra weight being added to the cudgel of NCLB: science testing. Beginning in the fall schools will be tested in math, reading, and science. Since science is one of the subjects that has been marginalized by the frantic clawing to make annual AYP increases in reading and math, we can count on thousands of new schools being added to the already-impressive lists of "public school failures" as the open onto the boulevard to school privatization.

With three hoops to jump through now instead of two, you can imagine how quickly social studies will be discarded. Children learning the democratic values associated with living in a diverse and free society based on a just Constitution? Who needs it! We need workers who can compete with the slave labor of totalitarian countries. A clip:

. . . . But starting with the 2007-08 academic year, the law requires states to test students in science. A new exam is being field-tested in Maryland this year.

"I think the test will open up some eyes," said Brian Freiss, a fifth-grade teacher at Highland Elementary School in Silver Spring.

The new test catches many Maryland schools at an ebb in science instruction.

The No Child act, signed into law in 2002, requires schools to post adequate yearly progress on their way to attaining 100 percent proficiency in reading and math by 2014. Schools would have to attain 100 percent proficiency in science by 2020 under a proposed reauthorization of the law.

Some states, including California, Florida and Virginia, assess students in science at multiple grades as part of statewide testing programs. Others, including Maryland and Pennsylvania, are beginning science field tests this year. The District's school system did not respond to requests for information on its science instruction.

Last year, the Prince George's County school system restored lost classroom minutes, increasing daily science instruction from 30 minutes to 60 in the lower elementary grades and from 45 minutes to 60 in grades 4, 5 and 6. Montgomery schools are rolling out new textbooks in grades four and five as part of a curriculum overhaul. Frederick schools are field-testing fifth-grade lessons that teach specific science topics during time allotted to reading.

In a fifth-grade classroom at Garrett Park Elementary School last week, students started work on a unit called "Magnets and Motors," an exploration of magnetism, electricity and the electric motor. Students tested their magnets on earrings and braces. Ilias Katsifis, 11, announced to classmates that if a magnet is set against the face of his watch, "it stops time."

Before the No Child act, 45 minutes to an hour of daily science instruction was common in fifth-grade Maryland classrooms, said Mary Thurlow, science coordinator for the State Department of Education.

These days, Freiss, at Highland Elementary, is allotted 30 to 45 minutes daily to teach both social studies and science, which is typical for schools in the region.

"It's definitely not as much as I would like," Freiss said.

Sallie Mae and Nelnet Named in NJ Investigation

Sallie Mae and Nelnet must be wondering if they paid too much in "campaign contributions"--or not enough. Part of the latest on Loangate from Inside Higher Ed:

Until now, the evolving controversy surrounding the federal student loan programs has focused mostly on the relationships between lenders and colleges and between lenders and federal officials. But now state guarantee agencies are being drawn into the fray, with Friday’s announcements that Sen. Edward M. Kennedy and New Jersey’s attorney general were investigating arrangements in which two lenders paid that state’s student loan guarantor millions of dollars for loans that the agency helped direct the lenders’ way.

Kennedy’s office released documents Friday showing that the New Jersey Higher Education Student Assistance Authority, one of 23 state-based agencies that guarantee loans provided by private lenders in the Family Federal Education Loan Program and provide a range of other services to colleges and students, had arrangements with Sallie Mae and the National Education Loan Network in which it received a cut (1.4 percent and 1 percent, respectively) of the volume of each loan referred to the lenders by the state agency.

The agreements, which the state agency ended on April 20 as scrutiny of the arrangements grew, has since 2000 brought the state agency $2.2 million a year from Sallie Mae and a lesser amount from Nelnet, according to The Star-Ledger of Newark, which first reported on the arrangements last week.

Kennedy and officials in the New Jersey Attorney General’s office said they would investigate whether the incentives paid to the state guarantor led it, or the colleges with which it works, to direct student borrowers to Sallie Mae and Nelnet rather than to other lenders from whom they might have received lower rates or better benefits.

The underlying implication of the entire student loan controversy to date has been that students are being hurt by being forced to pay more for their loans, although the lawmakers — members of Congress and attorneys general in various states, notably New York — have produced little evidence along those lines to date, focusing instead on revealing the relationships and questionable arrangements. . . .

White Justice Dept. Turns Clock Back to 1978

From Raw Story:

An investigation by the WJLA-TV I-Team uncovered the deep-seated diversity problems within the department. The Washington, D.C., ABC affiliate aired the report on Friday.

Roberta Baskin, a veteran award-winning journalist, led the reporting effort. Baskin recently joined the station's news staff after serving as executive director of the Center for Public Integrity since January 2005.

"One of the top priorities of the Justice Department is to prosecute violations of our civil rights," Baskin told WJLA viewers. "However, the team of prosecutors the Justice Department has put together looks nothing like the America it's supposed to protect."

"They need someone to investigate them," Conyers told Baskin.

"They don't have the diversity that we're saying is required in the country in businesses -- and, of course, in the Department of Justice itself." Conyers termed the lack of diversity in the civil rights division "totally unacceptable."

The Justice Department declined the I-Team's request for an interview. Instead, it issued a statement that listed the actions it has purportedly taken to improve diversity, including mentoring, diversity training and conducting exit interviews to improve retention of minorities.

Through interviews and reviews of dozens of pages of internal documents, the I-Team found that of the 50 lawyers in the division's criminal section, only two are black.

