Economic Disparities and the Death of the Teaching Profession

by Daniel Brook at Huffington Post:

For my new book, The Trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All America, I interviewed scores of frustrated professionals, toiling away in jobs that paid the bills but that they didn't care for or believe in. A few weeks ago, I came across another. Too late for the book, sadly, but still a story worth telling. Let's call him Tom.

Tom is 10 years out of art school and he's found his passion -- teaching Shakespeare to kids. If he could just do that full-time, he says, he'd be satisfied with his working life. But instead of being a teacher, he's a human resources consultant.

Tom's supporting three kids and his wife who stays home to raise them. (I didn't pry dollar-by-dollar into the family's financial situation, but the exorbitant cost of childcare makes it a wash for many women with several small children to work.) Tom doesn't have a huge house or huge expectations, but he does expect to own a home and send his kids to college. And the new math of raising a family scares him. For a baby born today, the estimated total tuition for a B.A. is now $150,000 for a public college, $300,000 for a private one, like the art school Tom attended.

When Tom talks about his aspirations as "teaching Shakespeare to kids" it has a kind of airy-fairy sound to it. What do you expect from an art school alum? But when you think about it, all he's asking for is the chance to be an English teacher or drama teacher and make enough to support a family. Teaching is a real, professional, middle-class job -- it's not like trying to make it as a comedian or a rock guitarist where you could strike gold or strike out. There are thousands and thousands of positions for people who do just what Tom wants to do. But in many parts of the country, teaching doesn't buy a middle-class lifestyle anymore. The question is, why not?

The answer is rising economic inequality. It's not that teachers are making less; it's that other professionals are making more. While teacher salaries have remained stagnant in recent decades, professional salaries in corporate America have gone through the roof. In 1970, starting teachers in New York City made just $2,000 less than starting Wall Street lawyers; today, they make $100,000 less. And the Reagan and Bush tax cuts for the well-off have allowed the have-mores to keep more. This has bid up housing prices wildly to the point where teacher-headed households -- what Tom aspires to lead -- can no longer afford to buy homes in many parts of the country. In San Francisco, teacher-headed households have been priced out of homeownership in 99.7 percent of the region's census tracts. In Boston that figure is 91.7 percent and in New York it's 92.4 percent. (The Brooklyn home where my grandparents raised their family on teachers' salaries now lists for $1 million -- and it's a decidedly un-trendy location.) What's even scarier is that even in the so-called affordable metro areas like Dallas and Phoenix aren't immune. Teachers are priced out of about half of each. Which brings us back to Tom. He's not from some high-priced enclave like Hollywood or Aspen -- he's from Philly.

Today, we're asking too much of would-be teachers. In the late 1980s, when Jonathan Kozol was researching Savage Inequalities, his book exposing the unequal funding between city and suburban schools, many of the inner-city teachers he interviewed sheepishly confessed to him that they sent their own children to private schools or well-funded suburban public schools. Now that teachers can't afford to move into the good suburban districts or pay the spiking tuition of private schools, becoming a teacher often requires sacrificing the quality of one's own children's education. This is a sacrifice few will make and it is an unfair demand to make of those, like Tom, who are so eager to serve.

Moyers on Murdoch and the Greed That Consumed Us

Bush and Spellings Go After Diversity Standards in Law Schools

We have already seen how the Bushies plan to reshape higher education by making the survival of college accrediting agencies dependent upon adoption of the political goals of the crooks, theocrats, and oligarchs who now own the White House. Inside Higher Ed reports the latest threat-down, with the ABA's accrediting body for law schools now on the grill for its diversity standards. A clip:

Education Secretary Margaret Spellings has upheld the recommendation of a federal advisory committee that she extend for 18 months her department’s recognition of the American Bar Association body that accredits law schools. But the secretary, expressing clear disapproval of the accreditor’s controversial new “diversity” standard, is also — against the recommendation of the advisory panel — requiring the law school accreditor to report about how it applies the diversity standard.

In December, when the ABA’s Council of the Section of Legal Education and Admissions appeared before the department’s National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity, the Education Department’s staff — at the urging of political appointees at the department, according to several people familiar with the situation — was told that it faced punishment if it did not alter a standard it used to ensure racial and ethnic diversity among law school student bodies. . . .

KIPP Cuts and Runs, Again

There was this story recently about a charter school in Buffalo losing its KIPP franchise when it ran into performance problems (KIPP only allows success, you see). It seems that when KIPP has a steady revenue stream, a public facility provided to them, a steady supply of Teach for America temps, a good overseer, and a dependable crop of self-selected children whose parents are eager to have them KIPP-notized, then we are likely to see the KIPP magic in action.

When faced with problems as in Buffalo or Atlanta, however, we see KIPP only ready to retreat to greener pasture$. Here is another example from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 06/27/07

Atlanta Public Schools officials want to close a charter campus — which opened four years ago with hopes of getting more inner-city children into college — even though the principal says his students are outperforming their traditional public school peers.

In a daylong, testy public hearing Tuesday on terminating Achieve Academy of Atlanta's contract, school system officials laid out why the campus for fifth- through eighth-graders should be shuttered, including repeatedly not paying teachers on time.

But the fledgling school's supporters gave a feisty defense, objecting to the proceeding and nearly every piece of evidence presented.

"We have not had adequate time to prepare for ever-moving, ever-changing allegations," Glenn Delk, Achieve's attorney, told the hearing officer. "This is not adequate notice, due process and an opportunity to be heard."

The academy, which the Atlanta Board of Education had approved as a new alternative to the area's traditional public schools, has struggled since opening. Envisioned as part of the Knowledge is Power Program, or KIPP, the campus was supposed to emulate the practices of an oft-lauded network of tuition-free public schools, which specialize in providing an academically demanding environment in poverty-stricken neighborhoods.

But KIPP pulled its powerful name and canceled its licensing agreement with the school last year, citing financial and management problems at the campus. Supporters successfully sued to keep the school open without the KIPP moniker and continued this past school year without the nonprofit group's backing.

Now, Atlanta officials say Achieve must be closed because of multiple violations of its charter or contract, which dictated the terms under which the taxpayer-funded school would operate. They say Achieve has a long history of serious management problems and that it would be irresponsible for them to keep the campus open.

"Teachers don't get paid. Services don't get provided," Sharron Pitts, Atlanta Superintendent Beverly Hall's chief of staff, said in an interview. "We think they've shown they've really been incompetent to run a school."

Every year, Achieve has been forced to move to a new location. While it first opened in the southeast area of the city, the campus now is located on the west side. Principal David Morgan, who has led the school since KIPP left, blames many of the problems on the school system, which he said has needlessly pulled building leases and withheld money for teachers' salaries — both of which system officials deny.

"There's a difference between dereliction of duty and you just don't have the means to do it," said Morgan, whose campus has sued the system for inadequate funding.

During Tuesday's hearing, which took place at the system's headquarters, an Atlanta official and former Achieve employees testified, among other things, that the campus was not using certified teachers, was not regularly providing special education or guidance counseling to students, and was not paying faculty members on time.

The school has met federal standards under the No Child Left Behind Act, unlike many of Atlanta's middle schools. But Jean Cohen, who oversees the system's charter school agreements, testified that Achieve hasn't met many of the academic goals in its own contract, including that students meet or beat the state's test score averages. . . .

Even though KIPP has cut and run in Atlanta, don't expect the Bushies to give up so quickly. After all, they never saw a charter school, failure or otherwise, that they did not prefer to a public school that costs a third more to operate. In fact, yesterday ED announced another $36.5 million (on top of last year's $21.6 million) to fund facilities for charter schools, even as large numbers of public schools are crumbling. Amount laid out by ED in capital building funds for America's public schools? $0.00.

Integration Evisceration Expert

More analysis from the NYTimes:

. . . . Writing for the other four justices in the majority, Chief Justice Roberts took a harder line. In an unusual effort to cement his interpretation of Brown, he quoted from the transcript of the 1952 argument in the case.

“We have one fundamental contention,” a lawyer for the schoolchildren, Robert L. Carter, had told the court more than a half-century ago. “No state has any authority under the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to use race as a factor in affording educational opportunities among its citizens.”

Chief Justice Roberts added yesterday, “There is no ambiguity in that statement.”

But the man who made that statement, now a 90-year-old senior federal judge in Manhattan, disputed the chief justice’s characterization in an interview yesterday.

“All that race was used for at that point in time was to deny equal opportunity to black people,” Judge Carter said of the 1950s. “It’s to stand that argument on its head to use race the way they use is now.”

Jack Greenberg, who worked on the Brown case for the plaintiffs and is now a law professor at Columbia, called the chief justice’s interpretation “preposterous.”

“The plaintiffs in Brown were concerned with the marginalization and subjugation of black people,” Professor Greenberg said. “They said you can’t consider race, but that’s how race was being used.”

William T. Coleman Jr., another lawyer who worked on Brown, said, “The majority opinion is 100 percent wrong.”

“It’s dirty pool,” said Mr. Coleman, a Washington lawyer who served as secretary of transportation in the Ford administration, “to say that the people Brown was supposed to protect are the people it’s now not going to protect.”

But Roger Clegg, the president and general counsel of the Center for Equal Opportunity, a research group in the Washington area that supports colorblind government policies, disagreed, saying the majority honored history in yesterday’s decision.

“There is no question but that the principle of Brown is that a child’s skin color should not determine what school he or she should be assigned to,” Mr. Clegg said.

Chief Justice Roberts wrote that Brown not only supported but also required yesterday’s decision striking down student assignment plans in Seattle and Louisville, Ky., meant to ensure racially balanced schools.

Justice John Paul Stevens, in dissent, said Chief Justice Roberts’s discussion of Brown “rewrites the history of one of this court’s most important decisions.” Justice Stephen G. Breyer, also dissenting, said the opinion “undermines Brown’s promise of integrated primary and secondary education” and “threatens to substitute for present calm a disruptive round of race-related litigation.”

Professor Greenberg said he was also wary of the reaction to yesterday’s decision. “Following Brown, there was massive resistance” that lasted some 15 years, he said. “This is essentially the rebirth of massive resistance in more acceptable form.”

Mr. Clegg, by contrast, said the decision’s practical consequences should be minimal. “Kennedy does leave the door open to some degree of consideration of race,” he said, “but it’s not very clear what that would be.”

As a consequence, Mr. Clegg said, most prudent school districts would shy from any use of race in assigning students for fear of costly and disruptive litigation.

Professor Greenberg suggested that more than law was at play in yesterday’s decision.

“You can’t really say that five justices are so smart that they can read the law and precedents and four others can’t,” he said. “Something else is going on.”

NAEP Failure or the Failure of NAEP?

Every time neoliberals or conservatives drag out the NAEP scores to justify their attacks on public education, please refer back to this essential summary by Dr. Bracey on how this tactic came to be. From Huffington Post:

The 2005 NAEP results will arrive shortly and more tongues will cluck about them this time than in the past. That's because some reformers have made the NAEP achievement levels -- basic, proficient, and advanced -- more prominent by calling for them to be used to validate state achievement results reported for NCLB. Such use would be a disaster. The NAEP achievement levels are "fundamentally flawed" to use the words of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS).

If fact, everyone who has studied the NAEP achievement levels has said, essentially, "These things are no damn good." Those who have studied them include the NAS, the Government Accounting Office, the Center for Research in Evaluation, Standards and Student Testing, and the National Academy of Education. Even the NAEP reports themselves contain a disclaimer quoting from the NAS study: "NAEP's current achievement level setting procedures remain fundamentally flawed. The judgment tasks are difficult and confusing; raters' judgments of different item types are internally inconsistent; appropriate validity evidence for the cut scores is lacking; and the process has produced unreasonable results."

Fundamentally flawed? Judgments inconsistent? Validity evidence lacking? Can you imagine the howls of outrage that would greet ETS or CTB/McGraw-Hill if they dared bring to market an instrument with such basic failures?

So why are we still using the achievement levels? The official story from the U. S. Department of Education is that "a proven alternative to the current process has not yet been identified." That was written in 1998. One would think that a Department as obsessed with applying "scientifically based research" as the current one would have screamed in horror at the flawed achievement levels and rushed to fix them.

The truth is, though, neither the Department nor anyone else is trying to develop a "proven alternative." Indeed, many observers believe that the NAEP achievement levels, created by the National Assessment Governing Board under its then-president Chester Finn, were deliberately set too high in order to sustain the sense of crisis created by 1983's "A Nation At Risk." There is no rush to develop new achievement level setting procedures because much political hay can be made by alleging that American students are performing poorly.

Here's what NAS meant by "unreasonable results:" The NAEP achievement level results do not accord with any other performance evaluations, especially results from international comparisons. For example, in the 1996 NAEP science assessment, only 30% of American 4th graders scored proficient or better. In that same year, though, the Third International Mathematics and Science Study found American 4th graders third in the world in science among 26 nations. Such "unreasonable results" as the NAEP-international comparisons discrepancy consistently appear.

The 2005 results will get more attention than usual because of No Child Left Behind (NCLB). Currently, under NCLB, each state uniquely defines "proficient." To some, this creates a Babel of incomparable results. We need a common yardstick, they say, that will let us compare states. NCLB made state-level NAEP mandatory and it ever so conveniently has an achievement level named "proficient."

Rod Paige said he would use the NAEP achievement levels to "shame" states into doing better. Others, such as the American Enterprise Institute's Frederick Hess and Finn have proposed that NAEP be the NCLB test used to evaluate schools in reading and math. And Hess and Paul Peterson of Harvard have developed a procedure to grade all states based on the discrepancy between the percent proficient on the state test and the percent proficient on NAEP.

Few states do well by Peterson-Hess. Only 5 get A's and only 2 get B's. The scale doesn't strike me as particularly sophisticated or accurate. For instance, South Carolina gets an A because there's little difference between the state test and NAEP: The state is low on both. Connecticut, on the other hand, gets a C-. Yet Connecticut has the nation's highest proportion of students proficient on NAEP reading. The "Texas Miracle," on the other hand, disappears. Texas gets an F because it claims that 87 percent of its 4th graders are proficient in reading while NAEP says only 33 percent.

But you can rest assured that when the NAEP results appear, school critics and reporters both will point to the NAEP-state discrepancies and imply that the state is lying about how well its kids are doing. In some quarters, it will be argued that the discrepancies mean we need vouchers and more charter schools.

The Massive Step Backwards

From the Louisville Courier-Journal:

By Suzy Post
Special to The Courier-Journal

Today's Supreme Court decision undermining Jefferson County’s student assignment plan, adopted after a federal court of appeals ruled in 1975 that our schools were racially segregated, is a massive step backwards for all of our parents and children who prize educational excellence.

The 1975 lawsuit was brought by the Kentucky Civil Liberties Union and then merged with another brought by the Kentucky Commission on Human Rights. The reason the lawsuit was brought was that Louisville and Jefferson County public schools were racially identifiable. That is, you could look at a school’s student population and identify it as white or black by the racial preponderance in a specific school.

Experience has shown that segregating students in this manner insures inequity to the student population with the fewest resources. For example, white students in white schools disproportionately came from relatively financially secure families. However black students in black schools came disproportionately from families with fewer financial resources.

This inequity translated into unequal school resources. For example, when the lawsuit was filed, Central High School had broken or missing seats in its auditorium. Many of its windows were broken, and there was no vegetation surrounding the school. After U.S. District Court Judge James Gordon ruled that the board must design a student assignment plan that allowed schools to escape from the racially identifiable tag, white parents whose children would be bused to Central got busy, and voilà! Almost overnight the chairs had seats, the broken windows were replaced, and trees were planted on the school playground.

Maybe more important, students who had had no experience with kids of different races were going to the same classes together. The busing plan, which was implemented three years after the filing of the lawsuit, was one that the majority of this county’s population soon endorsed.

Yes, there was white flight, and some kids left public school altogether. But the vast majority stayed, and after a tense opening, and some minor problems related to the busing of students, the plan was accepted by our community. The present Supreme Court’s treatment of Brown v. Board of Education — in which the Supreme Court ruled in 1954 that “separate was not equal” when it came to the delivery of public education — is in a word, despicable.

This decision will undo years of good community relations among different races in our city, it will adulterate our educational goals once again, and it will be a tragic step back to a time when we lived segregated lives, with segregated schools and segregated relationships.

Make no mistake: Black, white, Latino and Asians interacting on a daily basis has a profound relationship to the vitality of our community and to positive community growth. Just as immigration has made this country vibrant, so has integrated education made it more possible. We will not be grateful for this decision or for the capriciousness of the lawsuit that produced this outcome. Tragic may be too dramatic an adjective to use in describing this giant step backward, but to my mind, it fits.

An Antidote to Supreme Racism

No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, But shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due. U. S. Constitution, Article 4, Section 2; 3

Despite the objections of Justice Thomas to the contrary, Article 4:2, 3 makes it clear that the Constitution was not conceived and executed as a color-blind document. If it had of been, then Presidents Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Harrison, Van Buren, Jackson, and Polk could not have legally sent their bounty hunters across state lines in order to retrieve their flesh and blood black African properties who were seeking the freedom that the Founders could not afford to offer them in an, otherwise, color-blind Constitution.

Justice Thomas, of course, was in agreement yesterday with the Majority's Orwellian decision that concluded that if your school wants to make sure that black, brown, yellow, and white children go to school together, then you cannot use the color of their skin as a criterion to help you to achieve that end.

