Confessions of a White Hat Cube Farmer

A fine piece of work on the Ohio charter school fraud from Cleveland Scene News. Helloooooo, Governor Strickland.

Go Amy Rankin--and thanks for Education at its worst:

Suddenly, six groomed businessmen, cologned with importance, stroll in behind an absolute giant of a man, clad today in grandpa sweater and signature 10-gallon white cowboy hat.

The giant approaches tiny me. I already know who he is: Mister David Brennan. I don't know whether to sit or stand. I stand.

"Amy, nice to meet you," booms the giant. "I was hoping you could tell my colleagues and I why you enjoy being an adviser here." He gestures to the businessmen standing at the threshold of my canvas-and-metal cage.

I lean back, grasping the desk, hoping to mask my fear of saying something stupid or, worse, not being able to come up with anything to tell this important-smelling man, who holds my job in his extremely large hands.

The businessmen, having now been formally introduced as the Board of Education of Mr. Brennan's own White Hat Management, gaze at me with tight, polite smiles, folded hands, and expectation so forced that I gun instantly for what I know they want: The Canned Answer.

"I love working here because I think there's no better feeling than helping kids succeed at education."

The important men coo. Mr. Brennan is pleased. Here I am, smack in the presence of Mister Billionaire, who owns half the city of Akron and the charter school I work for, and I beam like it's my job.

As the men resume their tour of the cubicled "school," I overhear Mr. Brennan turning to one of the suited men, saying with conviction, "Internet-based schooling is the education of the future. As long as a child has a computer, he can learn wherever and at any time of the day. I believe this is the future of public education today."

The men coo again. I can still smell their aftershave as they stroll on, the big man with the big hat towering over them.

Employees welcomed the excitement interrupting another mundane workday when we were informed via e-mail that "Mr. Brennan is coming -- clean up your cube!" Sure enough, he'd come with a suited entourage of investors, business partners, and local officials to display his creation and talk to the animals chained to headsets in walled cubes, gazing into identical blue screens.

In many ways, we were like the rest of corporate America. But this wasn't supposed to be corporate America. This was meant to be the Forefront of Education, where technology meets classroom. This was White Hat Management.

The privately owned company was founded in 1998 by industrialist and self-proclaimed "education activist" David Brennan. And as his publicly funded, privately operated chain of charter schools erupt like a bad rash across Ohio and the rest of the country, one could say it's Mr. Brennan's way of turning education into big business.

White Hat is the largest charter school operator in Ohio, with over 16,000 students and 34 schools, including Hope Academies and Life Skills Centers. "If Brennan's White Hat charter-school chain was a recognized school system, it would be Ohio's ninth largest based on enrollment," a 2005 press release boasts.

Like McDonald's, White Hat serves as many kids as possible as cheaply as possible. But what many don't know is how White Hat is making millions and funneling scarce education money to profit a private empire.

Before White Hat took me on board, I was substitute teaching at Kent City Schools, but an impending funding crunch would soon force cutbacks. All full-time temporary teachers were required to have teaching certificates. Since I didn't have one, I applied at a local temp agency. That's how I landed the job at the Ohio Distance & Electronic Learning Academy, Brennan's internet school, where kids are supposed to earn their high-school diplomas online.

With buildings being shut down and teachers being canned in droves across the state, White Hat seemed to be the only place hiring. I was brought on board as an academic adviser. It seemed like a pretty cool gig at the time; I would be helping students graduate, via phone and e-mail, from a cubicle farm in downtown Akron.

On my first day at OHDELA, I was shown to my cube, given a large gray binder, and ordered to copy my own training manual. One week later, promptly at 8 a.m., a huge pile of messy files and the educational fates of 150 students were handed down to me by four overworked and mentally scattered advisers. It was the beginning of the school year. Enrollment was picking up rapidly. The little online high school was approaching an enrollment of 1,500 kids -- with a staff of only 30 to 40 teachers and advisers to steer their education.

We never actually met kids face-to-face. All tests are done online, and homework is e-mailed to teachers, who are housed in the same cubicle farm as advisers.

White Hat sells education as an all-expenses-paid package deal, promising families "individualized home-based educations . . . from the comfort and safety of home." Students are promised a free computer and "teachers who are dedicated to supporting families and students."

But during my first week as an "academic adviser," I almost drowned in a flood of desperate phone calls, e-mails, and voice mails that piled up before I arrived. There were frantic calls from kids and parents who'd just gotten their computer and didn't know where to begin. There were students who'd been enrolled for months, but had made no progress because they didn't know how to log in or find their classes online.

It became clear that we advisers were hired as an afterthought to rescue families stuck in White Hat's cyber black hole. While the teachers waded through hundreds of papers from faceless students, the advisers were the students' lifeline, there to bridge holes and bandage gaps in an organization that was thrown together in a hurry.

Parents rejoiced that there was finally someone to answer their calls, yet were soon dismayed to discover their child was desperately behind. A good percentage had proceeded blindly under the notion that by simply logging in to "Learning Opportunity Hours" -- i.e., attendance hours -- they would be automatically propelled to the next grade. Advisers had the unfortunate task of informing them that they still had an entire list (and a lengthy one) of tests and assignments to complete for each class, as well as another list of classes they must complete before moving on to the next grade.

"Don't worry," we were instructed to tell discouraged families. "At OHDELA, you can work through the summer and you can stay enrolled until you're 21, so you've got plenty of time." After all, the longer they stayed, the more money White Hat received from the state.

My job at Mr. Brennan's gerbil cage was contacting students and parents every two weeks, telemarketer-style, and attempting to hold kids accountable for their progress. More often than not, there was no progress at all for a variety of excuses -- valid and not -- concocted by students who seemed less interested in their educational well-being than I was. Faced with choosing between the importance of their education and the irresistible allure of the Xbox, the odds weren't good.

So every day at 8 a.m., I strapped into my headset and launched into my 30-plus Cheerleader/Bad Guy phone calls, for 11 bucks an hour with zero benefits.

Parents, I often found, were too busy working one or two jobs to be responsible for their child's progress. Accountability for the student fell to me, and all I could do was call, threaten, persuade, and call some more. Occasionally the school offered money to bribe students into finishing their classes. Could you imagine getting 20 bucks from your public-school teacher for finishing Algebra I?

The trouble with online schools is inherent: Teens are expected to be mature enough to school themselves. But with no face-to-face interaction with parents or students, the school has no control, and accountability ultimately falls by the wayside.

Every day I'd receive a call that someone's hard drive crashed or contracted hundreds of viruses, leaving students unable to work until a loaner was sent. As White Hat bureaucracy would have it, that meant a two- to three-week wait. Missing that much time at a normal school would prompt calls to principals and social workers. But at White Hat, it was all too common for students to miss weeks, even months, over technical difficulties alone.

After a few weeks, I had a clearer understanding of why these families came to OHDELA. Their stories had a common thread: They were looking for something better than their local public schools. Kids heard about the online school from other kids and begged their parents to enroll them. Kids naturally found it a cool idea. It meant sleeping in, not having to go to class. To their parents, it meant having their child at home instead of exposed to increasingly dangerous neighborhoods. White Hat sold it as a win-win deal.

We have the internet now! We can go to school without getting out of bed! It's the age of technology!

It also meant a free computer to families who'd never owned one. Unfortunately, many of the students I spoke with didn't even own a desk or chair. They were attempting to complete a high-school education on the floor of their bedroom, while the rest of the family vied for use of the brand new toy.

I left my cubicle every day feeling sorry for families who were lost and confused. Many had enrolled in our school as a last resort, and we left them more discouraged than ever. As I diligently explained buttons and links and log-in hours from the other end of the line, I could sense the students' declining hope of ever receiving a high-school diploma.

White Hat, meanwhile, seemed more preoccupied with charting spreadsheets, calculating endless employee performance measures, appeasing streams of irate mothers, and raking in cold, hard state cash.

Organizationally speaking, it was a nightmare on steroids. The place was built on a lopsided pyramid of spreadsheets, spreadsheets, and more spreadsheets. I was given the daily task of updating huge Excel workbooks with student data and test scores. Copies would circulate throughout the office, so that no two staff members had the same information about one student.

Every morning I arrived to stare eight more hours of drudgery in the face. It was one of those jobs that are traumatic to any creative, intelligent mind. I had to admit to myself that it really was nothing but a poorly run credit factory with killer marketing.

I've never witnessed lower morale at a workplace. Rumors circulated, cliques gossiped, managers took sides, and everyone had a cynical attitude toward the company. Many of the young, inexperienced teachers were hired straight out of college or after long bouts of trying to find "real teaching jobs." They became resigned to their roles as cubicle slaves, with no control over the material they "taught."

I felt dirty, like I'd landed in the middle of an illegal operation. I wanted to say something. But White Hat was paying my rent, just as it was everyone else's. And after nine months of working through the temp agency, the company finally hired me and handed over some benefits.

Though students could pretty much do as they pleased, staff was under strict control. We swiped in and out with special badges so that every move, every bathroom break, was tracked. Time at your computer was logged electronically to ensure you were available to answer the phone not a minute less than eight hours a day. Phone calls and e-mails were meticulously charted. If your performance wasn't up to par, you'd be summoned to the principal's office for a middle-management-style wrist-slap, and your chart soon contained the notation of troublemaker.

Each Tuesday at 9 a.m. sharp, we attended mandatory meetings in which our numbers were run. Our manager prided himself on being a "numbers guy." Our phone calls were graphed individually and in relation to co-workers' numbers, then were printed out, stapled, and handed to us on our way into the meeting. We'd talk about changes and details we had to keep track of. We gazed at fancy graphs, stats, and bell curves. But we didn't talk much about improving the educational experience of our students.

White Hat sells itself as a solution to at-risk kids and staggering dropout rates. But our school seemed almost perfectly designed for those kids to fail.

A large portion of the students arrived from poorer districts and the other side of the digital divide. Many were transferring directly out of Cleveland and Akron city schools, and most lacked basic computer skills. I remember one mother who called to ask if e-mail could be received while the computer was turned off. Most of the 150 students I worked with needed slow, methodical instructions just to attach a homework assignment to an e-mail.

Of course, it borders on the impossible to complete four years of internet high school when one can barely operate a computer. The Enrollment Department was supposed to screen for this type of thing. But each student meant another $2,500 from the state. Whether we could help a kid or not was irrelevant.

At OHDELA, the only tools students were given were books that arrived via snail-mail, a $600 computer, and advisers like me. Overhead at an internet school is minimal. A Columbus Dispatch investigation revealed that "nearly a third of the state funding received by each school was pocketed by Brennan's operation."

During my year at White Hat, many students came and left, yet I witnessed very few who made progress. I attended the first graduation ceremony of the school's existence. It was a big event, the kind Brennan loves to throw -- with caps and gowns, valedictorians, and truly bad motivational speeches. Twenty graduates out of a school of 1,500 made for a rather pitiful commencement march.

It's no secret that Brennan's schools are failing -- at rates far worse than the abysmal public schools they're meant to replace. White Hat's 20 Ohio Life Skills Centers, for example, are all on either academic watch or emergency. Not one meets the federal standard for yearly progress.

They do, however, meet Brennan's notion of a lucrative enterprise. State audit reports expose the Life Skills Centers as the real moneymaker. The schools, which target low-income students, are often housed in strip malls, herding three shifts of students through per day. They offer no music or art programs, extracurriculars or cafeterias.

Where the rest of the money is going is anyone's guess. Since teachers and administrators are technically employed by the entity of White Hat, not by the schools themselves, the company refuses to divulge such basic information as how many teachers it employs or what qualifications they hold.

The arrangement is beneficial for keeping state auditors at bay. A whopping 97 percent of White Hat's expenses are simply recorded as "professional services contracts" -- with the company providing unknown services to itself.

To legislators preaching fiscal responsibility, allowing such accounting tricks would seem the height of negligence. In 2005 alone, White Hat received $109 million from the state. Only Brennan knows where most of it went. But he's hedged his bets by shoveling millions to those charged with overseeing state money.

According to Sue Taylor, president of the Ohio Federation of Teachers, "Brennan and his family [wife Ann and daughter Nancy] gave $3.8 million to Republican lawmakers between 1990 and 2005." A sizable portion of that went to former state auditors Betty Montgomery and Jim Petro, both fiscal conservatives who nonetheless showed little interest in exploring where the state's money was going.

"Ohio taxpayers have no idea how the vast majority of the money going to Brennan's White Hat chain is being spent," says Taylor. "And no one is riding in to put a stop to it or ask what's happening to these children, because David Brennan makes big political campaign contributions."

I remember when U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige came all the way from Washington to visit our little school.

It was the morning of the company Christmas party, when we were coerced into performing mandatory skits for no beer, no bonus. Paige was coming that day under the guise of witnessing how his buddy, Mr. Brennan -- lavish contributor to the Republican Party -- was revolutionizing education in Ohio.

Prior to his arrival, we'd been given strict direction on how to act if Mr. Paige approached us. Appointed employees were instructed to rehearse an inspirational story or anecdote.

The secretary arrived with his own entourage, even more important looking and smelling than Mr. Brennan's. I peered out from my corner cubicle; we weren't to leave our desks for any reason. There was Mr. Brennan in signature white cowboy hat. He was guiding Paige around the office, allowing the cameras to capture all the back-patting and hand-shaking.

Today, the school's website advertises a quote from Paige, who, upon his return to the White House, called OHDELA "the future of education." Since then, White Hat has used the school as a model to create clones from Florida to Colorado. It now operates 50 publicly funded schools in six states, serving 23,000 students.

I witnessed firsthand Mr. Paige's "future of education." If he's right, America's own future is in deep trouble.

Saving New Jersey's Special Review Assessment

Achieve, Inc., which is leading a charge in New Jersey to have corporations decide the curriculum for New Jersey high schools, has another pet project aimed at further disenfranchising the disenfranchised: the elimination of the alternative graduation test that offers high school seniors such as English language learners and students in poor schools an optional assessment that may help them gain a regular high school diploma.

A recent report lays out the negative repercussions in store if the SRA is eliminated. From the Education Law Center:

New Jersey's Special Review Assessment: Loophole Or Lifeline?

New Report Calls For Reforming, Not Eliminating, The State's Alternative Graduation Test

Newark, NJ -- August 22, 2007

Eliminating the Special Review Assessment (SRA) could dramatically raise dropout rates and threaten New Jersey's claim to having one of the nation's best high school graduation rates, according to a new report on the state's alternative route to a high school diploma. The report recommends significantly reforming the SRA process, but says that eliminating it "would, almost by definition, constitute bad public policy."

"We have the highest high school graduation rates in the nation," boasted Governor Jon Corzine in his 2007 State of the State address. "Whatever we do, we must keep and enhance the nation's best school system." The new report argues that ending the SRA would undermine those goals, especially hurting English language learners, immigrants and those in the urban "Abbott" districts, while doing little to improve school programs.

The report, entitled New Jersey's Special Review Assessment: Loophole or Lifeline? was prepared by researchers from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, New Jersey's Education Law Center, the Institute on Education Law and Policy at Rutgers, Newark and Newark's Project GRAD. Among its key findings are the following:

• The number of NJ students graduating via SRA almost doubled in seven years: from 7,925 in 1999 to 15,669 in 2005, before declining to 13,535 in 2006. In 2006, about 12 percent of all NJ graduates and one-third of all graduates in the urban Abbott districts used the SRA to meet state graduation requirements instead of the state's traditional graduation test, the High School Proficiency Assessment (HSPA). (Both SRA & HSPA students must also earn at least 110 credits and meet other local graduation requirements to receive a diploma.)
• If the SRA were eliminated, the biggest impact would be on English language learners, immigrants and those in the urban "Abbott" districts. However, because nearly 60% of all SRA students are from non-Abbott districts, the impact would be felt statewide.
• Patterns of SRA use suggest a crisis in NJ mathematics education. By an almost 2 to 1 margin, more students use the SRA to satisfy the state's math standards than the language arts standards. This raises significant issues about NJ math education and about opportunities to learn, including access to certified math teachers and high quality instruction.
• The study found that the SRA's "performance tasks" were "rigorous" and aligned with the HSPA. But it found that uneven implementation practices and inconsistent scoring across districts undermined the SRA's credibility as an assessment tool. The report recommends improving the reliability of SRA scoring by using regional teams of NJ educators who are not evaluating their own district's students.
• The report found that there has been little research on the educational experiences of SRA students, or on their postsecondary outcomes compared to those of HSPA graduates or high school dropouts. "At this point New Jersey has no technical capacity for assessing any postsecondary outcomes," it states. "We really don't know if HSPA graduates fare better, worse or the same as their SRA peers." The report urges "caution in making graduation policy changes with high-stakes consequences for students and school communities" until such information is available.

Years of debate about reforming or replacing the SRA has led to considerable uncertainty about its current status. In August 2005, the New Jersey State Board of Education proposed phasing out the SRA beginning with the freshman class that entered in September 2006 for language arts and the freshman class entering in September 2007 for math. However, the State Board deferred final action until the Department of Education developed "alternative opportunities for students to demonstrate the achievement of high school graduation requirements." Those alternatives are still pending.

This fall both freshmen and sophomores and their teachers will return to school uncertain about the availability of the SRA as they approach graduation. Schools and districts face similar uncertainty about sustaining their supplemental instruction programs for potential SRA students (some of which involve early identification of students in 9th and 10th grades).

Another consideration is the timeline for implementing the state's Secondary Education Initiative (SEI), a major reform effort currently underway to introduce college preparatory curricula, small learning environments and improved family/student supports to all Abbott middle and high schools. According to the report, "Eliminating the SRA before significant and demonstrable improvements are made in secondary programs and supports could have a major negative impact on graduation rates, dropout rates, the SEI reform effort, and the prospects for broader reform."

The report's recommendations urge New Jersey to develop "multiple pathways to graduation" including:

• continued administration of HSPA
• continuation of the existing SRA until a revised alternative is fully in place
• implementation of a revised and strengthened SRA
• opportunities for districts to develop additional local performance assessment systems that could be externally validated by the state
• an appeals procedure for individuals who seek additional review
• accelerated implementation of a statewide, student-level database, and
• alignment of proposed changes in the state's assessment system and graduation standards with substantive reform efforts to improve school programs

"Such a menu of assessment strategies would assure that all graduates meet New Jersey Core Curriculum Requirements without insisting on one-size-fits-all," says the report. "It is important not to confuse 'assessment reform' with educational improvement. The proper purpose of educational assessment is to improve teaching and learning and to support better outcomes for the greatest number of students. Reform efforts should strengthen this fundamental purpose and resist tendencies to sort and label young people...."

The report and its recommendations have also been endorsed by a number of well-known national education experts, including Linda Darling-Hammond of Standard University who said, "The SRA is one reason why New Jersey has both very high achievement levels and very strong graduation rates... [it] reflects an approach that a growing number of states are seeking to emulate as an essential part of effective secondary reform."

Education Law Center Press Contacts: Stan Karp Secondary Reform Project email: skarp@edlawcenter.org voice: 973 624-1815 x42

Dr. Michelle Fine CUNY Graduate Center email: MFine@gc.cuny.edu voice: 212 817-8710

George Bush Cares About Toyota Dealerships

If you thought that Katrina relief from Bush Co. depended largely upon political affiliation, you would be right. Lardy lobbyist turned goveronor, Haley Barbour (R), of Mississippi, has received disproportionate amounts in relief for his cronies as compared to Blanco's (D) Louisiana. And if you thought that most of the aid that IS going to Louisiana is going outside New Orleans, you would be right again.

In order to buy another statehouse for the GOP, federal cash is being handed out all over Louisiana in places needing it much less than it is needed in NOLA. In fact, only a tenth of a percent of the federal GO Funds are going to fund New Orleans projects:

The giant steel beams of Price LeBlanc's new Toyota dealership reveal an emerging structure that rivals the size of many sports stadiums. Hundreds of construction workers swarm the site, assembling what will soon become a $20-million vehicle showroom — all funded through federal tax breaks.

After hurricanes Katrina and Rita, Congress approved billions of dollars in tax-free bonds to stimulate rebuilding along the Gulf Coast. It's called the Gulf Opportunity Zone — or GO Zone — and includes dozens of counties in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. But as new developments like Price LeBlanc's Toyota dealership cash in on federal aid, a trend is taking shape. The dealership is in Baton Rouge, nearly a hundred miles inland from Katrina's wrath.

Finally, if you thought that institutions serving wealthier white constituencies are receiving a disproportianate amount of Katina aid, you would still be scoring a hundred percent. A clip from a report on the meager educational assistance in the Gulf region:

. . . .As of the start of this academic year, the federal government has committed roughly $2.5 billion to relief and recovery relating to education after Katrina, the report says, citing the Congressional Budget Office and the U.S. Department of Education. That amounts to two percent of the country’s Katrina-related disaster funding. Hurricane funds made up less than 2.5 percent of the U.S. Education Department’s expenditures over the past two years, according to the report.

“What has been done thus far by the federal government by any measure is grossly inadequate,” said Lynn Huntley, president of the Southern Education Foundation. “What’s missing is a comprehensive plan for education recovery.”

A few months after Katrina, in an effort to quantify the storm’s effect on 27 colleges along the Gulf Coast, higher education associations put together a comprehensive estimate of $1.2 billion in estimated physical damages to the campuses (which those who calculated that amount said was conservative), and potential losses of $230 million in tuition refunds to students who left or were expected to leave.

In December 2005, Congress approved $200 million in aid for colleges, which was split largely between Louisiana and Mississippi — with a small percentage going to institutions that temporarily housed transferring students. Subsequent supplemental appropriations of less than $100 million have also gone to assist higher education.

Much has been said about how the federal aid was distributed. The Louisiana Board of Regents determined in early 2006 that $75 million of the initial aid would be spread across its institutions based on a formula taking into account enrollment, lost tuition revenue and financial aid budgets. (And, controversially, not physical damage caused by the hurricane.) Colleges there also used $8.5 million in federal funds to offer special need-based scholarships for displaced students to return to both public and private colleges in Louisiana. Distribution of funds was based on the number of students colleges had in fall 2004 who were from areas affected by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

In that first round, Tulane University, with a large student body and higher tuition than other institutions in the region, received the most aid, followed by the University of New Orleans and Delgado Community College, the two-year college of New Orleans. Dillard University, which had roughly 2,000 students but incurred the worst physical damage, received less than the others.

Mike Strecker, a spokesman for Tulane, said the university hasn’t paid attention to and is not concerning itself with funding comparisons among Gulf Coast institutions.

The report cites state and federal figures showing that even though Louisiana suffered more than four times the damage to its campuses than did Mississippi, the repair funding it received is only marginally greater than its neighboring state.

“Where is the equity in education resource allocation?” Huntley asked.

Steve Suitts, the report’s author and program coordinator at the foundation, said it makes no sense that Louisiana colleges, hit hardest by the hurricane and also by enrollment drops last fall, wouldn’t receive the lion’s share of the funding. The Education Department should focus more on distributing aid based on need, he said, particularly because the Louisiana colleges also are the ones educating some of the poorest students.

Suitts called for better tracking of students who move in and out of colleges in the region. Data show that the South still maintained the largest share of the students who transferred after Katrina, though many others went to the coasts. . . .

Teachers in Utah Take Action to Save Public Education

From the Salt Lake City ABC affiliate:

SALT LAKE CITY (ABC 4 News) - Some of Utah's best teachers are taking to the streets. They’ve launched a state-wide campaign to fight the voucher law that will be on November's ballot. If the proposed law is passed, millions of dollars will go towards helping families that want to send their kids to private school.

Members of “Utahns for Public Schools” are against the proposed voucher law, and with a big yellow school bus, they're traveling all over the state to tell us why. Spokesperson Lisa Johnson says, “What we're saying today is we're on the move to protect public schools.”

These advocates are claiming that the law is fundamentally flawed. They say it will not help the majority of Utah families. These advocates say the two major problems with the proposal are accountability and accessibility. They say unaccountable voucher schools may hire teachers who are not certified, and don’t have to meet the same course work and attendance standards as public schools.

In terms of accessibility, they say vouchers will not help the majority of Utah families. More than half of Utah’s counties do not have private schools at all. Using hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars for the voucher program is another concern.

Johnson says, “When we have these many problems, that much money, and so few people benefiting we just think overall this is not a good deal for Utah students and Utah taxpayers.”

Instead, these educators believe the money should be used to invest in public schools where the majority of Utah students go. . . .

NCLB, the Sequel: OCAD (Obsessive Compulsive Accountability Disorder)

If any department of the federal government operated under the level of scrutiny and distrust envisioned by the Miller-McKeon draft version of NCLB, another whole department would be required just to keep track of the paper. Miller and McKeon have that one figured out, though--they just plan to pass their impossible continuation of a pie-in-the-sky policy to the states to figure out.

There is lot here to read for those expecting something different. I found this on page 47 and stopped reading:

[MILLER-MCKEON DISCUSSION DRAFT]
‘‘(I) TIMELINE.—Each State shall establish a timeline for adequate yearly progress. The timeline shall ensure that not later than the end of the 2013–2014 school year consistent with subparagraph (F), all students in each group described in subparagraph (C)(v) will meet or exceed the State’s proficient level of academic achievement on the State assessments under paragraph (3).

In short, the impossible targets and the accompanying assured failure remain unchanged. Email Congressman Miller to say SCRAP IT AND START OVER!!!!!!!

Ed Week's "Learning the Language" has a spot to react to the draft, and thanks to Monty Neill's note at ARN, I found this reaction by Jim Crawford to the ELL revisions in the Miller-McKeon draft. Nice analysis.

I'm still slogging through the 435-page draft of Title I -- a necessity, I'm afraid, because the summary isn't altogether accurate. There are provisions affecting ELLs throughout, but see especially pp. 67-87. Also note that a draft of Title III, which deals specifically with ELLs, has yet to be released.

To quote Samuel Johnson out of context, I'd say that this reauthorization proposal reflects the triumph of hope over experience. Over the past 5 years, experience has revealed fundamental flaws in No Child Left Behind. But instead of fundamentally rethinking the law, Reps. Miller and McKeon propose to add new layers of complexity, apparently hoping to vindicate their rash creation.

Especially where English language learners are concerned, I think the draft bill is unlikely to improve NCLB's garbage-in, garbage-out approach to accountability, which uses invalid, unreliable assessments for high-stakes purposes.

Here are just a few reasons:

1. The bill mandates valid and reliable assessments for ELLs, but so does current law. We know how that's worked out: the vast majority of content assessments now being administered to these kids are English-language tests that nobody even bothers to claim are valid or reliable. All that would change under the Miller-McKeon proposal is that states would face a two-year deadline to develop valid/reliable tests or face financial penalties.

The assumption seems to be that states have simply dragged their feet in meeting their obligations. But would it even be possible to develop English-language academic assessments that are valid for ELLs at many different levels of English proficiency? That's never been achieved, and I suspect that trying to do so is a fool's errand.

2. How about accommodations for ELLs taking tests designed for proficient English speakers? The draft bill would require states to use only those with "research-based" validity and reliability. None currently exist, and research in this area remains quite limited. Accommodations do not offer an easy solution, at least in the near term.

3. The bill would allow the use of portfolios and other alternate assessments -- potentially an improvement. But again, these types of tests are rarely available and would take time to develop. Meanwhile, the "inclusion" of ELLs, using inaccurate assessments for measuring "adequate yearly progress," would continue until most schools with an ELL subgroup would find themselves in "corrective action" status or worse.

4. The bill would allow states to use English language proficiency scores for beginning ELLs for up to 2 years, while valid/reliable assessments are supposedly being developed. It would allow them to exempt ELLs from language-arts assessments for their first 12 months in U.S. schools. And it would allow them to count the scores of former ELLs for AYP purposes for up to 3 years.