That is the same number the criminal section had in 1978 -- even though the size of the staff has more than doubled.

If we are back to 1978, that can only mean one thing: we are ready for the Second Coming of Reagan!

Spellings, Whitehurst, and Nelnet, Oh My!

If today's front page story in the New York Times does not lead to criminal charges or at least immediate resignations, then it is hard imagine what might be required to make it happen.

Last September we had this story on the $278 million that ED had shoveled to the #1 Republican Congressional campaign corporate contributor, Nelnet. Paid in the form of phony interest payments on old student loans, these giveaways continued after the GAO and OIG issued separate reports waving the red flag on this practice in 2004 and 2005, respectively.

It wasn't until this year, when Nelnet had another bill to present for another $800 million in bogus interest charges that Spellings, under pressure from Kennedy and Miller, decided to let Nelnet keep their $278 million and to finally the Treasury hemorrhage by simply writing a letter, which she could have written the day she became Secretary if she wanted to end the payola. Which she did not, nor did Boehner.

Now we find out that Spellings's research man, Dr. Russ "Scientifically-Based" Whitehurst, did not have much of an appetite for researching the insidious corruption inside his own Department. After whistleblower, Jon Oberg, received a nasty-gram back from Whitehurst after reporting irregularities, it seems that Oberg was shut off entirely from access to ED loan records. Read the whole story--here is a clip:

WASHINGTON — When Jon Oberg, a Department of Education researcher, warned in 2003 that student lending companies were improperly collecting hundreds of millions in federal subsidies and suggested how to correct the problem, his supervisor told him to work on something else.

The department “does not have an intramural program of research on postsecondary education finance,” the supervisor, Grover Whitehurst, a political appointee, wrote in a November 2003 e-mail message to Mr. Oberg, a civil servant who was soon to retire. “In the 18 months you have remaining, I will expect your time and talents to be directed primarily to our business of conceptualizing, competing and monitoring research grants.”

For three more years, the vast overpayments continued. Education Secretary Rod Paige and his successor, Margaret Spellings, argued repeatedly that under existing law they were powerless to stop the payments and that it was Congress that needed to act. Then this past January, the department largely shut off the subsidies by sending a simple letter to lenders — the very measure Mr. Oberg had urged in 2003.

The story of Mr. Oberg’s effort to stop this hemorrhage of taxpayers’ money opens a window, lawmakers say, onto how the Bush administration repeatedly resisted calls to improve oversight of the $85 billion student loan industry. The department failed to halt the payments to lenders who had exploited loopholes to inflate their eligibility for subsidies on the student loans they issued. . . .

Congratulations to Sam Dillon and the Times for finally getting the story out. Read it savor the truth, just in time for Maggie's big day of testifying on May 10. Write your Congressman and demand her resignation and/or prosecution.

The Last Straw, Again

From the Seattle Times:

Cathy Beyer just gave her students the complete opposite of a standardized test.

Her test lasted seven years. She tracked 304 University of Washington students all the way through college. She reviewed coursework. Interviewed them repeatedly about what they learned. Had them write essays to assess their critical thinking. The result is a 428-page book called "Inside the Undergraduate Experience."

Its main finding, not surprisingly, is that college-level learning is so rich, individualized and colored by the various disciplines that there's nothing standard about it.

"We didn't set out to say anything about standardized testing," says Beyer, a researcher in the UW's Office of Educational Assessment.

"But you immerse yourself for seven years in what students learn and how they learn it, and it becomes crystal clear that giving them a centralized, standardized test would be utterly meaningless."

Yet that is exactly what we seem on the verge of doing.

A federal commission has recommended testing for college freshmen and seniors, as a way of colleges proving their worth to the public. Last week, the U.S. Department of Education said it might start withholding financial aid unless colleges show results through measures like testing or how many grads get jobs.

This is the last straw for me. Our mania for standardized testing is out of control. . . .

Vallas and the Future New Orleans Schools Miracle

There could not have a more appropriate finale to National Charter Schools Week than to have diehard EMO advocate, Paul Vallas, announced as the next superintendent of the distressed New Orleans Schools.

Even though you would never know it from reading the New York Times story on Vallas's new adventure and venture, he leaves an unimpressive privatization experiment hanging by a thread in Philadelphia, where a Rand study earlier this year showed the EMO-managed schools underperforming the public schools they were to replace--even though EMOs receive $450-$750 more per student, thanks to Vallas, than the public schools. (Philadelphia officials were less impressed by the Edison-sponsored study by voucher research chef, Paul Peterson, who turned himself into a psychometric pretzel once again in order to present a partly-sunny picture for Whittle.)

With Vallas's spending authority in Philly diminished as a result of a $73.3 million deficit that he created, and with the final vote on the EMO issue there slated for the coming week, perhaps it was high time for Vallas to move on to greener pastures. And there is none greener than New Orleans, where millions of greenbacks are to be made with fewer of those busybody citizens demanding to know how school money is being spent.

With the blessing of the White House to privatize the New Orleans Schools by whatever means, what better chance could Vallas ask for? Maybe this is where Chris Whittle will finally begin to realize his vision--and our nightmare. And perhaps Jeb Bush's investment of Florida state retirement funds will finally begin to pay off. Remember that story?

November 13, 2003—Acting through a captive money management firm, the Florida Retirement System--whose members consist primarily of public school teachers and other public-sector employees--will pay off the debts and buy out the shareholders of the for-profit education firm Edison Schools Inc., it was revealed Nov. 12.