What remains for those seeking integrated schools and an integrated society? In an analysis of yesterday's Orwell Decision, the Times has a bit to say about socioeconomic integration, as is used in Wake County, NC and other districts. Essentially, it is school integration based on family income (socioeconomic integration), and it appears to be a very promising practice, as noted by Richard Kahlenberg.

SF Chronicle For Postponing NCLB Reauthorization

Editorial:

THE ON-AGAIN, off-again debate on immigration reform threatens to overshadow almost every other key legislative challenge in Washington, D.C. -- including just how involved the federal government should be in our schools.

Few Americans are aware that the most important piece of education legislation in decades -- the federal No Child Left Behind law, which went into effect in 2002 -- is up for "reauthorization" this year.

The Bush administration continues to insist that the law is "working," despite the lack of convincing evidence to support such claims.

This month, a report from the Center on Education Policy, an independent think tank, concluded that student scores on state tests have improved since the law went into effect -- which allowed President Bush to once again trumpet its virtues.

But the report repeatedly cautions that there is no way to know whether the test score improvements are related at all to the federal legislation. What's more, the findings were based on results from only 13 states -- and of those only 9 reported upward trends in test scores. More important, the results of the study were based on student performance on tests devised by individual states. The rigor of those tests varies tremendously from state to state.

. . . .

The best approach would be to postpone reauthorizing the law this year, and to leave it until 2009 to revisit the issue. By that time, there should be more data on which to make a decision on the law. We are still a long way from having solid evidence to justify inflicting well intended, but intrusive, federal legislation on our schools for another five years.

A Day of Shame

Comments in the NY Times by dissenting justices in today's Supreme Court reauthorization of segregation:

. . . The four dissenters wrote, in effect, that the majority was standing history on its head. Justice Stephen G. Breyer said that today’s result “threatens to substitute for present calm a disruptive round of race-related litigation, and it undermines Brown’s promise of integrated primary and secondary education that local communities have sought to make a reality.”

“This cannot be justified in the name of the Equal Protection Clause,” Justice Breyer went on, alluding to the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which bars states from denying people “the equal protection of the laws.”

Today’s ruling threatens the promise laid out in the 1954 Brown decision, Justice Breyer lamented. “This is a decision that the court and the nation will come to regret,” he wrote.

Justice Breyer’s dissent was joined by Justices David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and John Paul Stevens, the tribunal’s longest-serving member, who wrote a separate dissent that was remarkable for its feeling.

“While I join Justice Breyer’s eloquent and unanswerable dissent in its entirety, it is appropriate to add these words,” Justice Stevens wrote. “There is a cruel irony in the chief justice’s reliance on our decision in Brown vs. Board of Education.”

Today’s ruling breaks faith with the 1954 ruling, Justice Stevens asserted. “It is my firm conviction that no member of the court that I joined in 1975 would have agreed with today’s decision,” he wrote. . . .

Spellings Serves Up Privatization Lite

(Photo Leslie Smith, USA Today). With immigration legislation dead (again), and with the majority of the American people disapproving of the NCLB debacle, the Bushies are already trying to make nice in hopes of salvaging something that might leave the Decider with a legacy other than corruption, incompetence, and greed. Nice try, Maggie, but---write Congress and urge them to say, NO THANKS!! We can do better than to give in to the privatization of the poor schools! We need a plan to make them better, not to turn them over to corporations and churches. From USA Today:

U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings on Wednesday proposed "a more nuanced" way of evaluating schools under President Bush's No Child Left Behind school reform law — one that would differentiate between schools that are close to meeting state math, reading and science standards and those that are "chronic, chronic underperformers."

Under the proposed change, public schools with just a few struggling students could help students without being labeled underperforming. In the bargain, they'd avoid sanctions that can include firing staff, privatizing or even closing their doors.

The law currently doesn't differentiate between the two. It breaks down schools' test scores by at least 36 categories, and if even one group of students — for instance, Hispanic or disabled students — doesn't improve, the entire school misses its "adequate yearly progress" goal.

That has been a major source of heartburn for educators. Recent figures show that about 2,300 of the nation's 90,000 public schools are being "restructured" under the law. That number will likely grow as more students miss progress goals.

The change, which Spellings floated during an interview with USA TODAY's editorial board, could quiet critics and help make No Child Left Behind more palatable as Congress prepares to reauthorize it. Spellings' spokeswoman, Katherine McLane, says Spellings has discussed the proposal with lawmakers.

The law requires schools that get federal money to test about half of their students annually in math, reading and science. If even one group doesn't improve, the school must offer all students free transfers to another public school; after another year, it must offer free tutoring. After five years, states can restaff schools, reopen them as privately managed charter schools or close them. In 2004, 41% of schools narrowly missed their goals.

Under the new proposal, schools that miss the mark because of just one or two groups could limit tutoring and transfers to these students — and avoid other sanctions.

Several education groups have suggested such a change, but Spellings hasn't discussed it in detail until now. Mike Casserly of the Council of the Great City Schools has proposed a similar change. He says it makes sense: "The strategies you use to address one set of schools ought to be different from the strategies that you use to address another."

Kati Haycock of The Education Trust, an advocacy group for poor and urban students, says restaffing or closing marginally struggling schools "undermines public support and doesn't really make any sense."

Mary Kusler, a lobbyist for the American Association of School Administrators, welcomed the idea: "We are delighted to see that the secretary recognizes the need for a graduated accountability system, where all schools and school districts are not considered the same."

But Rosemarie Young, principal of Watson Lane Elementary School in Louisville, says the law still usurps states' roles in education and mandates solutions that may not fit all schools: "I'm just really cautious about broad strokes."

R.I.P. Brown vs. Board of Education

Over 50 years ago the the Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that separate schools are inherently unequal. Today in the cruelest of ironies, desegregation plans in Louisville and Seattle schools have been struck down by conservatives in a 5-4 vote by the Court.

This comes as I listen to the slithering chancellor, Joel Klein, rationalize the continuation of apartheid schools in New York City. Thurgood Marshall must be turning in his grave today.

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Supreme Court on Thursday rejected school assignment plans that take account of students' race in two major public school districts. The decisions could imperil similar plans nationwide.

The rulings in cases affecting schools in Louisville, Ky., and Seattle leave public school systems with a limited arsenal to maintain racial diversity.

The court split, 5-4, with Chief Justice John Roberts announcing the court's judgment. Justice Stephen Breyer wrote a dissent that was joined by the court's other three liberals.

Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote a concurring opinion in which he said race may be a component of school district plans designed to achieve diversity.

He agreed with Roberts that the plans in Louisville and Seattle went too far. He said, however, that to the extent that Roberts' opinion could be interpreted as foreclosing the use of race in any circumstance, ''I disagree with that reasoning.''

The two school systems in Thursday's decisions employ slightly different methods of taking students' race into account when determining which school they would attend.

Federal appeals courts had upheld both plans after some parents sued. The Bush administration the parents' side, arguing that racial diversity is a noble goal but can be sought only through race-neutral means.

Louisville's schools spent 25 years under a court order to eliminate the effects of state-sponsored segregation. After a federal judge freed the Jefferson County, Ky., school board, which encompasses Louisville, from his supervision, the board decided to keep much of the court-ordered plan in place to prevent schools from re-segregating.

The lawyer for the Louisville system called the plan a success story that enjoys broad community support, including among parents of white and black students.

The Seattle school district said it used race as one among many factors, relied on it only in some instances and then only at the end of a lengthy process in allocating students among the city's high schools. Seattle suspended its program after parents sued.

The opinion was the first on the divisive issue since 2003, when a 5-4 ruling upheld the limited consideration of race in college admissions to attain a diverse student body. Since then, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who approved of the limited use of race, retired. Her replacement, Justice Samuel Alito was in the majority that struck down the school system plans in Kentucky and Washington.

Affirmative action has to be the next big target for the segregationists, now returned to power.

NAACP Will March Saturday Against LEAP Testing

In 2000 Louisiana became the first state in the Union to use once-a-year tests in reading and math to make promotion decisions in the elementary school. Fourth and eighth graders have to pass them both to be promoted. In the Title I school I was studying in 2000 (see PDF Full Text), 70% of the fourth graders were failed that first year. Now seven years later the failure rate in Title I schools ranges from 40 to 60 percent each year.

The Louisiana NAACP has decided to act. One can hope that the New York City NAACP might give them some support, particularly since Bloomberg has adopted the same guaranteed failure program for the poor in NYC.

The Louisiana NAACP is calling on parents and interested people to come to the State Capitol Saturday morning in protest of the state's new school testing requirements.

Ernest Johnson, president of the Louisiana National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, says that the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education recently made it a requirement that students pass standardized tests in order for them to move on to the next grade, regardless of how they did with their school grades.

In the past, Johnson says there were stipulations that allowed students who failed the tests to go to summer school and continue to the next grade if they met the standard at some point during the year.

Now, students who don't pass the tests during summer schools will not be allowed to continue to the next grade.

Johnson says the NAACP discussed its concerns with BESE and asked for the promotion requirement to be suspended for this year. He said it didn't get a favorable reaction.
Johnson says that with this requirement, BESE has gone beyond its administrative powers.
To raise awareness about the issue, the NAACP will hold a march and rally starting at 9 a-m Saturday at the Governor's Mansion.

Johnson says the group will then march to the State Capitol to draw attention to the fact that there is no state law that mandates that the tests be tied to promotion to the next grade or graduation.

(Copyright 2007 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)

The Phoenix Ready to Crash and Burn?

Despite the fact that their stock price has gone south and the scandalous fact that their unfortunate students show a four year completion rate of 7%, the for-profit diploma mill, University of Phoenix, continues to soak students of $2,000,000,000,000 a year in tax-subsidized student loans. All that could change if the courts hear the whistleblower suit brought by former UoP counselors who were, according to the suit, instructed to ignore student transcripts when enrolling new students.

From the Los Angeles Times:

SACRAMENTO, Calif. - The United States' largest vocational school chain asked a federal judge here on Monday to dismiss a massive fraud case against it, saying it already had paid the government to settle similar claims.

Two former University of Phoenix enrollment counselors, Mary Hendow and Julie Hendow, allege that the University of Phoenix, with 180 campuses and more than 310,000 students across the country, violated federal rules by offering incentives to employees based on the number of students they enrolled, including bigger salaries and more benefits.

The suit was filed in 2003 under the "Qui Tam" False Claims Act, a statute which permits whistle-blowers to sue on behalf of the government and share in the recovery if the suit is successful. "Qui tam" is legal term and an abbreviation of a Latin phrase which means, "he who sues for the king as well as for himself."

The suit, if it goes forward, could cost the university many millions in damages. About 80 percent of Phoenix's students, at campuses around the country, are on federal financial aid, and the school collects about $2 billion a year from those taxpayer-subsidized students, according to government records.

A June 2005 study by the National Consumer Law Center found that Phoenix's first-year completion rate for students enrolled in four-year programs was only 7 percent.

The university urges counselors "to enroll students without reviewing their transcripts to determine their academic qualifications to attend the university," the suit asserts.

Upheld in appeals

U.S. District Judge Garland E. Burrell already dismissed the suit once, holding that the plaintiffs' allegations were beyond the scope of the False Claims Act. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed that decision and the U.S. Supreme Court, in April, upheld the appeals court, setting the stage for a trial.

But a few months later, Phoenix filed a motion seeking to have the case dismissed on new grounds: that it already had paid $9.8 million to the U.S. Department of Education, to settle allegations similar to those made in the lawsuit -- numerous violations of the regulations prohibiting incentives based solely on enrollment numbers. . . .

Action Alert from FairTest

From Monty Neill:

The House Education Committee is about to adopt language for the next version of the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA)/No Child Left Behind (NCLB). It could approve a bill in early July, with the full House voting later in July!

Now is the time for assessment reformers like you to act. The next steps include:

1) Keep pressure on the leadership, especially Chairman George Miller. Demand they make needed major improvements (as outlined below) and allow substantial time for discussion and amendments. Tell your Rep. to deliver this message to Mr. Miller. (See contact info at the bottom.)

2) If your Representative is on the Education Committee, ask her or him to vote “No” to any bill or parts of the bill that do not make sufficient changes in the law. Ask them to propose amendments to advance the key changes and to take leadership on these issues.

3) Focus on key changes needed in the law:

• End unrealistic "Adequate Yearly Progress" (AYP) requirements. Expect schools to make reasonable progress based on real-world rates of student improvement.

• Require testing once each in elementary, middle and high school, scrapping requirement to test in grades 3-8. Over-testing takes time away from real teaching and learning.

• Assess academic progress using multiple sources of evidence, not just standardized test scores. Provide funding to help states and districts develop locally-based, performance and classroom assessments to improve teaching and learning as well as accountability.

• Replace the test-and-punish approach with support for improving educational quality. Expect all schools to take reasonable steps to improve, including use of high-quality professional development and strong parental involvement. Replace current sanctions-based system with a focus on targeted assistance.

4) Get other people and organizations to fax, call, or write Congress. Tell your Representatives and Senators to rely on the Joint Organizational Statement on NCLB and the legislative recommendations of the Forum on Educational Accountability to guide their votes on reauthorization of NLCB. http://www.fairtest.org/FEA_Home.html.

House contact info:

Rep. George Miller, Chair, House Education Committee, 2181 Rayburn, Washington, DC 20515; 202-225-3725; fax 202-226-5398.

Find your Rep at www.house.gov and Ed. committee members at http://edlabor.house.gov/about/members.shtml

• Your Rep. may be home over July 4 week – try to meet with her or him!

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Hitman Gene Hickok Goes After Spellings

The education privatizers' leading hatchet man, Gene Hickok, has emerged after a timeout that followed his $50,000 fine in March to clear himself of criminal charges related to his unreported Bank of America interests while he was Deputy Secretary of Ed under Paige.

Suddenly, Hickok is giving voice to what the "back of his mind" was telling him when he the lead enforcer of NCLB:

. . . .Bush might have expected that Eugene W. Hickok, a relative of the legendary frontier lawman Wild Bill Hickok and the original sheriff of No Child Left Behind, would support his drive for renewal. As the No. 2 Education Department official in Bush's first term, Hickok wrangled states and schools into compliance with the law so forcefully that foes called him "Wild Gene."

But Hickok, who is now urging Congress to revamp the initiative, said in a recent interview that he always harbored serious doubts about the federal government's expanding reach into the classroom.

"I had these second thoughts in the back of my mind the whole time," said Hickok, a former deputy education secretary. "I believe it was a necessary step at the time, but now that it has been in place for a while, it's important to step back and see if there are other ways to solve the problem." . . . .

And what else? It seems that Hickok has been loosed to go after Spellings, herself, who now we find has never been nearly so flexible as she has seemed to us through the mainstream media lens:

. . . .Hickok and his colleagues said they supported the law at the time, despite misgivings, in part because it focused unprecedented attention on public education and achievement gaps between privileged and disadvantaged students.

But former officials said Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, the top White House education adviser in Bush's first term, stymied efforts by top department officials to grant states more control over how they carried out the law. "Margaret wasn't very interested in flexibility," Hickok said.. . . .

You can run, but you can't hide from Wild Bill.

Alaska Exit Exam Ruled Unconstitutional

From the Anchorage Daily News:

Alaska spends enough money on schools to meet constitutional standards, an Anchorage judge ruled Thursday.

However, the state fails to adequately supervise local school districts to insure they do their job properly, said Superior Court Judge Sharon Gleason. Therefore, it is violating some high school students' rights by requiring that they pass a state exit exam to get a diploma, Gleason said in a split decision in the Moore v. Alaska school funding lawsuit. There are schools “that are not according to children a meaningful opportunity to acquire proficiency in the subject areas tested by the state,” Gleason wrote, in her decision.

“It is fundamentally unfair for this state to hold students accountable for failing this exam when some students in the state have not been accorded a meaningful opportunity to learn the material on the exam.”

In her ruling, Gleason gives the state a year to “address the issues” and report back to her.

The Moore v. Alaska trial unfolded last October in Gleason’s sixth-floor courtroom. The lawsuit -- the first of its kind in Alaska -- charged that the state has shortchanged Alaska schools for decades and cheats children of the education promised to them by the state constitution.

The case is the first of its kind here. But nationwide, and for decades, dozens of similar lawsuits have argued that public schools aren’t funded well enough to properly educate kids. Many of those cases have won hundreds of millions in increased budget dollars for public schools, but opinions are mixed about whether that’s resulted in improvements inside the classroom.

HS Scholars to Bush: Ban Torture

When Bush brought into the White House a top group of American high school scholars for a PR event to pump NCLB, he couldn't have known that he was about to be handed a hand-written plea signed by 50 of them to end his torture policy. The Bush response? To shift from Decider to Denier, of course. (Photo by Applewhite, AP):

The Associated Press

Monday, June 25, 2007; 7:33 PM

WASHINGTON -- President Bush was presented with a letter Monday signed by 50 high school seniors in the Presidential Scholars program urging a halt to "violations of the human rights" of terror suspects held by the United States.

The White House said Bush had not expected the letter but took a moment to read it and talk with a young woman who handed it to him.

"The president enjoyed a visit with the students, accepted the letter and upon reading it let the student know that the United States does not torture and that we value human rights," deputy press secretary Dana Perino said.

