Trading Chemistry Texts for 7 Weeks of FCAT Test Prep

From the Palm Beach Post:

When Priya Mistry returned from winter break, she expected to spend the next quarter in chemistry learning about Avogadro's number and converting moles to mass. Instead, her teacher said he was throwing out the chemistry curriculum for the next seven weeks and teaching a review for the science FCAT.

"It's kind of easier than the normal chemistry would be," said the Palm Beach Gardens High junior, who's not entirely displeased. "But we're supposed to be doing chemistry. . . .

Connecting the Rot

A President who believes that the best oversight is no oversight and a Congress impotent to act, yes? (from KaiserNetwork.org):

Capitol Hill Watch | Experts, Lawmakers Call for Increased FDA Funding To Address Agency Problems
[Jan 30, 2008]
FDA lacks adequate funds and organization to meet an increased number of responsibilities and ensure public health, witnesses and lawmakers said on Tuesday at a hearing of the House Energy and Commerce Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee, CQ HealthBeat reports. During the hearing, lawmakers heard testimony from members of the FDA Science Board, which recently released a report that found "lives are at risk" because of problems at the agency.

Peter Barton Hutt, an industry attorney and former FDA chief counsel who testified on behalf of the science board, said, "Science at FDA today is in a precarious position," adding, "The agency is barely hanging on by its finger tips." Hutt said that Congress should double funds for FDA over the next two years, increase the number of agency employees by 50% and provide an annual cost of living increase of 5.8% to all agency employees (Reichard, CQ HealthBeat, 1/29). According to Hutt, since 1988, more than 100 regulations have increased FDA responsibilities despite a lack of additional funds (Stark, McClatchy/Houston Chronicle, 1/30).

Gail Cassell, an Eli Lilly executive and chair of the science board, said, "We found that FDA's shortfalls have resulted in a plethora of inadequacies that threaten our society," such as "inadequate inspections of manufacturers; a dearth of scientists who understand emerging new technologies; inability to speed the development of new therapies; an import system that is badly broken; a food supply that grows riskier each year; and an information technology infrastructure that was identified as a source of risk in every (FDA) Center and program reviewed" by the board.

Meanwhile, back at the slaughterhouse (from Raw Story):

The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) has released footage taken by an undercover investigator which reveals horrifying abuse of cows at a California slaughterhouse which reportedly supplies meat to American school lunch programs.

Cows too sick or lame to walk are shown being shocked, prodded, shoved with forklifts, and even blasted with hoses in what the head of the HSUS describes as "torture ... right out of the waterboarding manual." Such "downer" animals normally would not be led to slaughter out of fear of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (i.e., "mad cow" disease) entering the food supply.

The abuses shown in the video violate state and federal laws intended to prevent cruelty to animals, the HSUS asserts. "This must serve as a five-alarm call to action for Congress and the U.S. Department of Agriculture," says HSUS CEO Wayne Pacelle. "Our government simply must act quickly both to guarantee the most basic level of humane treatment for farm animals and to protect America's most vulnerable people, our children, needy families and the elderly from potentially dangerous food."

The Washington Post reports that mad cow disease is extremely rare in the US, but of those documented cases, "the vast majority have been traced to downer cattle."

More on the story at this link. The HSUS warns that the following footage is graphic.

The Unbearable Stupidity of Chicago School Reform

As schools become more and more desperate to solve problems for which poverty stands in the way of solving, it is fascinating to watch the disemboweling of the public schools with the accompanying inhumane treatment of educators and students as they are ground up in the mindless and voracious reform crucible.

And while the teachers and administrators must still use "proven" and "scientifcally-based" curriculums and methods to turn around student performance now inspired by the evaporation of hope, the pols who control the schools adopt entirely unproven and draconian measures as a remedy for the school failure created by the poverty and lack of opportunity that they ignore, thus making it even more difficult for schools to have a positive effect in the lives of children who are now counted as test scores.

This is, truly, a stunning degree of self-imposed blindness by those chosen to lead. From the Chicago Tribune:

January 29, 2008
No school district in the nation has yet managed what Chicago officials proposed last week: a sweeping, simultaneous overhaul of a cluster of failing schools.