Reported price tag: $174 million.

The Florida Retirement System is chaired by Republican Gov. Jeb Bush, who supported the purchase despite vigorous objections from teacher unions and some investment experts. The decision to buy Edison, which has used school technology as a key sales point in its efforts to take over troubled public schools, is the most controversial move by the $92 billion pension fund since 2001. That's when the fund lost a reported $325 million buying plummeting shares of Enron stock.

In New York City on Nov. 12, Edison shareholders quickly approved the management-led deal. . . .

School Vouchers as Corporate Tax Write-Offs

With Florida's school voucher plan ruled unconstitutional last year, the privatizers are back with a new, old plan: allow corporations to pay for the vouchers and then have the taxpayers give them a dollar-for-dollar tax break for providing an inadequate education in a private school with no accountability. From The Ledger:

Legislation intended to revive a private-school voucher program the Florida Supreme Court struck down last year cleared the Senate.

The defunct Opportunity Scholarship Program had allowed students from failing public schools attend private schools with state-paid vouchers. The Supreme Court ruled it violated the Florida Constitution's requirement for a uniform system of free public schools. The bill (HB 7145) by Sen. Dan Webster, R-Winter Garden, would allow failing school students to obtain vouchers, instead, through another program for students from low-income families. It is financed through corporate income tax credits and was not challenged.

The Senate on Wednesday amended the voucher provision onto the House-passed bill, which otherwise would require Florida's education commissioner to develop a program for improving failing schools. The chamber voted 26-13 for the bill, sending it back to the House.

Different Meeting, Same Lies

From the Citizen-Patriot:

. . . . In attempting to dispel myths about the six-year-old school accountability law, Spellings told educations writers Thursday that NCLB is "not an unfunded mandate" or a one size fits all program.

"It's not a mandate at all," Spellings said, noting that the states set the standards. "It is not a one size fits all federal prescription."

But if state's don't got along with the law, they lose federal funding. So it's a do-this-or-we'll-shut-off-the-valve mandate?

The only mandate, Spellings said, is that Michigan and other states must produce test data and get every child at grade level by 2014.

She also said the federal law does not force teachers to teach to the MEAP test. She went on to defend that practice, though.

"There's not a thing wrong with teaching to the test," Spellings said last night during a Q&A at the Education Writers Association conference in Los Angeles that I'm attending.

Spellings added that teachers have been teaching to tests since the days of Greek philosopher Socrates.

This is the top education official in America. If it were not so embarrassing and scary, it might even be funny. Socrates considered the wise person the one who knows the extent of her own ignorance. Not a chance!

Plans for Hostile Takeover of New Jersey High Schools Continues Unabated

In March we reported on a meeting we attended in Long Branch that was designed to scare the unwary public into believing that New Jersey high schools are going to hell in a handbasket and, therefore, in need of rescue by Achieve, Inc., the Business Roundtable and the U. S. Chamber of Commerce. Now a new meeting is coming up Wednesday in Maplewood, New Jersey. Here are some reasons for you to be there.

If this national and local effort were just a harmless PR campaign to divert attention away from the accelerating exportation of American jobs, this would not be such a big deal. But what is at stake is the soul, the heart, and the legs of American public education. Will public education continue to strive to serve the diverse educational needs of a democratic republic, or will public high schools become corporate training and testing camps for the 21st Century? Be assured--nothing less than the future of the public high school is at stake here.

So this coming Wednesday when the Achieve, Inc. powerpointers begin with their song and dance about the need for more college graduates with high tech degrees, be prepared to share some of the reality. It is not the fault of the American high school that every job that is not nailed down is headed offshore, and it is not the fault of the American high school that the American jobs of the future will be mainly dead-end service work. These realities have resulted in corporate-government decisions, or indecision, as the case may be.

Some facts:
The chart at left (click it to enlarge) shows the type of job growth and job disappearance over the past 20 quarters since 2001, as more and more jobs get exported to cheaper foreign job markets. That line that spiking off the chart? Those are the most dynamic sources of American job growth--dead-end jobs requiring less than a high school education.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, eight of the top 10 fastest-growing occupations through 2014 do not require a bachelor's degree.

Even more graphic is this Table 3, Occupations with the largest job growth, 2004-14, in "Occupational employment projections to 2014," published in the November 2005 Monthly Labor Review. It shows that only five of the thirty jobs with the largest projected growth throught 2014 require a bachelors degree or above. These five jobs requiring bachelors degrees will constitute only 16% of the total number of jobs with the largest job growth. One of the top thirty, registered nurses, will require an associates degree (8% of the total number of jobs with the largest job growth).

The majority of those who are lucky enough to go to college will graduate with debt burdens to Nelnet and Sallie Mae that would choke a horse. Barbara Ehrenreich points out that this harsh reality makes for desperate, resume-padding job seekers who are willing to do anything their potential bosses may ask them to do:

Or maybe what attracts employers to college grads is the scent of desperation. Unless your parents are rich and doting, you will walk away from commencement with a debt averaging $20,000 and no health insurance. Employers can safely bet that you will not be a trouble-maker, a whistle-blower or any other form of non-"team-player." You will do anything. You will grovel.

So if you would like to join the effort to tell the real story behind this attempted hostile takeover of the American high school, be at Columbia High School this coming Wednesday evening.