Yet all of these provisions are arbitrary, unscientific, and unlikely to do much to mitigate the unfairness of the current system. Nor do they address the well publicized abuses that NCLB has created: emphasizing test prep to the exclusion of real teaching, stressing basic skills over critical thinking, and narrowing the curriculum to the 2 high-stakes subjects.

5. As a way out of this mess, Miller and McKeon rely heavily on expanding the use of native-language assessments. But they don't seem to recognize that only about 15 percent of ELLs now receive native-language instruction in core subjects. For those who lack literacy in, say, Spanish, native-language tests are inappropriate.

6. Yet the draft bill requires states to develop native-language assessments for any language group that makes up at least 10 percent of the state's ELLs. This would be a huge change. It would probably have some positive effects (e.g., for kids now in bilingual classrooms), along with some very perverse consequences.

First, the good news. Ensuring that native-language assessments are universally available would relieve some of the pressure to push ELLs into English as rapidly as possible (which contradicts research evidence on best practices). It also might slow down the trend of dismantling bilingual programs because of anxiety about ELLs making AYP on English-language tests. Which would be good thing, in my view.

On the other hand, the mandate could impose a crushing burden on many states. Virtually all of them would have to develop native language assessments in Spanish (or, e.g., in Texas, redesign these tests to make them valid/reliable). Some would probably have to do so in Tagalog, Hmong, Vietnamese, Chinese, Korean, Yup'ik, and possibly other Native American languages.

Developing such assessments would be quite expensive and time-consuming, especially in states with new or diverse immigrant populations. It would be a foolish diversion of resources away from what they most need: professional development and technical assistance to develop schools' capacity in serving ELLs. This is where the feds could play a major positive role -- if only Congress could get over its assessment obsession.

7. Finally, there's a loophole in this provision requiring that native-language assessments for ELLs be "consistent with state law." The perverse effect here might be that many states would choose to outlaw such assessments, denying them to ELLs for whom they would be meaningful and appropriate.

Looking at this draft -- a Rube Goldberg contraption if there ever was one -- I have to wonder whether Reps. Miller and McKeon heeded any expert advice on ELL needs whatsoever. Ignoring the views of most educators and researchers, while listening primarily to Washington "think tanks," proved disastrous in the first authorization of NCLB. Let's hope Congress can learn from its mistakes.

Apartheid Schooling

With SCOTUS completing the evisceration of Brown v Board of Education with its recent rulings, little stands in the way of the return to apartheid in the U. S, except the outrage of the American population. From the Civil Rights Project:

Report From Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles at UCLA Asserts Racial Inequality Growing in America's Schools

LOS ANGELES ¬_ The Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles at UCLA, one of the nation's leading research centers on issues of civil rights and racial inequality, today released a report examining the growing racial inequality in America's public schools. Offering evidence on how to realize the benefits of integration, the report, Historic Reversals, Accelerating Resegregation and the Need for New Integration Strategies, comes as school districts across the U.S. face the challenge of responding to the U.S. Supreme Court_s new limits on desegregation plans.

Co-authored by Civil Rights Project Co-director, Gary Orfield, and Researcher Chungmei Lee, the report shows that resegregation was accelerating long before the Court's June 2007 decision, particularly in the South, where new 2005-06 school year data shows an historic reversal in the region's desegregation leadership.

"Nearly two decades into the resegregation its earlier decisions helped create, the South is losing its huge gains in race relations in the civil rights era,_ said Orfield. _The country is likely to become even more separate -- shutting out rapidly growing Latino and Black populations from the strong schools and interracial experience they and our communities need if we are to be an economically and socially successful society. This goal is so important that educators and community leaders must find ways to support integrated schools in spite of the new limits."

The report concludes that for the first time in more than three decades, the South no longer has the nation's most integrated schools and desegregation there is in rapid decline. The report also suggests that the frequently proposed use of social class desegregation as an alternative to assignment by race will be unsuccessful because of a declining relationship between segregation by race and poverty.

Additionally, there is a substantial increase in multiracial schools where such policies would be far less likely to help integrate highly segregated black and Latino students. Findings also show that segregation has been increasing in all parts of the country before the recent court decision, largely because of a series of earlier negative rulings by the U.S. Supreme Court in the l990s.

Orfield commented on the massive evidence presented in briefs by researchers to the U.S. Supreme Court last fall. That evidence demonstrated the inequalities of segregated schools along with the educational and social gains found in desegregated schools. Orfield described the Court's decision as an "historic blunder ignoring much more powerful evidence than what was before the Court at the time of Brown v. Board of Education, and sending the country back on a path that failed in thousands of communities embracing 'separate but equal' for six decades before Brown."

The report notes that the Supreme Court decision will invalidate many desegregation plans that currently exist outside the South, and points out that a proposal by the U.S. Department of Education to change the racial categorization of students, if adopted, would make it impossible to effectively measure the impact of the Court's decision on school desegregation. It concludes with recommendations for school districts and communities that are trying to preserve racial diversity given the constraints of the Court's new decision.

Additional Key trends:

**White enrollment is down from 80% to 57% of U.S. students from 1968-2005; Latino enrollment has nearly quadrupled.

**The percentage of U.S. students poor enough for free lunch has soared and all groups of students now attend schools with higher percentages of poverty than in the past.

**Latino students are more segregated than black students, but both groups have a very high and growing isolation from whites.

**Asians experience by far the most desegregated schools; whites are the most segregated from other groups.

**There are now ten states where less than half of students statewide are white, and most non-white students live in these states.

**Black students are now the fourth largest minority group in the West, following Whites, Latinos, and Asians. Black students tend to be segregated in schools with more Latinos than fellow blacks.

**There is a powerful relationship between segregation and dropout rates.

**America's large suburban school districts are rapidly becoming more diverse and segregation is rapidly spreading into the suburbs.

The report, based on federal school enrollment data, is the latest of more than twenty reports issued under Professor Orfield since the first in 1976, after the federal government stopped issuing regular reports on the progress of desegregation in the nation's schools. The full text of the report is available at: www.civilrightsproject.ucla.edu

More Soldiers and Teachers for the Crucible, Please

If I had to design a system that is more of a disincentive for good teachers dedicated to children's welfare in schools where they are needed the most, I would be hard pressed to come up with something more efficient than the failure-inspired NCLB policies we have now.

Not only are ethical teachers shying away from being recruited to guard and force feed children they would prefer to liberate and nourish, but teachers with a choice will not volunteer for duty in schools that are AYP time bombs set to blow up in their faces. There is no clearer domestic analogy to the Decider's adventurous horror in Iraq. Ask any GI or any teacher.

From the NY Times:

. . . .In June, the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future, a nonprofit group that seeks to increase the retention of quality teachers, estimated from a survey of several districts that teacher turnover was costing the nation’s districts some $7 billion annually for recruiting, hiring and training.

Demographers agree that education is one of the fields hardest hit by the departure of hundreds of thousands of baby boomers from the work force, particularly because a slowdown in hiring in the 1980s and 1990s raised the average age of the teaching profession. Still, they debate how serious the attrition will turn out to be.

In New York, the wave of such retirements crested in the early years of this decade as teachers left well before they hit their 60s, without a disruptive teacher shortage, Ms. Bernstein said.

In other parts of the country, the retirement bulge is still approaching, because pension policies vary among states, said Michael Podgursky, an economist at the University of Missouri. California is projecting that it will need 100,000 new teachers over the next decade from the retirement of the baby boomers alone.

Some educators say it is the confluence of such retirements with the departure of disillusioned young teachers that is creating the challenge. In addition, higher salaries in the business world and more opportunities for women are drawing away from the field recruits who might in another era have proved to be talented teachers with strong academic backgrounds.

“The problem is not mainly with retirement,” said Thomas G. Carroll, the president of the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future. “Our teacher preparation system can accommodate the retirement rate. The problem is that our schools are like a bucket with holes in the bottom, and we keep pouring in teachers.”

The commission has calculated that these days nearly a third of all new teachers leave the profession after just three years, and that after five years almost half are gone — a higher turnover rate than in the past.

All the coming and going of young teachers is tremendously disruptive, especially to schools in poor neighborhoods where teacher turnover is highest and students’ needs are greatest. . . . .

PDK/Gallup Poll

First clip from new poll released today:

An important question is whether the gradual gain in knowledge about NCLB is causing the public to have a more favorable or more unfavorable view of the law. Trend data for this question are reported in Table 2. While 31% say they have a very or somewhat favorable view of the law, 40% say they have a somewhat or very unfavorable view. The percentage selecting one of the two favorable responses has grown by 13% since 2003, while the percentage choosing one of the two unfavorable responses has climbed by 27%. An even stronger unfavorable view of NCLB is held by those who say they know a great deal or a fair amount about the law.

Imagine that.

Kozol and Klein Books Reviewed

A clip from the LA Times:

If only it could have been one book.

Such was my wishful thinking, infused with a certain anger, as I read "Letters to a Young Teacher" and "A Class Apart," two up-close accounts of two radically different public school experiences written by, respectively, veteran educator Jonathan Kozol and Washington Post reporter Alec Klein. Of course, I figured just by the titles and authors that I was in for much more contrast than convergence. Kozol, 70, is the unsparing social critic and fierce public-school advocate whose last work, "The Shame of the Nation," detailed the almost intractable nature of public-school inequality in America 50 years after Brown vs. Board of Education; Klein, 40, is a journalist who in his book appears less influenced by political ideology than by the tenets of modern feature writing, which include a conscious neutrality on deeper education issues.

"Letters" uses the time-honored literary device of correspondence to steadily illuminate the long-standing concerns of the letter writer and those of Francesca, a novice first-grade teacher who toils in the tough, mostly black Roxbury area of Boston and who functions as Kozol's younger alter ego; "Class" is much more diffuse, full of characters, situations and odd moments meant to feel like an almost random year-in-the-life look at exclusive, high-powered Stuyvesant High School in New York City -- Klein's alma mater, by the way. . . .

AYP Suddenly "Meaningless" When Middle Class Schools Put On List

As NCLB's rigid, manufactured failure plan has been used to turn urban schools into behavioral chain gangs via cheap charters, there has been not a peep of protest heard from the suburban enclaves or the high-rises of urban liberals who send their kids to private schools. When the failure plan starts creeping into places like Fairfax County, however, parents are suddenly outraged at a law that could show their fine schools coming up short. And overnight, suburban superintendents become outspoken advocates for the truth that they have known, yet studiously ignored, during the five previous years of educational genocide that only now begins to threaten them. From WaPo:

Fairfax County schools boast SAT scores significantly higher than the national average. More than 93 percent of graduates go on to college or trade schools. And the dropout rate is low.

But this week, the school system was given a new -- and negative -- label: failure to meet academic goals under the federal No Child Left Behind Act.

Fairfax educators say the system as a whole, along with 68 of its schools, fell short largely as the result of tighter federal testing requirements for students with limited English skills. Officials and parents now face the question of whether the rating will tarnish the district's reputation.

Liz McGhan, mother of three children in Fairfax schools and president of Garfield Elementary School's PTA, said the rating doesn't change her positive view of the schools.

"For me personally, and for other people I talk to, school scores are not everything about the school," McGhan said. "I think a majority of the parents understand what's going on behind all the numbers. There's so much more to a school than the testing."

School and county officials, who often cite the quality of schools as a lure for businesses and residents, argue that Fairfax's situation illustrates flaws in the federal law.

"This is not a question of academic performance. It's a question of a rigid law," said Gerald E. Connolly (D), chairman of the Board of Supervisors. "The No Child Left Behind law does not make allowances for a highly diverse school systems such as we have in Northern Virginia."

Federal officials disagree. They say that all students must be held to the same standards and that Virginia had ample time to adjust to testing requirements. "We know that some limited English students need an alternative assessment," U.S. Education Department spokesman Chad Colby said. "We're working with states, but [Virginia] could have done that going back to 2003."

Many other Virginia school systems fell short of academic targets. But some reached them, including those in Chesapeake, Roanoke County and Virginia Beach.

The federal law, which aims to shine a light on blocs of struggling students and allow schools to pinpoint areas that need improvement, requires annual reading and math tests in grades 3 through 8 and once in high school. It also requires schools, and school systems, to show steady progress in improving scores. Subsets of students -- including ethnic minorities, students with disabilities, those with limited English skills and those from low-income families -- also must show gains each year. If one group does not meet the target, the school or district may be designated as not making "adequate yearly progress," or AYP.

Several other Northern Virginia school systems, including those in Alexandria and in Loudoun, Prince William and Arlington counties, also did not meet targets on the spring Standards of Learning tests. The number of Northern Virginia schools that did not make the grade nearly doubled, rising from 76 in 2006 to 146 this year.

Education experts say school systems nationwide are experiencing similar increases. Each year, it is tougher for schools to meet standards, because states raise performance targets as they move toward the goal of having every child proficient in reading and math by 2014.

In Maryland, for instance, the number of elementary and middle schools targeted for academic improvement because of low test scores rose this year from 167 to 176, the largest total since the No Child law was enacted in 2002.

"The crunch is starting to be felt," said Jack Jennings, president and chief executive of the D.C.-based Center on Education Policy. "There's more tests, and there's a higher bar. The game is getting more challenging."

The experience of Northern Virginia, and the question of whether student performance on standardized tests should be the sole measure of a school's success, is expected to play a significant role this fall as lawmakers debate reauthorization of the federal law. Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), House education committee chairman, has called for additional measures, such as graduation rates or the number of students passing Advanced Placement exams, to be included in the ratings.

Michele Menapace, president of the Fairfax County Council of PTAs, said parents who are not familiar with the intricacies of the federal law might question principals and school officials about the county's ratings.

"I don't think people will be up in arms, but I think there will be questions asked," Menapace said. "There has been a great deal of confusion. All they see is that their school didn't make AYP, and they don't understand all the testing groups."

Fairfax County School Superintendent Jack D. Dale said he is not concerned about the label.

"What I hear from the community is, AYP information has become meaningless," Dale said. "Our parents want to know how kids are doing on a broad spectrum of assessments."

With such fine reputations at stake, we can be sure that this game has just begun to change its rules.

Kozol News

From the Mid-Hudson News:

Newburgh – If you ask Jonathan Kozol, Ph.D. what the problem is as relates to public education in the United States, he will tell you there is too much emphasis on testing, especially in inner city schools; that class sizes are too large; and that much of the problem has to do with Washington.

Kozol spoke at the inaugural Lucy DiPaola Institute for Professional Development for Educators, which is being held at Mount Saint Mary College in Newburgh through Thursday.

“The greatest difficulty that these young teachers face is the testing-mania, the madness of repeated obsessive testing, that the White House has forced upon our public schools under the law called No Child Left Behind, which is probably the worst, most destructive piece of education legislation that I have seen in my entire lifetime,” he said.

Kozol’s new book, Letters to a Young Teacher: The Challenges and Rich Rewards of a Beautiful Profession – the Service of Children and the Thirst for Justice, was available for purchase at Tuesday’s session.

Fairfax County Latest NCLB Victims

Guaranteed failure picks up the pace. From WaPo:

Friday, August 24, 2007; Page A01

The Fairfax County school system for the first time failed to meet academic goals under the No Child Left Behind Act, largely because many students with limited English skills struggled on reading tests that were given in response to a federal order, according to school officials and scores released yesterday.

Several other well-regarded Northern Virginia systems, including those in Alexandria and in Loudoun, Prince William and Arlington counties, also fell short of target scores on last spring's Standards of Learning tests. The number of Northern Virginia schools that did not make the grade nearly doubled, rising from 76 in 2006 to 146 this year. . . .

Bracey on Latest "Excrement Dissemination" (ED)

Looks like Bill Gates and Eli Broad both have ED. From Huffington Post:

Eli Broad and Bill Gates have ponied up $60 million to "wake up the American people about their schools." The $60 million fuel a campaign to make education a major issue in the presidential election of 2008.

No matter what its good intentions might or might not be, ED in 08 is shaping up as one of the sloppiest, most unprofessional, irresponsible campaigns in memory (why such a campaign is necessary in view of the schools being blamed for Sputnik (1957), urban riots (1967), "grim and joyless classrooms" (Chuck Silberman, Crisis in the Classroom, 1970), the SAT decline (On Further Examination, 1977), letting the Japanese eat our lunch, (A Nation At Risk 1983), and the myriad of recent publications about the Chinese and Indians threatening our lunch, is not clear. Broad is 73 years old. Did he sleep through all 50 years of this fuss?

I will deal with this allegation more extensively in the 17th Bracey Report in October's Phi Delta Kappan, but for now consider this statement in the section of ED in 08's website, More Time and Support for Learning:

"China provides 30% more education than America..."

What on earth does this mean? Thirty percent longer year? Thirty percent more curriculum coverage? Thirty percent more years in school? Thirty percent higher test scores (China has never taken part in an international comparison for reasons that will be obvious momentarily)? A 30% longer day? I think this last might be true, but it is also true that most Chinese students get about two hours a day to go home and eat lunch. There is very little difference in how much time American and Chinese kids spend learning.

As reported by Vivian Stewart, vice president for education of the Asia Society, "Currently, only 40 percent of Chinese students go to upper-secondary schools." That is, past the 9th grade. "Its long-term goals include: a world-class education for the top 5 percent to 10 percent of high school students; universal 12-year education by 2020...." ("China's Modernization Plan", Education Week, March 22, 2006).

Jim Fallows is an former editor of and currently writer for the Atlantic Monthly who has often written about education and who is currently stationed in Shanghai. In an email to me this spring, he called the schools in Shanghai "awful." Deborah Meier and Eleanor Duckworth, two of the nation's premier educators, were gentler. They were invited recently to consult with Chinese educators. The Chinese are concerned about the quality of education schools are providing even for the elite. In an August 18 email, Deborah said "the idea that they have a superior education system is beyond absurd."

She also wrote that most of the "immigrant" Chinese kids are not even in school. "Immigrant" is the word applied to Chinese families who have moved, illegally often, into the cities from the poor rural regions. All Chinese schools charge tuition and they cannot afford it. Immigrant Chinese kids are legion.

Deborah says that they were told "that in many rural areas there are virtually no teachers--even if there are schools." As for the schools she visited, "The schools we saw were middle class ones in Shanghai which were working with the University and seemed pleasant enough but had 50 kids in a class and a relatively ordinary pedagogy."

China has come a long way and its plans, as outlined by Stewart anyway, are impressive but it has quite a ways to go. Fourteen years ago, Lena Sun in the Washington Post noted that "many state-run schools [in contrast to the private schools that have high tuitions], especially in poor, rural areas, have no heat and sometimes no electricity. Some students have to share notebooks, use pencils with no points, and sit on hard, backless wooden planks. Education is such a low priority in some areas that classrooms are used as cow-sheds." They should file an adequacy suit.

What most struck Sun was the press for conformity starting in pre-school: "Every child gets his or her cot ready for the required nap, whether they are sleepy or not. There is virtually no unstructured time...Even toilets breaks are scheduled into the day; the children squat together over one long trough in the communal bathroom." ("Chinese Swaddled, Not Coddled," March 20, 1993).

The state of rural education in China was shrewdly captured in a 1999 movie, Not One Less, by Zhang Yimou (Red Sorghum, Shanghai Triad, Ju Dou, Raise the Red Lantern, The Story of Qiu Ju, Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles, House of Flying Daggers, etc). A 13-year-old girl is pressed into service as the teacher for a one-room school house when the regular teacher must return to his home town to perform filial duties following the death of a parent. The film deftly contrasts the old poverty of rural China with the new poverty of urban China.

Why is it that education "reformers" feel obligated to idealize education elsewhere and demonize it here?

After Bill Gates' demonizing speech to the National Governors Association in 2005 (Gates is 50% of the $60 million behind the ED in 08 campaign), I wrote an article, "Yo Bill Gates: If You're So Rich, How Come You Ain't Smart?" I wrote about the general fear-mongering tendency in Stanford Magazine's July/August 2006 issue, "Believing the Worst." Putting the title and "Bracey" into Google will pull up the article. A much shorter, but slightly more current version is here.

Somebody needs to shake up ED in 08. In the meantime, as my granma, a school teacher with an 8th grade educaton used to say, "Don't pay 'em no mind."

Spellings Sued For Violating NCLB

Part of neglected NCLB story that goes unreported is the bogus rhetoric on "highly-qualified teachers" that masks a concerted effort to weaken the teaching profession by credentialing unprepared and under-educated teacher candidates. Short of blowing up colleges of education, which is the preferred solution by Bush's crackpot reading czar and co-conspirator in the Reading First corruption scandal, Reid Lyon, the Bush Administration has done all it can to undercut teacher education programs and the progressive educational philosophies that are a part of those programs.

Preferring no preparation to preparation programs polluted by the dangers of Deweyan democracy, the wingnuts in charge at ED have heavily backed various scams labeled "alternative route" certification, which range in ridiculousness from 8-week cram programs to certification via Internet testing. Finally, Spellings, Paige and Co. are being taken to task in the courts. From the CBS affiliate in San Francisco:

(BCN) SAN FRANCISCO A coalition of activist groups and parents filed a federal lawsuit in San Francisco Tuesday against the U.S. Department of Education and Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings charging that the department has violated the No Child Left Behind Act by certifying under qualified teachers as being "highly qualified."

The act, signed by President George W. Bush in 2002, requires that only teachers who have a full state credential be considered "highly qualified."

However, the department has issued regulations that allow states to label any teacher currently participating in an alternative credential program while teaching as "highly qualified," according to the plaintiffs.

The lawsuit argues that the department is violating the law, deceiving parents and harming the educational development of children by labeling beginning and intern teachers as "highly qualified."

"Providing all students with highly qualified teachers is the only way to ensure that no child is left behind. Defining teachers in training as 'highly qualified' violates both the letter and spirit of the law, primarily to the detriment of low income students of color," according to plaintiffs' attorney Jenny Pearlman of the law firm Public Advocates Inc.

Lorie Chinn, a board member of the activist group California ACORN, one of the lawsuit's plaintiffs, said that schools teaching poor and minority children have a disproportionate share of these intern teachers and because of the DOE regulation the schools' parents often do not even realize it.

"Parents deserve to know when their children's teacher is an intern," Chinn said.

The lawsuit seeks to have the DOE regulation ruled illegal and the definition of a "highly qualified teacher" that is in the NCLB Act be used instead.

"If we prevail, the suit will have ripple effects throughout the implementation of NCLB nationally," Public Advocates staff attorney Tara Kini said. "States and school districts will no longer be permitted to concentrate teachers in training in schools serving high numbers of students of color, and they will be required to report accurately the numbers of 'highly qualified' teachers so that real plans can be made to get better trained and qualified teachers to all students."

According to Public Advocates, more than 10,000 intern teachers are labeled as "highly qualified" each year in California. Nationally the number is more than 100,000.

In addition to California ACORN the other plaintiffs in the lawsuit include the activist group Californians for Justice as well as a number of individual students and parents. The suit was filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco.

Still Waiting for the U of Phoenix to Crash

From Inside Higher Ed:

A federal judge has rejected the latest attempt by the University of Phoenix to shortcircuit a potentially massive lawsuit it faces, increasing the chances that the five-year-old case actually goes to trial.

The case, which has been rattling around the federal courts since 2002, hinges on the question of whether the enormous for-profit university violated federal law by paying its recruiters based on how many students they enrolled. A federal appeals court ruled last fall that Phoenix had to defend itself against the charges brought by two former instructors on behalf of the federal government under the False Claims Act, which allows individuals who believe they have identified fraud committed against the government to sue, hoping to be joined by the U.S. Justice Department. (The plaintiff then shares in any financial penalties, which can include trebled damages.)

Phoenix officials had their way in the early court battles, with a federal district court twice dismissing the lawsuit in 2004. But the university’s fortunes began to ebb with the September 2006 ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit that was seen by many college lawyers as one of several recent decisions expanding the applicability of the False Claims Act to higher education. Since then, the entire Ninth Circuit court denied a Phoenix petition asking it to rehear the case, and the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear Phoenix’s appeal. . . .

The Bloomberg/Klein Plan to Segregate the "Laggards"

During the early 20th Century heyday of the American eugenics and social efficiency movement, primitive intelligence tests were used to "scientifically" label children so that the "defective" ones could be segregated into industrial education schools. Now it appears that the Bloomberg braintrust is about to use the failures generated by their non-stop achievement testing policy to launch an updated kind of reform school, this one intended to academically cleanse the crumbling high schools ahead of the grand plan to charterize the entire system.

Bloomberg and his corporate pals have plans to funnel millions of tax-deductible dollars through non-profit corporations to spread these secondary-level academic chain-gangs they are calling "transfer schools," where the curriculum will consist of non-stop, intensive remediation. You have to wonder how many cops will be required.

From the New York Times:

Faced with 70,000 students or more who are years behind in obtaining the credits needed to graduate from high school, New York City is at the forefront of a movement to recognize that for a significant number, high school might stretch into five, six, even seven years.

In an effort that has expanded across Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s second term, the city has spent nearly $37 million to identify and cater to students who are at the biggest risk of dropping out and has already contracted for $31 million more in programs.

The staggering numbers of those who are far behind cover almost a quarter of the city’s public high school population — students like Sunil Ragoonath, who at 18 had passed barely enough courses at John Adams High School in Queens to be considered a sophomore. He routinely skipped school. “All I had to do was walk out the door,” Mr. Ragoonath said recently.

To get younger students who have failed many classes back on track, Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein has created more than two dozen “transfer schools,” and plans to open as many as 30 more over the next five years. The city also offers them intensive remedial courses. . . .

SCRAP IT!

Bracey on Perlstein and Poverty

From Huffington Post:

Gerald Bracey

When people have said "poverty is no excuse," my response has been, "Yes, you're right. Poverty is not an excuse. It's a condition. It's like gravity. Gravity affects everything you do on the planet. So does poverty."

Obviously, poverty, per se, does not cause school failure. It sets up the conditions and a dynamic that make it tough for poor kids to succeed. Perhaps the quickest way to understand that dynamic in the concrete is to read passages in Linda Perlstein's new book, Tested: One American School Struggles to Make the Grade. Former Washington Post education reporter Perlstein spent a year in Tyler Heights, a poor school in a rich county (Anne Arundel, MD).

The kids get off to a bad start physically: they get sugar water or Oodles of Noodles as infants, Froot Loops as toddlers and show up at school overweight, undernourished, their teeth rotting.

Their academic beginnings aren't healthy, either. A segment from Chapter 3:

"Mrs. Facchine felt no small measure of distress when she asked what adding an 's' does to a noun and every face in her class went blank. Mill Milhoan was mortified when she handed out Post-it notes for questions about friendship and got back, "Ho do friend go yon" and "The kestos is the kmblso." One girl doesn't know what a paragraph is; one boy asked the character trait that describes him said, "Word." Another, asked how much is between seventeen and eighteen answered, Four."

I hear complaints about teachers treating kids as passive vessels. Given the school-oriented knowledge deficits these kids have and the behaviors that actively prevent learning, more progress could be made if they were passive vessels for a while. One teacher was baffled by a boy who farted all day and announced, "I smell like salad." There was the boy who, complimented on his new sneakers and said, "Thanks! My mom stole them!" During sharing time, one girl spoke of speaking to her father through the glass using a phone. One girl, asked the meaning of "stray," said "Like a homeless person." "Is Mars a lifetime?" One boy wanted to know. On multiple choice tests, kids answered the questions without reading the stems and quit early, beaming to be done even though segments of the test were unfinished. And we haven't even talked about kids who don't know English.

Passive would be good for a while. A third grader, denied a request to see the nurse (again), "put her face in her teacher's and said, "Excuse me. My rash hurts. What if I die?'" Then she swung her book in front of the screen, blocking a math problem, hopped to the side of the room, ran the faucet and created so much tension that all the other children were distracted. "I'll have to remove you," her teacher said. "I'll have someone remove you too!" said the girl. Comments Perlstein at one point, "The amount of individual attention that goes into soothing the truly dysfunctional children and keeping them in class is extraordinary" (p. 110). Occasionally, physical restraint or a police officer's visit was necessary (remember, we're talking mostly about kindergartners to third graders here), but mostly through conversation which some children required daily.