Experts say the plan to fire the staffs of eight schools and replace them with better qualified educators is somewhat of a gamble, one that will require an almost perfect alignment of stellar principals, committed teachers and re-invigorated curriculum and programs to succeed.

But that's no guarantee.

"No one knows if turnarounds work," said Andrew Calkins of the Mass Insight Education and Research Institute. "We spent two years looking at turnarounds and could not find a single example of turnaround work that was successful and sustained and done on scale, not just one school."

As Chicago parents began to digest the proposal first reported in the Tribune on Thursday, many seemed willing to roll the dice -- in part, an acknowledgment that even partial success is better than what their children face now.

Fara Bell, a Morton Career Academy parent, said turning around both Orr High School and Morton, an elementary school that feeds into it, is the only way to guarantee wholesale change.

"There's a little thing going on with every grade, and there's no progress. I believe [the teachers ] get to the point where they're ready to give up," said Bell. "I think we need stricter and dedicated teachers. Just because they come to work don't mean nothing. I see a lot lacking."

The school district is proposing replacing the staffs at Harper High School and the three small schools on the Orr High School campus.

Both Harper and Orr have undergone repeated efforts to be reinvented, but those efforts have been unable to improve student performance. Fewer than 25 percent of students at the schools met or exceeded state standards last year. . . .

2008 State of the School Privatization Plan

Will this be W's final insult to public education--a national school voucher proposal he would like to disguise by calling it the "Pell Grant for Kids." As Nick Burbules quipped, if NCLB has been such a success in not leaving poor children behind, why should they suddenly need cheap church school vouchers to escape their world class education that NCLB has provided?

From the NYTimes:

WASHINGTON — President Bush’s call for a $300 million program called Pell Grants for Kids is the latest effort by his administration to channel tax dollars to low-income parents to help them send their children to private or religious schools.

His proposal, in his State of the Union address Monday night, was denounced by some top Democratic lawmakers and teachers’ union officials as a national “voucher” program that would only drain resources from urban public schools that in many cases are in need of money.

And some critics said that the president’s call for yet another education initiative only underscored the failure of the No Child Left Behind Act, the federal law that Mr. Bush considers a landmark achievement of his first term.

In naming his proposed program after a federal scholarship program for college students, Mr. Bush sided with advocates for school choice who say low-income parents should be able to send their children to private schools.

The new program would be modeled after a much smaller federally financed “scholarship” initiative in Washington that Mr. Bush championed in 2003, which has provided more than $14 million a year for low-income children to attend private and religious schools.

But some lawmakers influential on education issues were not impressed by the proposal.

“The president didn’t commit the resources to expand educational opportunity,” Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, said in a prepared statement.

“Instead, on top of a $70 billion shortfall in funding for his own education reforms, he again proposed to siphon scarce resources from our public schools to create new voucher programs,” said Mr. Kennedy, who is chairman of the health, education and labor committee.

Randi Weingarten, the president of the teachers’ union in New York City, said: “It is an indictment of how No Child Left Behind hasn’t worked. If that policy had worked that would be no reason to call for any new policies to turn around and compete with public schools.”

Nine Weeks of Testing

By Patricia Lopez at Ed Equity:

AFT.org "NCLB Watch"
December 2007 / January 2008

The pressure to sacrifice teaching and learning to a treadmill of endless, duplicative testing is a common problem in school these days. But it would be tough to find a state harder hit by this burden than Texas, where public schools must navigate separate state and NCLB accountability provisions based on standardized test scores.

The demands have meant that some schools in Texas are spending 130 days a year involved in some aspect of testing-test prep, test administration, test benchmarking and test scoring. Now teachers are fighting back through a campaign called "Reclaim Your Classroom."

Texas AFT is distributing Reclaim Your Classroom Test Watch cards in schools statewide and on the Internet so that teachers, parents and students can track how much time is spent on testing, including standardized tests like the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS), which is used for grading schools under NCLB as well as the state's accountability system.