To make it easy to get there, I have clipped this from the official website:

Event:	Columbia High School--South Orange-Maplewood, 17 Parker Avenue Maplewood, NJ 07040 (973) 378-5269 Fax (973) 378-7607
Description:	Our world is changing – but are New Jersey’s high schools changing with it? Join us for a conversation on our state’s high schools. At each meeting, a variety of topics relating to the future of New Jersey’s high schools will be discussed [bring your prepared notes and line up to speak--they have two microphones waiting to hear from you].
Date:	5/9/2007
Time:	7:00 p.m.
Location:	17 Parker Avenue Maplewood, NJ 07040

Click here to register for this event

Directions: Click here for customized driving directions

Will More Abusive Testing Close the Health Gap?

Perhaps a more pressing and realistic goal would be 100% child health care by 2014. From CBS:

. . . ."It's more than just insurance and lack of insurance, that are keeping children from getting medical care," says Dr. Irwin Redlener, president of the Children's Health Fund of Columbia University.

It's estimated that 9 million children are completely uninsured. But the new study says 11.5 million more kids end up without medical care for part of the year. And another 3 million can't get a ride to the doctor. That's more than 23 million children.

To close the gap, Redlener is on Capitol Hill lobbying for a dramatic expansion of the $5 billion federal Children's Health Insurance Program, or CHIP. Redlener wants to add 9 million people to CHIP, plus dental and mental health benefits and transportation.

The price tag for all that? "Really what we need is $60 billion. Between $50 and $60 billion," he says.

Getting that type of government assistance may be a long shot, but Redlener says it's cheaper than the cost of neglecting the medical needs of a generation of children.

FCAT As "Injurious Deception"

The swooning third-grade reading scores just released in Florida brought this editorial today in the Daytona Beach News-Journal (ht to Marion Brady). A clip:

What the numbers do show is the silliness -- no, the injurious deception -- of using FCAT scores as comparative tools in any way, whether across annual classes, between schools or between counties. Any such comparison would be a discredit to the teachers and the students on the receiving end of the resulting analyses, good or bad. Just as Volusia and Flagler schools have a right to regard their third graders' reading scores skeptically, they should do the same regarding their third graders' better math scores.

How, then, to explain the disparities in numbers? The biggest variable isn't intelligence, quality of teaching or environment. It is, every year by far, the test itself -- those booklets where the questions are never the same in two successive years. Writing test questions isn't an exact science. The biases inherently built into standardized testing, however unintended, have been vastly documented. This year's results strongly suggest the same.

None of those rationales changes the fact that in a few weeks schools will be "graded" individually based on these scores. None of those rationales changes the fact that across the state thousands of third graders will be held back because they failed to meet an arbitrary benchmark, while thousands of 12th graders won't be granted a diploma for failing their next-to-last FCAT chance to pass. Many of those seniors will have accomplished four years' course work well enough to earn a diploma. But they won't, based on a few hours of standardized testing. How productive is that, when it drastically diminishes the students' chance of getting a job?

Science Education is Safe Because---

70% of Republican candidates still believe in evolution.

See the video at Crooks and Liars.

By the way, Tancredo, Huckabee, and Brownback constitute the minority opinion.

The Outraged and Outrageous Thomas Sowell

Kevin Drum blogged it under the title, "Banana Republicanism."

Unbelievable--but here it is from National Review Online:

. . . .The last time I saw a Republican express outrage was 1991, when Clarence Thomas told the Senators what he thought of the smear tactics used against him. Before that, it was Ronald Reagan saying, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” Before that, it was probably Teddy Roosevelt.

Too many people in positions of responsibility act as if these are just positions of opportunity — for themselves. The ones who simply steal money probably do less harm than teachers who propagandize their students, media who slant the news, or politicians who sell out their country’s interests in order to get reelected.

A reader wrote: “Have you ever noticed that opinion polls ask the opinions of people who have no expertise in the subject on which they are being polled and publish these opinions as if they were gospel truth instead of group ignorance?”

Judging by the polls, Republican voters’ memories do not seem to be as short as Senator John McCain may have thought. Judging by press coverage, the media’s memory does not seem to have been as long as he may have thought when he played to that gallery.

A sign of the times: A full-page ad for an Alaska cruise in the left-wing New York Review of Books says, “See Alaska’s Glaciers Before They’re Gone!” Shipmates listed include Ralph Nader and the editor of The Nation magazine.

. . . .

Our education system, our media, and our intelligentsia have all been unrelentingly undermining the values, the traditions, and the unity of this country for generations and, at the same time, portraying as “understandable” all kinds of deviance, from prostitution to drugs to riots.

. . . .

A review of one of the many environmentalist books says that even if you can’t do all you would like toward “living green,” you can at least “congratulate yourself on taking small steps to improve the planet.” That is what environmentalism — and much else on the political Left’s agenda — is really all about, self congratulation.

Just watching Suze Orman for a few moments while channel surfing is enough to make me feel exhausted.

When I see the worsening degeneracy in our politicians, our media, our educators, and our intelligentsia, I can’t help wondering if the day may yet come when the only thing that can save this country is a military coup.

In his book Income and Wealth, economist Alan Reynolds says that people often form “strong opinions” based on “weak statistics.” Unfortunately, that is also true of a wide range of other issues, from “global warming” to “gender bias.” . . . .