In Chapter 11, Perlstein contrasts Tyler Heights with Crofton Elementary in an affluent development I used to admire each summer as I drove from Virginia to the jazz joints in Manhattan, although, I wondered then why the gates were shut, a knowledge shortcoming from my own cultural upbringing. Crofton is no longer a gated community, but its third graders "created fairy tales on the computer, posted staff biographies on the school's website, and wrote 10 persuasive letters. They sat in circles, discussed what they read and proofread one another's work."

Fifth graders studied the political positions of candidates and ran a bank and managed savings accounts. Fourth graders gave speeches on Olympic sports (some of them had been to the Winter Games in Turin). Despite the presence of NCLB and its obsession with reading and math, they get 45 minutes a day of science or social studies which included maintaining a compost pile, making tortilla tepees and sugar cube igloos, creating picture stories about Native Americans and composing pictograph stories on faux animal hides.

Perlstein observes that NCLB and the standards movement, designed to reduce the disparities between rich and poor has actually increased it. "The practice of focusing on the tested subjects of reading and math at the expense of a well-rounded curriculum is far more prevalent where children are poor and minority" (p. 136) (I discussed this also in "Revenge of the Liberal Arts?" August 15, and "Growing an Achievement Gap," July 15). Says Perlstein, "President Bush, in introducing NCLB, vowed to banish the 'soft bigotry of low expectations' for the nation's disadvantaged children. To condemn them to a rudimentary education in the name of improvement is bigotry too."

Crofton kids arrive as kindergartners knowing their numbers and letters. Many can read. "Middle class students see every day how schooling relates positively to the riches of everyday life. They see this through their parents' jobs. They see this through travel and cultural exposure that extends beyond the Chuck E. Cheese's-shopping mall-television circuit that narrowly bounds the experiences of many children at Tyler Heights. This exposure fuels motivation..." (p. 137). Kids at Tyler Heights get many, many external rewards for doing what they are supposed to. Crofton kids don't get any. Crofton doesn't even have an honor roll. Tyler Heights is about prepping for the state test (even though the teachers hate to). Crofton is about knowledge.

These are only brief snap shots of life at Tyler Heights where Perlstein paints the teachers and, especially the principal, as pretty damn heroic. You might want to show them to the next person who tells you "poverty is no excuse."

Jeb Bush's Test Score Bonus Pay Debacle

From the Orlando Sentinel:

As appealing as teacher-bonus pay might sound, the idea never had much luster in Florida -- and it's losing what little it had.

Unions hate it. Teachers scorn it. Administrators find it a hassle.

The disdain is so complete that some of those who benefit from the extra money -- teachers and administrators -- are asking lawmakers to ax the program when they meet in special session next month to deal with budget shortfalls.

Even if teacher bonuses survive, legislators and school officials expect that school districts from the Panhandle to Miami will opt out of the newest bonus program.

"I do support performance pay if the teachers and administration and School Board collaboratively develop a plan," said Margaret Smith, superintendent of Volusia County schools, which nixed the bonuses last year. "I do not think this year is the year to spend millions . . . when the state says we may have to lose millions."

In Central Florida, Osceola County already has said no thanks to the money that would reward teachers next year. Orange County, emerging from the error-riddled, controversial program, is expected to steer clear as well.

But legislators love merit pay and are digging in to save former Gov. Jeb Bush's plan to reward top teachers. Cutting the $147.5 million program "would send the wrong message to teachers," said Rep. Joe Pickens, R-Palatka.

He and his colleagues promise to massage it into a bigger, better program. . . .

Nelnet's Prosecutor/Defender

From TPM Muckraker:

Call it a rookie political mistake. Its one thing for a politician to lend a hand to his constituents, particularly the ones who can afford to make campaign contributions. But please; be discreet.

Last week Nebraska Attorney General Jon Bruning ordered Nelnet, a student lending company caught up in the recent industry-wide scandal, to pay a fine of one million dollars. Nelnet has, at least twice, paid university administrators who recommended that students finance their debt through the firm. The company is also hired by universities to educate students about how to pay for college; not illegal, but surely a conflict-of-interest practice that they have agreed to stop.

So what’s wrong with this picture? Nothing, except the million dollars is actually a fine that Bruning assigned the company all the way back in April, a fine that he forgave only two weeks ago.

Bruing erased the fine after New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo ordered a similar punishment for Nelnet. Cuomo has made investigating student lenders a focus of his office; already, several banks have been ordered to contribute to a national education fund. Cuomo announced on July 31st that Nelnet would be paying $2 million to the fund.

Upon hearing the news, Bruning immediately forgave Nelnet his part of the obligation. He also used the opportunity to take a few shots at his fellow AG, saying that he “never believed that the investigation was particularly useful.” Bruning went even further, saying, "Nelnet is an ethical, decent, honest company…. I will never apologize for being a defender of Nelnet."

Admittedly, that statement is a bit misleading. After all, Bruning was removing a fine that his office placed on the company; Bruning somehow styled himself both prosecutor and defender. But more importantly, Nelnet doesn’t exactly have a sterling reputation. Only a few months before the original settlement, Nelnet settled another deal with Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings.

For two years, Nelnet had falsely classified a large collection of loans, resulting in a huge government subsidy. (The government will guarantee student lenders a return of 9.5% on certain types of loans. Nelnet incorrectly identified some loans, allowing them to earn twice market value on the investments.) Spellings informed the company that they would not be able to collect future subsidies on the mislabeled loans, but she did allow the company to keep $300 million in taxpayer money that it had already received.

Maybe Bruning was just sticking up for Nebraska (Nelnet is based out of Lincoln). Then again, Bruning might have been getting on better terms with a firm known for its generous political contributions.

Bruning has announced that he will run for the possibly vacant Senate seat of Chuck Hagel (R). HigherEdWatch.org, whose extensive coverage helped keep the story alive, has noted that the original settlement came only weeks after Bruning’s campaign got a $16,000 boost from Nelnet execs. In fact, the settlement was announced without Bruning’s office ever launching an investigation (presumably, Nelnet approached Bruning in the hopes of avoiding Cuomo’s investigation).

For now, the fine has been reinstated, and Bruning has hopefully learned a lesson both about conflicts of interest and discreet politics. He recently declared in an interview that the resurrected fine “eliminates the opportunity for political gamesmanship by those who may want to create the perception of a conflict of interest.” We’ll see if his opponents agree with him.

D.C. Charter Schools: "Nearly Nonexistent Oversight"

From WaPo:

Former charter school executive Brenda Belton was able to steal or illegally steer to friends more than $800,000 over three years because of nearly nonexistent oversight by an inattentive school board, an 18-month criminal investigation found.

Even when a school employee warned board members in spring 2006 that something was amiss about the invoices Belton was approving, a divided D.C. Board of Education initially dismissed the report as unsubstantiated grousing rather than fire Belton.

So the whistleblower employee took his concerns to the D.C. inspector general, who, along with the FBI, got a search warrant for Belton's home and office. The red flags he spotted -- noting, for example, that Belton rarely showed up for work -- eventually formed the crux of a federal criminal investigation that led to Belton pleading guilty Aug. 9 to four felonies and facing significant prison time.

In admitting her crimes in federal court, Belton, 61, said that from the time she was hired as the board's charter school oversight executive in March 2003 until just before she was placed on leave in June 2006, she robbed the troubled D.C. school system of both federal and city funds. The D.C. native admitted steering $446,000 in no-bid contracts to friends, sending $203,000 in school money to a dummy company she fabricated and taking $180,000 in kickbacks and gifts from contractors she helped win school business.

She faces up to three years in prison under sentencing guidelines. Her sentencing is scheduled for Nov. 29.

The investigation of her misdeeds -- led by the D.C. inspector general and the U.S. Department of Education's inspector general -- suggested how Belton could so successfully steal without being detected.

She reported directly to the board, which lacked any formal structure for checking on her. There were numerous instances when the school board didn't notice red flags or failed to look more closely into them.

"The board had a lot on its plate, and on one piece, the ball was really dropped," said former board member JoAnne Ginsberg. "The board didn't pick up oversight responsibility the way it should have. People weren't paying attention." One institutional flaw, former board members say, is that the board had Belton report solely to them. The chief financial officer had no responsibility for reviewing her books. Board secretary Russell Smith recommended that Belton report to him, but the board voted against that idea. That meant that a group of overwhelmed, part-time volunteers were supposed to scrutinize Belton's work. No one took on the task.

In the wake of the Belton investigation, the board gave responsibility for monitoring charter schools to a public charter school board.

A Foundations Student on NCLB

I just wound up a summer session of my graduate foundations class. This is how one student closed her final essay in response to this question:

Is it possible or likely that the purposes and aims that you will pursue and promote as an educator are or can be realized by all American children, regardless of race, gender, or where they happen to go to school? Using evidence supplied from this course, explain how and why your most important educational purposes or aims are equally accessible – or how and why they are or cannot be equally accessible.

American education should be an equal-opportunity endeavor, but it is not. History has seen a constant struggle for democracy in education. Educational thinkers and policymakers have grappled with the question of how to give all students equal educational opportunities, yet even today, equity in American education is lacking. As a result of No Child Left Behind, the country is experiencing a frenzy to close the achievement gap between white and minority students. The unfortunate irony of NCLB, however, is that it is creating inequity in education rather than alleviating it, for the law is effectively harming precisely those students it purports to benefit: minority students, students with learning disabilities, and students whose first language is not English. Thus, my aforementioned aims [to cultivate a love of learning in my students and promote an ethic of care] as an educator are not equally accessible to all American children, regardless or race, gender or where they happen to go to school. The current emphasis on test prep makes fostering a love of learning nearly impossible, and the push to bolster the scores of some students while letting others fall through the cracks precludes an ethic of care in education.

My first aim as an educator is to cultivate a love of learning in my students by engaging their interests and making the classroom experience a positive one. However, if I am forced to teach to a test, that aim is made almost impossible. Many critics of NCLB say it is an attempt by the federal government to implement a standardized curriculum in public schools. Scripted lessons and “one-size-fits-all” curriculums are the antithesis of engaging and interactive learning. As Jaeger points out, “Teachers find that their work has been reduced to follow a scripted teacher’s guide, passing out worksheets, and drilling students on isolated skills,” (chapter 6). How can I, as Dewey and Noddings suggest, take my students’ individual needs and interests into account when I must deliver a robotic lesson or drill test strategies into their heads? It seems to me that NCLB unfairly makes teachers more concerned about ensuring students are proficient in math and reading for the sake of a test than providing them with a wholesome, fulfilling education.

Not only does NCLB lead to robotic teaching and narrow curriculums, it also reduces learning to filling in blanks and bubbling in scantrons; that is, it sends the message that the purpose of learning is to pass a test. According to Dewey, learning needs to be made relevant to students’ lives so that they will seek out more positive educative experiences in the future. In order to achieve my aim of cultivating a love of learning in my students, I have said that I will try to help them see the relevancy of the material to their daily lives. But if I can only justify the relevancy of my lessons by saying, “You need to know this for the test,” that aim is effectively derailed. The last thing students want to hear is that they must absorb the information because they’ll be tested on it later. High-stakes testing turns students off to learning. School must be made relevant to daily life so that students can realize the immediate impact of their educative experiences. The current testing craze greatly inhibits that aim.

The law also is antithetical to my second aim of promoting an ethic of care in the classroom. The very name of the law, “No Child Left Behind,” sounds caring enough in theory, but the reality is that it cares very little about the welfare of America’s children. It is largely ineffective in providing support for the students who need it the most. It expects children with learning disabilities to achieve at the same rate as other students, yet states are not allowed to make provisions for alternative tests or significantly modify testing conditions to make that possible (Jaeger, chapter 3). Furthermore, higher qualification standards for paraprofessionals has forced many of them out of their jobs, which means students with learning disabilities are not receiving the extra support they need (Jaeger, chapter 5). English language learners who have been in the U.S. for at least a year face a similar unrealistic and unfair expectation, for they are required to take a test that is not written in their first language. What’s even worse is that when it comes to intervention services for struggling students, many districts now focus on “those children who are considered ‘pushables’ (those just below passing) and ‘slippables’ (those at risk of slipping out of the proficient category),” according to Jaeger. “When one teacher asked what was to be done for students in dire need of extra help, she was told by her principal to ‘forget them’” (chapter 2). How can teachers care about each and every student when they are being told to forget about those deemed lost causes? And how can teachers show students they care when they cannot gauge their understanding of and response to the material, as Jaeger describes when she writes, “ They are unable to respond appropriately to the diverse needs of their students because required adherence to a rigid pacing schedule forces them to move full speed ahead whether students understand the lessons or not” (chapter 6)? Noddings says every child has the potential to achieve. It is our responsibility as caring educators to help students realize their potential, yet NCLB prevents such a caring approach to education.

Furthermore, NCLB makes it advantageous for schools to let drop-outs fall through the cracks. The provision of the law that it supposed to help schools with high drop-out rates implement prevention programs has a $0 budget, and “other provisions of the law serve to diminish rather than increase incentives for keeping all students in school,” (Jaeger, chapter 7). “There is a reason for excluding from testing lower-achieving students...by transferring or expelling them, or by encouraging them to drop out. If these students leave school, they do not participate in the tests which determine whether schools are deemed under-performing,” (Jaeger, chapter 7). Thus, NCLB effectively encourages schools to not care about lower-achieving students who are likely to drop out. One hardly needs to point out how this goes against an ethic of care.

Thus, it is clear that society’s emphasis on standardized test scores, as well as the federal government’s intrusion into the educational system, makes the realization of my most important educational aims highly unlikely or nearly impossible. But, to end on a more optimistic note, there is hope for me yet, as No Child Left Behind is up for re-authorization this September. Repealing the law would make my aims more feasible.

References
Dewey, J. (1938/1997). Experience and education (reprinted ed.) New York: Touchstone Books.

Dewey, J. (1938/2000). Experience and education. In R. Reed & T. Johnson, Eds., Philosophical documents in education (2nd ed.) (pp. 115-124). New York: Longman. (Reprinted from Experience and education by J. Dewey, 1938, Indianapolis, IN: Kappa Delta Pi, pp. 33-50).

Dewey, J. (1897/1972). My pedagogic creed. In R. Reed & T. Johnson, Eds., Philosophicaldocuments in education (2nd ed.) (pp. 103-110). New York: Longman. (Reprinted from John Dewey: The early works 1895-1898, vol. 5 by J. Dewey, J.A. Boydston, Ed., Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, pp. 84-95).

Dillon, S. (2007, July 25). Focus on 2 R’s cuts time for the rest, report says. New York Times. Retrieved August 9, 2007, from http://www.nytimes.com

Glater, J. (2007, July 29). Certain degrees now cost more at universities. New York Times. Retrieved August, 9, 2007, from http://www.nytimes.com

Jaeger, Elizabeth. What every parent, teacher, and community member needs to know about No Child Left Behind. Unpublished manuscript.

Noddings, N. (1992/2000). The challenge of care in schools: An alternative approach to education. In R. Reed & T. Johnson, Eds., Philosophical documents in education (2nd ed.) (pp. 247-257). New York: Longman (Reprinted from The Challenge to Care in Schools: An Alternative Approach to Education, by Noddings, 1992, New York: Teachers College Press).

Tyack, D. (2003). Seeking common ground: Public schools in a diverse society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

I wish that all my colleagues could say as much on the subject as well.

Posted 11.18.07 at Education Policy Blog

NCLB: Leaving the Able and Ethical Teachers Behind

Teachers who are advocates for children's learning are leaving the profession quicker than we can replace them with new ones who are less squeamish about about the new role of drill sergeant and test score generator.

Below is the transcript of Merrow talking to two award-winning teachers on a News Hour report last evening. Subject: the demoralization of teachers as a result of the NCLB juggernaut.

Spellings's response? Stay the course, my way or the highway, you're with us or against us, blah blah, blah blah blah.

JIM LEHRER: Now our series on the No Child Left Behind law. In tonight's third and final report, how some of the country's best teachers are responding to the law. Here again is the work of our special correspondent for education, John Merrow.

ANTHONY CODY, Teacher: Solar energy is a huge topic, so it affects a lot of things.

JOHN MERROW, Special Correspondent for Education: We first met Anthony Cody in 1999, when he was teaching science at Bret Harte Middle School in Oakland, California.

ANTHONY CODY: There are some investigations that we've already begun using shadows and using the sun.

JOHN MERROW: A gifted teacher, Cody is nationally certified, a distinction that only 2 percent of teachers ever attain. And Cody shared his expertise mentoring other teachers.

ANTHONY CODY: As a teacher, my first priority is my own 90-some students. But thinking broadly, I really try to work with other teachers across the district. And I can reach more students in that way, by supporting new teachers, trying to give them some fresh ideas to work with in the classroom.

So the shadow starts where?

STUDENT: From the base of the thing.

JOHN MERROW: Eight years have passed, and when we caught up with Anthony Cody this time, his outlook had changed.

ANTHONY CODY: I'm seeing a lot of desperation on the part of teachers, a lot of frustration. Out of the group of six teachers that I've worked with for a long time, only one is still in the classroom.

JOHN MERROW: Cody believes the change in teacher morale dates back to 2002 and the No Child Left Behind law.

ANTHONY CODY: No Child Left Behind has cast a pall over the whole urban educational system. It has created unrealistic expectations and punished us for not meeting them.

JOHN MERROW: The U.S. secretary of education, Margaret Spellings, says that, before the law, many problems were being ignored.

MARGARET SPELLINGS, U.S. Secretary of Education: We were leaving thousands and thousands -- millions of kids behind. We had the ostrich approach when it came to them. And now, all of a sudden, we have an intensity around meeting their needs, and it's making people uncomfortable.

JOHN MERROW: Under the law, children in grades three though eight are expected to perform at grade level on multiple choice tests. But many of Anthony Cody's students were already three and even four grades behind when they arrived in his classroom.

ANTHONY CODY: If I say that No Child Left Behind sets unrealistic goals, then the very name of the law says that, by implication, I am leaving children behind. I am not interested in leaving anyone behind, but I'm not going to say that I am a failure because he came to me reading at the fourth-grade level and I've only managed to move him up to the fifth- or sixth-grade level in one year.

You know, I'm not going to say that he's a failure. I'm not going to say that I'm a failure. But the law says I'm a failure because he's not proficient. He's not at grade level.

Affecting outstanding teachers

JOHN MERROW: We wondered whether Anthony Cody's experience was unique. Could No Child Left Behind be affecting other outstanding teachers? We came here to Fairfax County, Virginia, one of the best public school districts in the nation. And behind me is Bailey's Elementary, one of its best schools.

LYNN RIGGS, Teacher: So today we will be building our own roller coasters...

JOHN MERROW: At Bailey's, we met Lynn Riggs, Fairfax County's teacher of the year for 2006-2007.

LYNN RIGGS: We've got gravity that we have to work with.

JOHN MERROW: Riggs is a science resource teacher. Besides teaching science, she also helps other teachers create challenging lessons.

LYNN RIGGS: One of the things that I do every year with fifth-graders, I do a roller coaster lesson. And really what it is, is a physics lesson.

I'm trying to turn that bucket upside down, but how come those paper clips aren't falling out?

Any good teaching involves connecting with the kids and having something that is real, that's authentic, something that will not only grab their attention, but will engage them so that they're learning.

JOHN MERROW: Like Anthony Cody in Oakland, Lynn Riggs is concerned about No Child Left Behind, particularly its reliance on multiple-choice tests.

LYNN RIGGS: I think that multiple-choice, bubble-in tests are the easiest kind of tests to give. Why are we spending all of this time training kids to give us the right answer when we should be training them to think?

JOHN MERROW: Bailey's prides itself on teaching children to think. This K-5 school is in a neighborhood with a large immigrant population. With its focus on science and the arts, Bailey's attracts talented teachers and student applicants from all over the county.

TEACHER: Do we come to school on Sunday?

STUDENTS: No!

JOHN MERROW: Bailey's 800 students come from more than 40 countries and speak more than 20 languages.

BETSY WALTER, Teacher: Now, here's the challenge: I want you to show me interdependence in a way totally different...

I have 26 students, and 17 of them are second-language learners, in my classroom. And so we have to do things that are visual and with our bodies or else they won't understand. And so I try to do things that will play to their strengths, build up their weaknesses, and make them the most well-rounded learner they can be.

JOHN MERROW: But is No Child Left Behind looking for well-rounded learners?

BETSY WALTER: I don't think the law was intended to be about testing. I think the law was intended to be about the quality of our schools and our teachers, and I think that it's turned into being about statistics.

Pressure for high test scores

JOHN MERROW: Under No Child Left Behind, schools are evaluated by test scores, which are broken down by subgroups such as race, family income, and disability. If even one subgroup fails, the entire school is labeled as having failed to make adequate yearly progress. At Bailey's, teachers in the testing grades -- three, four and five -- are feeling the pressure.

LYNN RIGGS: Everybody has succumbed to drilling to learn how to take a multiple choice test, so that we've all modified our teaching, Fairfax County included, Bailey's Elementary included.

JOHN MERROW: Secretary Spellings says that should not be a problem.

MARGARET SPELLINGS: If you have a curriculum that is sound and strong and is what you want your kids to know and you're measuring against that, there's not a thing wrong with teaching to the test.

JOHN MERROW: Fairfax County teacher of the year said, "Our country needs people who can solve problems, be analytical. All that's lost in the high-stakes tests and narrowing curriculum."

MARGARET SPELLINGS: Well, I mean, I guess what my question is, is that person advocating that we go back to not finding out how poorly or how well our students are being served, that we eliminate measurement of kids?

JOHN MERROW: But Bailey's teachers don't believe that one test is an accurate measure of student progress.

BETSY WALTER: As a teacher, I'm continually assessing my students. And I believe that they're much more authentic assessments than a standardized test. I don't come in every day and baby sit. I am a teacher. We have significant learning that goes on every day. It just might not be shown on that test that someone developed at the testing place.

LYNN RIGGS: We're going to find out about different types of energy.

JOHN MERROW: Lynn Riggs ran into a different problem when her fifth-grade students did a project on deep sea vents, underwater volcanoes.

LYNN RIGGS: One of the things that is absolutely fascinating about this fabulous ecosystem that is miles beneath the ocean, there is no sunlight there. What is it that's driving this ecosystem? What is this chemo-synthesis? How does this work? I've got to be able to explain it to fifth-graders.

JOHN MERROW: Riggs says her students love tackling such a difficult subject.

LYNN RIGGS: But the kicker is, this spring, as the kids were preparing for their state tests, one of the questions was about food chains. Of course, the right answer is "the sun." And I'm thinking, "Great, they're going to get the question wrong. I've taught them too much. They're going to be thinking, 'But what about the deep-sea vents, chemosynthesis? There's no sunlight that deep down in the ocean. It's dark.'"

JOHN MERROW: And testing pressure is getting worse. Earlier this year, Fairfax County lost a battle with the U.S. Department of Education. As a result, Bailey's teachers had to give grade-level English tests to immigrant students, regardless of their ability to understand English.

BETSY WALTER: I can tell you right now that my entire class will not pass. I have children who came to America a year ago that are being tested. I have children who have illiterate parents, so when they go home, no one can help them with their reading.

JOHN MERROW: Do you fear that Bailey's will not make adequate yearly progress?

LYNN RIGGS: I don't fear it; I know it. Chances are good that we will not be making adequate progress in at least one or two of our categories.

JOHN MERROW: And what will that mean?

LYNN RIGGS: It will mean we are a failing school.

MADDIE FENNELL, 2007 Nebraska Teacher of the Year: I'm joined with my colleagues today from across the country...

More frustration in Nebraska

JOHN MERROW: Far beyond Bailey's Elementary, teacher frustration is building.

MADDIE FENNELL: My name is Maddie Fennell, and I'm the teacher of the year for the state of Nebraska.

JOHN MERROW: In an unprecedented action, 50 of the 2007 state teachers of the year met in Washington, D.C., this April to propose major changes to No Child Left Behind.

MADDIE FENNELL: We know that America's public education system is in need of repair, yet classroom teachers have been denied a seat at the table when it comes to shaping and implementing the most influential education reform, No Child Left Behind.

If No Child Left Behind stays the way it is, I think the level of frustration is going to cause people to say, "You know what? This is just not worth it. I love my children, but I can't continue to do this when professionally I know this is what's not in the best interests of my students." We're just going to have many more people leaving the profession.

JOHN MERROW: In Oakland, Anthony Cody, after 18 years in the classroom, has already quit.

ANTHONY CODY: I left teaching because the morale at the school had fallen. There wasn't a feeling of optimism.

JOHN MERROW: Do you miss teaching?

ANTHONY CODY: In my collaborative research group, we used to talk about, "Wouldn't it be great if we could start our own school?" We don't talk about that anymore.

JOHN MERROW: But you haven't given up.

ANTHONY CODY: No, I haven't given up, but I can't see -- I haven't felt effective in the classroom lately. And I'd like to go back, but I'd like to know that I could be effective, and that the school would be effective, and that the school would be honored, and that I would be honored for the work that I do.

LYNN RIGGS: Predictions, who's got a hypothesis?

JOHN MERROW: And what about Lynn Riggs, the Fairfax County teacher of the year?

Knowing what you know now about No Child Left Behind, if you were starting over, would you be a classroom teacher?

LYNN RIGGS: I'm not a classroom teacher now.

JOHN MERROW: You've got the ideal job.

LYNN RIGGS: I have the ideal job. I am a resource teacher. I do not have to administer the state test. It does not impact my job. I would not go back to the classroom today.

JOHN MERROW: As the school year wound down, students and teachers at Bailey's celebrated the arts.

STUDENT: So the sort of basic idea of our mural was legacy, what people would remember about us.

JOHN MERROW: Nothing here looked like failure, but the teachers knew the all-important test scores would not come in until mid-August.

From "Distinction in Performance" to Failure in One Year

From The Kansas City Star:

The West Platte School District breathed a sigh of relief that it did not land on the “needs improvement” list but said it’s just a matter of time.

Missouri’s Department of Education this week released a list of about 250 school districts that did not meet adequate yearly progress on their Missouri Assessment Program scores and have landed on the “needs improvement” list.

In the Northland, these districts are: Platte County R-3, Kearney R-I, Smithville R-II, Lawson R-XIV, Excelsior Springs and North Kansas City.

The federal mandate No Child Left Behind was designed to close the achievement gap between disadvantaged students and their counterparts by requiring all districts to show adequate yearly progress in the areas of attendance and graduation, proficiency and participation rates. In the area of proficiency, testing benchmarks are set progressively higher each year so that by 2014 all students should be proficient when they are tested.

The “needs improvement” list essentially means that the district did not meet benchmarks for two consecutive years in the same subject area and must now develop an improvement plan. Additionally, the school district must notify all students’ families of its status.

Platte County R-3 Assistant Superintendent Rob Gardner expressed frustration with the federal mandate.

“I think the intent of NCLB is good and is solid,” he said. “But some components just don’t make sense. A small subgroup can make an entire district to be labeled as needing improvement.”

In Platte County R-3, the subgroups of free and reduced lunch, individualized educational program in communication arts and individualized education program in math did not meet benchmarks.

Because roughly half of the state’s school districts fell into the list, Gardner said that’s an indication of how unfair the mandate is.

“It’s not like we’re unaccredited with poor curriculum,” he said. “But by using NCLB standards, we’re being lumped into that group.”

Platte County had been recognized with “distinction in performance” from the state Department of Education in 2006 and 2001-2004.

West Platte Superintendent Kyle Stephenson isn’t happy about NCLB either, even though his district didn’t land on the list.

“At some point, we too will fail,” he said. “It’s blatantly unfair.”

NCLB: Making the Impossible Certain

If impossible test targets were not enough to kill the schools, how about choking off further funding for NCLB mandated school improvement implementation? Perfect.