The students had been invited to the East Room to hear the president speak about his effort to win congressional reauthorization of his education law known as No Child Left Behind.

The handwritten letter said the students "believe we have a responsibility to voice our convictions."

"We do not want America to represent torture. We urge you to do all in your power to stop violations of the human rights of detainees, to cease illegal renditions, and to apply the Geneva Convention to all detainees, including those designated enemy combatants," the letter said.

The designation as a Presidential Scholar is one of the nation's highest honors for graduating high school students. Each year the program selects one male and one female student from each state, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Americans living abroad, 15 at-large students, and up to 20 students in the arts on the basis of outstanding scholarship, service, leadership and creativity.

"I know all of you worked hard to reach this day," Bush told the students in his education speech. "Your families are proud of your effort, and we welcome your family members here. Your teachers are proud of your effort, and we welcome your teachers. And our entire nation is proud to call you Presidential Scholar."

The scholars travel to Washington each June for seminars, lectures and workshops with government officials, elected representatives and others.

The Emerging Mood for the Exclusion of Inclusion

Yesterday during the train ride back from the City, it was not unusual to see fellow passengers reading the Wall Street Journal. What was unusual was the middle of the front page placement of an education story that ran to the bottom of the page and beyond. On, of all subjects, the problems associated with mainstreaming special education students. Why would the WSJ give over 3,000 words to a front-page education story on inclusion, and why would they then make this story one of the very few that is not tucked beyond their pay to read firewall, as I found out this morning when I did an web search for it. Why would the WSJ want so many of its readers, regular and otherwise, aware of the problems related to inclusion of special populations in regular ed classrooms?

Could it have anything to do with a new push by voucher and charter advocates to deal with a continuing annoyance that stands in the way of their neoliberal and neoconservative final cheap solutions for indoctrinating the poor, the minority, and the immigrant in church and/or corporate schools? If these efficiency zealots could return us to a time of segregating and warehousing the disabled, the autistic, the mentally and emotionally disturbed, then the biggest hurdle faced by charter and voucher advocates could be neutralized, shall we say.

Is the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal really concerned about the claim presented in the story that a significant number of veteran teachers are leaving the profession because of problems brought on by mainstreaming? Has the Editorial Board ever given this kind of attention to the other well-documented reasons that creative, ethical teachers are leaving teaching, the ones who are fed up with the new uncaring scripted testing camps we have created for urban America? Or has the Editorial Board of WSJ ever given attention to why the best and the brightest cannot afford to even consider teaching as a profession? Could this 3,000+ words signal the sawing off of the third leg of the human rights stool that Americans built during the 60s and 70s? First came the attack on desegregation, then the attack on gender equality, and now comes the attack on IDEA? What kind of country are we becoming under the philosophy of moneyism?

Why Teachers Quit

By Mark Phillips in the Marin Independent Journal:

IT'S SUMMER break for teachers but, having read a report on the high dropout rate of California teachers, I've been wondering how many of our best ones won't return this fall. This should concern everyone committed to quality public education.

The best elementary teacher I ever observed was Steve Kay, my son's first-grade teacher in Santa Barbara. His classroom was a glorious six-ring circus, well organized, stimulating, caring and challenging. My son loved every day.

Despite being young, Steve was a legend among educators and parents. He quit teaching two years later. With a wife and two children, he couldn't afford to live in Santa Barbara on a teacher's salary and went into his dad's construction business.

I wasn't nearly as legendary, but I was a good teacher. I, too, left after a few years, in spite of loving the teens with whom I worked. My decision wasn't primarily based on the low salary, although I took a second job at a university and still ran up debts supporting a wife and two children on $29,000. I left because I felt suffocated by having no time between 8 and 4 to even collect my thoughts, frequently using the 38-minute lunch break to meet with students. And, spending hours at night and weekends reading student papers and preparing lessons, I was neglecting my family.

We all know there are teachers who should quit, some of whom don't enjoy teaching. But 18,000 California teachers quit each year and a large number of them are excellent teachers. One of the most critical challenges in public education is this loss of first-rate teachers.

The most obvious reason is pay. Spending time and money on years of education and training, knowing that you are doing excellent work in a socially critical profession, and then making less than most blue collar workers can eat away at your morale. Almost every teacher I know in the Bay Area who has a family and whose spouse is not working full time has a second job. Like Steve Kay, many finally decide they can't do it.

Many good teachers quit for other reasons. They enter the profession despite the pay because they enjoy working with kids, love their subject and want to make a contribution to society.

They quit because they find the workload and working conditions oppressive. They rarely have time for more than a five-minute break and many use their lunch break to meet with students. They work with an average of 125 students a day, many of whom are a continual challenge. Increasingly, they spend much of their time preparing students for state exams instead of focusing on what is most important and meaningful.

Although they generally receive more administrative support than teachers in most urban areas, Marin teachers are not immune from these pressures. Many also report a high level of stress related to the growing number of "at-risk" kids. More and more of these kids come from dual working families that have little time to provide the support children need. A far greater burden falls on teachers.

The combination of the increased needs of children and the increased testing and paperwork pressures of No Child Left Behind is a lethal one for many teachers. What started as exciting and meaningful work becomes overwhelmingly stressful and unfulfilling.

Inadequate funding, across all school districts in California, still places severe limitations on reducing class size and providing students with emotional support services.

Additionally, many districts are more concerned with the stigma of low test scores than they are with providing adequate support for teachers.

And while this may fall in the "so what else is new?" category, we all have to keep the pressure on our policy makers to change the low priority placed on money for public education and the high priority placed on standardized tests. Until this happens, Marin too will continue to lose many of its best teachers and the quality of education will deteriorate rather than improve.

Mark Phillips of Woodacre is a professor of secondary education at San Francisco State University.

The Anticultural Curriculum of the Lower Caste

From Gannett News Service:

WASHINGTON -- The federal No Child Left Behind law is prompting many schools to focus increasingly on math and reading at the expense of other subjects, new research suggests.

The trend is particularly apparent at low-performing schools in urban areas, according to a study the California-based RAND Corp. presented to a panel of education researchers early this month.

The study is sure to give ammunition to critics who contend a narrower curriculum deprives children of a rich education.

The study released June 12 concludes that subjects such as art, music and social studies, which aren't tested under No Child Left Behind, are increasingly neglected.

"If only math and reading count, then other (courses) will take second place, and we're starting to see that already," said Brian Stecher, a senior social scientist with RAND. . . .

Manufacturing the Teacher Shortage in Order to Solve It

The Washington Post has a piece today on the teacher shortage that contributes to the myth that NCLB has raised the bar on teacher quality. While it is true that NCLB increases the emphasis on new teachers having subject matter knowledge, which is important, NCLB and Bush Co. have taken the emphasis off of new teachers having any pedagogical knowledge of how to teach, address special needs, plan lessons, assess learning, and understand children. What has occurred as a result of the emphasis on subject matter requirements is that many state departments of education have opted for alternate route certification programs such as the one that Michelle Rhee headed in New York City before her ascension to Chancellor in DC. Another example of this kind of retreat from pedagogy by ED is the infamous and corrupt history of Rod Paige’s embrace of the online certification scam, ABCTE, that got its start with a discretionary grant from ED. ED gave its stamp of approval of ABCTE before it ever offered one of its online tests to the first teacher candidate to plunk down $500.

All of this would make an interesting political story, even without the added human tragedy that urban and rural schools face increasing shortages of qualified teachers that outfits like Teach for America , with all the willing co-eds from Yale and Harvard that it can round up, cannot begin to address. In over ten years, TFA has sent about 12,000 idealistic temps into the school to do their two years. We need 100 times that number. And even if there were enough of them, these idealistic TFA candidates did their 2 years of service having vast knowledge gaps when it comes to the history, philosophy, theory, psychology, or supervised practice of teaching. Even if TFA could double its numbers by in the next 5 years, it would be a sad drop in the bucket in terms of the growing shortage, which is exacerbated by, 1) accountability systems that guarantee failure, thus decreasing the chance of recruiting the best teachers where they are needed the most, 2) bonus pay proposals that reward the teachers in the best schools, and 3) a scripted, chain gang approach in urban schools that scares away creative and ethical teachers. (None of these issues, by the way, are even mentioned in today's WaPo gloss.)

Here is a little reality therapy for the reporters like Mathews at WaPo, who continue to advance the idea that a permanent stream of replaceable temps is good enough for the weakest rivulets of the human capital stream that flows all around that shining decision-making capitol on a hill.

From the NCTAF’s new report, The High Cost of Teacher Turnover:

By allowing excessive teacher turnover to continue unabated year after year, we have been digging a deep hole for ourselves. In 1994, former U. S. Secretary of Education, Richard W. Riley, warned the nation that we would need to hire two million teachers
within ten years to offset Baby Boom retirements. Over the next decade we beat that goal by hiring approximately 2.25 million teachers – but during that same decade we lost 2.7 million teachers, with over with over 2.1 million of them leaving before retirement.

. . . .

In 1999, in the School District of Philadelphia, 919 new teachers began teaching and 12,000 students began ninth grade. Six years later, 58% of those students had graduated from high school, but only 30% of those new teachers were still teaching in Philadelphia. This means that the new teacher dropout rate (70%) over six years in Philadelphia was higher than the student dropout rate (42%) (p. 1).

Senator Feingold on NCLB

From the Senator's website:

On The Issues: Education - No Child Left Behind Act

The President signed the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) into law in January 2002. This law, which reauthorized the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, is one of the primary laws that govern federal elementary and secondary education programs. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act is scheduled for reauthorization this year and I look forward to working with my colleagues to ensure needed changes are made to the testing mandates that were created under NCLB.

I voted against NCLB because it is not the best approach for Wisconsin students, teachers, and school districts. In particular, I could not support a new, largely unfunded federal mandate for annual, high-stakes testing in grades 3-8. The federal government should leave decisions about the frequency of standardized testing up to the states and local school districts that bear the responsibility for educating our children. While standardized testing does have a role to play in measuring and improving student achievement, one high-stakes test alone cannot accurately and responsibly measure our students or our schools.

There are a number of provisions in this law that I do support, such as funding for school libraries and reading programs, and increased funding for after-school programs and a number of small programs that were at risk of being cut. I was also pleased that the law authorizes specific funding levels for the Title I program and included programs to help rural school districts. This funding is vital for Wisconsin school districts. Unfortunately, levels of funding for the many programs under ESEA have not reached their promised levels.

In addition to my concerns about high-stakes testing, I am also concerned that the President's budget requests for the fiscal years since enactment of NCLB – one of the centerpieces of his domestic policy – have under-funded the programs that he signed into law and have actually eliminated funding for a variety of programs authorized by this law. The federal government has a responsibility to come through with education funds that we have promised to states and local school districts. To do otherwise sets students and educators up for failure with respect to the federal mandates we have imposed upon them.

While I certainly share the President's goal of improving education for all students and closing the achievement gap that exists between low-income students and their peers, I remain skeptical of an approach that relies on high-stakes testing. I continue to hear from people around our state about the negative impact that this law is having in our schools.

Due to the concerns raised by my constituents over the past several years, I have sent letters to the Senate, Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee for the past four years asking the Committee to have a series of hearings on the implementation of the NCLB and its consequences for students, teachers, schools, and school districts. I am pleased the Senate and House committees have already started to hold roundtable discussions and hearings this year as part of the reauthorization process.

A full and deliberative reauthorization process is needed and substantial changes must be made to the testing mandates of NCLB. Please click here to read the latest copy of my letter, cosigned by nine of my colleagues this year. I hope that the ongoing Senate and House hearings will be a first step to addressing the problems with this law and to ensuring that the voices of public school students, teachers, administrators, and parents in Wisconsin are heard during the reauthorization process. . . .

Bracey on the Latest Voucher Evidence

From Huffington Post:

VOUCHERS STRIKE OUT AGAIN

New York, Dayton, Washington, D. C., Cleveland, Milwaukee, Florida, and now Washington again. Kids who use publicly or privately funded vouchers to attend private schools don’t do any better in school than matched groups of public school children. You wonder how many at bats these guys are going to get. I guess when the club owners are people like George W. Bush, John Boehner, and James Leininger the answer is “infinite” (Leininger spent millions trying to influence voting in Texas to stack a legislature that would give him the vouchers he’s been chasing for 20 years. See Chapter 2, James Leininger, Sugar Daddy of the Religious Right in The Anatomy of Power: Texas and the Religious Right in 2006. Put the title in Google).

I guess if the names are George F. Will, Paul Peterson, or Joe Bast (Heartland Institute), the answer is also infinite simply due their infinite hatred for the National Education Association. Freud would have a field day with these guys.

The latest Washington debacle has to be especially disappointing to voucher proponents simply because it’s the latest. You’d think they would have learned something from all those earlier tryouts I named earlier.

Maggie Spellings was her usual inelegant self: “The report’s findings are in step with rigorous studies of other voucher programs which have not typically found impacts on student achievement in the first year. We know that parents are pleased with the success of the program in providing effective education alternatives.” And just how might you be defining “effective” Ms. Spellings?

Paul, when-the-going-gets-tough-the-Right-gets-Peterson, Peterson echoed Spellings “Kids lose ground when they change schools. Even if they may be in a better school, they’re not going to adjust right off the bat.” Well, Paul, live and learn, I guess. This is the first time I’ve heard you or any other voucher vulture invoke adjustment as an excuse for the poor showing.

And he and Maggie are wrong. Peterson’s own data show them wrong. Peterson claimed sizeable first year gains in Cleveland. Of course, he used fall-to-spring testing and had no control group so it wasn’t exactly a randomized field trial. Later, better studies by Kim Metcalf and a team from Indiana University found the public school kids starting out behind and catching up even though white students were overrepresented in the voucher groups.

In Peterson’s studies in Dayton and DC, Peterson got a “significant” effect in math—at the .10 level, a level not used by most researchers. By the second year, math had moved up to .05. Reading never showed any gain and by the third year everything had washed out.

Amit Paley’s article in the Washington Post says the Bush administration will attempt to expend vouchers nationwide in the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind. No doubt. Bush had them in there to start with, lost them to Kennedy, and was unable to get them reinserted despite six old college tries by Boehner.

But, hey, in a faith-based administration (see Ron Suskind, “Without a Doubt”, New York Times Magazine October 17, 2004) what’s a little negative data among prayer-mates?

Amit Paley, “Voucher Students Show Few Gains in First Year.” Washington Post, June 22, 2007, p. B1.

Saving Higher Ed from Political Hackery

Just as Spellings and ED are directed by the political arm of the White House for K-12 policy decisions, we see the same corrupt, crony politics at work as Bush Co. surges forward in an attempt to reshape higher education. The education text-and-test industry, the student loan sharks at Sallie Mae and Nelnet, etc., the for-profit online diploma mills that feed off of federally-guaranteed student loans, and the fundamentalist church schools are allied in an attempt to gain a controlling interest in a higher ed system that has remained so far the envy of the world.

Commentary from the San Antonio Express-News:

Americans need to elect officials who care about them and their well-being. This means never again the likes of the current bunch of nincompoops.

I can forgive their lies, misappropriation of funds and even the bloody global mess they have gotten America into. But I cannot forgive their attempts to stupefy America's kids and create an environment of mediocrity in the U.S. higher education system.

The Bush administration is trying to manipulate and modify the accreditation process of the 1998 Higher Education Act. All bona fide institutions of higher learning are accredited by specialized agencies such as the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools, or SACS. The U.S. Department of Education designates these agencies to ensure that diplomas issued by the accredited institutions are valid and course credits can be transferred.

More important, these institutions are eligible for Title IV funding, which governs federal student financial aid programs, as well as other federal funding. Hence, accreditation is the operating license for educational institutions.

A battle has been brewing between the Department of Education and the Council of Regional Accrediting Associations, or CRAC, over the language and substance of the reauthorization proposal of the Higher Education Act. The Department of Education is insisting on inserting language to reflect three interests that have little to do with serious education.

The first involves "for-profit educational corporations" that have championed school vouchers. Using its power of designation, the department is applying pressure on crediting institutions to force institutions of higher learning "to accept credits without regard to their accreditation status."

The second demand is on behalf of interests pushing for TAKS-type testing. This means that testing would most likely be done by external for-profit agencies using standards far removed from goals, objectives and missions of the institutions.

The third and most important insertion demanded by the Department of Education is a provision "requiring an accrediting agency to demonstrate that it applies its standards in a manner that does not undermine the stated religious mission of any institution of higher education."

This means that peer review per se goes out the window and the University of Texas at San Antonio or UT-Austin must accept Gog and Magog 102 from one of the institutions controlled by the Southern Baptist Conference or any other religious institution.

I have no problem with religious institutions sponsoring universities. Indeed, some of them are very good and I went to one. But mine ceased to be strictly a religious school a century ago, and so has Harvard, Princeton and others.

Secular institutions shouldn't be forced to accommodate any mumbo jumbo they do not want to accept. More important, the proposed changes open the door to accepting courses and credits from such mediocre online organizations as the University of Phoenix and the many others that have exploded on the Internet.

The question is, who is pushing this? The answer is four Bush appointees with little experience in education.

U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings is one main actor. She has a bachelor's degree in political science, and the limit of her knowledge is working on the failed No Child Left Behind program. She is in her position because she served as political director of Bush's first gubernatorial campaign and as his senior adviser as governor.