A Concise Primer on NCLB

Here is a clip from a excellent primer on NCLB pubished in the current issue of The Nation. Authors: Linda Darling-Hammon, Deborah Meier, Pedro Neguero, and Velma Cobb:

. . . .A Focus on Testing Rather Than Investing. Most centrally, the law does not address the profound educational inequalities that plague our nation. With high-spending schools outspending low-spending schools at least three to one in most states, multiplied further by inequalities across states, the United States has the most inequitable education system in the industrialized world. School funding lawsuits brought in more than twenty-five states describe apartheid schools serving low-income students of color with crumbling facilities, overcrowded classrooms, out-of-date textbooks, no science labs, no art or music courses and a revolving door of untrained teachers, while their suburban counterparts, spending twice as much for students with fewer needs, offer expansive libraries, up-to-date labs and technology, small classes, well-qualified teachers and expert specialists, in luxurious facilities.

The funding allocated by NCLB--less than 10 percent of most schools' budgets--does not meet the needs of the under-resourced schools, where many students currently struggle to learn. Nor does the law require that states demonstrate progress toward equitable and adequate funding or greater opportunities to learn. Although NCLB requires "highly qualified teachers," the lack of a federal teacher supply policy makes this a hollow promise in many communities.

At a time when the percentage of Americans living in severe poverty has reached a thirty-two-year high, NCLB seeks to improve the schools poor students attend through threats and sanctions rather than the serious investments in education and welfare such an effort truly requires. As Gloria Ladson-Billings, former president of the American Educational Research Association, has noted, the problem we face is less an "achievement gap" than an educational debt that has accumulated over centuries of denied access to education and employment, reinforced by deepening poverty and resource inequalities in schools. Until American society confronts the accumulated educational debt owed to these students and takes responsibility for the inferior resources they receive, Ladson-Billings argues, children of color and of poverty will continue to be left behind. . . .

Bracey Once More Debunks the "Schools Suck" Bloc of Ed Reformers

Even though the achievement levels established for the NAEP have been discredited by the "Government Accountability Office; the National Academy of Sciences; the National Academy of Education; and the Center for Research on Evaluation, Student Standards and Testing," the fear mongerers and privatizers have continued to point to American student scores on NAEP as proof that American schools are going to hell in a handbasket.

Bracey has some new findings that may bring Gates, Broad, and their 60 million dollar gas bag back to earth. From WaPo:

. . . .By comparing the results of foreign students and American students on tests administered in both nations, and then examining the American students' scores on the U.S. NAEP, it is possible to reliably estimate how well foreign students would perform on the NAEP.

And it turns out that only one-third of those high-flying Swedish kids would be considered proficient readers; the NAEP figure for U.S. fourth-graders was 29 percent. The great majority of the remaining countries would have fewer proficient students than the United States. Using the NAEP standard, no country comes close to having a majority of proficient readers.

Under the NAEP standard, Singapore is the only nation in the world to have a majority of its students be proficient in science, and that by a scant 1 percent. Only a handful of countries would have a majority of students proficient in mathematics.

All those august organizations have rejected the NAEP achievement levels because the process is confusing to the people who try to set the levels and because the results are inconsistent: Children can't answer questions they should be able to and can answer questions they shouldn't be able to. The levels also give what the National Academy of Sciences called "unreasonable" results, including the fact that only 29 percent of U.S. fourth-graders were considered proficient or better by NAEP, yet America ranked third among 26 participating nations.

Other evidence is easy to come by. In 2000, 2.7 percent of American high school seniors scored 3 or better -- the score at which colleges begin to grant credit for the course -- on Advanced Placement calculus. Almost 8 percent of seniors (including those who did not take the test) scored above 600 on the math SAT; nearly a quarter (24 percent) of those who took it scored over 600. Yet NAEP said that only 1.5 percent of the nation's seniors reached its "advanced" level.

So why does the government continue to report such misleading information? The "Leaders and Laggards" report illustrates why: The numbers are useful as scare techniques. If you can batter people into believing the schools are in awful shape, you can make them anxious about their future -- and you can control them.

In the 1980s, the "schools suck" bloc used such numbers to make us fearful that Japan, now emerging from a 15-year period of recession and stagnation, was going to take our markets; today, India and China play the role of economic ogres.

Recently, Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote in The Post that constant references to a "war on terror" "stimulated the emergence of a culture of fear. Fear obscures reason, intensifies emotions and makes it easier for demagogic politicians to mobilize the public on behalf of policies they want to pursue." Happens all the time in education. The most recent phony alarm comes from Eli Broad and Bill Gates, who are putting up $60 million hoping to "wake up the American people." If the fear-mongers can scare you sufficiently (how many times have you heard the phrase "failing schools" in the past five years?), you might permit them to do to your public schools things you would otherwise never allow.

FCAT Reading Scores Plunge, Thousands More Left Behind

Florida has to be the poster state for educational reform via oppressive testing, and they are leaders in the preferred Reading First direct instruction and phonics-based reading instruction approach. Last year former Education Commissioner Winn couldn't have made the State's position clearer when he said "we believe that testing well is reading well." As in years past, two-thirds of the of the thousands of 3rd graders who failed the FCAT were held back. This year guarantees that thousands more predominantly poor, black, and brown third-graders will learn failure at an early age. From the Palm Beach Post:

Thursday, May 03, 2007

Hundreds more Palm Beach County third-graders could be held back this year, based on reading scores released Wednesday showing a decline on the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test after four straight years of improvement.