From the Center on Education Policy:

Flat Funding Means that Most States Cannot Reserve the Full Amount for School Improvement Under No Child Left Behind, Report Finds

WASHINGTON – August 15, 2007 – With Title I funding streams remaining essentially flat over the last two years, a majority of states appear unable to reserve the full amount of funds required for school improvement efforts under the No Child Left Behind Act, according to a report from the independent, Washington, D.C.-based Center on Education Policy (CEP).

The report, which analyzes 2007-08 Title I, Part A allocations from the U.S. Department of Education, also finds that the level of Title I funding received by some states and school districts is extremely volatile, due to updated calculations made each year under the law’s funding formulas. Among the report’s key findings:

• Three states will not be able to reserve any funds for school improvement, while 26 additional states will be unable to reserve the full amount. Of these states, 22 were alsounable to reserve the full funding amount in 2006-07.
  

• Many school districts that were slated to receive increases in Title I funding under the U.S. Department of Education’s initial allocations will see their projected gains wiped out due to the NCLB requirement for states to reserve funds for school improvement activities. These districts include New York City Public Schools, the Houston Independent School District, and the Atlanta Public Schools.
  

• Shifts in the population of low-income children within states have caused turbulence in the level of Title I funding received by states each year. For example, Illinois will receive an approximate 10 percent gain ($53.5million) in 2007-08, with Wisconsin set to receive an additional 30 percent ($47 million) and Indiana expecting a 25 percent increase ($45.7 million). Meanwhile, California will experience a decrease of 5 percent ($80 million) since last year, while Florida will see a drop of 9 percent ($59.6 million) and New Jersey will lose 5 percent ($13 million).
  

The Center offers two key recommendations to address these funding issues:

• The Congress should continue to appropriate separately for school improvement and increase that appropriation substantially.
  

• The Congress should require the U.S. Department of Education and the U.S. Census Bureau to review the accuracy of estimates of low-income children and consider other options to calculate grants, such as averaging the two most recent Census estimates.
  

The report, Title I Funds: Who’s Gaining and Who’s Losing, School Year 2007-08 Update, and additional reporting on Title I, is available online at www.cep-dc.org.

Kozol on School Privatization

From "The Big Enchilada" in Harper's, via The Mahablog:

The next and more ambitious stage in the introduction of the private market and its values into public schools did not become possible until the voucher advocates made the well-timed marketing decision to renounce the terminology of “vouchers” and to forgo temporarily their efforts to assume the outright ownership of schools. They settled instead for the management of schools that technically remained within the public sector. Newly created corporations, which characteristically adopted such academically impressive names as “Nobel Learning” or “Edison Schools,” began convincing officials in minority districts– first Miami, later Chicago, then Baltimore, Philadelphia, and many other cities–to contract with them to operate at first a few, then larger numbers, of their schools. At present, forty-one Philadelphia public schools are being run by Edison and another profit-making firm, along with a handful of nonprofit private groups. Almost simultaneously, as states were pressured to test and measure children more relentlessly, to institute the same “goal-setting” mechanisms that are used in private industry, the testing affiliates of some of our largest textbook publishers, as well as the major test-prep companies (The Princeton Review and Kaplan, for example), began to move into our public schools, primarily in urban areas. By 2005, the schools were generating $2.8 billion a year for the testing industry.

In both these areas–testing services and the management of schools–the encroachment of the private sector on public education has been mightily assisted by provisions that the Bush Administration managed to insert into the No Child Left Behind Act. Among the various “sanctions” that this highly controversial law imposes upon low performing schools are two provisions that have opened up these schools to interventions by private corporations on a scale that we have never before seen in the United States. The first of these provisions stipulates that if a school receiving federal funds under what is known as “Title I,” the nation’s largest program of assistance for low-income students, fails to raise its test scores by a fixed percentage within three years, it must then use a portion of its funds to purchase what the government describes as “supplemental services.” These services must be provided outside of the normal school day and, among other options, by a so called third-party provider.

Although such “services” are defined somewhat ambiguously, most low-income districts have interpreted the term to mean that they must force these schools to institute test-preparation regimens geared explicitly toward raising scores on state exams. Increasingly, too, schools have been pressured into contracts with private corporations that provide these services. Meanwhile, the test-prep companies are actively promoting their success in raising scores to principals who live in terror of the more alarming second stage of federal sanctions they will otherwise incur.

If, despite their expensive test-prep programs, low-performing schools fail to pump up test scores fast enough to meet specific goals within five years, school boards are obliged to shut them down and dismiss their faculties and principals. Such schools will then be either operated directly by the state or reconstituted under an “alternative governance arrangement.”

Although the provider of such “governance” might be a nonprofit corporation (one that operates a chain of semi-private charter schools, for instance), it is the profit-making firms, with their superb promotional machinery, that are best positioned to obtain these valuable contracts. It is this prospect–and the even more appealing notion that companies that start by managing these schools might at some future point achieve the right, through changes in state laws, to own the schools as well–that helps explain why EMOs like Edison, which has yet to tum a profit, nonetheless attract vast sums of venture capital. The “big enchilada” represented by the corporate invasion of public schools, even if it takes place only in progressive stages, is sufficiently enticing to investors to keep the money flowing in anticipation of a time when private corporations will not merely nibble at the edges of the public system but will devour it altogether.

No Child Left Behind, with its draconian emphasis on high-stakes testing as the sole determinant of failure or success within a given school, was signed into law in 2002. The warning period for the first wave of low performing schools is now coming to an end. Thousands of schools that exclusively serve black and Hispanic children have failed to meet their federally mandated goals.

All of these schools, under the stipulations of No Child Left Behind, will soon be ripe for picking by private corporations. Progressive citizens who say they believe in public education, as well as the erstwhile liberal Democratic leadership in the U.S. House and Senate, have failed to recognize and confront this looming crisis. Meanwhile, the richly funded and well-oiled juggernaut of privatization continues to move forward, carving out increasingly large pieces of the public system. If those of us who profess to value public schools and the principle of democratic access they uphold cannot find the courage or the motivation to fight in their defense, we may soon wake up to find that they have been replaced by wholly owned subsidiaries of McDonald’s, Burger King, and Wal-Mart. Some $490 billion (4 percent of GNP) is spent on education yearly in the United States. It will be an act of social suicide if liberals blithely continue to dismiss the opportunities this vast amount of money represents for corporate predation.

Calera High School Becomes NCLB Casualty for 0.65% Shortfall in Attendance

It does not matter that Calera High met 20 of 21 goals and missed the 21th by less than 1 percentage point in attendance. Fair? No. Insane? Yes. Manufactured failure by NCLB? You bet.

From the Birmingham News:

It's a crushing blow to find out your high school has flunked state requirements, but Calera High Principal Ken Mobley plans on celebrating anyway.

Only a disappointing graduation rate dragged down the school's other accomplishments, Mobley said.

"It's demoralizing to meet 20 out of 21 goals and still be labeled a failing school," Mobley said. "We had six students not pass the graduation exam, and because of those six kids, Calera High School is considered a failing school."

Calera is among 109 high schools in Alabama that failed to meet state requirements only because of their graduation rates. Of the 241 Alabama schools that did not achieve 100 percent of their goals this year, 45 percent failed solely because of the graduation rate.

Under the federal No Child Left Behind law, schools must make adequate yearly progress each year on state assessments. They must meet state goals in reading, math and other indicators, including high schools graduation rates.

Darrell Hudson, principal of Carver High School in Birmingham, said he was devastated to learn his school failed solely because its graduation rate dropped slightly from the year before. That was especially painful, he said, since Carver surpassed the state average of 82 percent.

"We have an 89.35 percent graduation rate in an inner-city school, but because we had a 90 percent graduation rate the year before, we are considered a failing school," he said. "The people I feel bad for is the faculty, because it doesn't give a true reading of our success." . . . .

Reading Recovery Receives Top Marks in Federal Research

Six years ago when Margaret LaMontagne (Spellings), Reid Lyon, and Doug Carnine loaded the Reading First review panels with their direct instruction stooges and cronies, they set back reading instruction by decades, who knows how many. As ED's own Inspector General's reports have shown, states that applied for Reading First grants were manhandled into choosing reading programs aligned with the Lyon and Carnine back-to-brutality phonics orthodoxy. And if grantees ended up off the direct instruction reservation, Reid Lyon's Reading First Director, Chris Doherty, could simply pull the plug, as he did in Rockford, Illinois:

Mr. Doherty then directed the state to freeze the district’s funding, and ultimately to withdraw the grant. Those actions prompted another e-mail from Mr. Lyon: “wow – Talk about a guy with smarts, integrity AND balls,” he wrote. “I am talking about you Chris.”

The Lyon and Carnine Cabal's most hated reading program was the balanced literacy methodology of Reading Recovery, a holistic and humane literacy approach grounded by empirical research. It is suitably ironic, then, that Ed Week reports that Reading Recovery has emerged in the latest federal research from Spellings's own shop as the only program "found to have positive effects or potentially positive effects across all four of the domains in the review—alphabetics, fluency, comprehension, and general reading achievement:"

. . . .That program, Reading Recovery, an intensive, one-on-one tutoring program, has drawn criticism over the past few years from prominent researchers and federal officials who claimed it was not scientifically based.

Federal officials and contractors tried to discourage states and districts from using Reading Recovery in schools participating in the federal Reading First program, citing a lack of evidence that it helps struggling readers. . . .

How sweet it is!! It's just too bad that so many states are now stuck with the McGraw-Hill Open Court parrot reading system that they were force fed by hacks and crooks in order to get Reading First grants.

No Way, Jose, On National Standards

From Education Week:

The National Conference of State Legislatures has taken a hard line against any form of national academic standards, declaring last week that any national attempt to unite school curricula across states would be unacceptable until perceived flaws in the federal No Child Left Behind Act are fixed.

The strongly worded new policy against national standards—even voluntary ones—prompted virtually no debate and was approved on a voice vote during the Denver-based group’s business meeting at its annual conference here, which drew nearly 9,000 attendees from Aug. 5-9. NCSL policies such as the new one on national standards set the Washington lobbying agenda of the legislative group.

See Also

Read the main story, “Fiscal Forecast for States Begins to Darken.”

The policy reads, in part: “We need rigorous state standards that are anchored in real world demands. … This can be most readily accomplished through individual state refinement of standards … not through federal action—which flies in the face not only of the role of states since the inception of our system of providing education, but the historical role of states and local school districts in funding education with diminished federal support.”

Much of the group’s opposition to national standards is rooted in its dislike for the NCLB law, which is up for reauthorization before Congress. The NCSL, which has been among the most unified, vocal critics of the federal school accountability law, issued a report in February 2005 calling for more flexibility for states.

“The idea of going to national standards when we’re dealing with a system that has imposed itself on all 50 states—with the emphasis on process—would at best be premature,” New York state Sen. Stephen Saland, a Republican, said at last week’s ncsl meeting. Sen. Saland was a co-chairman of the group’s task force on the federal education law. “This would not be the time.” . . . .

Flat Worlds, Poison Toys, and Political Thinking

What happens when you depend upon businessmen to make educational decisions, businessmen whose prime motivation in life is the never-ending uptick in corporate quarterly earnings? You end up with a politically-and-artistically- denuded curriculum that's heavy on science, math, and technology--and short on everything else. Welcome to Achieve, Inc. and the Business Roundtable's new vision of the American high school.

When the world got flat, you see, the pedagogical braintrust, not at Teachers College, but the one at the U. S. Chamber of Commerce, made the determination that economics is the only social studies that matters in school anymore, and that if we need to emulate China's totalitarian tunnel vision in order to achieve its level of productivity, then so be it. Cardboard dumplings, poison toys, anti-freeze toothpaste, melamine animal feed, slave labor, environmental disaster, political repression? It's what maximum efficiency and amazing economic engines are built on, according to the Business Roundtable. China's your best example--nobody does it better.

I went in K-Mart the other day, and everything I picked up had an American brand and was made in China. I could not find anything not made in China. I wondered what cost-cutting poison was waiting to be brought home in these pillows and camp stoves, and I wondered how many workers died in forced labor camps in order to have this row of 40 gleaming bicycles, all under a hundred dollars. I finally found a shirt made in Nicaragua. I bought it and left.

Anyway, I found this interesting story today in the NY Times on some pedagogical developments in India that the geniuses at Achieve, Inc. probably haven't heard about, either. There, politics, real politics is being used in Indian high schools to teach and learn critical thinking. And students are eating it up. So, too, are their teachers. Maybe the world is not flat--maybe it never was.

A clip:

NEW DELHI, Aug. 14 — Quietly, a great upheaval is taking place inside Indian high schools.

For the first time, the messy brawl that is modern Indian politics, including some of its ugliest and most controversial episodes, is being taught in political science class. It is part of a broader revision of the school curriculum, with potentially long-lasting implications for how Indian children grasp the workings of their nation and its place in the world.

Using cartoons, newspaper clippings and questions that invite classroom debate on thorny contemporary issues, the new curriculum comes at a time when democracy has firmly rooted itself in Indian soil and is indeed one of the nation’s principal selling points as it tries to assert itself in the world. India marks the 60th anniversary of its independence from Britain on Wednesday.

“Sixty years after independence, it’s a statement of maturity of Indian democracy,” said Yogendra Yadav, one of the two chief advisers to the political science textbook committee. “This couldn’t have been written 30 years after independence. This probably couldn’t have been written 15 years ago.”

Shikha Chhabra, 16, offered an example from her new 12th-grade textbook, “Contemporary World Politics.”

She said she had always been taught that the nonaligned movement, in which India played a leading role during the cold war years and countries carved out at least a rhetorical policy of independence from both the Soviet Union and the United States, was “a wonderful thing.” The new textbook, she noticed, treats it differently. “Now they raise the question — does the nonaligned movement really apply in the world today? Was it just fence-sitting?”

She decided that it no longer applied, joining a contemporary hue and cry among politicians and political observers in this country about the merits of India’s new friendship with the United States. The class had a rich debate about the pros and cons of aligning with the Americans. It came during a chapter called “U.S. Hegemony in World Politics.”

“You do question what India’s strategy should be,” Ms. Chhabra said.

Her teacher, Abha Malik, head of the political science department at the Sanskriti School here, pounded on the textbook, which the National Council of Educational Research and Training, a government agency, rolled out four months ago for both public and private schools. “You can’t have a regular, regular class with this,” she said, beaming. “This book won’t let you sit still.”

In a country where rote learning has prevailed even at the most elite schools, the new emphasis on critical thinking signals a major shift in pedagogy. More striking is the substance of the new curriculum. Before, the emphasis in political science was on political theory. “This is realpolitik,” Ms. Malik said. . . .

Is "hegemony" on the vocabulary list of the Achieve curriculum? Didn't think so.

The Middle School Meltdown: Only a Mystery to Clueless Bloomberg

Dan Brown at Huffington Post nails it:

Why do standardized test scores drop -- sharply, in many cases -- when students hit middle school.

Today, The New York Times reported on NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg's answer to the $64,000 question of education:

"Generally speaking, those in elementary school do what you tell them to do. And I think it's also true by the time they get to high school, they don't. It's in those middle years where they transfer from one to another."

He went on to present a maddeningly misguided and half-hearted plan of dedicating $5 million toward 50-performing New York City middle schools.

The mayor of New York City's distillation of our urban education crisis is baffling and offensive. Firstly, how can he be so sure that "what you're telling them to do" is actually in their best interest? Since the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act in 2002, NYC elementary schools have fixated on testing, testing, testing. Today's middle school students have lived with counterproductive mania for this their entire scholastic lives.

Urban kids in sixth and seventh grade are hip to the fact that the test preparation craze that has dominated their years in school is actually a superficial, bureaucratic charade that has nothing to do with their own personal futures. An alarming number of sixth graders taught English Language Arts by my wife in the Bronx pointedly told her last January: "The test is over. I'm done." Scores are dropping now because those children have been failed repeatedly since Day One, and their foundation of enduring skills and understandings was never built in the interest of manufacturing short-end bumps on test score graphs.

Rather than making school a nurturing and personal experience, kids, as early as kindergarten, are jammed into overcrowded classrooms, denied support services like fundamental skills tutoring, denied much-needed counseling, and are supervised by administrators more worried about test scores than their real needs. It's no wonder that they "stop doing what you tell them to do," as the mayor says. Bloomberg is blaming the victims here. (And also, who is the "you" that Bloomberg mentions? Does "you" contain the families of the Bronx, for example? It doesn't seem so.)

Students don't spontaneously combust in middle school. When a student's "achievement" on the line graph tumbles, something undetected has been wrong for a long time. Solving the mystery of the middle school decline will require a genuine look at dedicating real resources to truly support every student -- from birth through high school graduation day.

Bloomberg shows little interest in such a difficult, expensive yet crucial undertaking. The New York Times reports:

"But the mayor shied away from adopting the most far-ranging changes recommended in the reports, like significantly reducing class sizes, creating a special middle school academy to train teachers about early adolescence, and removing police officers from city schools to create a more welcoming atmosphere."

How will voiceless public school students get real solutions, not stunts, from their elected leaders?

Dan Brown is a writer and teacher in New York City. His memoir of his first year teaching, The Great Expectations School: A Rookie Year in the New Blackboard Jungle, is being released this month by Arcade Publishing.

David Brennan Caught Washing Money Through National Charter Front Group

What happens when someone like charter school kingin, David Brennan, wants to buy more influence in Ohio elections than state law will allow? You do what Tom Delay did--you simply launder the money through an out-of-state outfit like All Children Matter that turns your cash into campaign contributions for your preferred stable of candidates. No fuss, no muss--well, maybe a little muss this time.

From the Columbus Dispatch:

By Mark Niquette and Jim Siegel

THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH

Ohio's biggest charter-school operator has given $200,000 to a Virginia political action committee. That group's transfer of $870,000 to an Ohio affiliate last year to help elect Republicans is the subject of a state election-law complaint.

Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner argues the influx of cash is an illegal dodge of state campaign laws. An opposing lawyer disagrees, and the Ohio Elections Commission will hold a hearing Aug. 23 on the dispute.

Industrialist David L. Brennan is president of Akron-based White Hat Management, a for-profit operator of charter schools in Ohio and six other states.

He gave $50,000 in 2004, '05, '06 and $50,000 so far this year to the Virginia political action committee of All Children Matter, a national group supporting charter schools, records show.

An Ohio PAC for All Children Matter was formed last year and received $870,000 in contributions -- but all of it came from the group's Virginia PAC, according to elections documents.

Columbus lawyer William M. Todd, representing the All Children Matter Ohio PAC, argues that state law allows unlimited transfers between any affiliated PACs of the same organization.

But Brunner's office says that's wrong, and critics say the practice can allow wealthy donors such as Brennan to bypass contribution limits and buy public policy in Ohio.

"Campaign-contribution limits are about making sure politicians aren't bought and paid for," said Catherine Turcer of Ohio Citizen Action, a government-watchdog group.

Brennan couldn't be reached late Friday.

The school-choice group's Ohio PAC has spent $856,559, including $10,000 contributions to House Speaker Jon A. Husted, R-Kettering, and 2006 GOP gubernatorial candidate J. Kenneth Blackwell, both staunch charter-school supporters. An additional $71,500 went directly to other candidates, records show.

The PAC also spent nearly $360,000 for campaign mailings on behalf of GOP candidates and nearly $287,500 in radio and cable TV advertising.

Todd, who also is the GOP candidate for Columbus mayor, points to state law that says transfers between PACs are allowed if both are controlled by the same corporation, labor group or other organization. He notes that Democratic labor groups have done the same thing without being challenged.

But an advisory opinion issued by the Elections Commission in May 2006 at the request of All Children Matter concluded that an out-of-state PAC that isn't registered in Ohio can give only the $10,670 limit to PACs in the state.

Unlimited transfers from a federal PAC to an affiliated Ohio PAC are allowed. But although federal contributions must be disclosed to the Federal Election Commission, contribution and disclosure rules in other states vary widely, said Philip C. Richter, executive director of the Ohio Elections Commission.

For example, although Ohio bans corporate contributions to candidates and limits individual gifts to both candidates and PACs to $10,670, there are no such restrictions in Virginia -- where donations to the All Children Matter PAC included $2.09 million from the estate of Wal-Mart heir John Walton.

The Virginia PAC for All Children Matter, which raised nearly $7.4 million last year, also gave money to the school-choice group's PACs in six states besides Ohio, records show.

A complaint also was filed in Wisconsin, contending the group laundered money and failed to register, but the state elections board there refused to authorize an investigation.

All Children Matter, founded by Dick DeVos, the Amway Corp. president whose wife is the former chairwoman of the Michigan Republican Party, has been active in Ohio before.

The group spent nearly $1.5 million here in 2004 and $261,000 in 2005, records show. . . .

Brennan's White Hat Charter Schools: "purely driven by greed"

From the Cleveland Scene:

Back when Bob Taft ran this defiled land, you could win a charter-school license with a $3 bet in a craps game.

But new Governor Ted Strickland has decided that spending millions on schools that perform worse than Cleveland's may not constitute reform. So he's axed funding for start-ups, and is demanding that everyone else keep a checkbook.

It may be Ohio's greatest educational achievement in 50 years: Hey everybody, what if we decided to keep track of the money?

Unfortunately, this poses a small problem for White Hat Management, Ohio's biggest charter company with 31 schools statewide. Mission statement: Sellabratin Rok Bottm Acheevment for Way Long Times.

Compared to White Hat, Glenville High is Oxford. And despite producing lower test scores than you'd get at a Klan rally or a Cleveland City Council meeting, the company has gobbled up $109 million in state tax money -- though it refuses to say where any of it went.

Fortunately, owner David Brennan is hedging his bets by operating in multiple states. Even better, he's finding that bribery outside Ohio is more competitively priced.

Take the Denver Public Schools. In February, leaders voted unanimously to yank White Hat's charter, due to the small matter of sucking something fierce. So Brennan fixed the problem by Ohio rules: He bribed a guy.

Enter Bob Schaffer, former congressman, current member of the Colorado State Board of Education, and prospective U.S. Senate candidate. Schaffer's board essentially overruled Denver, forcing the city to keep White Hat. In return, Schaffer received $4,000 in campaign contributions from Brennan, most of which arrived just a month after the vote.

ProgressNowAction, a Denver advocacy group, accused Brennan of buying Schaffer's vote. "They're the worst of what's going on in the school-reform movement," spokesman Michael Huttner says of White Hat. "It's all purely driven by greed."

Here in Ohio, of course, we simply call that government. More alarming was how little Schaffer charged.

Brennan has given $40,000 to Ohio Auditor Mary Taylor, and thousands more to her predecessor, Betty Montgomery. If you don't want anyone looking at how you're spending state money, these are the people to pay.

And just to make sure he never runs afoul of the law, Brennan has given $130,000 to Ohio Supreme Court justices.

So while Punch appreciates Schaffer's importing of our traditions to the Rocky Mountains, we urge him to reconsider his fee schedule. If he doesn't hike up his prices, he runs the risk of making politicians look cheap.

Involuntary Freedom of Expression

The good news for the students, teachers, and parents of Ocean Township? Superintendent Thomas Pagano did the right thing by allowing the production of "The Laramie Project."

The bad news is that it took the threat of busloads of protesters from New York for the superintendent to conclude that more of an" undue disturbance" could be caused by his censorship than his willingness to allow the show to go on. From the NY Times:

OCEAN TOWNSHIP, N.J. Aug. 10 — After a week of public outcry over the school district’s decision to block Ocean Township High School’s drama club from performing “The Laramie Project,” Superintendent Thomas M. Pagano decided Thursday to let the play go on this fall.

“People disagreed with my posture,” Mr. Pagano said, referring to the district’s earlier decision against the show. “I got no feedback from anybody who said, ‘We understand your position.’ ”

Mr. Pagano said he was willing to bear the brunt of the controversy, despite the fact that it was the school’s principal, Julia Davidow, who first raised objections in May to the play, which focuses on the 1998 beating and murder of Matthew Shepard, a gay student at the University of Wyoming.

“I am responsible for the community, the children and the board of education being in this position; therefore I have a responsibility for getting them out of it,” the superintendent said after meeting late Thursday with the drama club coach, Bob Angelini. (Ms. Davidow, who is recovering from double knee surgery, was not at the meeting.)

The play will be presented as an assembly for the high school and will also be performed there on three evenings in the first week in November.

Elated by the superintendent’s reversal, Mr. Angelini said he hoped that there would “not be any ill feelings toward anyone” and that the community would “let the students have the opportunity to present this wonderful play in the name of Matthew Shepard.”

In a flurry of e-mail exchanges with the drama coach beginning in May, Mr. Pagano and Ms. Davidow said that the play’s explicit themes and sometimes strong language had the potential to cause “undue disturbance” for the school and the community. They declined the choice and told Mr. Angelini to select another play. After Mr. Angelini went public with the messages last week, gay rights advocates from across the state and the country took up the cause.

Steven Goldstein, chairman of Garden State Equality, a gay advocacy organization based in Montclair, N.J., said 2,000 of the group’s members sent letters to school officials in the last week protesting the district’s original decision. The group was also planning to bus in up to 1,000 people to rally at a coming school board meeting.

“Had this school district not allowed this play to go forward, it would have sent a chilling effect to schools across the state and country about doing any plays with homosexual themes,” Mr. Goldstein said.

Mr. Pagano acknowledged that he received many e-mail messages, mostly from outside Ocean Township. “It had reached the point where the universe was focused on this community,” he said. “It was time to move on.”

Truth Dawns on NEA: Students are More Than Test Scores

It just took six years and the outcry of a general public disgusted with the current orgy of tabulation in schools. Maybe now the NEA will even dig up and dust off the NEA Code of Ethics that, if taken seriously, would have never allowed teachers to accept the current regimes based on criminal abuse of testing against children.

Better late than never, but still nauseatingly pathetic. And you can bet that Joel Packer has his focus groups out in Deleware to gauge the public reaction to the new ads. From the News Journal:

As students return to class this month, Delaware teachers are spending big bucks to spread their back-to-school message: "A student is more than a test score."

Last week, 44 billboards went up statewide, soon to have their message reiterated in a two-week radio spot that will hit the airwaves Aug. 20.

Delaware State Education Association, the state's largest school employee union, will spend $49,000 on the campaign.

The message is a shot at the federal No Child Left Behind law, now up for re-authorization. DSEA leaders' aim is to let families know that teachers know testing is not teaching and that testing is not learning.

"Teachers in public schools are caring people who understand that the goal is students who are productive, hard-working, responsible citizens who live up to their potential," spokeswoman Pamela Nichols said in an e-mail. "Testing is a tool to evaluate teaching and learning -- it's not the goal. But that is what it has become under NCLB."

Frederika Jenner, a sixth-grade science teacher at H.B. du Pont Middle School in the Red Clay Consolidated School District, said it is an important message.

"There has just been such an incredible focus on scores, on individual student scores, on class scores, on school scores, on using scores to prove or disprove a teacher's effectiveness," she said. "Ever since the first day I stepped in the classroom, I understood my accountability. My greatest accountability is to those kids sitting in front of me and to their families.

"Most of the teaching staff gets that and responds to it."

"This focus on testing as the be-all and end-all, as the No. 1 indicator of the success of a student or the success of a teacher or the success of a school has distracted us," she said.

Nichols said educators want students to love learning, not love being tested: "For many students, an overemphasis on testing will, in fact, kill their love of learning."

Bill Quigley on NOLA Charterizing, Pt. 2

From Truthout.org:

Part II: New Orleans's Children Fighting for the Right to Learn
By Bill Quigley
t r u t h o u t | Report

Friday 10 August 2007

(In the first installment of this article, which can be found here, Bill Quigley described the massive charter school educational experiment going on in New Orleans. That experiment has divided public school children into two groups - those in the charter and high-performing school group and those assigned to the Recovery School District (RSD) a state-managed set of schools for the rest of the children. In this installment, Bill continues the examination and looks at possible and predictable outcomes of this division between the haves and the have-nots.)