The cards also track the inordinate amount of time spent preparing for and benchmarking tests-and that pressure has only grown since enactment of the No Child Left Behind Act, says Ken Zarifis, a middle school language arts teacher from Austin. Zarifis began to track testing hours well before the campaign kickoff in September.

"My students are losing nine weeks a year to testing," he reports. "Ten years ago, testing was taking about a week out of the year. It's appalling." . . . .

Art? Music? Cultures? NCLB?

By Lisa Greenwood at LJ World:

Recently, Charles Goolsby, theatre director at LHS, invited the district 9th grade English classes the opportunity to see a special performance of the current LHS production-in-progress, Romeo and Juliet. What a fantastic opportunity for students to see one of the works of literature they study in class brought to life on stage!

But something was nagging at me...

If this production were not tied directly to the 9th grade English curriculum, would principals and teachers have responded so enthusiastically to the invitation? Or would it be construed as an obstacle to getting students through the required curriculum in order to perform strongly on standardized tests?

I thought back over my years as a student, and then as a teacher. I had a sneaking suspicion that there just weren't as many field trips as there used to be. So I polled my students, who said that field trips had definitely dropped off in junior high from the frequency encountered in elementary school. This is partly due to the large amount of fantastic and enriching programs and opportunities in our community for the elementary students.

But the teachers I spoke to said that they had noticed a definite decrease over the years. "Not enough time -- we are already trying to cram everything in before the kids have to take their tests -- we can barely get through the required district curriculum." This from two math teachers, and I had heard similar comments from English teachers as well.

So my question is...in the struggle to adequately educate our children, and in the struggle to maintain the high standards and increasingly unreasonable goals set by NCLB, where do we make time to teach them about life? About culture? About music and theatre? About arts? About their environment and their community? We can't do those things in isolation in a classroom. They have to get out of the classroom to experience some of these things, but that takes away from precious classroom instruction time.

For some of our students, a trip to LHS to see Romeo and Juliet may be the only chance they ever get to hear Shakespeare's work as it was intended. What else is passing them by while we keep them in the classroom, chained to the mandates of NCLB and standardized testing?

Squash, Anyone--anyone with $65K for Tuition?

While school privatizers continue to wave the freedom flag and talk about parental choice, their rhetoric is matched by the reality of choosing charter schools in shutdown strip mall storefronts or corrugated trailers, or the choice of four to six thousand dollar vouchers to attend church schools that are, otherwise, emptying for fear of the priestly pedophiles who lurk there.

Meanwhile, the NYTimes has the story on the real school choices, the ones that are accessible to those who can afford to choose a school with a billion dollar endowment that charges from 40 to 70 thousand dollars a year for tuition.

EXETER, N.H. — When Curtis Thomas, a 14-year-old from a poor family living in St. Rose, La., arrived here two years ago to attend Phillips Exeter Academy, he brought little more than a pair of jeans and two shirts. That would hardly do at a 227-year-old prep school where ties are still required for boys in class.

So Curtis’s history teacher, armed with Exeter funds, took him shopping for a new wardrobe.

That outlay was just a tiny fraction of what Exeter spends on its students. With its small classes, computers for students receiving financial aid, lavish sports facilities and more, Exeter devotes an average of $63,500 annually to house and educate each of its 1,000 students. That is far more than the Thomas family could ever afford and well above even the $36,500 in tuition, room and board Exeter charges those paying full price.

As a result, like the best universities to which most of its students aspire, Exeter is relying more and more on its lush endowment to fill the gap.

Despite Exeter’s expanding commitments, which include a new promise to pay the full cost for any student whose family income is less than $75,000, the school’s endowment keeps growing. Last year — fueled by gifts from wealthy alumni and its own successful investments — it crossed the $1 billion mark, up from just over $500 million in 2002. . . .

Dousing the Flame in Pennsylvania High Schools

Teacher Jake Miller speaks out for his students and for his profession on the plans in Pa. for high school exit exams.

From morningcall.com:

''Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.''