In some schools, the percentage of students failing the reading test doubled.

Across the state, third-grade reading scores dropped for the first time since the test was administered in 2001. Scores improved in only six of 67 school districts, prompting head-scratching among everyone from classroom teachers to the state commissioner of education.

State officials tried to deflect attention from the one-year dip and focus on the long-term improvement. They characterized the 2006 scores as a "spike" and this year as a return to normalcy.

"We don't think the performance of this year's third-graders is in any way a downturn in our trend," said Cornelia Orr, administrator for the state Office of Assessment and School Performance. "It's clearly on track. It's just that last year's performance was stellar."

No one saw this year's drop coming. Practice FCAT tests administered by many school districts, including Palm Beach County, predicted a different outcome.

Superintendent Art Johnson said he's "not buying" that the test scores reflect a weaker crop of readers in this year's third-grade class. The state must have graded the test wrong this year or last, or the test was more difficult this year, Johnson said.

"It would be a horrible thing if they had made a mistake, for the entire state to be off because of a Department of Education error," he said. "That would be a very embarrassing and bad thing."

Before announcing Wednesday's scores, state officials conducted a study of this year's reading test questions and found that it was no more difficult than previous tests, actingEducation Commissioner Jeanine Blomberg said. They also ruled out other anomalies, such as a large number of students moving during the school year.

State officials plan to look for other clues, including whether schools with reading coaches or other programs bucked the state trend.

In Palm Beach County, only 18 of more than 100 regular public schools saw an increase in the percentage of students reading on grade level. A number of charter schools also saw improvements.

Among all third-graders, 19 percent (2,408 students) failed the 50-question multiple-choice reading test, compared with 15 percent last year.

Math scores offered a positive departure. The percentage of county students scoring on grade level jumped from 73 percent to 76 percent.Scores also improved statewide.But the math scores are not as important.

Students who fail the reading test must repeat third grade, with some exceptions. . . .

The Sanctioned Abuse of Special Education Students

Since passage of NCLB in 2002, about 90% of all special education students have been required to pass the high-stakes tests at the same rate that other students are required to pass. Justified on grounds that no disabled child will be left behind, millions of special education students have suffered the indignity of repeated failures over the past five years. Never mind that there has been no extra help or proposed strategy to make it possible or even likely that the vast majority of these children, emotionally disturbed or cognitively challenged, will ever pass these tests. Cruel and unusual punishment guaranteed to produce failure? Don't get me started.

This year Tweaker-in-Chief Spellngs has grudgingly acknowledged the insanity of her department's policy regarding the impossible demands placed on special populations, so that in the coming year only 70% of special education students must suffer another round of failure. From the Cleveland Plain Dealer:

. . . . One of the bedrock beliefs of No Child Left Behind is that schools should be held accountable for the academic performance of all students and should test them - in grades 3-8 and at least once during high school - to determine if they are proficient in math and reading.

But since 2004, the law has allowed schools to exclude up to 1 percent of their students with severe mental disabilities from taking the tests their peers take. Some states, such as Ohio, granted additional waivers to districts to exclude more students from regular tests.

The new rule is aimed at "gap kids" - students who are academically below grade level, but are higher-functioning than students with grave mental impairments.

Added together, the two exemptions - the original 1 percent and the new 2 percent - will exclude as many as 30 percent of all special education students from regular testing.

While that percentage scares some advocates, many educators believe it is a modest accommodation for schools and students alike.

"For an urban district, 2 percent isn't high enough," said John Foley, interim superintendent of the Toledo schools and a former special education teacher. "Giving many of these children standardized tests is incongruous to what special education is supposed to be doing."

Federal education officials insist the new 2 percent regulation in no way backs off from the law's commitment to education for all children.

"We will still hold these students to grade-level standards, but give students more time to get there," said Raymond Simon, deputy secretary for the U.S. Department of Education. "This is going to make teaching and learning for special education students a whole lot better."

More time to get there? A whole lot better? What does that mean?

Kristof: Out of Africa and Into Fantasyland

Kristof must have decided on the way home from Darfur to solve a less intractable problem, and one that every prep school boy knows the answer to. Posted by Miss Malarkey Wednesday, May 03, 2006--I couldn't have said it better, so here it is:

There was an interesting op-ed piece in the Sunday New York Times titled “Opening Classroom Doors” by Nicholas D. Kristof. He expresses his belief that highly intelligent and talented people who want to become teachers are being discouraged by the barriers to the classroom, namely, having to go through the certification process, which includes student teaching and related coursework. He proposes relaxing the requirements “so people can enter teaching more easily.”

Frankly, I believe that this is the last thing we should be doing. The sad truth, as I’ve witnessed in my ten years as a New York City public school teacher, is that there are enough lazy morons in front of the classroom. Granted, they’ve been the minority, but even one is too many. Making the process of becoming a teacher easier is not the answer.

There is a shortage of teachers; Mr. Kristof is right about that, and the need for teachers will continue to grow. The numbers tell that story. But eliminating or relaxing certification standards isn’t the answer. Mr. Kristof calls the teacher shortage problem “one of the easiest to solve.” I’ve learned that none of the problems that plague education are easy to solve, this one included.