Possible Positive Results of This Experiment

Given the disastrous start to this experiment, at least for half the children in public schools in New Orleans, are positive results possible?

Supporters of the experiment rightfully point out the dismal state of public education in New Orleans prior to Katrina. The public school system had a few elite schools that had some racial mixing in their student body, while most of the rest of the schools were underperforming even by Louisiana standards. Outside of the elite schools, the population of the student body at almost all schools was nearly 100 percent African-American. Teachers valued teaching in the elite public schools because they had less turnover, students with better test scores, solid parental involvement and more access to additional resources. There was widespread corruption, resulting in over 20 convictions of school board officials or employees. While the national average term for a public school system superintendent was three years, from 1998 to 2005 the New Orleans average was 11 months.

At this point in the experiment, it is fair to conclude that the New Orleans public schools are still divided into some racially mixed elite and charter schools, while the other half of the schools must be classified as underperforming and nearly 100 percent African-American.

On the other hand, supporters hope that this experiment will show the way to improve public education. It very likely will, at least for the half of the children fortunate enough to get into the top-tier schools.

Politically, the real winners in this experiment are almost guaranteed to be those who back the idea of charter schools.

The New Orleans experiment offers tremendous opportunities for backers of charter schools. Up to now, charter schools have not proven superior to regular public schools. For example, in a 2004 Report "Evaluation of the Public Charter Schools Program," the US Department of Education study of charter schools in five states found "charter schools were somewhat less likely than traditional public schools" to meet state performance standards - but cautioned that the study was unable "to determine whether traditional public schools are more effective than charters." See full study at: http://www.ed.gov/rschstat/eval/choice/pcsp-final/execsum.html.

But in New Orleans, where the best public schools have been converted into charters and the kids most in need of good schools have been systematically excluded from the top half of the public schools and placed into a dysfunctional system - the charter schools in the upper half are guaranteed to demonstrate better educational outcomes than what education officials call the "leftover" public schools.

If charter schools cannot prove themselves superior with this New Orleans deck stacked in their favor, they should quit and go home.

Apart from charter school backers, are there others who are likely to see positive outcomes?

A real positive outcome would be if the experiment could translate the advantages of the top half of the selective schools into success for the rest of the public school children as well. There is little evidence of that happening at this time.

The creators of this experiment acknowledge that a large percentage of the children are being left out. "The bottom line is we are very hopeful about this system of school models that is emerging, and we are showing a lot of progress," said Tulane University President Scott S. Cowen. "But we still have challenges to overcome to fulfill that vision."

Negative Possibilities of This Experiment

Twice as many people in New Orleans think the public school system is worse now than think it is better, according to the Cowen Report.

Tracie Washington, civil rights and education attorney and head of the new Louisiana Justice Institute, points out the differences in the schools that she has heard about from hundreds of families.

"Think about the fact that we had parents who had the misfortune of sending their children to schools in two different systems - RSD and a charter. Now, if your daughter attended Lusher Charter or Audubon Charter, she always had hot meals, clean toilets, books, library, certified teachers, after-school activities, and NO ARMED GUARDS AT THE SCHOOL SITE. Your son had the misfortune of attending RSD schools like Raboin High School, Clark or John McDonogh. No books, cold food, essentially an armed encampment. Same family - same mom and dad, same home environment, but the daughter is treated like a student and the son is treated like an inmate at the State Penitentiary at Angola. Actually, they are treated better at Angola because there's a library and hot food is served!"

While the Cowen Report underscores the importance of saving the RSD, there has been no determined or comprehensive community or political attempt to rescue the RSD or the thousands of children assigned to it.

There is a cruel point in this experiment. Unfortunately, if the RSD continues to do poorly, that makes the selective charter schools appear even more successful. Thus, the worse the RSD performs, the better the charters look. Those who have access to the top half will push ahead; those who do not will fall further behind.

Danatus King of the New Orleans NAACP says many think the public education system is intentionally designed by those with economic power to keep other people's children under-educated. "If you keep them uneducated, you can control them easier. There is a power structure in New Orleans that has existed for hundreds of years. They don't want to see it changed, because if it's changed then it is going to hit them in their pockets. It is going to be hard to keep those hotel and restaurant workers from unionizing and demanding more money and better working conditions. It is going to be more difficult to attract folks to that industry when they are well-educated and have other opportunities. If you keep them uneducated, you can control them easier."

National critics like the Center for Community Change complain "The Bush administration was instrumental in creating this new chasm between the "haves" and the "have-nots" in New Orleans. Rather than create the world-class public schools that all New Orleans kids have deserved for so long, the Bush administration invested in an ideological experiment to make a pro-privatization, anti-public education statement."

"In a school system based on free market principles, schools become individual contestants - for the best teachers, for the best students, for the most resources, and of course ... for the best test scores. They can only do this because they are not required to provide access to every student within their community."

"There must be, backing up every large scale charter system, the schools for the children ... who are "un-chosen" by charter schools."

"The very existence of charter schools in New Orleans, at this point, is dependent on the availability of a universal access network of schools alongside it. And those schools, the schools with the state-run Recovery School District, are struggling with more than their share of kids with disabilities and less than their share of teachers and resources. To win, there must be losers."

Thus, the failures of the RSD will make supporters of charter and other restrictive admission schools appear even more successful. So where in this experiment is the incentive to make sure that the half of the kids left out have a fighting chance for a decent education?

The Future of the Experiment

Where does the experiment go from here? The RSD is supposed to return control of the public schools to local control after five years. Charter schools are supposed to only be chartered for five years. What happens in the next five years? No one knows. Really. No one knows. And if no one knows, then the likelihood of the left-behind continuing to be left behind is extremely high.

Parents do not need five years. They already know which half of the experiment they want their children to participate in. Will the powers who created this experiment dedicate what is left of their five years to try to create a system where ALL children have choices of quality education, or will the underserved half of the schools remain as a control group for the privileged schools?

The Cowen Report, overall supportive and hopeful for the experiment, admits "There is no system-wide responsibility, accountability, vision or leadership to guide the transformation of all public schools for all New Orleans students," and no "unified, widely-endorsed vision or plan" exists to chart transformation of the entire public school system.

Will race and economic segregation increase or decrease as a result of this experiment?

Tracie Washington, speaking as both a civil rights attorney and a parent, thinks any future success for all children will only come through serious struggle.

"What we need - to repair the New Orleans Public Schools systems (plural) and, indeed, the public hospital, the public housing, the criminal justice system, and our system of worker rights - is vision, opportunity and resolve.

"Our vision must embrace the entire community in the plans to rebuild a state-of-the-art school system. White folks don't send their children to public schools, so stop going to them for advice."

"Our opportunity requires that those in power release the resources for our community to fulfill its vision for public schools."

"And we need to demonstrate resolve. Resolve is what the community must stand together with as we demand the right to an education for all our children. We have to resolve that we will fight, we will scream, we will holla, we will call out your family, we will stop the economic engine of this entire city from running (yes, the entire city), until our children are given a fighting chance for a decent education."

The New Orleans Teachers Report insists that the dual and unequal systems of schools in the city which intensify the educational disparities that existed before Katrina must cease. They call on policymakers to provide more physical classroom space and educational materials for every student, and provide the best-qualified teachers possible for every child. Families must be able to send their children to a neighborhood school - charter or not - that is staffed by qualified, mostly experienced teachers. Finally, they ask that teachers and their unions be made full partners in the rebuilding and revitalization effort.

The Cowen Report's recommendations seems to start modestly, but perhaps not. The first recommendation? Make sure everyone can get into a public school this year. Other suggestions include: making sure all students have access to diverse, high-quality options; limiting enrollment barriers and open access schools in every neighborhood; fair distribution of resources to all schools; strengthen the RSD and create a process to return public schools to local control; get high-quality principals, teachers and staff; support excellence at all schools, and create short and long-term plans for action.

Two huge groups of kids are notably missing from all the official and unofficial plans for the future of the experiment - the newly arrived children of thousands of Latino workers, and much larger group - the tens of thousands of those still displaced who want to return. While there is little current accurate information on either of these groups of children, they are absolutely at risk in this experiment. And they are unjustly being left out of public policy debates about the future of public education in New Orleans.

Signs of Hope

Wherever there is injustice, there are also signs of hope - usually in those who are standing up despite the injustices and struggling, despite the odds, for what is fair.

"Education activists and organizers, including youth, have really gotten busy since Katrina," Damon Hewitt points out. "Groups ranging from the Douglass Community Coalition to the Downtown Neighborhood Improvement Association's Education Committee and the FYRE Youth Squad have stepped up their responses to educational inequity, despite having precious little in the way of resources to do the work. Their demands for equity and justice have been loud and clearly articulated. And there are some signs that their efforts are starting to bear fruit in the creation of after-school programs and the like. Community members who have long advocated for best practices and community-centered approaches to issues like school discipline may finally be starting to have a real say in how policies are crafted and implemented."

Hundreds of NAACP members and supporters marched at the Louisiana Capitol to protest against injustices in public education. The NAACP is also considering economic boycotts as a tool to raise awareness of the problems facing public schools.

Some see hope in the fact that there is a new Louisiana superintendent of education and a new New Orleans school superintendent. Will either or both be able to help create some fairness and equality and competency where little exists? One can hope. Tracie Washington waits. "I am pleased with the efforts being made by the new administrators. But really, at this time we are still simply repairing damage wrought over the last two years. To be sure, the new people at the top did not create this mess. However, there are hundreds of bureaucrats and the members of the Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education who sat and watched as our children suffered after Katrina. I will not forgive them for their acts of cowardice."

One concrete sign of hope is the New Orleans Parents Guide to Public Schools - a step-by-step handbook on how to select the right school for children. Aesha Rasheed of New Orleans Network is the editor of the handbook. The 95-page book includes a list of all public schools open in New Orleans as well as a map that shows where they are, followed by information pages on each school, showing the address, a photograph of the building, the grades it serves, its mission statement, the size of the student population, how to register, whether there are special requirements for enrollment, type of transportation provided, what health and child care services are available, any special programs and extracurricular activities. While one could hope that it would not take outsiders to create a description of the schools in the system, the guide is helpful for parents trying to navigate the current maze. See http://www.nolaparentsguide.org.

One of the greatest hopes for change is the students themselves. Students are speaking out and demanding changes in the fragmented, disorganized public schools. They are telling their stories locally and across the nation.

Jade Fleury, a New Orleans public school student, challenged a group of educators in Washington, DC recently. "Bring us together to make a change. We should be able to collectively put our ideas together to help one another. BRING US TOGETHER! Why are we developing more and more separate schools, and not more neighborhood schools that the whole diversity of young people in the neighborhood can attend?"

Conclusion - the Experiment and the Fight for the Right to Learn Continue

Our community understands there is an experiment going on. Everyone may not totally understand how this experiment got started, but the results are obvious and troubling.

The nation is watching. Charter school advocates are working furiously to make their half of the experiment a success. Those committed to the education of the rest of the children had better be working as hard. What is happening in New Orleans is an experiment about what people hope will happen to communities across the nation.

Jim Randels, a 20-year veteran teacher in the New Orleans public schools, posed the challenge to those who seek to remake public education today - "My need as a teacher is to see someone who will come in and do a charter that works within the attendance boundaries of an urban neighborhood. Demonstrate to us that innovation can happen in a school that's like the majority of public schools in urban settings. Will you commit to work in an attendance boundary? Will you commit to working with the same amount of resources that all of us work with?"

The public school system is a reflection of what is occurring in all our public systems post-Katrina. Public health care and public housing are going the same way. Those with the economic and political power are remaking the public systems with public funds the way they want them to operate. Naomi Klein calls this disaster capitalism. Those with the money see disaster as opportunity to reshape and help formerly public systems. Those at the top have effectively privatized the best public schools and erected barriers to keep others out.

But the people excluded are fighting for a voice in this experiment of choice.

These fighters recognize that false reformers are always willing to experiment on someone else's children.

The truest indication of the fairness of this experiment is that, so far, none of the supporters of this experiment have demonstrated a willingness to send their own children to an RSD school. So the experiment, and the fight, continue.

Until the day dawns when the educational rights of all the "leftover" children will be treated as just as important as the educational rights of our own children, the fight for the right to learn will continue.

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Bill Quigley is a human rights lawyer and law professor at Loyola University New Orleans. He can be reached at Quigley@loyno.edu.

Evolving Semantics: From "Charter School" to "Independent Public School"

I received a comment this morning from Paul Pastorek, State Schools Superintendent of Louisiana. He was responding to a post yesterday that included Bill Quigley's report on the charterizing of New Orleans Schools.

I include below Mr. Pastorek's letter, and I hope he will forgive me for responding within the text of his letter. I want to first commend Mr. Pastorek for finally owning the agenda that has driven school reform in Louisiana ever since 1999, when the LEAP came on the scene under the disingenuous guise of helping minority children and closing the achievement gap.

The single chart above (click it to enlarge) undeniably shows how school performance scores in Louisiana continue to be reflections of family and school income--and how the the closing of the achievement gap remains a rhetorical flourish not base in reality. No education reform alone is going to change that, including Mr. Pastorek's reckless new plan to create a statewide charter system before the uproven one in New Orleans is even tried. But I am glad to see, nonetheless, Mr. Pastorek finally and openly admitting the State mission to bury the public schools, not to fix them. His predecessors have not been so candid.

Dr. Horn,

When I became the State Superintendent of Education 4 months ago, I did so because of my displeasure with the direction of the Recovery School District (the state takeover schools). I have heard the criticisms that Bill Quigley have [sic] raised from people too numerous to count. While I agree with much of what is contained in the article, I don't agree with it all. Suffice to say, that I am determined to use charters effectively for children, to rectify the perception and the reality of a two tiered system.

When I spoke to the Baton Rouge Rotary, I spoke to citizens whose system in East Baton Rouge Parish is nearly uniformly comparable to the lower tier in New Orleans. I want to eradicate that. I believe that a healthy combination of community supported charter schools can fulfill that purpose and spur the independent public schools on to excellence.

A couple of interesting choices of words here, Mr. Pastorek. Do you mean "eradicate" in terms of another hurricane like Katrina, or do you mean "eradicate" in the sense of continuing to use the LEAP testing system to crush the schools where poor children go to school?

In one of your schools that I have been following since 2000, the committed and professional staff has done everything humanly possible to raise test scores, including the adoption of direct instruction and a laser focus on the test between September and March. They have changed their pedagogy and their curriculum, and they have done parental outreach, professional development, collaborative teaching, the pep rallies, central office experts, and prayers.

The one thing the committed educators at Alpha cannot change is the grinding poverty that is the way of life in their school district, nor can they cannot change the effects that poverty has on their fourth graders who have been ground up in your draconian State testing system that ignores their plight while it punishing them with repeated grade retentions and abusive methods. Nor can these educators do anything about the loss of Title I money that they must sacrifice from their threadbare school funds to pay for NCLB sanctions such as transporting students to other schools and paying tutoring company temps to hand out worksheets to exhausted and demoralized children.

New Orleans IS an experiment. If executed well, I believe that we will be successful. Paul Vallas is a very talented school administrator and I believe he is poised to do great things for both "tiers".

East Baton Rouge (and many districts) continue to do the same thing expecting to get a different result. We will experiment, knowing that we will and that it will be better than what we had before.

Yes, you will experiment with no evidence to show that what you are trying to implement is more effective than what you have now. In fact, the evidence we do have suggests that charters are less effective than the public schools they would replace. But that does not stop you from garnering financial support from the U. S. Department of Education, which, otherwise, demands scientically-based research when it is in the interest of force-feeding their sanctioned abusive chain gang literacy methods force fed to poor children.

It does require many changes. The security situation will be changed. The behavior of the charters with respect to registration must be changed to allow (in most cases) neighborhood children to go to the charter schools. We will likely continue to have some selective admissions schools. We will have greater resources for children in the independent public schools. We will have greater autonomy and flexibility as well.

Yes, I am sure the security situation will be changed. More guards in the schools and more and more behavioral control, which is the best preparation for the likely destination for so many of these kids within the booming incarceration industry of Louisiana.

And here is that interesting new term again, Mr. Pastorek. What does "independent public schools" mean, and which Frank Luntz focus group came up with this less obnoxious term for charter school? What does "independent public school" mean? Is it something other than a charter school that is removed from the control of democratically-elected school boards? Is an "independent public school" more than a charter school where an overseer principal hires and fires teachers without benefit of collective bargaining and tenure agreements? Is an "independent public school" other than a charter school that uses its charter to legally discriminate? Is an "independent public school" other than a charter school where meagerly-paid teacher salaries are cut another 20 percent? Is an "independent public school" other than a charter school that elimates the professional's Code of Ethics and turns them into junior prison guards? Is an "independenent public school" something other than a non-profit corporation funded with tax dollars and supplemented by corporate gifts that are tax-deductible?

Time will tell.

Paul Pastorek
Superintendent
Louisiana Department of Education

Yes, indeed, time will tell. While we wait, Mr. Pastorek, you might have look at this report based on the educational genocide in Louisiana that you now supervise. Sleep well.

Commandant (Pastor) Flowers Arrested for Dragging Girl Behind Van

Here is a clip from the slick website for the Christian Boot Camp (CBC) operated by Commandant Flowers's Love Demonstrated Ministries International (LDMI):

Commandant Charles Flowers and his wife Janice are the founders and directors of Love Demonssrated [sic] Ministries, International (LDMI). Christian Boot Camp (CBC) operates under the oversight of LDMI.

. . . .

CBC was intended originally for boys only. However in the summer of 1996 while Commandant Flowers was rejoicing over the success that CBC was having with the young men,the Lord spoke to his heart about young ladies. He was convinced that they needed to begin to train young ladies also and in the summer of 1997 they began training both male and female flights.

Flights? You see, the preparation for Mr. Reverend Commandant Flowers's pedagogical over-exuberance was as an Air Force drill instructor, even though Air Force drill instructors are not trained to drag their troops behind Humvees. Now the Commandant commands a company of Christan soldiers at the Faith Outreach Center International, and he has his own staff of Christian captains that he is training to help him "handle the leadership over the people."

The Commandant/Reverend is certainly busy enough to need a few captains to keep his enterprises up and running. His website has a "Shopping Cart and Donations" page, a "Mission Mall," where visitors are urged to "shop and help build God's kingdom through missions," a "Cyber School," and other intriguing links. And even without his various enterprises, the Reverend/Commandant has received government and private grants worth almost $300,000 a year in saintly salary.

Here's the story from the Houston Chronicle:

A San Antonio pastor and an employee of his Christian boot camp were arrested Friday on aggravated assault charges, accused of dragging a girl behind a van after she failed to keep up during a running exercise.

Investigators with the Nueces County Sheriff's Office arrested Charles E. Flowers, 46, shortly before noon at the Faith Outreach Center in northwest San Antonio, said Brad E. Bailey, a spokesman for the Schertz Police Department.

Bailey said boot camp trainer Stephanie Bassitt, 20, was later arrested without incident at her home in Kirby.

Flowers and Bassitt each were being held on $100,000 bail at the Nueces County Jail in Corpus Christi.

Girl alleges second assault

Authorities said both Flowers and Bassitt restrained the girl June 12, tying her to the back of a van with a piece of rope before dragging her on her stomach at the Love Demonstrated Ministries' boot camp in Banquete, about 10 miles west of Corpus Christi.

Schertz police assisted Nueces County authorities in the arrests because the camp's orientation sessions are held in Schertz, and the 15-year-old girl claimed she was assaulted there, too.

Bailey said the second assault claim was turned over to the Comal County district attorney's office, which hasn't said if any criminal charges will result.

He said the assault described as having occurred in Schertz isn't as severe as the dragging claim out of Nueces County.

"Obviously force was used, but the big question is whether or not it exceeded the force permitted by the parents," Bailey said, adding camp officials said they had permission slips from parents that allowed them to discipline their children.

Flowers declined to comment on the allegations Friday, evading reporters outside the offices of the Faith Outreach Center.

Scrapes and bruises

Authorities interviewed on Friday could not say how far the teenager was allegedly dragged. Her mother complained to authorities after boot camp personnel took her daughter to get treated for scrapes and bruises on her stomach, legs and arms.

Flowers, a retired U.S. Air Force instructor, holds the title of commandant of the boot camp he has operated with his wife, Janice, since the mid-1990s, states the camp's Web site.

The camp was created to "reinstill the values that have been lost in our society for a couple of generations, values such as discipline, morality, unity and integrity."

Exempt from regulation

Last year, Love Demonstrated Ministries reported private and government contributions totaling $314,673 to operate the boot camp, with nearly 89 percent of the costs, $278,549, going for salaries.

Associate pastors at the Faith Outreach Center couldn't be reached for comment Friday.

Patrick Crimmins, a spokesman for the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, said it "appeared that this operation is probably exempt from our regulation."

He said for a camp to be licensed, it needed to operate longer than 11 weeks.

The camp in Nueces County only lasts 32 days.

Former D.C. Charter School Oversight Chief Pleads Guilty to 4 Felony Counts

Just part of the cost of doing business in the education business. From WaPo:

Brenda Belton had some gall, by her own admission. As charter school oversight chief for the D.C. Board of Education, she repeatedly stole from the school system, arranging about $649,000 in illegal school payments and sweetheart contracts to herself and her friends.

Yesterday, she pleaded guilty to four felony counts of cheating the low-performing schools system over three years and trying to avoid taxes on her ill-gotten gains.

The former schools executive revealed numerous instances of the system's supervisors failing to catch on to what she was doing -- even as she was forging signatures, fabricating invoices and depositing taxpayer money into her bank account.

Belton, 61, admitted to U.S. District Judge Ricardo M. Urbina that she steered about $446,000 in seven no-bid contracts to friends and a cousin and stole $203,000 by paying school funds to a fictitious company she controlled. At the same time, she received $180,000 in illegal payments and kickbacks from friends she helped with school business. The crimes took place from March 2003 to May 2006, prosecutors said. . . .

America 41st in Life Expectancy

Now if schools were 41st in any international comparison, don't you know the conservatives would be howling even louder about the public school collapse? So why no right-wing outcry about being ranked 41st in life expectancy, especially when we Yanks spend more on health care than any other nation? Oh, I forgot--American healthcare is already privatized.

A clip of the AP story from Raw Story:

WASHINGTON --Americans are living longer than ever, but not as long as people in 41 other countries.

For decades, the United States has been slipping in international rankings of life expectancy, as other countries improve health care, nutrition and lifestyles.

Countries that surpass the U.S. include Japan and most of Europe, as well as Jordan, Guam and the Cayman Islands.

"Something's wrong here when one of the richest countries in the world, the one that spends the most on health care, is not able to keep up with other countries," said Dr. Christopher Murray, head of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington.

A baby born in the United States in 2004 will live an average of 77.9 years. That life expectancy ranks 42nd, down from 11th two decades earlier, according to international numbers provided by the Census Bureau and domestic numbers from the National Center for Health Statistics.

Andorra, a tiny country in the Pyrenees mountains between France and Spain, had the longest life expectancy, at 83.5 years, according to the Census Bureau. It was followed by Japan, Maucau, San Marino and Singapore.

The shortest life expectancies were clustered in Sub-Saharan Africa, a region that has been hit hard by an epidemic of HIV and AIDS, as well as famine and civil strife. Swaziland has the shortest, at 34.1 years, followed by Zambia, Angola, Liberia and Zimbabwe.

Researchers said several factors have contributed to the United States falling behind other industrialized nations. A major one is that 45 million Americans lack health insurance, while Canada and many European countries have universal health care, they say. . . .

The Pre-Determined Success of New Orleans Charter Schools

When Katrina wiped out the schools of New Orleans, the new reform zealots, the Charterites, thanked God for the opportunity to create a new system of publicly-funded schooling that could be used to clearly separate the haves from the have nots. In the words of Phyllis Landrieu, Orleans Parish School Board President, "I say, 'Thank you, Katrina' all the time."

This new educational caste system being created in New Orleans is intended to serve as the urban schooling model for America. It is funded and controlled by the Louisiana State Department of Education, the U. S. Department of Education, and, of course, by Bill and Melinda. This past week at a Rotary luncheon in Baton Rouge, Lousisiana Superintendent of Education, Paul Pastorek, had this to say: “pay attention to New Orleans. . . . We are going to show how it can be done and we are going to translate that to the rest of the state.”

Loyola law professor, Bill Quigley, explains how it is working so far:

. . . . How the Experiment Actually Operates

With a few exceptions, the state of Louisiana essentially now controls the public school system in New Orleans. There is little local control. The state has subcontracted much of the work of education to willing charter schools.

Of the public schools operating at the end of the 2006-2007 academic year, charter schools were educating 57 percent of public school students.

This makes New Orleans the urban district with by far the highest proportion of publicly funded charter schools in the nation. Dayton, Ohio has the second-highest concentration of charter schools, involving 30 percent of its 17,000 students.

This experiment has resulted in a clearly defined two-tier public school system.

The top tier is made up of the best public and charter public schools, which most children cannot get into, and a number of new and promising charter public schools that are available for the industrious and determined parents of children who do not have academic or emotional disabilities.

The second tier is for the rest of the children. Their education is assigned to the RSD (some are already calling it "The Rest of the School District").

The top half of the schools are the point of this experiment in public charter schools. National charter school advocacy groups are pointing to New Orleans as the experiment that will demonstrate that publicly funded charter schools are superior to public schools.

However, the top half could not work without the bottom half. If the schools in the top half had to accept the students assigned to the second-tier schools, the results of the experiment would obviously turn out quite differently. As the experiment is structured, students in the bottom-half schools will be very useful to compare with the top half to see how well this works.

While some sympathize with the children in the bottom half, little has been done to assist those in the RSD schools.

How the Top Half Operates

Start with the money. Charter schools have more of it than the RSD schools.

Each charter school is given a share of the federal $20.9-million-dollar grant. None of that money is available to non-charter public schools.

As the Cowen report notes, charter public schools also have advantages other than just financial ones over the rest of the public schools. Though funded by tax dollars, charters are granted greater autonomy over staffing, budgeting and curriculum than regular public schools. Charters have better facilities, fewer problems attracting staff, and can keep school class size small.

Charters are allowed to impose enrollment caps. These caps allow them to turn down additional students who seek to enroll. This keeps pupil/teacher ratios down and class sizes small - a universally recognized key to academic achievement.

Some of the top-tier public schools have explicit selective enrollment policies which screen out children with academic problems. Most of the remaining charters are technically supposed to be open enrollment schools but require pre-application essays, parental-involvement requirements and specific behavior contracts - allowing these charter schools the flexibility to "manage" their incoming classes, rather than having to accept every student who applies. At nine schools, traditional public school transportation is not provided, further limiting the choices.

A look at the Algiers Charter School Association (ACSA) web site illustrates how schools in the top half operate.

Financially, the ACSA budget reports expenditures of $27 million in 2006-2007, leaving an apparent surplus of $11 million. For 2005-2006, the ACSA was given $2.5 million from Orleans Parish School Board ($500 per student over and above their regular funding), a $6 million federal charter school grant, plus the state minimum foundation funds.

That is not all of the extra money. The ACSA has also received several major grants. For example, in June of 2007 the ACSA was awarded a special $999,000 federal grant to help improve learning in American history. In March, 2007 Baptist Community Ministries announced a $4.2 million grant to create a network among the charter schools.

The ACSA website includes their application process, which specifically spells out that student applicants will NOT be considered "on a first come, first serve basis." Decisions on whether an applicant is allowed to attend will be based on several factors, including scores on state examinations and whether the applicant has ever received any special education services for a learning disability or emotional disturbance.

Many of the other charter schools also benefit from special funds and special admissions policies. One of the most selective public charter schools, Lusher Charter School, received millions extra in special grants from Tulane University, FEMA, the State of Louisiana, a German Foundation which gave $1.1 million to renovate the gymnasium, and other foundations.