While a student at Bloomsburg University, I remember stumbling across this banner, and being floored by its message. These words, which I later learned were a quote by Irish poet William Butler Yeats, serve as the flag to my classroom at Panther Valley High School today.

I am a firm believer that students learn by doing, but more importantly, by wanting to do. Give them a torch and a sense of guidance, and they will find their way. But give them a pail, and you'll find how much they hate being compared to other students on assessments such as the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment (PSSA).

After learning about the Pennsylvania Board of Education's decision to make PSSAs standard as a graduation requirement, I gave them the torch of my classroom to discuss the proposals. Here's what I learned:

A mere mention of the acronym PSSA automatically conjured an array of emotions. Some students were filled with revulsion. They hate the PSSA. But they detest our school's 4SIGHT remedial test, its evil step-brother, even more. Just yesterday, one of my problematic ninth grade students was pulled from my class during a test review, which he was fully participating in and thoroughly enjoying, to fulfill his 4SIGHT requirement. He pleaded to stay, but I explained the state supercedes me as boss. His response? ''Mr. Miller, I'm going to finish in five minutes.'' He was back in four.

Many students, like this young man, have learned to be apathetic about tests. After years of taking tests with no review of their answers, they do not know how to improve themselves and achieve the coveted ''Advanced'' or ''Proficient'' ratings. So, they've learned to be unconcerned.

Yet, others are entirely consumed by them. One student told me that when he was in third grade, he used to get nauseous the day before the PSSA because he had been brainwashed to succeed. Instead of finding success, some students unearth stress. Approximately 49 percent of students suffer from test anxiety; giving them more tests shows how little their apprehension matters.

Special education students are also a concern. One of my students explained to the class, if we have these standardized tests, a student like her might be forced to drop out. Her face turned sour as she explained, ''I need teachers' help on tests, and I feel lost when I take the PSSA.''

What about vocational-technical students? ''I'm not going to college,'' professed one of my very blatant students. ''I just want to learn a trade. But with this proposal, I'll be forced out of something I love to do into college prep courses. That is crap!''

Imagine that your son or daughter has problems the year he or she is to take one of the two English PSSAs (language arts and reading and writing, which must both be passed). Said another student, ''It doesn't matter what the problem is whether it's a bad teacher, a teacher on maternity leave, or the student having personal issues. He or she still will be forced to take a test needed to pass, but are doomed to fail.''

I love feeling floored by statements like that.

But, if teachers are forced to teach to tests, conversations like the one I had with my class, where students discuss and solve problems, will be replaced by the memorization of answers. In effect, we will force a continual extinguishing of the fire by examining the filling the pail that is standardized testing.

It's a light we cannot afford to lose.

Jake Miller is a social studies teacher at Panther Valley High School.

All the March Nooses Across Louisiana

Racism has never been just about Jena, Louisana. Since 2000 the Louisiana State Department of Education has used the Louisiana Education Assessment Program (LEAP), with its ground-breaking 4th and 8th grade retention policy that Michael Bloomberg has now emulated, to strangle children, teachers, and schools into a rigid, mindless, behavioral control system that would be an embarrassment even in a totalitarian state.

While music, art, social studies, science, health, recess, field trips, and loving teachers have been left behind, the constant surveillance of practice tests, the fear of failure on an individual level, and fear of failure at the school level (thanks to NCLB) have turned poor, black, and brown Louisiana schools into year-round test preparation chain gangs.

Children in grades 4 and 8 have to pass both the reading and math sections of the LEAP in order to move on to the next grades. All Louisiana elementary schools are to have a School Performance Score (SPS) of 120 by 2014. At Lincoln Elementary in Iberia Parish, they started this journey in 2000 with an SPS of 54.8. Now 7 years later they are at 71.7. At their current rate of improvement, the 4th graders today at Park Elementary will be 30 years old when their school reaches the 2014 target for all schools in Louisiana.