I’m resisting the urge to call former I.B.M. chief Louis Gerstner a corporate hack, since I don’t know the man and I sure his intentions are good. But his so-called “blue-ribbon panel,” the Teaching Commission, cited “confusing and cumbersome procedures to discourage many talented would-be teachers from entering the classroom.” Having jumped through this set of hoops twice, first to get New York State teacher certification, then to get a New York City license, I have to say that while annoying, it wasn’t all that complicated. If a person truly wants to pursue a career as an educator, “confusing and cumbersome procedures,” shouldn’t interfere. And if they can’t figure out the requirements, should they be in the classroom?

I also can’t help but feel a little insulted by this piece. Mr. Kristof gives the impression that he thinks teaching is easy, that any smart person with personality can just do it. For some people, unaware of the depth and breadth of knowledge needed, teaching probably is easy. But I know there are also many others like me, teachers who want to be reflective, who research best practices, who question what they’re doing and why, who have a reason for everything, big and small, that they do in their classrooms. For me, it’s all ongoing, but the process began as a pre-service teacher, before I even set foot in a classroom. Mr. Kristof says there’s no evidence that teacher training courses are of any help, but uses no supporting evidence for that claim.

Admittedly, I am a bit defensive about the choice I made to enter teaching through a conventional route that included a bachelor’s in English, a Master’s in English Education, and a semester of student teaching. But in my first year of teaching, those credentials helped me get through the year. During my toughest times, I took comfort in the fact that the depth and quality of my preparation would help me figure it out. On the worst days, that little scrap of confidence was all I had. Will someone who walks in with a B.A., a piece of chalk and a strong feeling of altruism have that?

Teach for America is lauded here, and in other publications, as an example of an organization that has placed successful teachers in the classroom with minimal training. I worked in a school with a significant number of TFA teachers, and while some of them flourished, almost as many failed, at least initially. Kristof names one study, which cited stronger gains in math when taught by TFA teachers. But that’s one study; I found one study myself which found that students of TFA teachers made 20% less academic growth than students with non-TFA teachers. The last few groups of TFA teachers I worked with were woefully inadequate, with serious classroom management problems. Most of them, however, were better in their second year after having graduate courses under their belts. Their teaching experience taught them a lot as well, but what about their students, who had to spend a year with a teacher who started with little more than a summer-long crash course in teaching? Besides, the majority of them choose not to become career teachers anyway.

I wish I had a workable solution, but I think improving conditions for teachers is critical if we are going to entice more people to become teachers. Today, it only takes a brief spin around the blogosphere to learn the truth about teaching: that classes are overcrowded, parental support is often sorely lacking, many administrators prefer to lead by intimidation, for starters. Why would someone want to become a teacher? How many people have been turned off by those factors? I have never heard someone say that they didn’t want to teach because of the salary; they always cite some combination of the factors I mentioned.

I think the teaching profession needs a major image overhaul. Changes need to be made within the profession to make it more appealing to the right people. And at this time I almost feel like I’m wrong in calling it a “profession.” In NYC we aren’t treated as professionals, and this will not help us attract teachers. Teacher morale in New York City is as low as it’s been since I began in 1996. We have absurd mandates and are expected to adapt the one-size-fits-all approach, or else. We have a Chancellor who looks to every “expert” he can find, experts who largely haven’t taught, to find solutions. But he never thinks to ask those of us in the classrooms, who really know. So why become a teacher, when you can keep your cushy corporate job and still have a chance to make important decisions about education?

Ohanian Reviews Berliner and Nichols

Reviewed by Susan Ohanian

May 2, 2007

In her foreword to Collateral Damage, Nel Noddings forcefully summarizes the book’s contents: “Nichols and Berliner demonstrate that high-stakes testing is wrong—intellectually, morally, and practically. Not only will it ‘not work’ to improve education, it is already doing demonstrable harm.” Bringing together many press accounts of the negative impact of high stakes testing, Nichols and Berliner provide convincing argument that the punitive measures accompanying this testing is destroying America’s greatest invention, its public schools. . . .

Get the rest here at Education Review.

New Report on NCLB Tutoring Sinkhole

A new policy brief from the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice finds that the corporate "foot in the door," as Sen. Judd Gregg described the tutoring provision, has turned in a dollar drain for the poorest of schools, who must, as a part of their accountability plan commit 20% of their Title 1 funds to pay corporate tutoring outfits who are entirely unaccountable for results. Sound like a Bush plan?

EAST LANSING, Mich., (May 1, 2007) – Supplemental Education Services, a key component of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) act, has been adopted and implemented with little evidence to support its effectiveness according to a new policy brief funded by the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice.

The policy brief, “Supplemental Education Services under NCLB: Emerging Evidence and Policy Issues,” is by Patricia Burch, Ph.D of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The brief examines the supplemental education services (SES) provision of NCLB, which requires school districts to pay the cost of after-school tutoring services for eligible students attending schools that have failed to meet mandated Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) benchmarks three years in a row. Those schools must set aside up to 20 percent of their Title I funds to pay for third-party tutoring services provided by state-approved providers. Currently, this field of providers is dominated by private, for-profit companies.

The report finds that SES programs have low participation rates and offer limited services for English Language Learners and special education students. It also finds that states and school districts lack the capacity to offer significant monitoring or accountability for SES programs—in stark contrast to the NCLB law’s strict accountability measures applied to the schools themselves.

The report emphasizes the overwhelming lack of evidence to support (or refute) the wisdom of the SES policy. The report states, “existing research offers little information about specific conditions that support positive outcomes” from supplemental education services provided under the law. “To make well-informed decisions in the future, policy makers will require additional empirical evidence.”