Wouldn't every returning student like to enroll in one of these schools?

Students returning to New Orleans who might seek to enroll in one of the top-half schools are likely to be disappointed. The deadline for enrollment at most of the charter schools has already passed. For example, applications to enroll in Lusher Charter for this fall were due December 15, 2006.

How the Rest of the School District Operates

By law, the RSD is required to accept any student who shows up, and is prohibited from having any selective admissions policy.

From the beginning, Louisiana officials charged with making policy and operating the RSD complained that they were being left with educating the "leftover children" after the charters and the selective schools took the children with the best academic scores and best parental involvement.

Damon Hewitt, a civil rights attorney with the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and a New Orleans native, discovered the reference to "leftovers" in an email sent by one of Louisiana's top education policy makers. The email is from Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) member Glenny Lee Buquet. She wrote in an internal BESE email in January 2007, obtained by Hewitt in a federal case, "We wanted charter schools to open and take the majority of the students. That didn't happen, and now we have the responsibility of educating the 'leftover' children."

Who are the "leftover children" in the RSD? Hewitt again: "The students served by the RSD are typically those who could not get into any of the fancy charter or selective admissions schools. They are the average New Orleans students - talented, creative and bright, but locked in poverty and out of opportunity."

The average New Orleanian child is our child. These children are the children of our sisters and brothers and cousins and coworkers. Yet they are categorized as, and treated like, something quite different by people in charge of public education.

The RSD has not been up to the job of educating New Orleans children because, from day one and continuing until today, it lacked the appropriate number and quality of people and the expertise to run a big urban school system.

One of the best illustrations of the problems of the RSD is their refusal to admit hundreds of returning New Orleans children to public schools in January of 2007. Instead, the RSD put these kids on a "waiting list." Public outcry and two federal lawsuits forced a quick reversal and the kids were put into RSD schools.

At the same time as the RSD put kids on a waiting list, "Thousands of empty seats and dozens of empty classrooms could be found in charter schools or in the city's selective or discretionary-admissions public schools" the New Orleans Teachers Report points out.

So why was there a problem? There was space for these kids in the charter public schools. But because the public charter schools are allowed to cap their enrollment they did not have to admit any new children. In reality, the main reason there was a problem was not space, but a shortage of teachers willing to work for the RSD.

Is it any surprise that the disorganized and understaffed RSD was having problems finding teachers for their schools?

The New Orleans Teachers Report indicates that many veteran teachers remain furious at the State of Louisiana and its RSD because they were fired and their right to collective bargaining was terminated. Teachers point out that veteran teachers hired in adjoining districts continue to enjoy collective bargaining along with the rest of the teachers. But not in New Orleans.

Uncertified teachers were widespread in RSD schools.

In fact, certified teachers from around the country who wanted to help by teaching in New Orleans were directed by the Teach for NOLA recruitment web site to charter schools. Uncertified teachers were directed to the RSD.

The RSD was still 500 teachers short at the time this article was written. In July of 2007, the RSD ran a $400,000 national campaign to try to hire an additional 500 teachers to start in the fall. The RSD is offering up to $17,300 in relocation and other incentives to try to get teachers into the system. If there are any teachers reading this, please come and help the children in the RSD Ð you are desperately needed!

As of July, the RSD was also working furiously to erect temporary modular buildings to house children when school starts in the fall. Meanwhile, neighboring St. Bernard Parish opened school in temporary school buildings two months after Katrina - nearly two years ago.

An indication of the fragmentation of the system are the many starting dates for New Orleans public schools. Some charter schools will start August 6, another on August 8. Five start August 14, others in mid- to late August. The two dozen or so RSD schools will open September 4 - in part to give more time to build new schools to open and to recruit teachers.

During 2006-2007 school security became a top issue. Consider the experiment of placing thousands of recently traumatized and frequently displaced children into schools without enough teachers or staff or facilities. Consider also that those who are charged with supervising the schools are inexperienced and understaffed as well. The logical outcome of such an experiment is insecurity.

The RSD spent $20 million on security. They had one security guard for every 37 students in 2006-2007, a rate nine times higher than the old public school security system. At one point there were 35 guards at RSD John McDonough Senior High, plus two off-duty police officers. Thirty-two guards started at another school in the fall.

This situation quickly prompted the Fyre Youth Squad, a group of high school students in New Orleans, to challenge the "prison atmosphere" at John McDonough High. There were more security guards than teachers at their school.

What impact does this have on education of children? Research shows that students feel more tense when they encounter security guards at every turn in a school, said Monique Dixon, a senior attorney at the Advancement Project, a Washington, DC civil rights organization that works with community groups on issues such as school discipline. "It becomes more of a prison on some levels where people feel they are being watched constantly instead of feeling protected," she said. "It creates a police state."

The financial implications of spending money this way are also troubling. While New Orleans spent $20 million on private security for around 50 schools, the New Orleans Times-Picayune reported that the Philadelphia public school security budget for more than 260 schools was about $47 million, which included a 450-member independent police force, 150 auxiliary officers, and partnerships with more than 200 community members. In Detroit, the budget this fiscal year for the 400-member independent police force that protects the public schools, which has more than 100,000 students and more than 200 schools, was about $16 million.

Controlling students sometimes appeared to take priority over educating students.

Damon Hewitt points out that "the line between criminal justice policy and education got much blurrier over the past year and a half, as local schools have resorted to increasingly punitive approaches to school discipline. Relying more on police officers than community engagement, school officials' harsh responses to challenging behavior mirror public fear and sentiment about crime in the city. As a result, more children end up being suspended, expelled and arrested and sent to juvenile court. This phenomenon, which some call the School-to-Prison Pipeline, is literally robbing New Orleans of its most valuable asset - people."

"Some say that children in New Orleans are suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder," continues Hewitt. "But they are really suffering from the impact of Continuing Trauma - trauma that plays itself out every day. To the extent that children do act out [...] in schools, a lot of it has to do with both this continuing trauma and unmet educational needs, especially for those students in need of special education and related services. We cannot suspend, expel and arrest our way out of this problem. In fact, those harsh responses only make things worse by depriving young people of much-needed educational opportunity."

The academic results measured by standardized test scores given in spring 2007 at the RSD schools were predictably low. Nearly half the students failed in most fourth and eighth grade categories. Two-thirds of high school students failed in the Louisiana Educational Assessment Program (LEAP) and Graduate Exit Exam (GEE). The selective public schools had only an 18 percent failure rate on the GEE. LEAP scores for individual schools reported during the summer show what most expected: charter schools test better than RSD schools.

One current public school teacher, name withheld for reasons that will be obvious, was not hopeful.

"The public schools are totally fragmented. The struggles are still the same. Students still have difficult situations at home, some are still in trailers or living with too many people in one small home.

"Schools still lack books and materials, which I don't understand. After Katrina there were so many offers of help, both physical and monetary. I don't think that the people in charge knew what to do to organize a decent response to the offers.

"The RSD schools lack enough qualified and experienced teachers. The state Department of Education is well-intentioned, but they are barely dealing with the day-to-day issues and they still need to open more schools as people come back to the city.

"Yes, it sounds dismal. I don't see any big changes for next year. I think many of the charter schools have promise. The charters usually have a committed administration and staff and frequently a committed parent body. That is the secret to success."

Leigh Dingerson of the Center for Community Change in Washington, DC, who has been researching the New Orleans schools after Katrina, sums up the problems with the New Orleans experiment.

"In the 18 months since Hurricane Katrina, the infrastructure of the New Orleans public schools has been systematically dismantled and a new tangle of independently operated educational experiments has been erected in its place. This new structure has taken away community control and community ownership of all but a handful of schools. Instead, independent charter management organizations - virtually all from outside the state - are now running 60 percent of New Orleans schools.

"There are no more neighborhood boundaries. In a market-based model, parents are considered 'customers.' And they're supposed to 'choose' where to send their kids to school. But since every one of the charter schools was filled to capacity, hundreds of parents had no choice at all for their kids.

"Hundreds of kids with disabilities (who are often turned away from charter schools) are being placed in the under-resourced and over-burdened state-run Recovery School District. It's their only choice.

"This Balkanized school system is not closing a gap. It's opening a chasm."

The Cowen Report survey of the community agrees with much of the Digerson analysis, finding that "for many in the community, the RSD-operated schools are viewed as an unofficial 'dumping ground' for students with behavioral or academic challenges."

All indicators conclude that the RSD overall has done a poor job educating all the thousands of children in their half of the experiment, especially those with disabilities, because of RSD's own lack of expertise and experienced staff and because the schools they supervise lack the necessary teachers, support staff and resources.

---------

Next installment - What the Future Looks Like for New Orleans Children in Public Schools.

Bill Quigley is a human rights lawyer and law professor at Loyola University in New Orleans. He can be reached at quigley@loyno.edu.

The NCLB Warning That Still Goes Unheeded

This coming Monday will mark the 6th year anniversary of Kane and Staiger's prescient op-ed in the New York Times, "Rigid Rules Will Damage Schools." It was published at the same time that Sandy Kress, Margaret LaMontagne (Spellings), Gene Hickok, and Karl Rove's office were secretly lacing together the adequate yearly progress (AYP) requirements of the House and Senate versions of NCLB in a way that would guarantee widespread and ongoing failure among public schools and, thus, preserve the Administration's original intent of using NCLB to achieve school privatization.

Of course, it would be the poor, black, and brown children of America who would first suffer the brunt of this intentional abuse that has been sold under the label of tough medicine needed to close the achievement gap. The question coming in September of 2007 will be whether or not Dems once more will cave to the same Rovian strategy of painting reauthorization opponents as soft bigots with low expectations, or will they find the courage and conscience to call a spade a spade, or even the goddamn shovel that it is: Those who insist on the continuation of unreachable performance targets and subsequent sanctions are, indeed, the perpetrators of a bare-knuckled racism perpetuated by a conscious insistence on impossible demands for the sake of an ideological agenda. That is the question whose answer could "change everything forever," as Gene Hickok likes to say.

August 13, 2001

Rigid Rules Will Damage Schools

By THOMAS J. KANE AND DOUGLAS O. STAIGER

As school was about to let out this summer, both houses of Congress voted for a dramatic expansion of the federal role in the education of our children. A committee is at work now to bring the two bills together, but whatever the specific result, the center of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act will be identifying schools that are not raising test scores fast enough to satisfy the federal government and then penalizing or reorganizing them. Once a school has failed to clear the new federal hurdle, the local school district will be required to intervene.

The trouble with this law in the making is that both the House and Senate versions would disrupt successful reforms that are already under way in many schools around the country. Unless Congress can agree to rewrite the formula for pinpointing a failing school, as some states and some members of Congress are now urging, this education bill -- the most ambitious federal initiative in education in three decades and a centerpiece of President Bush's plans for his presidency -- is likely to end as a fiasco.

The central flaw is that both versions of this bill place far too much emphasis on year-to-year changes in test scores. Under either, every school in America would have to generate an increase in test scores each and every year or face penalties like having to allow its students to transfer to another public school, being converted into a charter school or being taken over by a private contractor.

However, the path to improved performance is rarely a straight line. Because the average elementary school has only 68 children in each grade, a few bright kids one year or a group of rowdy friends the next can cause fluctuations in test performance even if a school is on the right track.

Chance fluctuations are a typical problem in tracking trends, as the federal government itself recognizes in gathering other kinds of statistics. The best way to keep them from causing misinterpretations of the overall picture is to use a large sample. The Department of Labor, for example, tracks the performance of the labor market with a phone survey of 60,000 households each month. Yet now Congress is proposing to track the performance of the typical American elementary school with a sample of students in each grade that is only a thousandth of that size.

With our colleague Jeffrey Geppert of Stanford, we studied the test scores in two states that have done well, investigating how their schools would have fared under the proposed legislation. Between 1994 and 1999, North Carolina and Texas were the envy of the educational world, achieving increases of 2 to 5 percentage points every year in the proportion of their students who were proficient in reading and math. However, the steady progress at the state level masked an uneven, zigzag pattern of improvement at the typical school. Indeed, we estimate that more than 98 percent of the schools in North Carolina and Texas would have failed to live up to the proposed federal expectation in at least one year between 1994 and 1999. At the typical school, two steps forward were often followed by one step back.

More than three-quarters of the schools in North Carolina and Texas would have been required to offer public school options to their students if either version of the new education bill had been in effect. Under the Senate bill a quarter of the schools in both states would have been required to restructure themselves sometime in those five years -- by laying off most of their staffs, becoming public charter schools or turning themselves over to private operators. Under the more stringent House bill, roughly three-quarters of the schools would have been required to restructure themselves.

Both bills would be particularly harsh on racially diverse schools. Each school would be expected to achieve not only an increase in test scores for the school as a whole, but increases for each and every racial or ethnic group as well. Because each group's scores fluctuate depending upon the particular students being tested each year, it is rare to see every group's performance moving upward in the same year. Black and Latino students are more likely than white students to be enrolled in highly diverse schools, so their schools would be more likely than others to be arbitrarily disrupted by a poorly designed formula.

. . . .
Congress can still pass effective legislation to create more accountability in education. But the present bills need changing.

. . . .

Schools should have to report the test performance of students in each racial and ethnic group, but sanctions based on one group's performance should be withheld until there is real evidence that disadvantaged minority students are being allowed to lag behind. The secretary of education should develop a way to determine this with statistically justifiable methods.

In their current bills, the House and Senate have set a very high bar -- so high that it is likely that virtually all school systems would be found to be inadequate, with many schools failing. And if that happens, the worst schools would be lost in the crowd. The resources and energy required to reform them would probably be dissipated. For these schools, a poorly designed federal rule can be worse than no rule at all.

Thomas J. Kane is a professor of policy studies and economics at the University of California at Los Angeles. Douglas O. Staiger is an associate professor of economics at Dartmouth. Both are associates at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Perlstein Interviewed

by Greg Toppo in USA Today:

Since 2002, when No Child Left Behind became law, states have spent millions of dollars giving standardized reading and math tests; one estimate puts the total cost above $5 billion through 2008.

The law requires that about half of all students take the tests and that schools improve each spring so they can stay off federal "needs improvement" lists. Many educators say that's turning schools into test-prep factories where history, science and even recess get shortchanged.

Linda Perlstein, a former Washington Post reporter, wanted to see the effects firsthand, so she spent an academic year inside a high-poverty elementary school in Annapolis, Md.

The result is Tested: One American School Struggles to Make the Grade. USA TODAY's Greg Toppo talks with her about testing:

Q: You spent a year getting to know kids at Tyler Heights Elementary School. How did this change your outlook on their education and tests?

A: I don't have a problem with testing children. I have a problem with thinking test results tell you most of what you need to know. They simply don't — these tests are often very narrow instruments. Where reforms have forced educators to notice children who might otherwise have been neglected, I give credit. But I wrote this book because school reforms intended to abolish a two-class system were in some ways exacerbating it. There's one world where students pass the test as a matter of course and get to write poems, and another where children write paragraphs about poems.

Meanwhile, there's supposed to be a movement in American schools to educate each child as an individual. The teachers at Tyler Heights work mightily to do that, but they have to get everybody to the same place in the same amount of time, and follow daily curriculum agendas handed down from above.

Q: President Bush says the "soft bigotry of low expectations" preceded his school reforms, but you say condemning kids to a "rudimentary education" is just as bad. What's so rudimentary about the education at Tyler Heights? And what about similar schools that keep a rich curriculum while doing well on tests?

A: Tyler Heights kids in some ways are very fortunate: Even though many are poor, their well-off district provides them a safe, clean building, plenty of learning tools and a smart, hard-working staff who cares immensely about them. But those educators feel constrained because of rigid curriculum strictures, the low skills of many kids and the pressure to excel on the test.

So a teacher suspects her third-graders might be asked on the test to write a paragraph enumerating the elements of a poem. The kids can't get it right. Does she have them write that paragraph over and over until they do, or does she let them actually write poems? The latter would be more engaging and, in the long run, instructive, but the school might calculate that drilling is the more direct, reliable line between two points. Or that science experiments, since they won't be on the test, aren't the best use of a too-short school day. These aren't choices I agree with, but I understand why they're made. The schools with rich curricula exist here and there, most likely with daring staffs and flexible school districts that give educators plenty of room to innovate.

Q: In one memorable scene, a district supervisor watches kindergartners in gym class waft a parachute into the air and scamper beneath it. She says of the teacher, "I can't see his goal." It seems absurd, but does she have a point?

A: No. The silliest thing I have seen in my decade of education reporting is the insistence that every "learning outcome" be posted — the more jargon, the better. Do 5-year-olds need to know that they are tossing balls onto a parachute and running underneath to "demonstrate ways to send and project an object using a variety of body parts and implements" and "move safely in personal and general space"? Can't they just think they're having fun?

Q: Reading your account of a teacher dropping nonsense words into lessons to prep for their appearance on a vital speed-reading test, I thought about Thoreau's warning against becoming "the tools of our tools." What is wrong with this picture?

A: The teacher wanted her kindergartners to be prepared for their assessment, which makes sense. Kids should learn to sound out letter combinations whether or not they make actual words. But she would have preferred to use that time teaching her kids real vocabulary.

Q: I won't give away the ending, but Tyler Heights seems a different place after the big state test is over — science fairs, creative writing and field trips return. Are tests really calling the shots?

A: After I left Tyler Heights, the principal eased up a bit on her "laser-sharp focus." Activities were spread more evenly throughout the year, third-graders wrote poems, there were more attempts at critical thinking. Compared to the previous year, the percentage of kids passing the state test decreased in more categories than it increased. But I don't think the teachers would tell you the students learned any less.

Pelosi Promises Major Overhaul to NCLB

It is is a critical time to keep the pressure on to repeal the NCLB school privatization act and to start over. Let them know that a name change is not enough. Call and write your Representatives and Senators. HT to Bob Schaeffer for this:

U.S. HOUSE SPEAKER PLEDGES TO OVERHAUL NO CHILD LAW
Stateline.org -- August 9, 2007
by Eric Kelderman

Boston U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) today (Aug. 8) told state legislators Congress would seek a major overhaul of the No Child Left Behind Act, which states have protested as an unfunded mandate and unprecedented federal intrusion into schools.

"So different will this bill be from the original No Child Left Behind, that we're thinking of changing it's name," Pelosi told lawmakers gathered for the annual meeting of the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL).

The 2001 federal law, which has riled some state lawmakers and educators to the point of rebellion, mandates annual testing in reading and math for grades 3-8 and once in high school with the goal of making all students proficient in the subjects by 2013-14. Schools that fail to make annual progress face a variety of penalties, from being forced to pay for tutoring to being taken over by the state.

Pelosi said Congress would work to address state lawmakers' concerns that No Child is too rigid for states and provides little money to meet its goals.

“I believe you will be pleased with the legislation that is gathering strong bipartisan support. The bill will be fair and flexible, responding to legitimate concerns by you and others while fulfilling our promise to improve student performance, increase school accountability and provide students with the resources they need to learn the skills that will be crucial to their future success," she said.

David Shreve, an education analyst with NCSL, said states are mostly interested in being able to tailor their testing systems to meet their own needs, including allowing schools to use more than one kind of test to determine proficiency.

Utah Rep. Kory Holdaway (R), a special education teacher, said that extra money from Congress would not be useful unless the law is changed to meet states' needs. "You could increase the money to the full amount {authorized} and still have the same problems," he said.

Pelosi, the first woman elected speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, also touted Congress' efforts expanding the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) for low-income children and money to replace National Guard equipment and protect state authority over those soldiers. . . .

Students for an Equitable Education

A bright, hopeful group of students in Illinois are on the road with a message--change the way that public schools are funded primarily through property taxes. From the Sun-Times:

By Erin Calandriello STAFF WRITER
ELGIN -- It might not be Martin Luther King Jr. delivering his "I Have a Dream" speech in Washington, D.C., but students from across Illinois on Tuesday served lawmakers with a message in Springfield -- reform education funding.

A small group of pupils from the Students for an Equitable Education, a new youth organization working to change Illinois' school funding system, joined the "Riding for Reform" bus tour. Pupils went to the state's capital to rally for change in education funding.

"We take our education very seriously, and so should Governor (Rod) Blagojevich and state lawmakers," said Marcus Smith, 18, a founding member of SEE. "When school starts again in the fall, I hope we don't have another year of crowded classrooms and crumbling school buildings."

To hear these pupils' cries, Blagojevich sat down with SEE to discuss alternative routes to cover the costs of public school education. SEE members said they would like to see the state look at increasing income taxes instead of relying heavily on property taxes.

If this were to happen, SEE members said school districts wouldn't be defined by the wealth of the communities they serve. Instead, they said, pupils across the state could receive a fair and equal public education.

The call for more money to balance out the rich and poor school districts is a common one. Illinois has a relatively low income tax, according to the Illinois State Board of Education. As a consequence, the state's share of funding kindergarten through 12th-grade public education is 37 percent, ranking it 48th in the nation. Illinois property taxes, on the other hand, are significantly greater than in other states.

In July 2006, U46 received about $8.2 million in property tax revenue, and in August, roughly $9.5 million, according to district officials. Those figures are about $2.2 million more than was received in July 2005 and about $7.6 million more than in August 2005.

Justin DeJong, a spokesman for the governor's office, said Blagojevich is open to new means to pay for public school education.

"School districts in Illinois have had a strong reliance on local property taxes for several decades, but through the past four years Governor Blagojevich has been committed to providing new state support for our school," said DeJong. "In his first term, Governor Blagojevich invested $1.8 billion into Illinois' schools, and he continues to push for more state money for education in the coming year in budget discussions currently taking place in Springfield."

How NCLB Can Fail Thee--Let Us Count the Ways

From the Huntsville Times:

Wednesday, August 08, 2007 Huntsville Times

New local scores raise as many questions as they answer

Any system that measures a public school is only as effective as its ability to show a parent easily and clearly whether his or her child is getting a good education.

Yet how many parents feel comfortable with the federal government's No Child Left Behind system for gauging school performance here?

Most local schools that had fallen short in previous years in terms of test scores met the mark this year. Yet 11 schools - plus the city alternative school - in the three systems didn't make "adequate yearly progress" (AYP) this year under the criteria. Only three didn't make AYP last year.

But look at how the scores affect some individual schools:

Westlawn Middle School would have made AYP if two more white students had shown up to take the state math exam - whether they passed it or not.

Butler High School improved in reading and math but missed AYP because the arbitrary graduation rate wasn't high enough. "Arbitrary" is the right word here. Since the state allows students to drop out at age 16, how can Butler forcibly keep them in?

And at Bob Jones High School in Madison, either 99 percent of the students took the state reading exam and only 79 percent took the math exam or the Principle of Bureaucratic Bungling exerted itself and somehow about 100 juniors weren't counted.

Throughout the three systems - but particularly in the city - you can find assessments that tend to show schools are improving but other categories where they are dragged down.

It's a case of things getting better but getting worse. Who designed this system? Yogi Berra?

A problem is the all-or-nothing cumulative scoring on the 39 different goals that the federal rules can require schools to meet. That, as Huntsville Superintendent Ann Roy Moore argued, is unfair. "If you make a percentage of your goals," she said, "you should get credit for it."

But at Butler, where 92 percent of the goals were met, the results are the same as if a great many of the goals weren't. Students can now transfer from Butler - and four other Huntsville city schools - because of a history of not meeting all the criteria.

Still, things are better in one sense: "This time we have to send out five choice (ability to transfer to other schools) letters," said Moore, "whereas last year we had to send out 18." So is public education here better or worse?

For that answer, parents have to go beyond the scores of schools and into individual classrooms - and get to know teachers and their expectations of students. Those have always been parents' best gauges of what kind of education their children are getting.

As things stand, the No Child Left Behind scoring system may offer some insight into a school's strengths and weaknesses, but it's a far cry from the accurate snapshot it is supposed to give. In fact, you can take this year's scores and point to significant progress by administrators and teachers in all three systems.

If there's a reason to test schools - and there is - this one's scoring factors obviously need tweaking. But no system is going to be able to supersede a strong parent-teacher effort to educate children at the highest level possible.

By David Prather, for the editorial board. E-mail: david.prather@htimes.com

What Texas Testing Giveth, Texas Testing Taketh Away

From the Dallas Morning News:

AUSTIN – More than half of the 1,150 Texas schools rewarded in the first year of the landmark teacher pay-for-performance plan have fallen out of the program this year, mostly because they failed to maintain their performance ratings as passing standards went up.

Just 501 of the campuses that participated in the Texas Educator Excellence Grants program last year are also eligible in 2007-08. An additional 675 or so will have to terminate the bonus payments, ranging from $3,000 to $10,000 per teacher.

. . . .

"How effective can a merit pay system be ... where teachers have to think what is here today could be gone tomorrow?" Mr. Kouri said. "Essentially, folks are still doing the same things at schools, and sometimes they get money for it – sometimes they don't." . . .

Spinning While You LEAP Into the Failure Abyss

The Louisiana Department of Education is more practiced at bad new than the "folks" in the White House. Of course, they have been at it longer. Louisiana's war against the poor and the dark-skinned began in 1999 with the LEAP (Louisiana Education Assessment Program). Yesterday the State put out a press release puffing themselves up for the results on the big Summer of testing that followed the big Spring of testing which followed the big Year of preparing for testing, etc. Here's the opening to the Press Release:

BATON ROUGE, La. – More than 9,000 Louisiana 4th and 8th grade students succeeded in passing the LEAP test after taking summer school courses and retaking at least a portion of the test, according to results released Monday. About 25,000 4th and 8th graders participated in the summer retest.

And here is the way the Daily Iberian reported it yesterday:

Statewide numbers released Monday show about 9,000 students will move on to fifth or ninth grades after passing the LEAP test this summer.

Sounds great, doesn't it? What the LDE doesn't brag about is down in the pdf files made available on Monday. The facts are that 10, 762 8th graders will repeat the eighth grade this coming year (if they don't drop out), and 8,177 4th graders will repeat the fourth grade this coming year. So while 9,000 passed the LEAP re-test this summer, 18,939 did not:

• 10,762 Eighth Grade repeaters

• 8,177 Fourth Grade repeaters

The Graduate Exit Exam (GEE) goes unmentioned in the text of Monday's glowing Press Release. Good reason from a PR perspective. The results were even more devastating. The GEE is given the first time in 10th grade, and students must pass (Approaching Basic) math, reading, and either science or social studies to earn a diploma.

In Spring 2007 41,346 high schoolers took the Math part of GEE and 8,075 failed it.

Of the 8,075 failures, 5,303 took the Summer retest, and 3,524 youngsters failed that. With the 2,772 who did not retake the Math part and the 3,524 who failed the retest, there will be at least 6,296 students who failed the mandatory Math section of the GEE. Those 6,296 failures represents a 15% failure rate among 10th and 11th graders, and that does not take into account the thousands who dropped out between 8th grade and now.

Bottom line: Louisiana has a total of 25,235 failures this year in grades 4, 8, and 10 as a result of a single test that is directly correlated to family income levels. This is how Louisiana is getting entirely color-blind in the 21st Century.

Digging at the Roots of Racism

The great civil rights lawyer, Oliver Hill, died on Sunday at 100 year of age. It is sad to think that he had to spend his last days living a nightmare that most civil rights activists thought they would never see--the total evisceration of Brown vs. Board of Education. Sad that he would have to suffer the shift from Thurgood Marshall to Clarence Thomas. But I am sure Mr. Hill would argue what we know--that freedom is only part inheritance--the rest of it is hard work that must be learned and applied and protected by every subsequent generation.

It seems, then, that this essay by Nancy MacLean is a fitting tribute to the work of Oliver Hill to neutralize some of the deep roots of modern day racism at the highest levels, now masquerading as freedom and liberty. From History News Network:

The Scary Origins of Chief Justice Roberts's Decision Opposing the Use of Race to Promote Integration

By Nancy MacLean

Ms. MacLean is author of Freedom Is Not Enough: The Opening of the American Workplace (Harvard University Press, 2006) and Professor and Chair of History at Northwestern University.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts reversed a half-century of precedent and progress on civil rights with his decision on school desegregation. That was the prerogative granted him by the President and the party who entrusted him to shift the Supreme Court to the right.