The second is Charles Miller, who has a bachelor's degree in mathematics. A successful investment portfolio manager, he was appointed to the UT System Board of Regents.

Cheryl Oldham, a lawyer from St. Mary's University who was appointed to the Department of Education after serving at the White House, joined Miller.

The fourth is Vickie Schray, who worked with vocational programs at Mount Hood Community College in Oregon.

A letter from the Education Department threatened that if CRAC does not agree with the administration's plan, the department will be "free to recommend whatever rules it wishes."

CRAC's response was to inform the administration that it would not be swayed into changing its accreditation principles.

Congress has joined the battle and negotiations have ended without agreement. America now ranks 15th in education among the developed countries.

With mediocrity like this running the system, I am surprised it isn't behind Afghanistan.

Write Congress to Say, Scrap It!

A letter by Monty Neill in The Nation:

SCRAP 'NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND'!

Cambridge, Mass.

Would that Congress had consulted Linda Darling-Hammond, Pedro Noguera, Velma Cobb and Deborah Meier when drafting No Child Left Behind ["Evaluating 'No Child Left Behind,'" May 21]. They lay out a powerful case for why NCLB needs fundamental reform if it is to help us "pay off the educational debt to disadvantaged students that has accrued over centuries of unequal access to quality education."

Darling-Hammond cites the work of the Forum on Educational Accountability (FEA) in building a consensus for a new NCLB that would shift the law's emphasis "from applying sanctions for failing to raise test scores to holding states and localities accountable for making the systemic changes that improve student achievement." The Joint Statement on NCLB has been signed by 121 education, civil rights, religious, disability and civic organizations, a constituency of more than 50 million people. These voices are beginning to be heard, but much more must be done.

Congressional committees are writing legislation. Now is the time to act. Contact your senators and Representative today. Tell them NCLB should not be reauthorized until its serious flaws are fixed. Ask them to contact the Education Committee and press for adoption of the FEA's legislative recommendations.

Rather than just test and punish, the new federal law proposed by FEA would improve schools through high-quality professional development for teachers and administrators; involve parents more deeply in school improvement; enable families to participate better in their children's education; continue to assess and report student learning but based on multiple measures, not just test scores. Expectations for achievement would be realistic, based on rates of improvement actually achieved by schools. Targeted assistance would replace sanctions (see www.edaccountability.org).

MONTY NEILL
Chair, Forum on Educational Accountability

ETS Comes Back With Spellings-Approved Findings

It's a tough season for supporters of the abusive and stupidifying No Child Left Behind Act. With 7 out of 10 Americans convinced that a yearly standardized test is an unfair way to judge schools, the ed industry and the theocrats are pulling out all stops to save their privatization plan from repeal or remaking. Enter the Educational Testing Service, the most trusted "non-profit" name in the education industry and recipient of over $600,000,000 in profits last year. Big surprise--ETS has new "research" touting widespread public support of NCLB.

Before being coached by ETS questioners, survey respondents were evenly split (43% for/41% against) on their level of support of NCLB. When respondents were provided the positive spin from ED, however, the ETS researchers got the response they were looking for (56% for/39% against). Here is the question (from Ed Week's article) that got the response that ETS was sent out to get:

“The No Child Left Behind Act provides federal funds for school districts with poor children in order to close achievement gaps. It also requires states to set standards for education and to test students each year to determine whether the standards are being met by all students. In addition, No Child Left Behind provides funding to help teachers become highly qualified. It also provides additional funding and prescribes consequences to schools that fail to achieve academic targets set by their state. Based on this statement and anything else you may have heard, would you say that you have a favorable or an unfavorable opinion of the No Child Left Behind Act?”

Compare that finding to the PDK/Gallup Poll last fall, or the more recent Scripps poll:

Phi Delta Kappan/Gallup Organization
“From what you know or have heard or read about the No Child Left Behind Act, do you have a very favorable, somewhat favorable, somewhat unfavorable, or very unfavorable opinion of the act—or don’t you know enough about it to say?”

Scripps Survey Research Center
“Based on 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 law?”

It will be interesting to see the new PDK/Gallup results coming out in September.

New School Voucher Study Shows No Voucher Advantage

Despite the fact that a new ED study on vouchers in D.C .was directed by the Walmart-funded Professor and 21st Century Chair in School Choice of an academic department devoted to "choice" advocacy, which was bought and built by Sam Walton and headed by Jay P. Greene (of Manhattan Institute fame);

and despite the fact that 20% of the students enrolled in the program left within the first year (and no researcher asked why);

and despite the fact that student academic performance was no better in the private voucher schools;

and despite the fact that there was students felt no more satisfied or safe than did public school students;

and despite the fact that there was no evidence found that students were, in fact, safer in terms of "actual school experiences with dangerous activities";

despite all of this, Sam Dillon chooses a headline, "Voucher Use in Washington Wins Praise by Parents," that points to the only positive finding that voucher advocates like Spellings and her researchers could dredge up.

For a more balanced account, see Paley's "Voucher Students See Few Gains in First Year" in WaPo.

Congressman Miller, I think, sums it up: "This report offers even more proof that private school vouchers won't improve student achievement and are nothing more than a tired political gimmick."

The Immoral Clarity of No Child Left Behind

If NCLB were just about using the U. S. Department of Education in an attempt to break the backs of the public schools in order to privatize them, that would be reason enough to tar and feather the dissembling crooks who have been put in charge at ED. The fact that Bush & Co. are attempting this scam under the pretense of helping poor, minority children, teachers, and parents who are now being ground up and sacrificed in high stakes testing boot camps is reason to get in the faces of legislators to demand the repeal of this ideological lunacy and the firing of the functionaries who continue to perpetrate this legalized child abuse and intellectual genocide against the the poor and impoverished.

These realities, plus the reality of mass firings and school closures, are no longer abstractions for the students, parents, and teachers of 2,300 American schools. Here are some clips from an AP piece:

(NEW YORK)—The scarlet letter in education these days is an "R." It stands for restructuring — the purgatory that schools are pushed into if they fail to meet testing goals for six straight years under the No Child Left Behind law.

Nationwide, about 2,300 schools are either in restructuring or are a year away and planning for such drastic action as firing the principal and moving many of the teachers, according to a database provided to The Associated Press by the Education Department. Those schools are being warily eyed by educators elsewhere as the law's consequences begin to hit home.

Schools fall into this category after smaller changes, such as offering tutoring, fall short. The effort is supposed to amount to a major makeover, and it has created a sense of urgency that in some schools verges on desperation. "This is life and death," says John Deasy, superintendent of schools in Prince George's County, Md., where several schools are coming face to face with the consequences of President Bush's signature education law. "This is very high-stakes work."

. . . .

The 2002 education law, which is up for renewal in Congress, offers a broad menu of options for restructuring. They include firing principals and moving teachers, and calling in turnaround specialists.

. . . .

The pressure to prepare kids for high school is clear at Long Branch Middle School, a school in restructuring in a working-class New Jersey shore town.

The most obvious sign of the pressure is in a public hallway near the school's main entrance where graphs hang in full view of passing students and teachers. Each bears a teacher's name and shows a growth curve, indicating plainly whether students in a class are making progress on reading and math tests given throughout the year.

Superintendent Joseph Ferraina, a former teacher and principal at the school, acknowledges that such discomforting changes make teachers nervous. "It's difficult to change schools," he said. "What often happens is we talk about change, change, change, and we go back to what we felt comfortable with."

Ferraina says the wall charts are helping force his school to rely on testing data throughout the year, not just on the No Child Left Behind spring tests. "There are people working with data every day now," he said. "They're sitting down with people and saying, 'You know what, your class seems to not be doing well in whole numbers. We need to add a lesson in whole numbers.'" The focus on tests worries some who say teachers are focusing too much on preparing kids for exams rather than spending time on important other instruction.

Long Branch, like Far Rockaway, has been organized into small academies where certain subjects are emphasized. The middle school, in a state-of-the-art building, also has moved to block scheduling, where core courses last roughly 90 minutes — twice as long as typical classes. Louis DeAngelis, an eighth-grade English teacher, says that pushes him to be more thoughtful and creative about lesson planning. "You can't get up there and sing and dance. You should be able to go bell to bell," he said.

Whether it's the block scheduling or the other changes, student performance is moving in the right direction at Long Branch. Last year, only special education students missed annual No Child Left Behind benchmarks. Test scores for students with disabilities, for immigrants, poor children and minorities must be separated out under the law. But if one group fails to hit testing benchmarks at a school — like last year at Long Branch — the whole school gets a failing grade. . . .

Other changes the administration is pushing include giving schools in restructuring more options. The Education Department has proposed letting them become charter schools, which are public but operate more freely than traditional schools, regardless of state limits on how many charter schools are allowed. The administration also wants the federal law to override provisions in collective bargaining agreements to ensure failing schools have complete control over who works there. "These are schools where there are some significant problems," Briggs said. "Without more serious action, we're going to keep getting what we've gotten."

Regardless of whether No Child Left Behind is altered, the message is getting to schools that they must make real changes now, said Douglas Anthony, principal of Arrowhead Elementary in Upper Marlboro, Md., a suburb of Washington. During a recent visit, first and fourth graders alike were busy with math and reading basics.

It was around 2 p.m, shortly before the school day was to end, and a time when elementary-age students might typically be playing tag, working on craft projects or just easing into the end of the academic day. But at Arrowhead, a school in the restructuring planning stage, math worksheets were on the desks, kids were sounding out vowels and special-ed teachers were working with small groups of children.

Superintendent Deasy acknowledges the atmosphere at Arrowhead is more intense than at schools that aren't facing restructuring. He said lessons at schools missing testing goals have to be very targeted, and he says there often isn't time for electives and free play like at other schools. . . .

Michelle Rhee Lands Free Media Relations Man at WaPo

It should come as no surprise that WaPo's Jay Mathews is all aflutter that NYC's junkstore model for "highly-qualified" teacher preparation is about to come to DC. After all, Fenty's duplicitous, and perhaps illegal, appointment of Michelle Rhee, former New Teacher Project Director as the new chancellor of DC Schools, promises a good future for Mathews, who continues to use his day job as a way to promote visibility for his other concerns such as the College Board, KIPP, Kaplan (a WaPo property), and his lucrative authoring on issues for which he has no expertise beyond that which he has proclaimed for himself.

The fact that a national newspaper would continue to allow Mathews to promote his conservative and self-serving opinions in the news stories that he files is a sad statement on the cringing rush to the Right by the media and the overriding desire among elites (both right and left) to arrive at a cheap solution to the crumbling, lead-laced apartheid schools of our nation's capitol.

Enter Michelle Rhee, who is schooled in the new school of teacher preparation, which consists of a 6-week basic training period that focuses on classroom discipline. She and her media relations man, Mathews, have a solution, in fact, for the 50% rate for urban teacher turnover: they would turn over all of them by creating a corps of Teach For America Temps (call it T-FAT), composed of young Ivy League graduates who are offered a resume-building opportunity before our best and brightest go on for their corporate law training or their corporate medical training. Fenty will be get the cheap, compliant, hard-working, malleable, and temporoary teacher corps that the moneyed ed reformers are demanding from him. No silly requirements for that boring educational theory, ed history, child development, teaching methods, educational psychology, fieldwork, curriculum making, or assessment training. This is a bold new era with a more efficient understanding of what it means to be a highly-qualified teacher (for poor kids).

Think of it. No costly retirement plans, no seniority issues, no highly-degreed or expensively-experienced employees, no resistance to the curricular or behavioral brainwashing programs developed by corporate curriculum makers aimed at creating "corporate learning environments." No wonder that Fenty can afford to pay the AFT leadership to play ball. And it will save billions, as reported where else, in the Washington Post, for the costly unending expense of replacing the fleeing educators whose ethics, nerves, or stomachs cannot abide the slave mentality that they are expected to promulgate among the Work Hard, Be Nice KIPPster children, all of whom are black, brown, and/or poor.

Movement on Higher Education Act

Big losers so far: student loan lenders and the for-profit diploma mills. Winners: working families looking for help for college education. From Inside Higher Ed:

The U.S. Senate education committee fleshed out its bipartisan package of legislation to renew the Higher Education Act Tuesday, calling for $17 billion in new funds for Pell Grant recipients and $18 billion in cuts to student loan providers over five years. The Senate panel also revised a Higher Education Act renewal bill it had released Monday in several key ways, most notably abandoning a plan to require accreditors to ensure that colleges do not discriminate against for-profit colleges in their policies on the transfer of academic credit. . . .

Bloomberg and No Child Left Without A Few Dirty Dollars

Fresh from an announced intention yesterday to initiate his Third World inspired pay-the-poor-to-accept-their-poverty plan, New York's own version of Ross Perot continued making headlines today by ending yet another fling with his latest political sweetheart, the GOP.

By declaring himself independent of either political party's principles, it would appear that Bloomberg is perfectly positioned to take advantage of his vast wealth to subject the nation to another independent run for the Presidency by another irrepressible, though less comedic, megalomaniac.

With his open plans to pay teachers for test scores and to pay students for test scores, one must wonder if he has the same offer in mind for '08 voters. If the White House can be bought, Bloomberg, like Perot before him, is another one who can afford it.

NCLB Tutoring Fiasco and Corporate Giveaway

Desperate public schools being held accountable for test results use their own Title One federal funds to give to tutoring companies that are not held accountable for results. Sound like a Bush plan?? Just part of it.

From USA Today:

Program costs up to $2.6 billion a year but shows few gains.

Back in 2001, when the No Child Left Behind law was being crafted, President Bush wanted students from failing schools to get vouchers to attend private schools. The idea was that this would help the students and put pressure on the schools to improve. But Democrats, fearing that public education would be undermined, hated that idea. So a compromise emerged: Students whose schools repeatedly fell short of performance goals would be eligible for free tutoring, courtesy of federal taxpayers.

Six years later, hundreds of thousands of students across the USA are receiving such tutoring. No one knows exactly how many. Estimates range from 450,000 to 600,000. Nor does anyone have a handle on the costs. Estimates range from $700 million to as much as $2.6 billion a year.

In everyday terms, that means every man, woman and child in the country is contributing $2 to $9 annually for a program that for all its good intentions is poorly administered and shows scant evidence of effectiveness.

That's not to say tutoring is a bad idea. Watching effective school tutoring — such as the "book buddies" program designed by the University of Virginia — is akin to viewing fine ballet in action, with a series of carefully choreographed interactions among students, tutors and regular teachers. By contrast, many of the federally financed tutoring programs under No Child Left Behind resemble a clumsy polka.

The tutoring providers are a mishmash of non-profits, for-profits, local school districts and faith-based organizations. Classroom instruction and tutoring are often misaligned, according to numerous education researchers, think tank studies and news reports. Time gets wasted when tutors don't show up. Overly large tutoring sessions of 10 or even 15 students per teacher produce no gains. Services are scarce for special education or limited-English students.

Sometimes this leads to scandal: In Georgia, one tutoring company was caught paying students $5 to forge parents' signatures for non-existent sessions.

Next week, the U.S. Department of Education will release a report citing schools with successful tutoring programs. No doubt some exist. But much more is needed to ensure that students are benefiting and that federal taxpayers are getting their money's worth:

* Real accountability. States are charged with oversight, but most struggle to tell the good from the bad, according to Congress' Government Accountability Office. The only true measure is proof of learning.

* Research-based programs. Schools are not required to use tutoring programs that have been proven effective. In the absence of that, fly-by-night outfits have moved into some schools, recruiting students by handing out gifts.

Defenders of tutoring argue that states are starting to assert accountability over the program. And they argue that you can't measure improvements when a child gets only 40 or so hours a year of tutoring. Their solution is more of the same, which is a very hard sell.

If a program can't be proven effective, it should lose the money. There are other ways to help those kids, who remain very much in need.

Education Industry Agenda Exposed

Below is a review of the Mark Tucker project to privatize education in the name of American economic survival. The review is posted on a new website called Book Smarts, and here is their intro:

BOOK SMARTS offers brief but informed discussion of books on critical issues in education. Many writers from a variety of fields—notably business and politics—are writing books that promote ideas for educational reform. Given that the future and well-being of hundreds of thousands of children are affected by reform initiatives, BOOK SMARTS intends to help readers cut through the clutter and sort out sound proposals from a contemporary proliferation of unsubstantiated claims about educational policy and reform. We offer not only commentary by education professionals well-versed in theory, research and practice, but also a guide to other reliable readings on relevant topics that incorporate the best of existing research. The editors’ hope is to provide all citizens or civic minded members of the public—parents as well as policymakers—a trustworthy path through the forest of texts trying to shape public opinion.

Thanks to Monty Neill for the link. And here is the review of Tough Choices . . .:

Tough Choices or Tough Times contends that the global economy (especially India and China) is producing highly skilled workers who will work for low pay, putting pressure on the U.S. workforce to outwit its global rivals for the best, most creative work. According to the authors, the education system is the principal means to achieving such a talented workforce. Morever, they assert that producing the desired workforce is the primary responsibility of schools. The book equates national educational well-being with the health of the U.S. economy and claims that the U.S. educational system is presently ill-prepared to compete globally for these scarce jobs; hence the country is at risk of a drastic decrease in material living standards. Once this strictly economic view of education’s potential is claimed with gusto, vitriol, and reference to other scary reports like A Nation at Risk, the report goes on to call for radically transforming public education as we know it.