In the meantime, hundreds of thousands of children will have been labeled failures because of the poverty they can do nothing about. In the meantime, they will have been robbed of an education whose purpose of democratic citizenship, creative thinking, survival and health skills, cultural and artistic awareness, global awareness, ecological understanding, will have been all sacrificed in order to obtain an iron-fisted control over the next generation of compliant, ignorant, dependent, duped, and incapacitated drones willing to be ordered about by a numerically-shrinking white elite. This is the true banality of evil, unacknowledged in our presence, and given the name of equality and goodness. What kind of people have we become.

And in the meantime, too, test preparation goes forward at Park Elementary with the hollow hope of success this coming March. Last March 50% of 4th graders failed the LEAP, thus learning the loss of hope at an early age. From the New Iberian:

BY RANDY LOUIS, THE DAILY IBERIAN

Teche Area students are preparing to take high stakes testing.

This year teachers and staff members at Park Elementary School are making sure every student is prepared for the LEAP and i-LEAP tests by offering after-school tutoring to give students a second look at the math concepts and language arts skills they will see on the two tests, which are March 10-14.

The LEAP test taken by fourth- and eighth-graders determines whether students pass to the next grade. The i-LEAP, taken by students in the third-, fifth-, seventh- and ninth-grades, does not determine whether a student is promoted to the next grade.

Evelyn Louis, principal at Park Elementary School, said about 80 students at the school have taken advantage of the after-school tutoring.

“We have been preparing students since Oct. 1 for these high stakes tests that they will be taking later this spring,” Louis said. “The students have 30 to 45 minute intervals in which they focus on Math and English-Language Arts skills to help them prepare for the test.”

Louis said students recently took a benchmark test to see where they stand and most of the students did pretty well on the practice test.

“Some kids have a little touching up to do before the big test, but for the most part, I think the students and teachers are doing a really good job preparing for the test,” she said.

“The kids are into it and overall everyone is doing pretty well. Hopefully the afternoon training will benefit all the kids on the i-LEAP and LEAP tests who have participated in the after school tutoring.”

Llamira Crosby and Tanasia Leon, fourth-grade students at the school, said they have been attending after-school tutoring since it began in the first week in October.

“Tutoring has been a little sophisticated but I have been doing pretty good with all of my worksheets that we have been working on,” Crosby said. “I know I am going to pass the LEAP test because I am focused and I have been doing the necessary things to be successful on it.”

Leon agreed.

“During tutoring we have been doing a number of math and English activities,” she said. “Staying after school has helped me out a whole lot, and I believe I am ready for the LEAP test. I know I will pass it.”

Will Leon be in the 50% that does pass it?

Unending War Relies On Steady Supply of Dropouts and Pushouts

During World War I, the new racist "scientists" of human intelligence field tested their new human sorting tool that came to known as the IQ test. GIs who did poorly (the poor, the brown, and the black) on the bogus inventory were shipped off to the trenches of France, while the high flyers got Washington desk jobs.

Almost a hundred years later we use other racist tests to accomplish the same end, all the while calling it a civil rights initiative. And now WaPo reports that a third of new recruits are the great grandsons and great granddaughters of the World War I generation of poor, brown, and black citizens who did not finish school. These youngsters today have failed to make it in the testing factories we call schools, and recruiters, armed with these kids' school data (NCLB mandates it), have an unending supply of hot leads.

What would that recruiting poster look like--an army one group of dropouts and pushouts who can still contribute to the America's world class military economy. Sign your body up today!

At Lincoln Elementary, They Are Free At Last

Please help Lincoln Elementary, a rural school in Lindsay, California make up the $250,000 they relinquished in Title I funds to go NCLB free.

Story from Susie Pakoua Vang at the Fresno Bee (photo by Christian Parley) :

Lincoln Elementary is among a small number of U.S. schools turning down Title I funds -- and gaining independence.

By Susie Pakoua Vang / The Fresno Bee
01/20/08 22:17:30
LINDSAY -- Last fall, one little elementary school in this poor farm town did something startling: it said no to nearly $250,000 in federal funds. In exchange, Lincoln Elementary gained something its teachers considered even more valuable: more independence.

"We want to do a better job than we've been able to do and we want to do that by being flexible," Principal Pam Canby said.