But no one should grant Roberts a free pass when he says “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race. ” His opinion has its lineage in a well-documented conservative strategy to hijack civil rights rhetoric to roll back advances toward substantive equality.

Roberts’s decision, which denied local communities the right to choose race-conscious methods, is replete with quotable phrases from the lexicon conservative strategists honed in their think tanks in the 1970s and then carried into the nation’s courtrooms through their various legal societies.

Roberts claimed to be upholding the spirit of Brown v. Board of Education. Yet the conservative movement that put him on the bench bitterly opposed the Brown decision and has fought every serious civil rights initiative since.

The year after Brown, 1955, as Martin Luther King, Jr. led the Montgomery bus boycott to victory, William F. Buckley, Jr. launched the National Review to “stand athwart history, yelling Stop.” It is no secret that Roberts has worked with the Federalist Society and other conservative legal organizations favored by the National Review.

“National Review was part of a larger movement that created institutions which shaped and trained several thousand young conservatives,” as Irving Kristol has written, “to go into the Republican party and take control of it.” Scholars, too, cite the magazine’s founding as the start of the movement that brought Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush to the White House. Reagan and Bush, in turn, appointed the justices who drove the recent school ruling.

So how did National Review greet the Brown decision? Frank Meyer, its founding co-editor and the leading conservative movement builder in the formative years, called the high court’s decision a “rape of the Constitution.”

To fight the implementation of Brown, Buckley and Meyer forged an alliance with the intellectual architect of “massive resistance,” James Jackson Kilpatrick. Kilpatrick’s agitation against school desegregation as editor of the Richmond News Leader earned him praise as “one of the South’s most talented leaders” from the Mississippi-based white Citizens’ Councils then working to crush the civil rights movement.

Buckley traded mailing lists with this avid white supremacist organization in 1958, assuring its leader that “Our position on states’ rights is the same as your own.” Indeed, it was. What made “the White community” in the South “entitled” to use any means necessary to keep blacks from voting, Buckley had editorialized the year before, was that “it is the advanced race” so its “claims of civilization supersede those of universal suffrage.”

Northerners like Buckley and Meyer allied with southern segregationists not only from racism, however, but also from shared conservative convictions, not least what they called the “original intent” of the Constitution. The pioneers of this tradition were defenders of slavery in the antebellum era and its apologists thereafter. They used their peculiar readings of the Constitution to limit what democratic government could do for its citizens, an approach embraced today by the Federalist Society and the conservative block on the Supreme Court.

Buckley and his allies fought the quest for social justice at every turn. They urged the defeat of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and every measure to promote true fairness thereafter. National Review warned that the Civil Rights Act “would undermine the most precious rights of property.” “The whole basis of individual liberty is destroyed,” it insisted, when “the citizen’s right to discriminate” is denied.

Yet the civil rights movement so altered American culture that even conservatives learned they must update their sales pitch. They were tutored by northern neo-conservatives like Irving Kristol, who in 1964 warned Buckley of the “political folly” of arguing against school desegregation “in terms of racial differences.” Buckley and his allies wisely dropped the racial rationales and most now say that they regret their earlier arguments.

But their core commitments stayed the same. To fight social justice, conservative spokesmen simply mastered the art of rhetorical jujitsu. They seized the civil rights movement’s greatest strength--its moral power–to defeat its goals. They complained less and less that civil rights measures violated property rights, aided communists or elevated racial inferiors. Instead, conservatives claimed that civil rights measures themselves discriminated.

“I am getting to be like the Catholic convert who became more Catholic than the Pope,” Kilpatrick marveled in 1978 about his own altered phraseology. “If it is wrong to discriminate by reason of race or sex,” intoned the outspoken enemy of civil rights, “well, then, it is wrong to discriminate by reason of race or sex.”

The former segregationists now portrayed themselves as the true advocates of fairness. They framed “the egalitarians,” in Kilpatrick’s words, as “worse racists--much worse racists--than the old Southern bigots.” Color blindness, conservatives had come to see, offered the most promising strategy to defeat the push for equality.

Stealing civil rights language for rhetorical jujitsu attacks on the civil rights movement was a calculated strategy. In its 1981 Mandate for Leadership for the Reagan administration, the Heritage Foundation explained: “For twenty years, the most important battle in the civil rights field has been for control of language,” particularly words such as “equality” and “opportunity.” “The secret to victory, whether in court or in congress,” it advised, “has been to control the definition of these terms.”

The Federalist Society, with which Chief Justice Roberts has collaborated and to which the Bush administration looks for judicial nominees, avidly promotes this maneuver.

That’s little wonder. The president of the Federalist Society is Eugene B. Meyer, the home-schooled son of the conservative movement tactician and National Review co-editor who declared the Brown decision “a rape of the Constitution.” Back when the elder Meyer wrote, conservatives were truthful about who they were and which side they took.

The Booker Agenda: Killing Public Education or Stopping the Killing?

From the AP:

NEWARK, N.J. (AP) - In a city where gun violence has become an all too common part of daily life, these shootings were enough to chill even the most hardened residents: Four young friends shot execution-style in a schoolyard just days before they were to head to college.

Three were killed after being forced to kneel against a wall and then shot in the head at close range Saturday night, police said. A girl was found slumped near some bleachers 30 feet away, a gunshot wound to the head but still alive.

The four Newark residents were to attend Delaware State University this fall. No arrests had been made by Monday and authorities had not identified suspects.

The shootings ratcheted up anger in New Jersey's largest city, where the murder rate has risen 50 percent since 1998. The high number of killings have prompted billboards in the downtown area that scream, "HELP WANTED: Stop the Killings in Newark Now!"

"Anyone who has children in the city is in panic mode," said Donna Jackson, president of Take Back Our Streets, a community-based organization. "It takes something like this for people to open up their eyes and understand that not every person killed in Newark is a drug dealer."

The killings bring Newark's murder total for the year to 60, and put pressure on Mayor Cory A. Booker, who campaigned last year on a promise of reducing crime.

One can hope that Mayor Booker's school takeover and privatization plan may be shelved long enough to deal with what could be more pressing issues of children murdered execution style. From the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board's latest Booker celebration a few days before the latest multiple murder incident:

Part of Mr. Booker's solution to this dilemma is education reform centered on school choice. "It's the last frontier we have to cross in order to become the most thriving city in America," he states confidently. "Parents in Newark are more demanding than ever, and they deserve a plethora of options of excellence to choose from that meet the needs of their kids." Mr. Booker is a longtime advocate of school choice: In 1999 he helped found E3, a prominent education-reform group in New Jersey that pushes for charter schools and vouchers for inner-city communities.

Newark's public schools enroll around 42,000 students. With frequent instances of in-school violence, decrepit facilities and low morale, the system is in need of serious overhaul. Just 37% of the city's high-school seniors passed the state proficiency exam in 2005, a statistic that is even more embarrassing considering that city schools spend around $20,000 per pupil--far above the $13,000 state average (itself the second-highest in the country).

Before Mr. Booker can pursue any sweeping reforms, though, he must wrest control of the district from the state, which took over in 1995. "My goal is to turn the clock back to the '70s and vest control in the mayor to appoint school board members that can drive an agenda for reform," Mr. Booker says with hope. "Elected school boards often hit the lowest common denominator. . . . They are not the way to get courageous, driven change."

Mr. Booker emphasizes that until local control returns--which, thanks to recent moves by the state, could be within "16 to 18 months"--his powers are limited. But that hasn't stopped him from cultivating donors to start thinking about charter schools for the future. Last month, he flew to Seattle to meet with representatives of the Gates Foundation. "We had very strong conversations," he reports. "I told them, 'If we can grow KIPP schools and overachieving charter schools [in Newark], it will be much easier to show that [school choice] can work, because you'll see results a lot quicker than in a place like New York, which has around a million school-aged children.'"

Many charter-school donors won't touch Newark until Mr. Booker gains control. Without a powerful leader to ensure accountability, they fear, the city is simply a black hole for outside funding. "The Broad Foundation and others don't want to invest in cities that don't have mayoral control," Mr. Booker says. "So mayoral control has to be one part of the strategy to bring resources into Newark [schools]."

Mr. Booker realizes that educational turnaround will take a lot more than charter schools. Across the country "you're seeing teachers unions allowing merit pay, or unions allowing more leeway in the hiring of good teachers and the firing of bad teachers." In Newark, he predicts, multi-pronged reforms could quickly create "an abundance of excellent schools that can empower our kids to create a 21st century knowledge-based economy, plus keep a lot of residents here."

Meanwhile, Newark's high crime rates are a pressing crisis. Thanks to the zero-tolerance policy of new police director Garry McCarthy, a no-nonsense former NYPD crime strategist, most major crime categories are down in the mayor's first year. The high murder rate, however, hasn't budged.

"These homicides are principally drug-related," Mr. Booker says, explaining that his next step is to tackle New Jersey's draconian drug laws. . . .

Here and here are some background on Booker's more focused agenda.

Sallie Mae Kingpins Ready to Cash In

With the help of John Boehner's Republican Congress, the scammers who run Sallie Mae turned it into a multi-billion dollar goldmine that was built on the backs of college students who must borrow for an education. Next week these same corruptoids will be voting to cash in all their chips.

If you think that Chairman Al Lord's $280 million in salary over the past 5 years is a little high, then how about a platinum parachute worth $225,920,802. And he's not the only one. Polo ponies all around. Inside Higher Ed has the list:

When the directors of Sallie Mae meet next week to consider a $25 billion offer to buy the student loan giant, they will be voting on a transaction that will benefit the company, and also themselves — significantly.

A proxy filing by Sallie Mae with the Securities and Exchange Commission last month shows that the company’s directors will earn a total of about $370 million in profit if the sale of Sallie Mae to J.C. Flowers, Friedman Fleischer & Lowe, Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase goes through on August 15. The bulk of that money — almost $225 million — will go to Sallie Mae’s chairman and former CEO, Albert L. Lord. (A list of the directors and the value of their shares appears below.)

But some current and former higher education officials on the board will benefit handsomely as well, and to some observers, the significant sums going to Sallie Mae directors are symptomatic of larger questions raised by the sale of the mammoth lender, which had its roots as a quasi-governmental entity. Is it appropriate for a company that was built to a large extent through its connection to the federal government to profit so enormously as it has slowly shed those ties?

“Sallie Mae was built to serve a public purpose, of providing student loans,” said Robert Shireman, executive director of the Project on Student Debt and a longtime observer of the student loan programs. “It was set free and no one really knew whether the federal government got a good deal or not. This level of profiteering off the corporation suggests that ultimately the deal that was struck may well have undercompensated taxpayers.”

While the funds going to the company’s directors and officers are a tiny portion of the money that will flow to Sallie Mae and its share holders, Shireman said, “those figures are indicative of the nature of the deal that was struck.” . . .

Background here and here and here.

Economic Integration Moves Forward in Florida's Seminole County

From the Orlando Sentinel:

Seminole County is joining a handful of school systems across the nation that are making integration more a matter of green rather than black and white.

Starting this school year, the district is abandoning racial considerations when deciding who goes to which school.

Instead, household income will become the primary factor in approving student assignments and transfers and will play an important role in decisions that shift attendance zones.

"Our new direction is looking at socioeconomic diversity," said Anna Marie Cote, director of instruction for Seminole schools.

Seminole is among 40 school districts in the nation that have adopted "economic integration" in pupil assignments to some extent, according to a new report by Richard Kahlenberg, a researcher with the nonpartisan Century Foundation, who advocates the approach. Other Florida school districts using economics are Duval, Manatee, Miami-Dade, Palm Beach and St. Lucie.

Orange County schools, which have been involved in a school-desegregation lawsuit since 1962, have talked about economic integration, too, although it's uncertain the concept will become part of a settlement. Nevertheless, the school system is considering economics in school-rezoning decisions, district spokesman Dylan Thomas said.

A federal judge last year declared that Seminole County schools were "unitary," which meant they no longer had the remnants of separate education systems for black and white students.

As part of the settlement of the decades-old school-desegregation case, the district agreed to use family wealth rather than student race to balance diversity.

The change may have been timely.

In late June, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that while schools need to be diverse, race cannot be the sole deciding factor in assigning students. Several school districts across the country, including Louisville and Seattle, which were the focus of the court case, are considering economic integration as an alternative.

"We are way ahead of the curve," Seminole School Board Attorney Ned Julian said.

While the new policy is no longer based strictly on race, it will continue to affect many black students whose families are poor, along with a large number of Hispanic and white students who live in poverty. . . .

Spellings Reads

Weekend Edition Sunday, August 5, 2007 · When U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings gets time to read, she likes to escape reality.

Who would've guessed!!

NEA on NCLB

Following the appearance of the Educator Roundtable petition online, it took just a matter of days for the NEA to mobilize a warning to every local affiliate in the nation to stay clear of the ER petition to dismantle NCLB.

Now the NEA has its own petition, and if the stakes were not so high in this showdown on rearthorization of NCLB, this NEA "protest" would be comical. As things stand, it's just very sad:

It’s time for a change! No Child Left Behind (NCLB), the current version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), isn’t working. This year we have an opportunity to make it more responsive to the real needs of children.

As one of your constituents, I urge you, the entire Congress, and the President to help us improve the law by:

* Using more than test scores to measure student learning and school performance.

* Reducing class size to help students learn.

* Providing financial incentives to teachers who work in hard-to-staff schools.

* Calling teachers certified by the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards "highly qualified."

* Supporting teachers of multiple subjects, including special education and rural educators.

It’s time to change NCLB. By signing this petition, I am standing up for students, educators, and public education.

The Bush Administration has one of its big dirty jackboots on the neck of America's public school system, and this is the most outrage that the NEA can muster?

Well, here are a couple of facts for the NEA chiefs to consider as they huddle with Miller and Kennedy to figure out how to appear supportive of teaching and learning while bowing to the money of the education-industrial complex:

• Unless NCLB's AYP schedule is disrupted, there will no public school systems left by 2014.

• Unless the draconian chain gang approach to scripted teaching and testing is dumped, most parents will abandon the public schools whether or not AYP is achieved.

• Unless equitable teaching and learning replace testing as the prime mover of education, America's political and economic prospects will quickly erode at the same rate that our commitment to democracy evaporates.

• Unless "trust" regains the status that "accountability" has usurped during the past ten years, a police state will most likely result in the foreseeable future.
  

Peter Henry reports that the NEA had a significant presence at Yearly Kos in Chicago, and there the NEA suits appeared full of protest and bluster about NCLB. No, they are not for repeal—they just want to appear that they are in opposition to NCLB in a venue that demanded it--a venue with a lot of people who have remained supportive of the labor movement despite NEA's abandonment of the principles that made the movement great.

NCLB and the Impending Trainwreck

Commentary from PNT Online:

We have a report card on our school systems called Adequate Yearly Progress behind us. Unfortunately, few people outside the education system know what it means. They just see “fail” marks.

AYP, as it’s known, is the state’s annual assessment results of the federal No Child Left Behind Act. The premise of the 2002 act is to have every child in America 100 percent proficient in reading and math by 2014. A worthy goal, but the devil is in the details of this federally-mandated idea and those details bite harder every year.

Schools must close gaps in subgroups sorted by race, poverty, language and special needs.

To reach the 2014 goal, the standards rise annually, and more students in each category must improve on AYP tests. Even school administrators who aren’t having trouble with AYP agree a train wreck is coming.

In a recent Time magazine article about NCLB, a retired Ohio superintendent said, “NCLB is like a Russian novel. That’s because it’s long, it’s complicated, and in the end, everybody gets killed.”

For New Mexico’s schools, the detail biting larger schools right now is the special needs students subgroup.

Portales has seen admirable improvement in reading and math skill in its schools and that’s shown in the category that reflects “all students” on AYP. Unfortunately, as school officials put it, there is one way to pass AYP and 37 ways to fail. Our schools improved overall, but six of eight are labeled as “failing schools.”

In Carbondale, Colo., where I lived before returning to Portales, one elementary school’s stumbling block was the English language learners subgroup. When I left, 50 percent of that school’s students were English language learners; now it is over 70 percent. Teachers were adapting and still coming up with gains school-wide. Yet, the school was labeled a failure.

When that school hit the federally-mandated corrective action designation, Colorado’s best education minds investigated and found no solution the school hadn’t tried.

It was a good school under tough circumstances, but NCLB labeled it a failure. That label threatened to drag teachers down. Fortunately, some dynamic administrators kept them onboard and focused on educating children despite NCLB.

Portales teachers have the same encouragement, but could use more.

After listening to parents complain about AYP failures at a special board meeting Wednesday, retired Eastern New Mexico University professor Vern Witten said we should stop worrying about bubbles on a test and start worrying about educating each individual child. . . . .

Rhee Hires "best and the brightest" Paper Pushers

Wonder how much was spent this year to get the lead out of the water fountains in D. C. schools. From the Washington Examiner:

D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee is spending nearly $1.6 million in taxpayer funds to pay 13 of her top aides.

According to figures obtained by The Washington Examiner, Rhee is paying an average of $122,000 to each top aide.

Rhee is paid more than $275,000 to lead the troubled school system.

The top salaries in the new school administration include Lisa Ruda, Rhee's chief of staff. She's being paid $200,000 along with Kaya Henderson, the deputy chancellor of the school system.

The salary chart shows a "transition assistant" in Rhee's office will be paid $150,000.

D.C. Council member Phil Mendelson says the high salaries for school officials is cause for worry.

He says the schools shouldn't be paying private sector salaries.

Mafara Hobson, a spokeswoman for Mayor Adrian Fenty, says they have to pay top dollar to attract "the best and the brightest" candidates to the school system.

Semi-Dem Congressional Cowards List

Voters hit list for 2008. From DailyKos:

Of the 41 House Democrats who voted today to roll over on the eavesdropping amendment that the White House demanded be added to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, 26 30 were Blue Dogs. The bill, Orwellianly named the Protect America Act, passed 227-183, with 181 Democrats and two Republicans opposed.

These are the Dems who ... failed us. Who failed our country.

Jason Altmire (4th Pennsylvania)
John Barrow (12th Georgia) Blue Dog
Melissa Bean (8th Illinois) Blue Dog
Dan Boren (2nd Oklahoma) Blue Dog
Leonard Boswell (3rd Iowa)
Allen Boyd (2nd Florida) Blue Dog
Christopher Carney (10th Pennsylvania) Blue Dog
Ben Chandler (6th Kentucky) Blue Dog
Rep. Jim Cooper (5th Tennessee) Blue Dog
Jim Costa (20th California) Blue Dog
Bud Cramer (5th Alabama) Blue Dog
Henry Cuellar (28th Texas)
Artur Davis (7th Alabama)
Lincoln Davis (4th Tennessee) Blue Dog
Joe Donnelly (2nd Indiana) Blue Dog
Chet Edwards (17th Texas)
Brad Ellsworth (8th Indiana) Blue Dog
Bob Etheridge (North Carolina)
Bart Gordon (6th Tennessee) Blue Dog
Stephanie Herseth Sandlin (South Dakota) Blue Dog
Brian Higgins (27th New York)
Baron Hill (9th Indiana) Blue Dog
Nick Lampson (23rd Texas) Blue Dog
Daniel Lipinski (3rd Illinois)
Jim Marshall (8th Georgia) Blue Dog
Jim Matheson (2nd Utah) Blue Dog
Mike McIntyre (7th North Carolina) Blue Dog
Charlie Melancon (3rd Louisiana) Blue Dog
Harry Mitchell (5th Arizona)
Colin Peterson (7th Minnesota) Blue Dog
Earl Pomeroy (North Dakota) Blue Dog
Ciro Rodriguez (23rd Texas) Blue Dog
Mike Ross (4th Arkansas) Blue Dog
John Salazar (3rd Colorado) Blue Dog
Heath Shuler (11th North Carolina) Blue Dog
Vic Snyder (2nd Arkansas)
Zachary Space (18th Ohio) Blue Dog
John Tanner (8th Tennessee) Blue Dog
Gene Taylor (4th Mississippi) Blue Dog
Timothy Walz (1st Minnesota)
Charles A. Wilson (6th Ohio) Blue Dog

Education for Better and Wiser Persons? Imagine That

From the NY Times, reporting the release of new study on the value of arts education:

. . . . In campaigning for keeping arts education, some educators say, advocates need to form more realistic arguments.

“Not everything has a practical utility, but maybe it’s experientially valuable,” said Elliot Eisner, a professor emeritus of education at Stanford University. “Learning through the arts promotes the idea that there is more than one solution to a problem, or more than one answer to a question.”

Edward Pauly, the director of research and evaluation at the Wallace Foundation, which finances arts education, said that the arts can promote experiences of empathy and tolerance. “There is no substitute for listening to jazz, seeing ‘Death of a Salesman’ performed, reading ‘To Kill a Mockingbird,’ seeing the Vietnam War Memorial,” he said. “Those powerful experiences only come about through the arts.”

Still, such reasoning may not be sufficient to keep arts education alive in public schools. “That’s not the kind of argument that gets a lot of traction in a high-stakes testing environment,” said Douglas J. Dempster, dean of the College of Fine Arts at the University of Texas, Austin.

In a time when President Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” policy emphasizes test results, the arts do not easily lend themselves to quantifiable measurements.

Art classes are often the first thing to be jettisoned from a crowded curriculum. As a result, Ms. Winner said, it is understandable that some arts advocates hew to the academic argument to keep the arts in the curriculum. “The arts are totally threatened in our schools,” she said. “Arts advocates don’t even think about whether they’re accurate — they latch onto these claims.”

“I am an arts advocate,” she added. “I just want to make plausible arguments for the arts.”

No NY Times, No WaPo, No AP

None of the above is interested in the biggest educational research story of the summer:

Test Scores Slow Under No Child Left Behind Reforms

The press release just sits there at Newswise, with narry education reporter interested. Fascinating!

Epistemological Redlining: The Price of Doing the Education Business

How much is a history or journalism course worth compared to, let's say, a business or engineering course? Or a math education course compared to a ed foundations course (I know, they are both worthless). Wonder what will happen to poor and minority enrollment numbers in high-premium knowledge areas as we double the tuition charged for those courses? I don't know the answers either, but it looks like we are about to find out before the discussion can begin.

A couple of clips from the NY Times story earlier this week:

. . . .Starting this fall, juniors and seniors pursuing an undergraduate major in the business school at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, will pay $500 more each semester than classmates. The University of Nebraska last year began charging engineering students a $40 premium for each hour of class credit.

And Arizona State University this fall will phase in for upperclassmen in the journalism school a $250 per semester charge above the basic $2,411 tuition for in-state students.

Such moves are being driven by the high salaries commanded by professors in certain fields, the expense of specialized equipment and the difficulties of getting state legislatures to approve general tuition increases, university officials say.

“It is something of a trend,” said Barmak Nassirian, associate executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers.

Even as they embrace such pricing, many officials acknowledge they are queasy about a practice that appears to value one discipline over another or that could result in lower-income students clustering in less expensive fields.

“This is not the preferred way to do this,” said Patrick V. Farrell, provost at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “If we were able to raise resources uniformly across the campus, that would be a preferred move. But with our current situation, it doesn’t seem to us that that’s possible.”

At the University of Kansas, which started charging different prices in the early 1990s, there are signs that the higher cost of majoring in certain subjects is affecting the choices of poorer students.

“We are seeing at this point purely anecdotal evidence,” said Richard W. Lariviere, provost and executive vice chancellor at the university. “The price sensitivity of poor students is causing them to forgo majoring, for example, in business or engineering, and rather sticking with something like history.”

. . . .

“There was a time, not that long ago, 10 to 15 years ago, that the vast majority of the cost of education at public universities was borne by the state, and that was why tuition was so low,” he said. “That was based on the premise that the education of an individual is a public good, that individuals go out and become schoolteachers and businessmen and doctors and lawyers, that makes society better. That’s no longer the perception.”

. . . .

“The salaries we pay for entering assistant professors [in business] on average is probably larger than the average salary for full professors at the university,” Mr. Parker said of business professors. “That’s how far the pendulum has swung at the business schools, and I sure wish they’d fix it.”. . . .

LEAP and the Sickening Tragedy of Assured Failure

Good to see this voice of protest against the educational genocide in Louisiana:

Published: Aug 3, 2007

I applaud NAACP Louisiana Chapter President Ernest Johnson’s recent letter regarding the appropriate use of LEAP and what is best for children (July 19).

Johnson is right when he states, “BESE needs a new look at how to monitor school performance ... . It’s time to stop experimenting with these kids’ lives and demand good public schools that provide good environments where they can learn.”

To further the point, the history of reform efforts with a strict focus on testing has already proven to be of limited impact, and there are reasons why.

First, the disagreement with respect to LEAP or any other standardized test is not a question of rationalizations and making excuses for children; rather it is a question of what is developmentally and educationally appropriate. To be sure, it is absolutely inappropriate for standardized tests to be virtually the only authority for students’ academic progress.

Second, overemphasis upon pre- and post-standardized testing assumes what research has already demonstrated as patently untrue; that is, all students learn the same way.

Finally, testing experts and several well-respected education organizations have made it clear that it is a mistake to place too much emphasis on test scores. Indeed, assessment is key to help improve instruction and learning. Clearly, however, the problem lies in the distorted utilization of these tests, resulting in an unhealthy school climate.

This climate is increasingly dominated by a discourse that is becoming cold, calculated and consumed with numbers and ratings, ultimately objectifying children.

What is tragically lost is authentic talk about children, discovery, passion and excitement about learning. It is a serious mistake to assume that because test scores have gone up or down we have a complete picture of what schools are doing. In short, our obsessed focus on testing, at best, will only lead us back to the status quo, and will actually further distance us from authentic, innovative renewal in this post-Katrina era.

Guided by the assumption that education is about people, as obvious as that may sound, we need to underscore a vision for state-of-the-art schools where insightful educators keenly recognize the relevance of a developmentally appropriate practice within classroom settings with small pupil-teacher ratios and creative curricula.

In addition to the core disciplines, all children must have meaningful opportunities to be immersed in the variety of the creative arts and foreign language study.

Finally, assessment must include a multiplicity of instruments that allow for a balanced, more accurate perspective. If we begin taking those first steps, we will move toward, as Ernest Johnson indicated, providing meaningful environments where children can authentically learn, ultimately building a brighter future for Louisiana.

James D. Kirylo, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Education
Hammond

"Failing" Schools and "Trustworthy" Tests

Andy Rotherham's woozy sycophant, Alex Russo, recently quoted a letter from Bill Sanders warning against the use of any multiple measures in a reauthorized NCLB that are not standardized tests:

“Most of the measures usually advocated under the banner of ‘multiple measures’ have so little reliability that any attempt to use them in summative assessment is certain to provide results so untrustworthy that essentially no distinction among schools can be made."

Let's try to forget for a moment that Sanders is owned by SAS, Inc., and that he is doing his best to help SAS make good on their investment in him and his mysterious proprietary statistical formulae that purports to eliminate all noise from test data that might intrude from those otherwise annoying peripheral domains such as bias, poverty, culture, or even bullets.

Untrustworthy multiple measures of learning? Give me a break! One must wonder why Sanders has never expressed the same concerns for the thousands of junk tests (James Popham estimates 90% junk) whose invalid and unreliable results Sanders has spent his years sifting through like an alchemist whose optimism knows no limit. If our abusive, maniacal, and stupefying NCLB policy had ever been dependent upon valid and reliable measures, it would have disappeared years ago.

Let me share, then, a brief article on this issue of trustworthiness by Popham that appeared in the March 2005 issue of The School Administrator:

At a time when just about everyone on the planet seems to be urging educators to pursue challenging curricular goals, I may seem somewhat demented because I’ve recently been begging my language arts colleagues to devote more instructional attention to punctuation — and in particular to the use of quotation marks. But I have a reason.