However, the radical remaking that the report calls for looks nearly identical in substance to the privatization-oriented reform trends that have been gaining ground for the past fifteen years. There is little new here. The remedy to the declared crisis relies heavily on business metaphors, assumptions, and logic (and relies on a standby crew of privatization advocates like Hanuschek and Finn). It includes, for example, the idea that what schools need is deregulation: public schools should be transformed into charter school networks (that the authors handily call "performance schools" so they can avoid the bad news that charters have gotten in performance studies).These charters would be run by for-profit companies and other companies composed of teacher groups and non-profits; parents would shop for schools "among the available contract schools"; the schools would be made to compete against each other until the bad ones went out of business. The authors further suggest introducing teacher merit pay as well as removing local school boards and their democratic governance: "Schools would no longer be owned by local school districts. Instead, schools would be operated by independent contractors, many of them limited-liability corporations owned and run by teachers."

There are three basic problems here. First is the idea that the crisis of the global economy and the problem of providing good jobs and high standards of living, explained by the report, should be solved principally through educational reform rather than through a number of comprehensive checks and controls on the excesses of neoliberal globalization and on authoritative government action in a number of public and private realms. Tough Choice participates in the endless call for educational remodeling as a response to the failures of business to compete internationally and the failures of government to check the damaging effects of globalization. There are a number of other places to look if one wants to understand why, for example, real wages and income have steadily declined since the 1970’s while CEO pay has increased exponentially. The book fails to engage with the tremendous bodies of literature in the social sciences and humanities that engage this broad economic question and it certainly has little to say about the growing global trend away from the neoliberal "Washington Consensus" model of economic development characterized by the WTO, World Bank, IMF dictates for widescale privatization and trade liberalization—a program that results in a global race to the bottom as capital becomes increasingly mobile and wages are suppressed by this mobility.

Second, the book mistakenly suggests that the educational system should principally be understood for its economic role of preparing workers for a business-dominated economy as opposed to, say, preparing citizens for participation and self-governance in a democratic society or preparing human beings to improve themselves and others through free and creative work. The use of people for the continued profitability of business becomes the be-all and end-all in this stunted partisan view that the reader is expected to accept as universal.

Third is an essential weakness of the remedy proposed: there is no evidence that the charter schools, for-profit educational management companies, and/or the school choice called for by this plan provide any benefits. In fact, there is plenty of evidence to the contrary. Some of the abundantly dubious research relied upon in the book includes unpublished research from Eric Hanushek and other Hoover Institution "luminaries" who provide a chart that attempts to show that GDP growth correlates to educational quality rather educational quantity. While this is a convenient way to justify the methods-not-money mantra of right-wing educational policy, it decontextualizes the numerous factors involved in economic growth while failing to comprehend the vast limitations of economic growth viewed as an end in itself. These conveniently ignored byproducts include environmental devastation, cultural devastation as consumerist values are universalized and exported, and the idiotic equating of public schooling with private service provision—as if the private accumulation of profit and the public service goals of public schooling are the same. Other purported research study cited in the book attempts to correlate NAEP scores to per pupil expenditure to suggest that quality is not closely correlated to educational investment. Rather bizarrely, the only scores used to make the claim are 4^th grade reading scores. More importantly and still more bizarrely, as many readers will know, NAEP score comparisons between traditional public and charter schools have shown that the charter experiment has had unimpressive outcomes to date—though that doesn’t stop the authors of Tough Choice relying on them as one of the primary solutions to the problems of public education.

The brand of market fundamentalism that calls for privatization and trade liberalization and that equates education with business profit is the inspiration for this book. Such market fundamentalism undermines public sector protections and supports, and it has made tough times for more and more people. The proposals in this book call for undermining rather than strengthening public schools.

Readers are advised to stick to somewhat tough-minded educational policy authors who address these issues in a serious way. The following readings offer examples.

Suggested readings:

On charter schools:

Carnoy,M., Jacobsen, R., Mishel, L., & Rothstein, R. (2005). The charter school dust up: Examining the evidence on enrollment and achievement. Washington, DC: Economic Policy Institute Washington.

Wells, A.S. (2002). Where charter school policy fails: The problems of accountability and equity. New York: Teacher’s College Press.

On globalization and education:

Lauder, H., Brown, P. Dillabough, J. & Halsey, A.H. (2006). Education, globalization and social change. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Robinson, W.I. (2003). Critical globalization studies. New York: Routledge.

On the issue of the economic misframing of educational and other social questions:

Apple, M. (2001). Educating the right way. New York: Routledge.

Bourdieu, P. (2005). The social structure of the economy. New York: Polity.

Giroux, H. The terror of neoliberalism. Boulder: Paradigm Publishers.

Saltman, K. (2005). The Edison Schools. New York: Routledge.

The New Crusade for Racial and Gender Segregation

Almost 200 years ago in Massachusetts, a new movement for a publicly-funded school system was inspired by the vision of Horace Mann. It was a system of schools that would serve boys and girls, rich and poor, protestant and catholic; it was intended to lessen the likelihood of class and sectarian violence, which Mann believed to be a tangible threat during his time. Mann's vision eventually shaped an American public education system, even though it would take another 150 years for African-Americans to reap the benefits of the Common School Crusade. By 1980, Americans had eradicated educational apartheid in the South, and school integration was a priority that seemed destined to continue what seemed at the time an inexorable march of civil rights, human rights, and gender rights.

Enter Ronald Reagan and the conservatives he brought with him to Washington. Replacing the equality and equity movement in education was a standards movement, a high standards for all movement driven by the desire to make all those black and Mexican boys and girls be accountable for now living up to what American society had refused them during the previous 200 years of inhumane treatment. With standards came accountability for reaching them, and with accountability came the tests, ah yes, the tests that would once again serve as the tool to sustain the economic and social pecking order based on economic privilege--just as the early IQ tests had been used to sustain the belief in white supremacy earlier in the Century.

With equity and equality being replaced over the past 25 years by a bottom-line confusion of equating excellent learning with excellent test scores, minority youth find themselves further shut out by a system that continues to favor those who are economically advantaged and punish those who are not. For these kids who have now had the deck stacked exactly against them, school has become just another place where their second-class status is made more obvious to themselves, the general public, and the pigeon feeders like Bloomberg and Klein who now insult them with a handful of dirty tax-exempt dollars in order to bribe out of them a higher, but no less meaningless, test score. A Third World model for treating poverty in the middle of the greatest economic and cultural megalopolis in the history of the Planet. Think of it.

Now a new crusade is underway that is supposedly intended to make this threatened African-American male child species thrive, but it is not a crusade for common schools or a crusade for an integrated society or for equal opportunity, but, rather, it is a crusade that, indeed, mocks the 9-0 Supreme Court decision in 1954 that concluded that separate schools are inherently unequal. This new crusade is one inspired by an educational philosophy that embraces gender isolation and racial segregation, a philosophy that insists these black male children do more with less, keep their mouths shut, and wear their uniforms and eagle-emblazoned ties to school each day, a day that lasts through breakfast, lunch, dinner. And Saturday. From Ed Week:

In the face of mounting evidence that schools are losing alarming numbers of young black men, a small band of educators gathered here recently to bolster one response to the crisis: creating public schools designed to serve African-American males.

Haunted by the specter of a bleak future for millions of young men—and aware that single-gender programs can face legal and political opposition—the two dozen principals were nonetheless united in their conviction that it is high time to build education programs that meet the academic and emotional needs of black boys.

“[People] ask us why we are doing single-gender education, as though what the kids are currently involved in is working,” David C. Banks, the founding principal of the Eagle Academy for Young Men, a 3-year-old public school that serves predominantly low-income black and Latino boys in New York City, told a roomful of educators, scholars, and policymakers. “When you recognize that you are in crisis, you have to do more.”

Mr. Banks and other school leaders formed the core of a June 3-5 conference billed as “a contemplation on the education of black male students.” It was co-sponsored by Wheelock College, the Panasonic Foundation, Eagle Academy, and the Delores Walker Johnson Center for Thoughtful Leadership, a training institute that is part of the Cambridge, Mass.-based ATLAS Learning Communities, which helps schools implement its comprehensive reform model.

The conference enabled principals to share promising practices for boys who have likely had to learn in crowded schools with inexperienced teachers, cope without fathers at home, and contend with pop culture’s negative images of them. Woven through the conversations about academic strategy were signs of the urgency and passion the school leaders see as necessary to the work.

“This isn’t a job, it’s a ministry,” Jerome Harrell, the principal of the Alpha School for Excellence, in Youngstown, Ohio, told his colleagues. . . .

Yes, a new crusade, a new ministry. Yes, yes. Work hard. Be nice.

Write Sen. Kennedy and Rep. Miller Today

During this period of deliberation on the future of NCLB, please write these leading Congressmen today and let them know what you think.

My open letter to Senator Kennedy and Representative Miller:

Dear Senator Kennedy and Representative Miller:

As esteemed leaders in our Congress on the important issue of education, I humbly ask that you hear my concerns regarding high stakes testing under No Child Left Behind.

My commitment to help restore some common sense to the education discussion during this current outbreak of testing hysteria began seven years ago, when I learned firsthand as a researcher in an inner city Louisiana school how high stakes testing can turn communities of care into pressure cooker environments managed by grim line bosses who were just previously nurturing teachers. Here is some of what I learned, even before NCLB turned up the heat with its added pressures and unrealistic demands:

As these urban educators saw testing raise standards and expectations, they became keenly aware that high stakes testing increases pressure, stress, and failure for themselves and their students.

With increased accountability came widespread retention, public scrutiny, and pressure to immediately fill the achievement gaps that a long history of poverty has inexorably carved out.

As curriculum and assessments become clearly focused on what is tested, there is an accompanying emphasis on teaching to the test and a dependence on multiple-choice assessments to the exclusion of other methods.

Subjects that are not tested are marginalized or eliminated.

Students who are in the most desperate need of help are given less attention than those who are the most likely (the “bubble kids”) to pass the test.

Classrooms environments become highly organized to the point of militarized behaviors.

Scripted curriculums are purchased for math and reading, and the professional and imaginative roles of teachers are essentially eliminated as they become actors learning their lines, rather than professionals planning their lessons.

Just as instruction becomes more rigorous and focused, there is a loss of the spontaneity, creativity, and professional judgment.

As accountability provides a strong impetus to improve or remove ineffective teachers, the new regimentation pushes out some competent teachers, and the public pressure discourages new applicants where they are most needed.

School activities and celebrations such as Black History Month are constrained.

Recess is eliminated.

There is now both pre-test and post-test curriculums, where active learning projects are reserved for the period between the March test and the end of school. August to March is all about test preparation.

Just as teachers see academic gains among some of their students, they see more failure and a loss of joy in coming to school and learning.

As Alpha Elementary’s school performance initially showed “exemplary academic growth,” Alpha remains “academically below State average” and finds the next rung of the performance ladder even farther away as State expectations move upward, while test score gains go flat.

Since NCLB, Alpha is faced with cutting teacher positions and programs funded with critically-needed Title One money in order to pay the salaries of literacy coaches and to transport children to another school that is not on the “needs improvement” list.

More Title One money will be diverted next year to pay companies for supplemental services tutoring for which there is no measure of accountability in place.

While the school principal and assistant principal are more engaged in the instructional program in active ways, there is less time to focus on the individual growth needs of teachers that their increased involvement has helped them to identify.

Even though increased parental outreach has increasingly brought parents into the school, more parents with their own educational shortcomings are desperately grasping for ways to help their children.

While the high-stakes testing at Alpha has provided an impetus to work harder, faster, and longer, these educators and their students face increasing level of exhaustion and the signs of emotional burnout.

In the end, these educators present themselves as determined, persistent, and hopeful at the same time they exhibit signs of serious stress, anxiety, and continuing worry about their students’ future prospects.

Finally, all of the hard work that Alpha Elementary's administors, teachers, parents, and students have done since the state testing began in 1999 will not keep them from the inevitable closure and the accompanying money-saving charter school makeover faced by 2014--or before. The NCLB 100% proficiency target unequivocably mandates their eventual failure, and that is what administrators, teachers, and even children are coming to realize in this poor community that is truly being left behind by a political and economic system intent upon removing the public from the public schools through charters, and, thus, saving 30-40% of the cost on warehousing these children in school labor camps that will accept no excuses for the effects of the grinding poverty that provides them no reprieve.

Please, please, help us save our public schools, and help us improve them rather than shutting them down. Please say no to the reauthorization of this punishing law so monstrously-titled, No Child Left Behind.

Respectfully,
Jim Horn

High Stakes Testing and Fraud

June 15, 2007, 9:34 PM EDT

In what appears to be the worst case of test fraud in New York's recent history, the State Education Department has invalidated all test results in the Uniondale district for last year's math assessments in grades three to eight, together with all math Regents exams at the district's high school.

All eight district schools have been placed on academic probation as a result of the findings, and could see their state scholastic ratings slip next year if test scores don't improve. However, none of the 5,100 Uniondale students who took those tests has been implicated, and no individual exam scores will be affected.

Although no suspects have yet been named, state and local authorities have concluded someone in the district -- probably one or more administrators -- tampered with students' answer sheets after tests were completed in an effort to inflate scores.

Parents were notified by district letter Friday that math tutoring will be made available over the summer for any children whose skills might turn out to be weaker than indicated by their test scores.

The state attorney general is investigating potential criminal conduct in the case, and administrators from the regional Nassau Board of Cooperative Educational Services have been dispatched to Uniondale to monitor the latest round of Regents exams that will be administered through next week.

Local school officials describe themselves as reeling from the effects of the state's five-month probe.

The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decisionmaking, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor. --Donald Campbell

Why More Money for Higher Test Scores Has No Merit

The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decisionmaking, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor. --Donald Campbell

Sam Dillon has a piece in today's NY Times on the cancerous spread of the practice of paying teachers an extra bounty for higher test scores from their students. Unfortunately for Dillon and the rest of us, calling this mis-educational practice "merit pay" adds no merit at all to a pedagogically-poisonous practice, and it does nothing to improve the vast and growing array of commercial and state-generated junk tests that are used each school year to effectively punish the poor and reward everyone else. While the test score bonuses will have the benefit of surely putting more needed dollars into the pockets of teachers who can wring higher scores from their charges, it will also have the effect of lowering the caliber of education, and it will incentivize the transformation of teachers into line foremen who oversee, correct, and cheerlead for daily labor practices that will increase production, i. e., more high test scores.

For those who believe that teacher education is a waste of time and a threat to monocultural values of conservatives, test bounties for teachers will have the added benefit of neutralizing or marginalizing the entire body of credible research and accumulated experience on effective pedagogy, curriculum practices, and performance assessments. Test score bounties for teachers will have the effect of further sharpening the focus on a single abstracted and dessicated outcome that separates students and teachers even further from an involvement in their own learning and growth. If there is an incentive that could have a more alienating, decontextualizing, and mind-numbing effect on what happens in the classroom and the school among teachers and students, I cannot think of it.

As a former librarian, I wonder if bonuses are being planned for library-media teachers based on the number of books they check out to students, regardless of whether students read them or know what they mean. That would be about right.

The Real Threat to American Security

There has been no shortage of overheated and alarmist rhetoric in recent years regarding the demise of "rigor" and collapse of science and math learning in schools. These educational shortcomings are purportedly fueling the loss of American preeminence in science and technology and the economic advantages associated with that loss of scientific and technological stature.

The Business Roundtable, the U. S. Chamber of Commerce, philanthropists such as Broad and Gates, and the education privatizers who are driven by both ideology and dollars, have embarked, then, upon a new crusade of blame-the-schools "education reform." The success of these reforms would be measured in how well schools are turned into training camps for instilling the corporate cultural values of competition and self-aggrandizement, rather than creating caring (supportive and challenging) communities where children learn American political values, their own histories, and the core values of being humans with a wide range of aspirations, abilities, and dreams for the future.

Besides turning education into a consummable commodity that produces a warehousable resource we now know as human capital, these reforms have also produced a very effective smokescreen that conceals a serious crack in the foundational belief that crony capitalism and manipulated markets are the keys to keeping America strong. For while the BR and the CC and the moneyed, meddling philanthropists have made great strides toward destroying public education, undermining the profession of teaching, and marginalizing large chunks of knowledge such as the arts, humanities, and vocational subjects, the real reasons for the potential loss of scientific and technological preeminence have remained hidden and unaddressed, as noted in a new report by the National Academies of Science.

The real threat to American scientific and techological preeminence, it seems, is not that school children are refusing the force-feeding of trigonometry or that their teachers have looked beyond their pacing guides and into the eyes of their students, but rather the threat appears to be clearly linked with the starvation diet of basic research and the insidious elimination of the educational imagination that, indeed, fuels such research. This is the educational imagination grounded in the "what if," and it breeds the curiosity that produces the basic research and basic questioning that obviously lacks a connection to a forseeable gadget that can be overpriced and mass marketed as the symbol of status for the majority of consumers who cannot otherwise afford it.

These are core issues beyond the expertise of Wharton MBAs or even Harvard dropouts, not to mention the burgeoning population of 21-Century education reformer versions of George Babbitt and Elmer Gantry, now lit with the renewed fire of small-minded boosterism, home-grown bigotry, and an all-consuming greed.