The report recommends policy makers redesign NCLB to commission federally funded studies that assess the effectiveness of SES programs and their accessibility to at-risk students. It also offers concrete recommendations for amending NCLB to assist local school districts and state education agencies in administering SES programs.

The full policy brief is available at http://www.greatlakescenter.org.

Wood on Reading First

Part of George Wood' strong post yesterday:

. . . . The corruption and pseudo-science surrounding Reading First is bad enough. But the real problem with Reading First and similar programs is the assumption as to where decision-making authority and judgment should lie.

Nothing demonstrates this more clearly than the case of Madison, WI and that district’s experience with Reading First. As reported on the front page of the New York Times, Madison was experiencing great success with their Balanced Literacy approach—blending some phonics instruction with a Whole Language approach. But consultants hired by the Department of Education pushed Madison to abandon this approach in favor of a phonics-only, commercially-produced program. When Madison refused, and provided documentation of their success, they were told that because “the city’s program lacked uniformity and relied too much on teacher judgment” it could not be recommended for Reading First funding.

The Reading Recovery program has faced a similar fate on a national scale. As a program it was specifically signaled out by DOE as “not scientifically based.” And yet, in March of this year DOE’s own What Works Clearninghouse gave Reading Recovery its highest rating (Education Week, subscription required). Responding to this, Reid Lyons, one of the architects of Reading First said he was not opposed to Reading Recovery. Rather “The question we need to ask is what level of professional development is needed to implement a program with fidelity? Can the district provide that? Can we cover the expense of the program? Is it cost-effective?”

These two cases demonstrate what is really at stake in the latest rendition of the ‘reading wars.’ Do we, on one hand, turn over schools to commercial interests who proscribe teacher behavior, standardize teaching practices, and work to be ‘cost effective’? Or, do we choose to trust teacher/parent/community judgment, invest in developing that judgment, and allow for multiple approaches to helping children learn?

This is the crux of what is wrong with so much of what is done in the name of school improvement. Misunderstanding everything that teaching and learning is about, faceless bureaucrats (until they are called before congressional panels) dictate to teachers they are to teach, to communities what is to taught, and to administrators what programs to buy. The desire is to eliminate teacher, and often parent, judgment and replace it with so-called ‘expert’ or ‘scientific’ direction.

This is a recurring dilemma in democratic societies. As Forum Convener Deborah Meier pointed out in our last newsletter, if we believe in democracy as our most special and effective form of accountability we need more, not less, local decision-making. At the same time we do not always trust each other to make good judgments. The solution, to paraphrase Thomas Jefferson, is not to usurp authority; rather it is to invest in helping people exercise authority wisely.

That is why we have public schools, to nurture in the young the skills and dispositions of thoughtful democratic citizenship. But they will only learn this when they are in the company of adults who demonstrate such abilities—as opposed to sitting at the feet of someone whose judgment is not to be trusted.

Seeking Views from New York City Parents

The New York Times has a story today about the Mayor's new charade to convince parents that they have some voice in the operations of NYC Schools. For those parents who would rather hold the Prince accountable for his kingdom rather than the subjects, here is a survey that may be copied and sent back to the Castle.

1=Agree 2=Disagree 3=Can't say

1 2 3 Prince Mike makes school parents feel welcome in making decisions that affect public schools.

1 2 3 Prince Mike allows friends and cronies to drain education resources intended to help children.

1 2 3 Prince Mike puts down parents and teachers who disagree with him.

1 2 3 Prince Mike has taken the public out of public schools.

1 2 3 Prince Mike blames poor children and parents for the economic disadvantages that largely determine test scores.

1 2 3 Prince Mike's testing and mandatory retention policy teaches failure to children at an early age.

1 2 3 Prince Mike would like to privatize the public schools.

1 2 3 Prince Mike's test-and-punish assessment policies will encourage dropouts and pushouts.

1 2 3 Prince Mike respects teachers.

1 2 3 Prince Mike respects poor parents.

1 2 3 Prince Mike's business model for schools has turned New York schools into corrupt testing factories.

1 2 3 Prince Mike's education policy supports the continuation of the income gap and the achievement gap.

1 2 3 Prince Mike knows a great deal about running a business.

1 2 3 Prince Mike knows just enough to be dangerous when it comes to operating humane schools that care about children.

ED: "Wholly Owned Subsidiary of the Loan Industry"

Since it has become safe, and even cool, to go after the bare-knuckled crooks and thugs who own the lease on the Executive Branch until 2008, I am delighted to see WaPo and the New York Times once more competing to be the lead newspaper in support of virtuous government. Today's Post digs a little deeper, or at least has read a few more blogs, to expose further details in Loangate.

It seems that the Bushies, in early 2001, quashed a proposal left on the table by Clinton to rein in some of the more dubious practices of the student loan biz. And now they have new proposals they would like to put in place just as they leave office, thu assuring ample opportunity for another 18-20 months of the same kind of Treasury looting that began in 2001. Here is my favorite quote in today's piece:

"The Department of Education has been run as a wholly owned subsidiary of the loan industry under this administration," said Barmak Nassirian, a longtime advocate for industry reform at the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers. "They are running the federal loan program for the profit of their friends and not for the benefit of students and taxpayers."

Teacher Dropout Study in California

(Click image to enlarge.) Here are the highlights from the article in the L. A. Times.