Lincoln is among a small number of U.S. schools -- no one can say how many for sure -- that have gained flexibility in following federal education mandates by turning down Title I funds.

In rare cases, whole school districts have rejected Title I as a way to opt out of the federal academic accountability system set up by the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act. But most heed the warnings of state and federal educators who caution that the cost of giving up Title I can be steep.

The federal dollars are distributed to state education departments, which then give the money to school districts based on poverty and low test scores. Districts then decide which schools receive Title I funding, with priority given to schools with 75% or more low-income students. Funds can be used for staff development, supplemental materials and literacy and math coaches.

In return, schools receiving the money must show test results demonstrating that an ever-escalating share of their student bodies meet proficiency standards in English and math.

No Child Left Behind has met strong opposition since it became law. Some educators and parents say the program is under-funded and forces teachers to follow a standard script, rather than adapt to the needs of their students.

"Many teachers no longer can be innovative in their teaching," said Mike Green, a California Teachers Association representative and Lindsay Unified teacher. "A lot of that has to do with the fact that you are required to teach to the test."

Some local and national educators share Green's frustrations. Canby said Lincoln educators have been "diligent in marching to the tune of Title I." The school worked with a board of education experts who evaluated and monitored the campus' academic progress under the federal program.

The school also saw a major shift in staffing. Canby was brought in about five years ago after Lincoln failed to reach annual academic targets, Lindsay Unified Superintendent Janet Kliegl said. More than half the teaching staff is new.

District officials took the unusual step of giving up $243,000 -- out of its budget of $4 million -- to free the school from Title I mandates because too much time was spent on paperwork, when time could be better spent on more innovative teaching efforts.

Kliegl said Lincoln was a good candidate for the change because overall it is a high-achieving school, but there are groups of students, such as English learners, who miss federal targets. This calls for a more flexible approach, she said.

Tom Rooney, Lindsay Unified's assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction, said No Child Left Behind requires a great deal of staff time on paperwork.

"That is necessary for some schools and it's necessary for some districts," Rooney said. "We've made the decision that that's not a necessary burden to put on [Lincoln]."

In past years officials spent Title I money on computers, learning programs and literacy and math coaches to try to meet the standards.
Now, Lincoln's staff will use creative student programs that teachers would not have had time for under provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act. These include teaching via the Internet, far-ranging field trips and a renewed focus on science and the arts.

"We want our kids to go out on the road, go to the ocean, go to the mountains," Canby said. She wants students to appreciate music and art, which often were dropped from classrooms in order to focus entirely on improving test scores under the No Child Left Behind Act.

"An effective citizen is a person who is fluent in the arts. It's not just about reading and writing," she said.

Canby said she also wants to see a strong focus on science, which previously took a back seat to English and math.

Although the school no longer is obligated to meet federal mandates, the campus still must meet the state's Academic Performance Index benchmarks, which measure annual academic growth. Index scores range from 200 to 1,000, with all schools working toward 800 or better.

Lincoln is still far from the state goal. Last August, test results from the California Department of Education showed Lincoln dipped 38 points from its previous score of 691.

It's unclear how many other schools nationwide have followed the same path, but Lincoln is not alone.

Thousands of miles away, the Community Consolidated School District 21 board in Wheeling, Ill. has rejected about $250,000 in Title I for the past three years, said Kate Hyland, an assistant superintendent. She said consultants were assigned to underperforming schools, which resulted in several meetings, but little progress.

"It's a very punitive law. ... Our board really took a stand in saying, 'We are philosophically opposed to the law,' " Hyland said.

Other California educators have inquired about refusing the federal dollars as a way to gain more local control, but it's difficult to track how many schools, if any, followed through, said Jerry Cummings, who works for the state's Title I policy office.

While rejecting Title I isn't yet a trend, "it's potentially the front end of what could be a wider movement," said Jeffrey Henig, a professor of political science and education at Columbia University Teachers' College in New York City.