Here is a clip of a research study summary from Ars Technica:

. . . . Stagnating research

The total grant money dedicated to the field has barely outpaced normal inflation over the last decade, but lab costs (especially salaries of students and fellows) have shot up at a much faster rate: grant buying power has declined by 15 percent as a result. Because of this, researchers are applying for more grants, sending the competition up and success rates down: overall funding rates have dropped from 38 percent to 22 percent. New investigators, who are generally thought to take more aggressive and innovative approaches, are faring even worse as their success rates have dropped by more than half and now stand at only 12 percent.

The net result is that the academic community is now devoting far more of its time to writing grants, a shift that has come at the expense of directing and publishing research. In the past, academics have had an escape route from the pressures to retain funding: the "blue sky" research labs run by major companies, such as AT&T's Bell Labs. But the report refers to these institutions as "once great," since recent years have seen them closed, sold off piecemeal, or refocused on product development.

Combined, these changes have caused US research output to shrink in comparison to the rest of the world. Based on publications in Physical Reviews B and E, the US contribution to papers has remained flat over the last decade, while papers originating from other countries have nearly doubled. The report predicts that this reduced output will ultimately exact a price on the American economy.

Money for new directions

Many of their recommendations for correcting the situation are similar to the proposed solutions for other fields of research. Grant success rates should be brought up to the neighborhood of 30 percent, and the funding amounts need to be adjusted to compensate for the fact that academic researchers are now paid semi-reasonable wages. Grants should be pushed towards small research groups, as these are the major source of innovations. More minorities and women should be brought into the field, and career flexibility needs to be provided so that researchers do not have to choose between career and family needs as often.

There are three recommendations that stand out as being distinct from those proposed for other fields. Two suggest restructuring the way grant money is currently allocated. The National Science Foundation currently lumps interdisciplinary studies and educational programs in with other grants, where they are evaluated by people who may not have an appropriate background to judge them. The report recommends that the NSF recruit expertise across fields (such as the physics/biology overlap) specifically to provide a decent evaluation of grant proposals.

It also suggests an emphasis on education and outreach programs, which are essential to increasing public understanding of science and attracting a new generation of researchers. These programs need to be targeted to both college and K-12 education, and the funding for them needs to be separated from general research funds. Evaluations of education grants need to be separated as well, as research scientists are often incapable of properly evaluating them.

But the most radical proposal is that the equivalent of the great industrial labs needs to be reestablished. It suggests that all interested parties, ranging from industry through the Department of Defense and Energy to the academic world, should meet and determine what's needed to recreate the research environment they once fostered. Unfortunately, beyond calling for these discussions, the report is remarkably vague about how to resuscitate these now moribund labs. . . .

On the face of it, it would seem there is plenty for the business community to do to put their own houses in order, before they treat themselves to the luxury of meddling in the affairs of instititions for which businessmen have no preparation or experience.

Whoa, Girl!

From the Chronicle of Higher Ed:

The Senate education committee sent a pointed letter on Thursday to the U.S. education secretary, Margaret Spellings, asking her to “refrain from proposing new regulations on accreditation until after the Higher Education Act is reauthorized.”

The department recently completed a series of negotiated rule-making sessions on accreditation and is considering regulations that would introduce new measures of “student-learning outcomes” into the accreditation process and prohibit colleges from denying the transfer of credits “solely” on the basis of the sending college’s type of accreditation.

In its letter, the committee said that it planned to make changes in the section of the Higher Education Act that deals with accreditation, including “clarifying the Department of Education’s responsibilities with respect to recognizing accreditation agencies and organizations, and by specifying the criteria that those agencies should examine when reviewing institutions of higher education.”

The letter follows a floor speech last month by Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, one of the committee’s Republican members, in which he warned Ms. Spellings that he would seek to block her department from using its regulatory authority to transform the accreditation process. —Jeffrey Selingo

Options from Forum for Educational Accountability

From the Omaha World-Herald:

WASHINGTON - A Nebraska official and other education experts called Thursday for replacing the No Child Left Behind Act's annual multiple choice tests and its penalties for lagging schools.

They called for more frequent state and local assessments and broader measures to determine which schools are teaching kids best.

"We have the accountability horse pulling the learning cart," said Pat Roschewski, director of statewide assessment for the Nebraska Education Department, at a Capitol Hill press conference.

"Tests won't solve the problem; it will be people's actions based on those tests. None of us need the sanctions. What we really need is support, not intimidation," Roschewski said.

She was joined by other members of the Forum on Educational Accountability, a coalition of 130 education, civil rights, religious, children's, disability and civic organizations.

Roschewski is part of the group because Nebraska's education system has emphasized local district accountability, but that is headed for some major changes with the Legislature's approval this year of new statewide testing.

. . . .

The educational forum, which opposes the law's penalties for struggling schools, proposed:

• Ensuring that all students have access to resources and information needed to learn.

• Providing incentives for states and districts to develop more local assessment of student achievement and teaching.

• Supporting research to ensure that English language learners and students with disabilities receive attention.

• Developing multiple ways of assessing student performance from state and school district data.

• Encouraging states to use all subjects not just reading, math and science in evaluating quality of teaching and student learning.

• Providing help to struggling schools, such as professional development, curriculum improvements or help in retaining high-quality teachers.

Nebraska's education system, which has opposed standardized testing under the No Child Left Behind law, has drawn attention from Time magazine, educators and lawmakers.

They include Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., a key backer of the No Child Left Behind Act. Roschewski has a personal note signed by Kennedy in blue felt-tip marker expressing interest in Nebraska's system.

But the Nebraska Legislature recently approved a new statewide reading test by 2009-10, and a new statewide math test the year after. That will allow the public to compare test results among school districts. The state already has statewide testing in writing.

Roschewski said she hoped the new tests would complement the state's existing system that emphasizes local assessments of student learning.

NY Test Gains Reason for Suspicion?

Could this be another version of the latest FCAT fiasco? It would seem reason enough for the heroic Bloomberg and Klein to put down their trumpets long enough to have a look. From NY Times:

We know the script. It opens with a Greek chorus lamenting how poorly students are reading. A pedagogic hero — a new chancellor or state commissioner — appears on the scene with a fresh quiver of weapons and schedules improved tests.

The results come back, and — alakazam! — achievement surges, and our hero is hailed as rescuer of the school system. That is, until tests in later years reveal that students are back to about where they were.

Such a pattern has stamped the history of standardized testing. And so the heartening results last month on the annual reading tests in New York State and New York City, and the results on the math tests announced yesterday, should be taken in perspective.

Officials trumpeted these results. In reading, the city’s proportion of passing eighth graders — for years the subject of hand-wringing — rose a breathtaking 7.9 percentage points, with 46.4 percent of fluent English speakers tested qualifying as proficient compared with 38.5 percent the year before. Reading results for eighth graders statewide were as comforting. In math, almost 73 percent of students from third through eighth grade met standards compared with almost 66 percent last year.

But some skeptics who have been on this roller coaster before wonder whether these increases are animated more by the content of the tests or by how the results are measured than by anything administrators or teachers did or did not do. In these critics’ view, a test may show an individual student’s progress, but is not as precise at measuring the progress of an entire grade or school system.

That’s not to say that New York students did not genuinely improve. State officials say scores rose because tougher curriculum standards were spelled out, teachers were given better training and students were given extra tutoring. But a little humility may be called for.

Robert Tobias ran New York City’s office of assessment for 13 years under seven chancellors, so he knows in his marrow the vagaries of test scores. He was there when chancellors flaunted the results and when they had to sheepishly explain why scores fell. He has learned neither to get too intoxicated by the leaps nor too downhearted by the plunges.

Mr. Tobias, who directs the Center for Research on Teaching and Learning at New York University’s Steinhardt School of Education, gets suspicious when test results rise too high from one year to the next, or when one grade rises spectacularly and others register only a modest change. . . .

New Report on Loangate

Notice that Bank of America responds that its thievery was consistent with ED "standards and policy." No doubt!

From the New York Times:

. . . .The Senate report shed new light on how lenders sought to curry favor with financial aid offices.

Nelnet, a lender based in Nebraska, created an elaborate point system to reward college officials who advised it. Contributing an idea for a product earned 25 credits. Completing an online survey won another 25. The credits could be redeemed for donations to an “alma mater or college/university of choice.” Each was good for $1.

A spreadsheet from Chase’s student loan unit showed the scope of marketing activities, listing payments of over $1,000 each to produce 405 foldable wallets for Ursuline College, CD replications for Southeastern Louisiana University, 200 T-shirts for Texas Southern University, to name just a few examples.

Bank of America’s activities included $11,414 to sponsor a lunch at the College of William and Mary.

In some cases, colleges themselves demanded contributions from lenders. A Citibank sales report told how Chaminade University in Hawaii had asked the bank to hold receptions for admitted students in exchange for business.

The bank held eight receptions and spent $2,000 on each with the understanding that that would increase the bank’s “guaranteed share” of the college’s loan business. The report added that the deal did not work out in Citibank’s favor and that its loan volume decreased the next year.

Chaminade said yesterday that it “does not endorse any particular student lender and at no time has it entered into a ‘quid pro quo’ arrangement with Citibank.”

The report provided new details of lenders’ dealings with Lawrence W. Burt, the financial aid director at the University of Texas at Austin and Ellen Frishberg, a Johns Hopkins financial aid official. Mr. Burt was fired and Ms. Frishberg resigned after revelations that each had benefited financially from Student Loan Xpress or its parent company, Education Lending Group.

The report quotes a former Bank of America employee’s notes of a conversation with one of Mr. Burt’s assistants about what was expected of lenders recommended to students: “Larry loves tequila and wine — since becoming director at UT Austin, he has not had to buy any tequila or wine — lenders provide this to him on a regular basis.”

The employee complained about what officials in Mr. Burt’s office expected him to do to win business. “I am not going to see Larry 10 times yearly,” he wrote. “I do not golf, I do not have happy hours, I do not provide sports tickets and only once have I bought Larry tequila.”

When Mr. Burt also demanded favors from Citibank, and it refused, he dropped it from the college’s preferred lender list, the report said. It returned after treating him to golf and meals.

In Ms. Frishberg’s case, the report shed light on how she came to receive more than $65,000 in consulting fees and tuition payments from Student Loan Xpress. E-mail obtained by the Senate showed her soliciting tuition reimbursement.

She wrote to an officer of Education Lending that she had been accepted to a doctoral program. “I am searching for ½ tuition support — know any good scholarship programs?? (I already know where to get loans) — or why don’t you put me on retainer to Ed Lending?”

Robert DeRose, the chief executive of Education Lending, replied, “How much is ½ tuition? If we can help you we will.”

William R. Brody, the president of Johns Hopkins, said yesterday, “Although it is clear that one university employee violated university policy in her relationships with student loan companies, Johns Hopkins as an institution has always stood for a financial aid program that meets the highest ethical standards.”

In relation to the agreement with Mr. Cuomo, Johns Hopkins said that it had not violated New York law but was taking steps to comply with Mr. Cuomo’s code of conduct on student loans, and would provide annual training and closer supervision of its financial aid officers.

Lenders and colleges cited in the report offered mixed reactions.

Lawrence Di Rita, a spokesman for Bank of America, said the bank believed that its activities described in the document were “consistent with Department of Education standards and policy.”

Citibank, which was described not only as paying for student receptions for Chaminade but also of taking the college officials on its advisory board to places like San Marco, Fla., and San Diego, said that it was the first lender to voluntarily commit to a new code of conduct.

Ben Kiser, a Nelnet spokesman, said it had used its reward system only for university officials who were members of its Innovation Council. He said the council was discontinued this year, and that Nelnet had never made payments to any universities because of the council’s work.

The Anti-Civil Rights Civil Rights Agenda

During the Reagan phase of the Far Right Revolution, followers called for shutting down whole departments of the federal government. During these more advance stages of the new fascism, federal departments are used as tools to undercut the previous work of those same departments. We see this phenomenon at ED, the EPA, FDA, the Justice Department, or any other department whose oversight can now be construed as a threat to the right-wing theocracy, the unrestrained greed of crony capitalism, or the newly-secreted contractual arrangements of the military-industrial complex.

Here are a few examples from the New York Times of changes in the Civil Rights Division of Justice since Bush:

. . . .The changes are evident in a variety of actions:

¶Intervening in federal court cases on behalf of religion-based groups like the Salvation Army that assert they have the right to discriminate in hiring in favor of people who share their beliefs even though they are running charitable programs with federal money.

¶Supporting groups that want to send home religious literature with schoolchildren; in one case, the government helped win the right of a group in Massachusetts to distribute candy canes as part of a religious message that the red stripes represented the blood of Christ.

¶Vigorously enforcing a law enacted by Congress in 2000 that allows churches and other places of worship to be free of some local zoning restrictions. The division has brought more than two dozen lawsuits on behalf of churches, synagogues and mosques.

¶Taking on far fewer hate crimes and cases in which local law enforcement officers may have violated someone’s civil rights. The resources for these traditional cases have instead been used to investigate trafficking cases, typically involving foreign women used in the sex trade, a favored issue of the religious right.

¶Sharply reducing the complex lawsuits that challenge voting plans that might dilute the strength of black voters. The department initiated only one such case through the early part of this year, compared with eight in a comparable period in the Clinton administration. . . .

Latest on the Tutoring Fraud

From Ed Week:

Five years after the No Child Left Behind Act became law, there’s still a dearth of research evidence to show whether one of the federal measure’s least-tested innovations—a provision that calls for underperforming schools to provide after-school tutoring—has an impact on student achievement.

While an estimated 500,000 students nationwide are expected to receive free tutoring under the law this coming school year, most studies of its “supplemental educational services,” or SES, provision track how states and districts are implementing the requirement. Experts estimate that only three states—Georgia, New Mexico, and Tennessee—and districts in four cities—Chicago, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, and Pittsburgh—have looked to see if the services are boosting students’ scores on state tests.

And those studies, for the most part, suggest a mixed picture of success. While most parents report satisfaction with the services, the studies find, the added hours of tutoring have so far produced only small or negligible gains on state reading and mathematics tests.

“There’s a huge amount of money going out to this program with no understanding of whether it will work,” said Gail L. Sunderman, a senior researcher for the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University who has been studying the program, which has been estimated to cost up to $2.6 billion in 2005. . . . .

KIPP: Work Hard, Be Nice--Or Get Lost!

When students of the 19th Century black industrial education schools such as Hampton and Tuskegee could not get their minds right to accept the brainwashing imposed by Samuel Chapman Armstrong and his teaching lieutenants, they were simply booted out. Only 1 in 5 students actually went on to earn a certificate that would give them the credential needed to teach the Hampton ideology of black moral inferiority and unquestioning acceptance of white rule that was used to gain from freed slaves complicity in the own continued subjugation into the next century.

KIPP, the 21st Century inheritors of the Hampton and Tuskegee ideology, would appear, too, to be booting out large numbers of students who can't cut the mustard. Similar, too, is the fact that today's white philanthropists such as Gates and Broad join former do-gooders such as Carnegie and Rockerfeller in viewing this type of repressive testing and behavioral adjustment camp as the solution to alleviating the white man's burden.

Ed Week has a piece on the new urban school panacea that sheds some light on just how these spiffy new reform schools manage to maintain those high test scores:

As the high-profile Knowledge Is Power Program network of schools continues to expand, KIPP leaders are taking a close look at student attrition amid arguments from critics that the loss of students at some of those public schools of choice is alarmingly high.

Attrition rates at a few KIPP schools in the San Francisco Bay Area, in particular, have recently drawn scrutiny. Fewer than half the 5th graders who entered three new middle schools in fall 2003 are still enrolled this academic year, when they would generally be finishing 8th grade, according to a KIPP analysis. At one of the schools, in Oakland, Calif., only about a quarter of the students from that 5th grade class have remained.

National attrition data on the San Francisco-based network of 52 mostly charter middle schools are unavailable. But information the network provided on a handful of other schools, as well as a review of national enrollment data by Education Week, suggests that levels of student mobility vary widely across KIPP campuses.

In certain KIPP schools, in fact, attrition appears very low.

Still, some observers are raising concerns, especially given the accolades KIPP has attracted. For one, if most of the exiting students are low-performing, they say, the average test scores could be higher than they would be otherwise, and not accurately reflect the schools’ actual success.

“To some advocates, KIPP is the savior of public education,” said Alex Molnar, who heads the Education Policy Studies Center at Arizona State University, in Tempe. “If a large number [of students] don’t stay, how can we say this is a model for public education?” . . . .

British Study: Advantage Gap Becomes Achievement Gap

Yet another study shows family income as a primary determinant to how far behind poor and black children are in school long before these children even get to school. Denying or ignoring this obvious fact has become the primary enabler for maintaining a bankrupt and cynical meritocracy that, in fact, protects the advantaged while further punishing the disadvantaged.

It has led, too, to sanity-resistant racist and classist testing practices that pile more rewards on the already privileged, while blaming teachers and the children themselves for not correcting the inequalities that are sustained by a persistent avoidance of reality by those with the resources to actually alter that reality.

This situation largely explains how we end up with Ted Kennedy, Amy Wilkins, and George W. Bush embracing an education policy that has turned inadequate schools into intellectual extermination camps and behavioral chain gangs.

A clip from The Herald:

Many children from disadvantaged backgrounds are already up to a year behind more privileged youngsters educationally by the age of three, a major study published today has revealed.