Recently I wrote a general-market book about the No Child Left Behind Act entitled America’s “Failing” Schools. The book’s publishers, understandably eager to sell scads of books, signed me up to do a flock of in-studio radio and telephone interviews regarding the book.

Well, most of the interviews went quite well, for the interviewers already had read at least parts of the book. However, other interviewers had apparently just scanned the book’s title because their first question to me was: “Why do you believe our nation’s schools are doing such a rotten job?” My most accurate response would have been an emphatic, “I don’t!” But such a confrontational reply fails to engender interviewer-interviewee rapport. Thus I explained, hopefully without condescension, that the quotation marks around “Failing” indicated my disagreement with the typical meaning of that word.

So just to set the record straight, I do not think America’s schools are failing. Indeed, the main message of my book was that, because of NCLB, many schools (and school districts) are now regarded as failing although, in fact, such negative appraisals are inaccurate.

Insensitive Testing

Let’s consider for a moment how it is that a public school gets placed on the NCLB-authorized loser list. If any school fails to improve students’ scores sufficiently each year on its state-designated NCLB tests, the school ther eby fails to make adequate yearly progress. According to the law, a school that fails to make AYP is identified as being in need of improvement because the school failed to make AYP for its students as a whole or for one of several NCLB-designated subgroups. Yet most such schools will simply be viewed as “failing.” Just because a school is thought to be failing according to a federal law, this does not make the school, in fact, a failing school. Here’s why.

The essence of NCLB’s school evaluation strategy is tied to improvements in students’ scores on state-chosen NCLB tests. But what if a state’s chosen NCLB tests are incapable of detecting instructional improvement— even if such improvement takes place? In that case, NCLB’s test-based evaluative approach makes no sense. Schools labeled as failures may not be. Schools not identified as having failed AYP may be doing a dismal instructional job. Regrettably, in all but a few of our states, NCLB tests chosen by their state education agencies are more influenced by students’ socioeconomic status than by a school’s instructional success.

One sort of instructionally insensitive test is the nationally standardized achievement test, including those with added items so they’re better aligned with a state’s curriculum. The chief measurement mission of these tests is to provide comparative interpretations of students’ scores. To do so, the items on these tests must yield a reasonable degree of score-spread. It turns out that one of the most dependable ways to get an item to produce score-spread is to link the item to socioeconomic status so students from more affluent backgrounds are apt to answer the item correctly. But the inclusion of such items, of course, makes the test instructionally insensitive because its scores are too heavily influenced by test-takers’ SES.

Often a state’s custom-built standards-based NCLB tests are also instructionally insensitive. These tests supposedly measure students’ mastery of a state’s curricular aims, that is, its content standards. Unfortunately, because most states have identified so many curricular aims that no one can tell what’s actually going to be assessed, teachers are unable to target their instruction sensibly.

Moreover, because of the massive numbers of curricular aims, these tests’ score reports provide such general feedback that teachers can’t tell which parts of their instruction were effective. Thus after a few years of trying to make sense out of such senseless assessments, teachers begin to pay scant attention to the tests. Thereafter, of course, what turns out to influence a school’s test scores is, you guessed it, students’ SES.

Impending Perils

If your state employs instructionally insensitive NCLB tests, then it is almost certain that NCLB labeling of school quality will be inaccurate. Schools should be judged using as much relevant and accurate evaluative data as can be assembled. For instance, it is important to consider a variety of students’ significant work samples, especially those collected in a credible pre-instruction versus post-instruction manner. Additional indicators of quality (which NCLB permits) might include attendance rates, tardiness indices and suitably measured evidence of students’ attitudes and interests.

School administrators, many of whom will most certainly be evaluated on the basis of their schools’ NCLB-determined success, need to learn enough about these issues to (1) try to improve any serious shortcomings in their state’s NCLB tests and (2) inform parents and pertinent policymakers about the perils of uncritically regarding a “failing” school as one that’s actually failed.

Jim Popham is an emeritus professor in the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. He can be reached at 1706 Keoniloa Place , Koloa, HI 96756 . E-mail: wpopham@ucla.edu. He is the author most recently of America’s “Failing” Schools: How Parents and Teachers Can Cope With No Child Left Behind (RoutledgeFalmer).

$278 Million Giveaway - $2 Million Settlement = $276 Million Illegal Profit for Nelnet

From the NY Times:

One of the nation’s largest student loan companies, Nelnet, agreed yesterday to pay $2 million into a fund to educate high school students about financing college, settling an inquiry into its business practices by the New York attorney general.

. . . .

Nelnet has also been under scrutiny because in January, the federal Department of Education permitted it to keep $278 million in loan subsidies that an audit had found improper.

You're doin' a heckuva job, Maggie.

Kennedy on NCLB: Tragically Fanatical

From Dan Brown at Huffington Post:

In an administration where the Business Roundtable -- a consortium of CEOs and moguls -- has the president's ear more than the National Education Association in making education policy, warning bells should be going off.

While President Bush has lost the confidence of most of the country (his disapproval rate is right about where Nixon's was at resignation time), for some reason his No Child Left Behind education policy still has credibility for discussion. Perhaps Edward Kennedy's tragically fanatical support for NCLB has protected the suffocating law from being swept into Bush's ever-expanding garbage bin of failed policy.

And so we have to deal with the consequences. Eight-hundred-pound money gorillas like the CEOs of State Farm, Intel, and Prudential meet privately with President Bush to talk turkey on reauthorizing NCLB, but teachers and parents-- the ones living with the draconian mandates of the law--are left to sift through the propaganda.

The first line of the Department of Education's policy blueprint reads with such stunning condescension, it's clear that its Bush loyalist authors have no experience working on the ground with real students. It reads:

"Five years ago, Americans united behind a revolutionary idea: Every child can learn."

I hate to break it to them, but that's actually the most un-revolutionary idea there could be in a democracy. Millions of Americans trapped in the system are desperate for a whiff of reality from Washington.

When House Education and Labor Committee Chairman Miller spoke out this week that NCLB definitely needs changes, it was a breath of almost-fresh air, a recognition that the screaming out of students, teachers, and families had finally reached the ears of Congress. In his July 30 speech, Chairman Miller cut to the heart of the issue: "Many Americans do not believe that the success of our students or our schools can be measured by one test administered on one day. I agree with them. This is not fair." He's right. However, he maddeningly goes on to recommend artificial solutions for achieving success like looking at graduation rates and teacher merit pay for higher test scores. There is no mention of incorporating an array of classroom-based assessments--the kind that can actually tell a true story about a student's achievement. Under this barely-altered sort of statistics-worshipping "accountability" regime, we will be left with empty numbers and disillusioned children.

No Child Left Behind hunts down failure rather than promoting success. Trapped under this framing, all boats sink. Perhaps test score graphs show a few hills here and there, but there is no graph to measure how NCLB has ruined any possibility of many children associating learning and school with stimulation and empowerment. You can't calibrate with a test or a dubious graduation rate chart how NCLB has stolen teachers' and schools' creative spirits, or how it has widely denied to student a rich, interdisciplinary curriculum because of the harsh mandates of test preparation.

We need to snap out of the haze that has permitted people like the State Farm CEO to shape public opinion on how American schools should run. The voices of teachers and students' families must be heard to make good education policy.

Test the Kids!

Thank you, Susan Ohanian, for this and everything else you do for our children and the sanity of the Nation:

Alfie Kohn on NCLB

From a piece for Resist called Case against tougher standards (ht to Monty Neill):

A Word about NCLB

The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) places an overwhelming emphasis on standardized testing as a route to success in school. However, it is also designed to humiliate and hurt the schools that, according to its own warped standards, most need help. Families at those schools are given a green light to abandon them— and, specifically, to transfer to other schools. This, it quickly becomes clear, is an excellent way to sandbag the “successful” schools, too.

Those concerned about education must quit confining their complaints about NCLB to the peripheral problems of implementation or funding. Too many people give the impression that there would be nothing to object to if only their own school had been certified as making adequate progress, or if only Washington were more generous in paying for this assault on local autonomy. We have got to stop prefacing our objections by saying that, while the execution of this legislation is faulty, we agree with its laudable objectives. No. What we agree with is some of the rhetoric used to sell it, invocations of ideals like excellence and fairness. NCLB is not a step in the right direction. It is a deeply damaging, mostly ill-intentioned law, and no one genuinely committed to improving public schools (or to advancing the interests of those who have suffered from decades of neglect and oppression) would want to have anything to do with it.

The party line, of course, is that all these requirements are meant to make public schools improve, and that forcing every state to test every student every year (from third through eighth grades and then again in high school) is intended to identify troubled schools in order to “determine who needs extra help,” as President Bush put it.

To anyone who makes this claim with a straight face, we might respond by asking two questions.

First, how many schools will NCLB-required testing reveal to be troubled that were not previously identified as such? For the last year or so, I have challenged defenders of the law to name a single school anywhere in the country whose inadequacy was a secret until yet another wave of standardized test results was released. So far I have had no takers.

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And second, of the many schools and districts that are obviously struggling, how many have received the resources they need, at least without a court order? If conservatives are sincere in saying they want more testing in order to determine where help is needed, what has their track record been in providing that help? The answer is painfully obvious, of course: Many of the same people who justify more standardized tests for information-gathering purposes have also claimed that more money doesn’t produce improvement. The Bush administration’s proposed budgets have fallen far short of what states would need just to implement NCLB itself, and those who point this out are dismissed as malcontents.

Tougher Standards Don’t Make Grade

So, what have the results been of high-stakes testing to this point? To the best of my knowledge, no positive effects have ever been demonstrated, unless you count higher scores on these same tests. More low-income and minority students are dropping out, more teachers (often the best ones) are leaving the profession, and more mind-numbing test preparation is displacing genuine instruction. Why should anyone believe that annual do-or-die testing mandated by the federal government will lead to anything different? Moreover, the engine of this legislation is punishment.

Who will be left undisturbed and sitting pretty? Private schools and companies hoping to take over public schools. In the meantime, various corporations are already benefiting. As The Wall Street Journal stated in December 2003, “Teachers, parents, and principals may have their doubts about No Child Left Behind. But business loves it.” Apart from the obvious bonanza for the giant companies that design and score standardized tests, WSJ further states “hundreds of ‘supplemental service providers’ have already lined up to offer tutoring, including Sylvan, Kaplan Inc. and Princeton Review Inc. ¨ Kaplan says revenue for its elementary- and secondary-school division has doubled since No Child Left Behind passed.”

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In addition to testing and tutoring profits, corporate impact is also seen in the burgeoning sales of software to track student performance and interpret test data; classes for administrators and teachers to master test-prep techniques; and mid-career professional development courses to enable teachers to retain their “highly qualified” status. . . .

NY Times Reports "Study" Supportive of NCLB Expansion in High Schools

Does the Times have anything yet on the Fuller study that shows progress on test scores and achievement gaps slowed since NCLB? Nope. Just this report on the latest dreck from the ever-reliable neo-lib technocrats at Ed Trust, calling for expansion of NCLB in the high schools (to help minority children, of course):

. . . .While the No Child Left Behind law has created a national focus on reading and math proficiencies, it has done little to raise expectations for the number of students graduating from high school, the report said.

Because the law allowed states wide latitude, the goals for graduation rates vary widely. Nevada, for example, says its goal is to graduate 50 percent of its students; Iowa sets a target of 95 percent. . . .

Saving Young Children from the Testing Genocide

From the London Telegraph:

Just as we are all in a state of angst about Britain's depressed, underperforming, over-eating offspring, teachers are recommending that children should stay well clear of formal school until the age of seven.

The Professional Association of Teachers said at its annual conference yesterday that children ought to be allowed to delay the start of formal education, allowing them more time for play. Are they mad?

Or is it just possible that the organisation could be plugging this for all the right reasons, having seen at first hand the consequences of the present directive regime of pressure and performance targets on fragile, five-year-old minds?

Increasingly, when I have visited schools and met parents, teachers and child psychologists, there have been discussions about why our children have to start school so early. Raising the starting age is not a radical idea - many countries have followed the practice for decades and their children do not suffer.

American research recently found that children who had "teacher-led, academic lessons" at the age of five did not display "lasting academic advantage" over those who began later. Moreover, they were more likely to suffer emotional problems as adults. . . .

Mainstream Media Not Interested in NCLB Facts

Who knew fixing NCLB was going to mean the corporate media fix! From Colorado Media Matters:

Rocky, Post reported Spellings' NCLB comments without noting criticisms or controversy

Summary: Reporting on U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings' speech to Denver business leaders in which she defended the federal No Child Left Behind Act, July 31 articles in The Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News made no mention of widespread dissatisfaction with the law or efforts by state and federal lawmakers to modify some of its provisions.

In July 31 articles about a speech U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings gave to a group of local business representatives, the Rocky Mountain News and The Denver Post reported her defense of President Bush's No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) but omitted mention of the controversy or criticism surrounding the education reform measure. Both newspapers quoted Spellings as saying NCLB is a "good," "strong," and "hawkish" law that Congress should reauthorize, but neither reported the growing dissatisfaction with the measure among educators, state officials, and federal lawmakers of both parties.

As the online policy journal Stateline.org noted in a July 7, 2005, article, "Congress passed NCLB, President Bush's signature education reform law, with strong bipartisan support in 2001 with the intent to raise academic achievement for all students and close the gaps in achievement that separate students of color and low-income students from their peers. However, states have complained since the law went into effect in 2002 that it is too costly and that federal standards usurp state and local control of schools."

For example, as Gannett News Service reported in a July 27 article by Pamela Brogan, "More than 60 House Republicans are bucking the Bush administration and supporting a bill by a Michigan congressman that would let states bypass testing and accountability standards in the No Child Left Behind law and still get federal funds."

Additionally, The New York Times reported on July 31 that U.S. Rep. George Miller (D-CA) -- chairman of the House education committee and "an original architect of the federal No Child Left Behind Law" -- has proposed significant changes to how the law measures students' progress in various subject areas. The Times reported that in a July 30 speech at the National Press Club, Miller said he remained committed to the law but "acknowledged the many complaints about the No Child Left Behind law from school districts nationwide, saying: 'Throughout our schools and communities, the American people have a very strong sense that the No Child Left Behind Act is not fair. That it is not flexible. And that it is not funded. And they are not wrong.' "

Furthermore, a July 31 article in The Washington Times reporting on Miller's proposed changes noted that "many in Mr. Bush's own party don't like the education law and want to reduce federal involvement in the classroom. Sixty-three House Republicans have signed onto a bill by Rep. Peter Hoekstra, Michigan Republican, that would essentially gut the law by letting states opt out of it." Similarly, The New York Times reported on April 7 that "discontent" with NCLB "in many states is threatening to undermine" its reauthorization, and that "Spellings is working to minimize defections" among Republicans critical of the measure.

According to the News article by Betsy Lehndorff, "The U.S. education secretary said Monday that federal reforms must continue, especially if Colorado business leaders want a pipeline of skilled workers." It further reported:

Although the No Child Left Behind Act is up for reauthorization this year, "it stays in place, so spread the word," Education Secretary Margaret Spellings told business leaders during an hour-long roundtable discussion at the Brown Palace Hotel.

"The law is good and strong and hawkish and will stay on the books," she said. "The critical thing is that Congress needs to appropriate money for the act."

The event, hosted by Colorado Succeeds, a nonprofit coalition of business people committed to improving schools, gave local business leaders a chance to discuss education issues at the federal level.

The No Child Left Behind act set a course in 2001 for education reform requiring all the nation's school-aged children to be able to read and do math at competent levels by 2014.

The Denver Post article by Bruce Finley similarly reported, "The point of Spellings' visit was drumming up support for congressional reauthorization of the Bush administration's No Child Left Behind reforms now in place for five years." The article continued:

This is "a good, strong, hawkish" law that is improving schools and student achievement, she said, acknowledging core problems such as half of minority students dropping out of high school at a time when most new jobs require at least two years of college.

Even if Congress balks at renewing No Child Left Behind, new, mandatory testing of students in math and reading, with schools held accountable, will remain in place, she said.

Despite reporting on Spellings' efforts to strengthen support for NCLB, the News and The Denver Post failed to mention the widespread criticism the education reform measure has received since its enactment in 2002 or provide any information about the proposed congressional legislation that would modify the law.

The Gannett News Service article noted the opposition that spurred Hoekstra's legislation, describing House Minority Whip Roy Blunt (R-MO) as an initial supporter of NCLB who "now has misgivings":

"What I want is more flexibility for the states," he said. "I don't think that has to eliminate No Child Left Behind. But I think you are better off having decisions made about secondary and elementary education closer to where kids are. I think we now have to change our approach."

A March 15 Washington Post article reported that under Hoekstra's legislation, "[A]ny state could essentially opt out of No Child Left Behind after one of two actions. A state could hold a referendum, or two of three elected entities -- the governor, the legislature and the state's highest elected education official -- could decide that the state would no longer abide by the strict rules on testing and the curriculum." Similar legislation sponsored by Republican Sen. Jim DeMint (SC) is "slightly less permissive, but it would allow a state to negotiate a 'charter' with the federal government to get away from the law's mandates," the article reported.

And while its July 31 article made no mention of opposition to or controversy about NCLB, The Denver Post reported in a January 23 article by Allison Sherry that a survey of Colorado teachers, school administrators and parents conducted by the office of U.S. Sen. Ken Salazar (D-CO) found that the respondents "overwhelmingly say the federal education law No Child Left Behind is unrealistic and underfunded":

Almost all of those who responded to the survey -- sent to all Colorado school districts as well as a handful of parent advocacy organizations and administrators -- said the law's goal of all students reaching 100 percent proficiency by the 2013-14 school year was not achievable.

Teachers also said they favor charting student academic growth over time, versus the law's comparison of the same grade levels year after year.

Roughly 2,000 people responded to the survey, sent out last summer, including 1,600 teachers, 119 principals and 117 parents.

The News and The Denver Post also failed to mention that, in addition to the recent federal action, several states have challenged the NCLB law through litigation and legislation. The April 7 New York Times article reported on state and federal officials' dissatisfaction with NCLB's requirements:

Arizona and Virginia are battling the federal government over rules for testing children with limited English. Utah is fighting over whether rural teachers there pass muster under the law. And Connecticut is two years into a lawsuit arguing that No Child Left Behind has failed to provide states federal financing to meet its requirements.

Reacting to such disputes in state after state, dozens of Republicans in Congress are sponsoring legislation that would water down the law by allowing states to opt out of its testing requirements yet still receive federal money.

On the other side of the political spectrum, 10 Democratic senators signed a letter last month saying that based on feedback from constituents, they consider the law's testing mandates to be "unsustainable" and want an overhaul.

In addition to omitting criticism of NCLB, the News article reported Spellings' comments about the role of "early education programs, such as Head Start," but not that according to the National Head Start Association, the Bush administration has issued proposals that would result in a real-dollar cut in federal Head Start funding:

Preschool and early education programs, such as Head Start, must have strong ties to local school systems, Spellings said.

That way, all children will know how to hold a pencil when they attend their first kindergarten class and their parents will understand the value of learning, she added.

According to the Association, "An estimated 30,599 slots for Head Start children would have to be cut out of programs nationwide if President Bush's proposed Fiscal Year (FY) 2008 budget is approved." A recent news release from the Democratic majority on the House Committee on Education and Labor similarly asserted that Bush's proposed 2008 budget would cut Head Start funding:

The Bush budget cuts Head Start and Early Head Start by $100 million. If enacted into law, the President's 2008 proposal would result in a 13% real cut (inflation adjusted) in Head Start and Early Head Start funding since FY 2002. Under the President's recent budgets, many programs have had to shorten program hours, decrease classroom instruction, and eliminate transportation services. Given the need to provide cost-of-living adjustments to current grantees, the President's budget will result in additional cuts that threaten the quality of the program. The program currently serves less than one-half of the children eligible for the pre-school program and much fewer in Early Head Start. [emphasis in original]

On July 19 the House passed an appropriations bill that, according to a summary from the House Appropriations Committee, increased Head Start funding by $75 million over fiscal year 2007, which the summary stated was a $175 million increase in nominal dollar terms over Bush's proposal but a 0.8 percent cut in real dollar terms from FY 2007. The Senate is considering a version that would increase Head Start's appropriation by $200 million from the 2007 fiscal year.

Spellings and the Dirty Hand of No Oversight and No Guidance

From the NY Times:

The federal Department of Education, after months of criticism for lax oversight of the student loan program, still has no system to detect and uncover misconduct by lenders and protect student borrowers, a new government report said yesterday.

The report, by the Government Accountability Office and released by Congressional Democrats, found that the department had “no oversight tools” to see whether lenders were giving improper incentives to colleges to steer student borrowers their way, and, that since 1989, the department had offered lenders no “comprehensive guidance” on what incentives might be forbidden. In 20 years, the report found, the department has tried to punish only two lenders for violating government rules.

The department does not have a way to find out whether universities are improperly limiting students’ choice of lenders, according to the G.A.O., the government’s main research arm. . . .

No Newspaper Left Reporting the Facts on NCLB

Do you think there would be a hundred percent snub from newspapers if a prestigious refereed journal reported that NCLB was having a positive effect on test scores or on closing the achievement gap? That is exactly what has happened since the press release two days ago of a report showing that NCLB has had negative effects in both those areas. Not one newspaper has bothered to report the truth. From Ed Week:

Since the enactment of the No Child Left Behind law, test-score improvement among 4th graders in 12 states has fallen off in reading and slowed in math, according to a new study.

The paper also cites National Assessment of Educational Progress scores reflecting a virtual halt to progress in closing racial achievement gaps in reading since the federal law was signed in 2002.

The research, which draws on data from both state tests and the federally administered NAEP, is sure to add fuel to the heated debate over the controversial law as Congress prepares to take up its reauthorization.

“Over the past four years, ‘No Child’ proponents have made very strong claims that this reform is raising student achievement,” said lead author Bruce Fuller, a professor of education and public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the director of the Policy Analysis for California Education research center based at Berkeley and Stanford University. “In fact, after NCLB, earlier progress made by the states actually petered out.”

Mr. Fuller said that pattern emerged from his examination of pre-NCLB state test data as well as results from the long-term NAEP. But he does not suggest that the NCLB law is responsible for the reading-achievement stagnation and math-gain slowdown that he says occurred in the 12 states since the 1990s.

The study, published in the July issue of Educational Researcher, a peer-reviewed journal of the Washington-based American Educational Research Association, joins a thicket of recent reports on achievement levels since the federal law took effect.

In math, the new study found a rise in achievement since passage of the NCLB law in the 12 states studied: Arkansas, California, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Massachusetts, Nebraska, New Jersey, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Texas, and Washington state.

Between 2002 and 2006, the study shows, scores on the 12 states’ tests registered an unweighted mean growth rate of 2.4 percentage points in math proficiency. But the researcher noted that growth was slower after 2003 than it had been before passage of the NCLB law.

“Sustained gains in math post-NCLB offer a bright glimmer of hope that federal policy can make a difference inside classrooms,” Mr. Fuller said in an e-mail.

The new research follows a June study by the Washington-based Center on Education Policy that found consistent and significant increases in state-test scores since the legislation became law in January 2002.

Mr. Fuller found fault with the CEP study’s reliance on state tests alone, which he said were less trustworthy gauges of progress than long-range NAEP data—especially on reading.

When asked to comment on Mr. Fuller’s new analysis, CEP President Jack Jennings defended the state tests as “more accurate barometers of whether kids are learning what the state thinks is important.”

Reading Gap Sustained

Katherine McLane, the press secretary for the U.S. Department of Education, took issue with Mr. Fuller’s conclusions.

“The fact is that No Child Left Behind is working,” she said. “What the report seems not to account for is that a law that affects tens of thousands of schools all over America can’t be implemented overnight and its effects are not immediate.”

On the achievement gap, Mr. Fuller’s study pointed to national NAEP data showing that in math, African-American 4th graders closed the gap with white students by more than half a grade level between 1992 and 2003. But it highlighted the fact that no further progress was made in 2005. Latino 4th graders, he observed, continued to close the math achievement gap even after passage of the federal law.

In reading, however, Mr. Fuller pointed to national NAEP data showing that black and Latino students’ 4th grade reading proficiency has not appreciably narrowed the gap with white students’ scores under the NCLB law.

Spellings to Business: Blame Outsourcing and Factory Closures on Poor Schools

While corporations continue to export American jobs to slave labor factories in China and elsewhere with no regard for the third-worlding effect such policies are having in the American heartland, Margaret Spellings continues her unending PR tour to blame bad schools, thus offering corporations a ready-made excuse, and to pump her stupidifying NCLB de-education policy.

Of course, there are no shortages of qualified American workers for the jobs flying to cheap labor markets--there is just a shortage of qualified workers who will work for 50 cents an hour. And that's a problem that only de-education can solve with a "good, strong, hawkish" law:

U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings on Monday confronted a challenge on many Americans' minds: how relatively comfortable U.S. students can compete against the family-driven zeal children bring to school in countries such as China and India.

Political leaders "have to keep putting the elephant on the dining room table" and kindling a sense of urgency on this front, Spellings said Monday during a swing through Denver.

Today's U.S. educational system "is not sufficient" to prepare students to compete in the global economy, she said. "In some places, you'll have to have big plant layoffs and soul-searching" before Americans grasp what's at stake.

Spellings made the remarks in an interview after meeting with 23 Colorado business leaders downtown. Improving schools "is absolutely relevant to us as businesspeople," said Zack Neumeyer, board chairman of Sage Hospitality Resources, a hotel management firm.

He and other local executives raised concerns about global competition. Convinced that Colorado schools are failing to prepare students to succeed, they've launched a campaign called Colorado Succeeds to improve schools and student competitiveness.

Executives elsewhere have announced they're considering moving more business abroad where they can draw on a better-educated workforce.

The point of Spellings' visit was drumming up support for congressional reauthorization of the Bush administration's No Child Left Behind reforms now in place for five years.

This is "a good, strong, hawkish" law that is improving schools and student achievement, she said . . . .

Keep the Pressure On!

From Monty Neill:

Keep up the Pressure!

Your calls and letters urging a comprehensive overhaul of the federal Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA)/No Child Left Behind (NCLB) are having a major impact!

So far, we've blocked efforts to push through an inadequate bill. But supporters of the current law are still working to stop fundamental reform. We have the month of August, while Congress is on recess, to puncture the rhetoric of those who claim NCLB is the only way to do "accountability." This is no time to let up the pressure we've worked so hard to build.

Members of Congress are at home in August -- talk to them about NCLB reform now!

. . . .

Find your Representative's contact information at www.house.gov and your Senators' at www.senate.gov. Focus your message on these key changes needed in the law:

Assess academic progress using multiple sources of evidence across all core subjects to encourage a rich, varied and equitable curriculum for all students. Every child deserves a nourishing education, not the empty calories of test prep drill-and-kill in two subjects, which is becoming standard fare, particularly in classrooms serving poor and minority communities.

Create a balanced accountability system based on more than just test scores. Hold schools and districts accountable for making systemic changes that support school improvement, such as high-quality professional development and strong parental involvement. Provide additional, targeted assistance to enable low-performing schools to educate all children well. Provide significant financial support to help states and districts develop multiple measures and balanced accountability systems.

End arbitrary "Adequate Yearly Progress" (AYP) requirements, which most testing experts agree set students and schools up for failure. Expect Title I schools to post learning gains based on rates of student improvement attained by effective schools serving similar children. Allow growth measures that track the progress of the same students from year to year.

Reduce the amount of mandated testing. Scrap the requirement to test every child every year in grades three through eight. Allow sampling procedures for accountability purposes.

Support research, development and dissemination of high-quality assessments for English language learners and students with disabilities, including tools to be used by and professional development for teachers.

Act Now - and Spread the Word!