Janie Castro, Lincoln Elementary's Parent Teacher Organization president, said she supports the new vision for her school. She noted Canby prepared the school to do without Title I, partly because she used previous Title I money to buy long-term resources, such as computers and software. Said Castro: "We know that she's going to make this work."

While the school can do without Title I this year, next year could bring some changes. Nancy Frank, the school's math coach, said the lack of money may mean returning as a classroom teacher. Frank said that means she may not have time to go into several classrooms each day to teach students or offer one-on-one teaching sessions with new staff members.

To help make up the difference, the school has asked for financial help -- and some is already trickling in. A citrus company provided Lincoln a $20,000 grant to help the campus be a model for rural school reform, Canby said.

Mike Wood, a science consultant who was on Lincoln's alternative governance board, said it isn't easy for the school to give up more than $240,000. But he said it's important for local educators to dictate what is best for students. Said Wood: "Let's make learning fun again."

935 Lies

From Raw Story:

A study by two nonprofit journalism organizations found that President Bush and top administration officials issued hundreds of false statements about the national security threat from Iraq in the two years following the 2001 terrorist attacks.

The study concluded that the statements "were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses."

The study was posted Tuesday on the Web site of the Center for Public Integrity, which worked with the Fund for Independence in Journalism.

White House spokesman Scott Stanzel did not comment on the merits of the study Tuesday night but reiterated the administration's position that the world community viewed Iraq's leader, Saddam Hussein, as a threat.

"The actions taken in 2003 were based on the collective judgment of intelligence agencies around the world," Stanzel said.

The study counted 935 false statements in the two-year period. It found that in speeches, briefings, interviews and other venues, Bush and administration officials stated unequivocally on at least 532 occasions that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or was trying to produce or obtain them or had links to al-Qaida or both. . . .

M. L. King, III to John Edwards

January 20, 2008

The Honorable John R. Edwards
410 Market Street
Suite 400
Chapel Hill, NC 27516

Dear Senator Edwards:

It was good meeting with you yesterday and discussing my father's legacy. On the day when the nation will honor my father, I wanted to follow up with a personal note.

There has been, and will continue to be, a lot of back and forth in the political arena over my father's legacy. It is a commentary on the breadth and depth of his impact that so many people want to claim his legacy. I am concerned that we do not blur the lines and obscure the truth about what he stood for: speaking up for justice for those who have no voice.

I appreciate that on the major issues of health care, the environment, and the economy, you have framed the issues for what they are - a struggle for justice. And, you have almost single-handedly made poverty an issue in this election.

You know as well as anyone that the 37 million people living in poverty have no voice in our system. They don't have lobbyists in Washington and they don't get to go to lunch with members of Congress. Speaking up for them is not politically convenient. But, it is the right thing to do.

I am disturbed by how little attention the topic of economic justice has received during this campaign. I want to challenge all candidates to follow your lead, and speak up loudly and forcefully on the issue of economic justice in America.

From our conversation yesterday, I know this is personal for you. I know you know what it means to come from nothing. I know you know what it means to get the opportunities you need to build a better life. And, I know you know that injustice is alive and well in America, because millions of people will never get the same opportunities you had.

I believe that now, more than ever, we need a leader who wakes up every morning with the knowledge of that injustice in the forefront of their minds, and who knows that when we commit ourselves to a cause as a nation, we can make major strides in our own lifetimes. My father was not driven by an illusory vision of a perfect society. He was driven by the certain knowledge that when people of good faith and strong principles commit to making things better, we can change hearts, we can change minds, and we can change lives.

So, I urge you: keep going. Ignore the pundits, who think this is a horserace, not a fight for justice. My dad was a fighter. As a friend and a believer in my father's words that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere, I say to you: keep going. Keep fighting. My father would be proud.

Sincerely,

Martin L. King, III

The Surveillance and Rehabilitation of NYC Teachers and the Feigned Innocence of Randi Weingarten

Part of the genius of Michel Foucault was in showing how the repressive organization or society may use intermittent surveillance or just the threat of surveillance to accomplish full social control--if the subjects are unaware of where the surveillance is happening.