Vocabulary scores of more than 12,000 children showed that the sons and daughters of graduates were 10 months ahead of those with the least-educated parents.

A second "school readiness" assessment measuring understanding of colours, letters, numbers, sizes and shapes that was given to more than 11,500 toddlers found an even wider gap - 12 months - between the two groups.

The equivalent gaps for children in families living above and below the poverty line used by the researchers were five months for vocabulary and 10 months for school readiness. . . .

Desperate Times for Desperate Ducks

Will Bush passively-aggressively pursue NCLB reauthorization the same way he did the Immigration Bill? Bruce Fuller has this op-ed in yesterday's SF Chronicle on the prospects for federal education legislation this summer:

No Child Left Behind lowers the bar on school reform

Monday, June 11, 2007

President Bush seems a bit frantic as he campaigns for swift renewal of the No Child Left Behind Act, eager to salvage a late-inning win on the domestic policy front. He recently dropped into a Harlem charter school by helicopter, urging the Congress to pass No Child 2.0, no questions asked. Bush's education secretary, Margaret Spellings, pitched pithy remedies on a satirical news show. Washington simply needs "to expect more of our kids," Spellings said to the incredulous host, Jon Stewart.

But despite the Bush administration's orchestrated theatrics, the bipartisan coalition that crafted the original No Child law in 2001 is splintering badly, an unsettling development for those who count on Washington to help equalize educational opportunity in America. The first real test comes this month when Sen. Edward Kennedy -- Bush's odd bedfellow on both education and immigration reform -- intends to rally his congressional committee to move forward No Child's 1,100-page bundle of centralized school reforms. But sharp criticism is growing louder and from unexpected corners.

Speaking before thousands of cheering teachers in Washington last month, Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., agreed that federal activism is required to boost the schools, "but not the kind of accountability that the NCLB law has imposed. The tests have become the curriculum instead of the other way around."

Former President Bill Clinton then sharpened the attack on No Child's holy grail -- standardized testing -- speaking to the nation's local school boards in San Francisco. "You don't need to test every child, every year," he said. A nationwide poll out late last month revealed that just more than two-thirds of all parents with school-age children believe that No Child should be rewritten or simply killed by the Congress.

Still, Bush insists that "the No Child Left Behind Act is working," as he proclaimed during his New York visit, running counter to the evidence.

Federal officials track children's learning curves in reading and math in each of three grade levels. Since No Child was approved, just one of these six trend lines has inched upward: fourth-grade math. The other five plots have gone flat or simply fallen. Progress in narrowing achievement gaps also has stalled, after closing markedly in the 1990s.

California students continue to inch upward within elementary schools. But Sacramento officials -- feeling enormous and unrealistic pressure to move all pupils toward proficiency under No Child -- tinker with state tests. After the state's third-grade scores failed to rise, test designers were nudged to make the questions a bit easier.

The aging Democratic bulls, including Kennedy and House Education Committee chair, U.S. Rep. George Miller of Martinez, risk perpetuating a costly and disappointing schools policy if they jump at the chance to cut a deal with Bush while failing to confront No Child's deep flaws.

Some testing experts, for instance, support Mr. Clinton's alternative.

Yearly exams given to every student are not essential in gauging how schools or student subgroups are performing over time. Federal monitoring of achievement gaps should continue, but it doesn't necessitate the huge chunks of time spent on test preparation that No Child now requires. Most surreal, No Child has pushed many states to lower, not raise, the bar that defines whether students test at "proficient" levels, given Washington's wishful mandate for universal proficiency.

Many states in response have simply lowered the hurdle that defines proficient student achievement. Texas claims that 79 percent of its fourth-graders are proficient readers; in California, where the bar is set higher, just 46 percent of all students are deemed proficient. In turn, Washington declares more schools as failing, because smaller shares of pupils clear the bar in states like California that set high standards.

States are adapting to Byzantine mandates from Washington. But governors and state school officials also game the system to create the illusion of rising achievement. So, its important to fix No Child in ways that retain a forceful yet surgical federal role. We certainly need a single benchmark for tracking student achievement over time.

Another monumental challenge facing the Congress is how to help states attract able and motivating teachers to work in flagging schools. But irrationality prevails again in No Child. Washington only credits schools for lifting students over the proficiency bar. This penalizes poor children -- and those who teach them -- who have much farther to climb to clear the hurdle than kids in better-off communities. Inner-city teachers quickly see their schools being slammed for being guilty on one count: trying to serve poor children.

Congressional Democrats may opt this summer for a middle ground, legislating a new effort to recruit and reward high-quality teachers while slowing down to judiciously work through the weaknesses of the larger No Child law. Such teacher legislation could finance crisp incentives to attract and retain the best teachers in urban schools. What's key for congressional Democrats is to avoid cutting an expedient deal with Bush. Instead, the Congress might first pass bipartisan legislation to enrich the teacher workforce, then move carefully to shape a federal role that truly lifts the schools.

Bruce Fuller, a sociologist at UC Berkeley, recently published "Standardized Childhood," (Stanford University Press, February 2007).

Performance Assessments to Replace Standardized Tests?

Linda Darling-Hammond, George Wood, and Monty Neill have prepared a briefing document for members of Congress that makes the case that knowing, understanding, and doing are more important to children than memorizing, drilling, and bubbling. Here is a clip:

Performance assessments that are locally managed and involve multiple sources of evidence assist students in learning and teachers in teaching for higher order skills. These tools engage students in the demonstration of skills and knowledge through the performance of tasks that provide teachers with an understanding of student achievement and learning needs. Large scale examples involving the use of such performance-based assessments come from states such as Nebraska, Wyoming, Connecticut and New York, as well as nations such as Australia and Singapore. The evidence from research on these and other systems indicate that through using performance assessments schools can focus instruction on higher order skills, provide a more accurate measure of what students know and can do, engage students more deeply in learning, and provide for more timely feedback to teachers, parents, and students in order to monitor and alter instruction.

Research evidence suggests that in order for performance assessment systems to work, governments must make significant investments in both teacher development and the development of performance tasks. However, this investment is often no greater than the cost of standardized measures. More important, it strengthens teacher quality and student learning. Performance assessment systems can be reliable and valid, having both content and predictive validity when appropriately utilized.

Based on the evidence that performance based assessment better meets the federal agenda of teaching for higher-level skills, reauthorization of NCLB should support and encourage state and local education agencies in developing performance assessments. Congress can amend Section 1111 (b)(3) of NCLB with a new paragraph (D) that authorizes and encourages states to move to performance based assessments and multiple measures incorporated into a system combining state and local assessments. Authorization for adequate funding to support this move should be included in the legislation.

More Spellings Lies, More Reality Checks

Jerry Bracey has a post up at Huffington that once again beats back the new flare up of old lies from Spellings in her Washington Post op-ed. A clip from Bracey:

. . . .First, Spellings referred to the "tough NAEP standards." To the best of my knowledge, this is the first time that any administration official has used any modifier in front of "NAEP standards." Let's hope it's a first step towards saying "unrealistically tough NAEP standards" or "outrageously tough NAEP standards." That's what they are as indicated in my blog "A test everyone will fail" last month.

Second, she wrote, "According to NAEP, more reading progress was made by 9-year-olds from 1999 to 2004 than in the previous 28 years combined." In her many, many previous repetitions of this mantra, she had always said "In the last five years," implying a more current time frame than 1999-2004. As I have noted before, NCLB became law only in 2002. All of the gain could have happened on Clinton's watch. We can't tell -- these are NAEP trend data only farmed every so often. No data were gathered in 2000, 2001, 2002 or 2003. The implementation of NCLB during the 2002-2003 school year can charitably be described as "chaotic." The 2004 NAEP data were gathered in February. That means that NCLB only had the fall of 2003 to work its miracles.

But, after these small signs of candor, Spellings loped off to double-think land. Her article announced her opposition to national standards. Her first argument was that "[National Standards] goes against more than two centuries of American educational tradition. Under the Constitution, states and localities have the primary leadership role in public education. They design the curriculum and pay 90 percent of the bills. Neighborhood schools deserve neighborhood leadership, not dictates from bureaucrats thousands of miles away."

It always makes me a bit dizzy when a bureaucrat in Washington rails against bureaucrats in Washington. And this from an architect of and Chief Flagellator for the largest federal intrusion into this state and local function in the nation's history. Takes one's breath away.

She also revealed a new dictate from The Decider: "The president's plan to reauthorize the No Child Left Behind Act calls on states to post their scores side-by-side with the NAEP results." This is a great way to destroy NAEP. NAEP's integrity rests largely on the fact that people don't pay much attention to it. Attach high-stakes to it and it will lose whatever utility and validity it has. . . .

GTC of Britain Says Dump Abusive Testing

Will England join Wales in saying no to child abuse in schools? The influential General Teaching Council has urged just that, concluding in a new study that the testing mania has brought demotivation, stress, boredom, and dropping out in unprecedented proportions. Perhaps the Brits should consider the most recent Bloomberg/Klein brain flatulence to end poverty and motivate children in NYC--pay children for test scores!

The British story from the the Guardian:

All national exams should be abolished for children under 16 because the stress caused by over-testing is poisoning attitudes towards education, according to an influential teaching body.

In a remarkable attack on the government's policy of rolling national testing of children from the age of seven, the General Teaching Council is calling for a 'fundamental and urgent review of the testing regime'. In a report it says exams are failing to improve standards, leaving pupils demotivated and stressed and encouraging bored teenagers to drop out of school.

The attack comes in a study submitted to the House of Commons education select committee and passed to The Observer. The council says that schoolchildren in England and Wales are now the most tested in the world, facing an average of 70 tests and exams before the age of 16. Standard Assessment Tests, or Sats, currently taken by children at the ages of seven, 11 and 14, should be abolished, it concludes.

It says: 'The GTC continues to be convinced that the existing assessment regime needs to be changed.'

The submission, which has emerged as more than a million teenagers sit their GCSEs and A-levels, says teachers are being forced to 'drill' pupils to pass tests instead of giving a broad education.

Some are under such pressure from trying to keep schools at the top of league tables that they have gone further and fiddled results or helped children to cheat, according to Keith Bartley, chief executive of the council, the independent regulatory body set up by the government in 2000.

Yesterday, it emerged that Vanessa Rann, a 26-year-old teacher found hanged in her home, was being investigated for allegedly helping students to cheat in a GCSE exam.

'The pressure is on and it is growing,' Bartley, whose role includes advising ministers on education policy, said in an interview with The Observer. 'What we are saying to the government is that we do not think their policies are best serving the young people in this country or their achievement.

'The range of knowledge and skills that tests assess is very narrow and to prepare young people for the world they need a set of skills that are far broader.' Exams as they stood, he said, were 'missing the point'. . . .

Boehner, Spellings, and Student Loans at 20 Percent

Written into the bankruptcy bill of 2005--the No Loan Shark Left Behind Act--was a provision to make it practically impossible to default on private loans taken out by students to pay for a college education. At the time Sallie Mae's sugar daddy, John Boehner, was in tall cotton, telling bankers they could rest easy in his "trusted hands." Since then the "representative from Sallie Mae," as he is known by fellow members on the House Committee for Education and the Workforce, has worked diligently to weaken the federal guaranteed student loan program, which caps interest rates on loans at 6.8%.

All the while, Spellings looked the other way as college student databases were mined by mercenaries planted at ED for that very purpose. And as she did zero oversight of the pillaging, preferring to concentrate on paying out unearned hundreds of millions to finnagling loan companies like Nelnet, Sallie Mae was paying off college officers to ditch the guaranteed federal loan programs offered to students. If it were not for Cuomo's insistent digging, we would still be in the dark dark on this whole sleazy travesty.

Now as this New York Times story points out, we are beginning to assess the collateral damage, with graduating seniors owing up to a hundred thousand of private loan debt, some with a 20% ceiling. Of course, the highest interest rates are preserved for those least able to pay. A clip:

WASHINGTON — As the first in her immigrant family to attend college, Lucia DiPoi said she had few clues about financing her college education. So when financial aid and low-interest government loans did not stretch far enough, Ms. DiPoi applied for $49,000 in private loans, too. “How bad could it be?” she recalls thinking.

When Ms. DiPoi graduated from Tufts University in Boston, she found out. With interest, her private loans had reached $65,000 and she owed an additional $19,000 in federal loans. Her monthly tab is $900, with interest rates topping 13 percent on the private loans.

Ms. DiPoi, now 24, quickly gave up her dream to work in an overseas refugee camp. The pay, she said, “would have been enough for me but not for Sallie Mae,” her lender.

The regulations that the federal Education Department proposed this month to crack down on payments by lenders to universities and their officials were designed to end conflicts of interest that could point students to particular lenders.

But they do nothing to address a problem that many education officials say may have greater consequences — more students relying on private loans, which are so unregulated that Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo of New York recently called them the Wild West of lending.

As college tuition has soared past the stagnant limits on federal aid, private loans have become the fastest-growing sector of the student finance market, more than tripling over five years to $17.3 billion in the 2005-06 school year, according to the College Board.

Unlike federal loans, whose interest rates are capped by law — now at 6.8 percent — these loans carry variable rates that can reach 20 percent, like credit cards. Mr. Cuomo and Congress are now investigating how lenders set those rates.

And while federal loans come with safeguards against students’ overextending themselves, private loans have no such limits. Students are piling up debts as high as $100,000.

Banks and lenders face negligible risk from allowing students to take out large sums. In the federal overhaul of the bankruptcy law in 2005, lenders won a provision that makes it virtually impossible to discharge private student loans in bankruptcy. Previously such provisions had only applied to federal loans, as a way to protect the taxpayer against defaulting by students. . . .

Utah Voucher Plan In Hands of Voters

Astroturf groups in support of school privatization have failed in their efforts to force feed Utah voters with a tamper-proof school voucher arrangement. From the Salt Lake Tribune:

In a win for voucher opponents, the Utah Supreme Court decided today that Utah's two voucher bills are joined at the hip -- and should live and die on the outcome of a Nov. 6 referendum vote.

The court said the referendum-proof law remaining in Utah code will also die if voters reject the original voucher law.

"If the voters choose to reject [the original voucher law, the amending voucher law] will not create an additional voucher program," said the court's written decision.

The decision came just hours after the court heard oral arguments on the issue from four separate parties, who each got 20 minutes. Justices asked all of them, in one way or another, how they expect the court to clean up the mess created by voucher statute remaining in Utah code. . . .

ED Sent to Time Out

From Inside Higher Ed:

Two weeks after Sen. Lamar Alexander warned the Education Department not to trample on Congress’s authority in pursuing changes in federal rules governing accreditation, leaders in the House of Representatives used a legislative procedure to send a similarly direct message.

Tucked into a 2008 spending bill for the Education Department and other agencies that a House subcommittee passed Thursday afternoon (see related article here) was a provision that would prohibit the department from using any of its funds to “promulgate, implement or enforce” new federal regulations related to accreditation. The provision, which is called a “limitation” under House rules, is a time-honored tactic used by members of Congressional appropriations committees to stop federal agencies from taking regulatory or other actions that the lawmakers oppose.

The provision was included at the urging of Rep. David Obey, the Wisconsin Democrat who is chairman of the Appropriations Committee and of its Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education and Related Agencies. The committee’s staff director, who as is Congressional standard practice asked not to have her name used, said that the provision was meant to express “bipartisan concern about what the department is doing, and that the department may be exceeding its authority.”

Is that a kind way to say, abuse of power?

Orwellian Circus at ED Moves to New Level

A new public relations campaign that will pave the way for national standards and growth models as a remedy for the failure of NCLB, has officially been launched and is hitting the airwaves with the release of a DoE report. The new report renders proficiency measurements under NCLB meaningless.

This excerpt is from the New York Times:

Academic standards vary so drastically from state to state that a fourth grader judged proficient in reading in Mississippi or Tennessee would fall far short of that mark in Massachusetts and South Carolina, the United States Department of Education said yesterday in a report that, for the first time, measured the extent of the differences.

The wide variation raises questions about whether the federal No Child Left Behind law, President Bush’s signature education initiative, which is up for renewal this year, has allowed a patchwork of educational inequities around the country, with no common yardstick to determine whether schoolchildren are learning enough.

Spellings, however, still basking in the glow of the CEP report touting slight gains in test scores, continues to play the role of a clown in the Orwellian circus going on at ED with her latest mantra, "The law has struck a chord of success."

Someone needs to tell her the chord is nothing more than a sour note.

The differences between state proficiency standards were sometimes more than double the national gap between minority and white students’ reading levels, which averages about 30 points on the national test, Mr. Whitehurst said.

Many education experts criticize No Child Left Behind, saying it gives states an incentive to set low standards to avoid sanctions on schools that do not increase the percentage of students demonstrating proficiency each year. Those experts argue that uniform national standards are needed.

But Congress is unlikely to go that far. Ms. Spellings said, “It’s way too early to conclude we need to adopt national standards” and added that it is also too early to conclude that state standards are too low.

On Tuesday, a survey of state scores in reading and math, released by the Center on Education Policy, an independent Washington group, found that since the passage of No Child Left Behind in 2002, student achievement had increased and the racial achievement gap narrowed in many states.

Ms. Spellings said the results showed the law has “struck a chord of success.” Her department’s report, though, raises doubts about just how much progress has been made.

Mr. Petrilli said, “Even if students are making progress on state tests, if tests are incredibly easy, that doesn’t mean much.”

NCLB and The Growing Divide

In the June 6, 2007, issue of Education Week, James Crawford, president of the Institute for Language and Education Policy, aruges No Child Left Behind represents a "diminished vision of civil rights" and is actually creating a growing divide in educational equity. The vision of a child's most basic rights to an equal education has been lost and forgotten in an era of accountability and test scores. In fact, in this article, he builds a solid case against NCLB by explaining how the consequences of the legislation are antithetical to the original purpose of ESEA.

It is a powerful article because it provide a historical perspective and goes beyond the usual rhetoric to make a case against NCLB as a inherently unjust and unfair law that violates the basic civil rights of children.

The entire article can be found at Duane Campell's blog Choosing Democracy.

In 2001, key Democrats in Congress, including Sen. Edward M. Kennedy and Rep. George Miller, encouraged by certain liberal advocacy groups, joined forces with the Bush administration and with Republican leaders in Congress. The result was bipartisan passage of the No Child Left Behind Act late that year.

Eliminating achievement gaps is paramount among the law’s goals; equal educational opportunity is not. In fact, the latter term—which had been prominent in previous versions of the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act—appears nowhere in NCLB. (No doubt an anonymous congressional staffer performed a search-and-delete operation on the bill, just as one did with the word “bilingual,” which was also expunged.)

What’s the significance of this shift in terminology? Achievement gap is all about measurable “outputs”—standardized-test scores—and not about equalizing resources, addressing poverty, combating segregation, or guaranteeing children an opportunity to learn. The No Child Left Behind Act is silent on such matters. Dropping equal educational opportunity, which highlights the role of inputs, has a subtle but powerful effect on how we think about accountability. It shifts the entire burden of reform from legislators and policymakers to teachers and kids and schools.

By implication, educators are the obstacle to change. Every mandate of No Child Left Behind—and there are hundreds—is designed to force the people who run our schools to shape up, work harder, raise expectations, and stop “making excuses” for low test scores, or face the consequences. Despite the law’s oft-stated reverence for “scientifically based research,” this narrow approach is contradicted by numerous studies documenting the importance of social and economic factors in children’s academic progress. Yet it has the advantage of enabling politicians to ignore the difficult issues and avoid costly remedies. If educators are the obstacle, there’s no need to address what Jonathan Kozol calls the “savage inequalities” of our educational system and our society.

In other words, despite its stated goals, the No Child Left Behind law represents a diminished vision of civil rights. Educational equity is reduced to equalizing test scores. The effect has been to impoverish the educational experience of minority students—that is, to reinforce the two-tier system of public schools that civil rights advocates once challenged.

CEP's Fig Leaf

A new study by The Center on Education Policy is providing much needed cover for Democrats and Republicans as No Child Left Behind makes it way through the halls of Congress and heads towards reauthorization. The Washington Post headline on its web site reads"Test Sores Soar Under No Child Left Behind." As the country's general media outlets widely report the results of this study by a "bi-partisan" organization, how many people will take the time to read beyond the headlines and be able to see that criticism from education scholars point out that the study's methodology is deeply flawed, basically rendering the study meaningless. More important, how many Americans will stop and ask whether a few points higher on a standardized tests actually means children are getting a good education.

Today, we live in a country that is mired in illusions and myths perpetuated by the never ending stream of lies coming from this administration. At the same time, presidential candidates from both parties to date have ignored the problems in education and with No Child Left Behind. The subject was barely mentioned in the presidential debates this week. Now, we have yet another study to provide the perfect fig leaf for those lacking the political will and courage to come out and take responsibility for the achievement gap that anyone with any common sense knows stems from the increasing economic gap that continues to leave millions of children behind.

"This study confirms that No Child Left Behind has struck a chord of success with our nation's schools and students," U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings said in a statement. "We know the law is working, so now is the time to reauthorize."

Along with Spellings' inane and ridiculous quote ignoring any semblance to reality on the ground, comments from critics and scholars can be found buried in the last few paragraphs of the story:

Some scholars criticized the report's methodology. Bruce Fuller, a professor of education and public policy at the University of California at Berkeley, said it made little sense to draw conclusions when so few states have adequate data. He also said the researchers overstated small gains and did not adequately address states that he said have been dumbing down standards.

"These big-hearted analysts, to amend an adage, look at a glass that's nine-tenths' empty and celebrate that it's one-tenth full," Fuller wrote in an e-mail.

The good new is more and more people are beginning to speak out. A recent editorial in the Providence Journal, The nation, not schools, takes lousy care of our children, says it loud and clear and highlights Richard Rothstein, one of the true champions of children and education. Rothstein, a former education columnist for The New York Times, in his book, Class and the Classroom, describes the numerous social conditions contributing to the achievement gap in great detail. In it he cites poverty as the primary ingredient in maintaining the achievement gap.

Schools may exacerbate the achievement gap, but they didn’t create it in the first place. As a nation, we are shockingly content to tolerate widespread poverty among our fellow citizens. We are the richest country in the world, but one in five children is brought up in a family living at the federal poverty line. The quintile above them is not much better off.

In short, we take lousy care of our kids, but find it convenient to blame the schools.
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How much longer will this charade continue? How much longer with the American public tolerate it? And, when will the political leaders who now ask for our confidence in running the country begin to speak the truth about the inequalities in education that no test will ever cure?

Let Children Be Children

This op-ed was written by a teacher in San Francisco:

"The present emphasis on testing and test scores is sucking the soul out of the primary school experience for both teachers and children."

Let Children Be Children
Is your 5-year-old stressed Out because so much is expected?

Penelope H. Bevan - June 3, 2007

As I was watching one of my second-grade girls try unsuccessfully to tie her shoes the other day, and I thought, "This is a person who is supposed to be learning plural possessives?" I think not.

We've just finished test time again in the schools of California. The mad frenzy of testing infects everyone from second grade through high school. Because of the rigors and threats of No Child Left Behind, schools are desperate to increase their scores. As the requirements become more stringent, we have completely lost sight of the children taking these tests.

For 30 years as a teacher of primary kids, I have operated on the Any Fool Can See principle. And any fool can see that the spread between what is developmentally appropriate for 7- and 8-year-old children and what is demanded of them on these tests is widening. A lot of what used to be in the first-grade curriculum is now taught in kindergarten. Is your 5-year-old stressed out? Perhaps this is why.

Primary-grade children have only the most tenuous grasp on how the world works. Having been alive only seven or eight years, they have not figured out that in California there is a definite wet and dry season. They live in high expectation that it will snow in the Bay Area in the winter. They reasonably conclude, based on their limited experience with words, that a thesaurus must be a dinosaur. When asked to name some of the planets after he heard the word Earth, one of my boys confidently replied, "Mars, Saturn, Mercury, Jupiter and Canada!" to which a girl replied, "No, no, no, you gotta go way far outer than that."

Research has shown that it takes approximately 24 repetitions of a new concept to imprint on a young brain. The aforementioned plural possessives come up twice in the curriculum, yet they are supposed to know it when they see it. This is folly.

Currently, 2 1/2 uninterrupted hours are supposed to be devoted to language arts and reading every morning. I ask you, what adult could sustain an interest in one subject for that long? Yet the two reading series adopted by the state for elementary education require that much time be devoted to reading in the expectation that the scores will shoot up eventually. Show me a 7-year-old who has that kind of concentration. Show me a 64-year-old teacher who has it. Not I.

The result of this has been a decline in math scores at our school, because the emphasis is on getting them to read and there isn't enough time to fit in a proper curriculum. Early math education should rely heavily on messing about with concrete materials of measurements, mass, volume and length, and discovering basic principles through play.

There is no time for this. The teaching of art is all but a subversive activity. Teachers whisper, "I taught art today!" as if they would be reported to the Reading Police for stealing time from the reading curriculum, which is what they did.

It is also First Communion time in second grade. Yes, I teach in a public school, but First Communion happens in second grade, and it is a big deal, the subject of much discussion in the classroom. The children are excited.

A few months back one of my girls exclaimed, "Jeez, I have a lot to do after school today, Teacher. I gotta do my homework, go to baseball practice and get baptized." I laughed to myself at the priorities of this little to-do list, so symbolic of the life of one second-grader. But there was a much larger issue here. What is happening to their souls? You may ask, what business it is of the schools what is happening to the souls of these little children?

I will tell you. Any fool can see that those setting the standards for testing of primary-grade children haven't been around any actual children in a long time. The difference between what one can reasonably expect an 8-year-old to know and what is merely a party trick grows exponentially on these state tests.

Meanwhile, children who know they are bright and can read well are proved wrong time and again because of the structure of these tests. Teachers spend inordinate amounts of time trying to teach the children to be careful of the quirky tricks of the tests when they should be simply teaching how to get on in the world.

Twenty years ago, I had a conference with a parent, a Sikh, whose child was brilliant. I was prepared to show him all her academic work, but he brushed it aside and said, "Yes, yes, I know she is quite smart, but I want to know how her soul is developing."

The present emphasis on testing and test scores is sucking the soul out of the primary school experience for both teachers and children. So much time is spent on testing and measuring reading speed that the children are losing the joy that comes but once in their lifetime, the happy messiness of paint, clay, Tinkertoys and jumping rope, the quiet discovery of a shiny new book of interest to them, the wonders of a magnifying glass. The teachers around them, under constant pressure to raise those test scores, radiate urgency and pressure. Their smiles are grim. They are not enjoying their jobs.

Our children need parents and teachers who, like Hamlet, know a hawk from a hand saw, who know foolishness when they see it and are strong enough to defend these small souls from the onslaught of escalating developmentally inappropriate claptrap. The great unspoken secret of primary school is that a lot of what is going on is arrant nonsense, and it's getting worse. Any fool can see.

Contact us at insight@sfchronicle.com.

Redshirting for Higher Test Scores

Redshirting, the practice of delaying entrance into kindergarten of age-eligible children in order to allow extra time for socioemotional, intellectual, or physical growth, is gaining momentum as a tool for producing higher test scores and a way for the more affluent to give their kids a competitive advantage over others in the race to the SAT.

Redshirting has its origins in the world of collegiate sports and refers to postponing an athlete's participation in regular season games for one year with the hope of improving the player's skills for future seasons. Today, with politicians, administrators and parents looking for the "competitive edge" in the high stakes world of test scores, kindergarten has become the latest battleground in the education war.

In today's New York Times Magazine, an article by Elizabeth Weil, When Should a Kid Start Kindergarten? raises profound questions about what we, as a society are doing to four and five-year-olds in order to maximize standardized test scores:

That the social skills and exploration of one’s immediate world have been squeezed out of kindergarten is less the result of a pedagogical shift than of the accountability movement and the literal-minded reverse-engineering process it has brought to the schools. Curriculum planners no longer ask, What does a 5-year-old need? Instead they ask, If a student is to pass reading and math tests in third grade, what does that student need to be doing in the prior grades?

Whether kindergarten students actually need to be older is a question of readiness, a concept that itself raises the question: Ready for what? The skill set required to succeed in Fulgham’s kindergarten — openness, creativity — is well matched to the capabilities of most 5-year-olds but also substantially different from what Andersen’s students need. In early 2000, the National Center for Education Statistics assessed 22,000 kindergartners individually and found, in general, that yes, the older children are better prepared to start an academic kindergarten than the younger ones. The older kids are four times as likely to be reading, and two to three times as likely to be able to decipher two-digit numerals. Twice as many older kids have the advanced fine motor skills necessary for writing. The older kids also have important noncognitive advantages, like being more persistent and more socially adept. Nonetheless, child advocacy groups say it’s the schools’ responsibility to be ready for the children, no matter their age, not the children’s to be prepared for the advanced curriculum. In a report on kindergarten, the National Association of Early Childhood Specialists in State Departments of Education wrote, “Most of the questionable entry and placement practices that have emerged in recent years have their genesis in concerns over children’s capacities to cope with the increasingly inappropriate curriculum in kindergarten.”

If higher test scores are the primary aim and purpose of education then redshirting will continue to be used as a "cheap" and easy way to get a small bump in test scores. As Weil points out in her article, governors are racing to change their cutoff dates for kindergarten as a way to make their states look better on the national report card.

Indeed, increasing the average age of the children in a kindergarten class is a cheap and easy way to get a small bump in test scores, because older children perform better, and states’ desires for relative advantage is written into their policy briefs. The California Performance Review, commissioned by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2004, suggested moving California’s birthday cutoff three months earlier, to Sept. 1 from Dec. 2, noting that “38 states, including Florida and Texas, have kindergarten entry dates prior to California’s.” Maryland’s proposal to move its date mentioned that “the change . . . will align the ‘cutoff’ date with most of the other states in the country.”
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Don't let your state be left behind!

Voluntary Integration Plans vs. the Rights of Segregationists

This summer will no doubt be important in nailing down specifically where we are on the socio-political calendar, as the cons and the neo-cons continue their attempt to nullify all the gains in civil rights and human rights over the past hundred years. If the current regime has its way, by the end of the summer we will be back to to May 16, 1954--the day before the Supreme Court's 9-0 decision in Brown v. Board of Education. From Rethinking Schools:

By the Editors of Rethinking Schools

In the publishing industry, it's customary to pre-write the obituaries of famous people who, due to either age or ill-health, are expected to die soon. Then, when death occurs, the obituary is ready to go.

Unfortunately, an obituary pre-write is needed for the 1954 Brown v. Board decision, in which the U.S. Supreme Court took aim at a major structure of Jim Crow racism and outlawed separate- but-equal schools for blacks and whites.

Over the years, the Court has so chipped away at Brown that it is a mere shell of a decision, honored in speeches every Martin Luther King Jr. holiday but ignored in practice 365 days of the year.

By summer, the Court is expected to issue a ruling that will get rid of even the shell. Brown will die.

The decision involves voluntary integration plans in Seattle and Louisville that have been challenged because race is one of several factors used to maintain diversity as students are assigned to schools. Few expect the court to uphold the Louisville and Seattle efforts.

"The only question was how far the court would go in ruling such plans unconstitutional," the New York Times noted after the Dec. 4 oral arguments.

Widespread Repercussions

The significance of the cases goes beyond schools. As Theodore Shaw, president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, has noted, opponents of voluntary integration make an argument that "if followed to its logical end, would make it illegal and unconstitutional in this country to do anything voluntarily and consciously about racial inequality."

Shaw was one of several commentators at a November gathering in Washington to discuss the Supreme Court cases. At the meeting, Roger Clegg, president of the Center for Equal Opportunity, articulated the prevailing conservative view that those who promote race-conscious integration policies are no different than the segregationists of old because both make determinations based on skin color. What's more, conservatives argue, race-conscious policies are no longer necessary because the United States is becoming a multiracial, multiethnic society.

But, as Shaw responded, "This country has always been a multiracial, multiethnic society. The problem in this country has never been mere race consciousness. It has been white supremacy."

There is "no symmetry, moral or legal," Shaw continued, between the race-consciousness of those struggling against institutions of white supremacy and the race-conscious discrimination of those who believe in the superiority of white people. The first is used to include, integrate, and promote equality for all, while the second is used to exclude, segregate, and subordinate those deemed inferior.

The seriousness of the Supreme Court's likely U-turn on school integration is particularly apparent in the Louisville case. The school system had been under a federal court desegregation order from 1975 to 2000 — in other words, the courts mandated a race-conscious desegregation plan. When that court order expired, the district voluntarily adopted a plan to prevent resegregation. That plan is now under attack.

One of the most galling aspects of the attack is that conservatives are using the historically specific demands of Brown and the civil rights movement — that no one should be denied equal opportunity on the basis of the color of their skin — to argue against the substance of Brown and to bolster white supremacist policies that lock African Americans into segregated, inferior schools.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg most articulately picked up on the Alice-in-Wonderland aspect to the oral arguments. "What's constitutionally required one day gets constitutionally prohibited the next day," she noted. "That's very odd."

Meanwhile, every year U.S. schools are increasingly segregated.

Given the Court's hostility to race-conscious efforts to promote equality, the debate will of necessity have to focus on new ways to struggle against segregated schools. Merely decrying the Court's direction is insufficient.

There are no easy answers, but clearly the debate must evolve. Public education plays a central role in our society. Just because the Court may declare voluntary integration policies illegal does not mean teachers and schools can give up the fight against white supremacy and racial inequality.

It is becoming increasingly clear, then, that American "democracy" will remain intact only as long as the continuation of white supremacy is guaranteed. The browning of America has made that continuation not entirely assured, which is reason enough for the rise of the prison industrial complex (prison spending will soon exceed spending for higher ed in California) and the education industrial complex (the chain-ganging of children in test camps), both ramping up to serve the needs of the new security state that will protect what democracy could not: the power and privilege of the white protestant male minority.

Vouchers Voted Down in South Carolina

From the StarNewsOnline:

COLUMBIA, S.C. | Senators defeated attempts Wednesday to add private school vouchers to a bill that would allow students a chance to enroll in any public school regardless of attendance lines.

It was the first time senators debated school vouchers on the chamber floor. The idea of helping parents send their children to private school using public money has died repeatedly in the House over the past several years.

The proposal's lopsided failure Wednesday on nearly two-to-one votes means the Senate is unlikely to take up the issue again this year or next, said Senate President Pro Tem Glenn McConnell, who supported the idea.

"The votes are not there," said McConnell, R-Charleston. "Let's move on to other issues." . . .