In the panoptic (all-seeing) schema, those social objects who don't know whether or not they are being watched perform as if they were, thus accomplishing the goal of punishment, which in today's society is social rehabilitation.

Today's piece in the NYTimes offers a perfect example, with ten percent of New York's teachers under surveillance, thus accomplishing cheaply what might have been expensively required by 100 percent. We can imagine, too, the anxiety that teachers will undoubtedly experience every time they consider moving off their scripted lessons designed to promote thought control and behavioral control of the children:

New York City has embarked on an ambitious experiment, yet to be announced, in which some 2,500 teachers are being measured on how much their students improve on annual standardized tests.

The move is so contentious that principals in some of the 140 schools participating have not told their teachers that they are being scrutinized based on student performance and improvement.

While officials say it is too early to determine how they will use the data, which is already being collected, they say it could eventually be used to help make decisions on teacher tenure or as a significant element in performance evaluations and bonuses. And they hold out the possibility that the ratings for individual teachers could be made public.

“If the only thing we do is make this data available to every person in the city — every teacher, every parent, every principal, and say do with it what you will — that will have been a powerful step forward,” said Chris Cerf, the deputy schools chancellor who is overseeing the project. “If you know as a parent what’s the deal, I think that whole aspect will change behavior.”

The effort comes as educators nationwide are struggling to figure out how to find, train and measure good teachers. Many education experts say that until teacher quality improves in urban schools, student performance is likely to stagnate and the achievement gap between white and minority students will never be closed. Other school systems, including those in Dallas and Houston as well as in the whole state of Tennessee, are also using student performance and improvement as factors in evaluating teachers.

The United Federation of Teachers, the city’s teachers’ union, has known about the experiment for months, but has not been told which schools are involved, because the Education Department has promised those principals confidentiality.

Randi Weingarten, the union president, said she had grave reservations about the project, and would fight if the city tried to use the information for tenure or formal evaluations or even publicized it. She and the city disagree over whether such moves would be allowed under the contract.

“There is no way that any of this current data could actually, fairly, honestly or with any integrity be used to isolate the contributions of an individual teacher,” Ms. Weingarten said. “If one permitted this, it would be one of the worst decisions of my professional life.” . . . .

Well, Randi, one has permitted this, the one is you. You stood in the doorway between this nightmare scenario and the classroom teachers, and you chose to slink away into the darkness under the pretense that you had somehow protected the identities of those teachers under surveillance. Can you tell us when you became part of the mechanism?

"The panoptic schema, without disappearing as such or losing any of its properties, was destined to spread throughout the social body," Foucault explains; "its vocation was to become a generalized function" (Discipline 207). The ultimate result is that we now live in the panoptic machine: "We are neither in the amphitheatre, nor on the stage, but in the panoptic machine, invested by its effects of power, which we bring to ourselves since we are part of its mechanism" (Discipline 217).

Tomorrow

we can celebrate the life and contributions of a great man, Dr. King

and

we can mark the first day in the last year of the worst President in all of our American history.

Dann Sues Charter School As "Abject Academic Failure"

From the Columbus Dispatch:

Attorney General Marc Dann today filed suit against Harmony Community School in Cincinnati, citing the charter school for "abject academic failure, gross financial mismanagement, ethical lapses, and what amounts to consumer fraud."
It was the fourth suit Dann has filed against a charter school.

Dann, who traveled to Cincinnati personally to file the case in Hamilton County Common Pleas Court, charged that the school failed to properly educate students using $31.9 million in state money it received since 1998. He asked the court to close the school “to free the students who are trapped in this failed institution.”

“During my time in office I have rarely encountered a more egregious abuse of the public trust or the public treasury than is documented in these pages,” Dann said of the allegations contained in 600-page supporting document he filed.

To critics who say the Ohio Department of Education and not the attorney general should be taking action against charters, Dann said, "...if Harmony was another type of charitable trust, if it were a non-profit hospital that routinely injured or killed patients or a charity that misused donations, the same people who are criticizing me for holding community schools accountable would be clamoring for me to act immediately and decisively."

Michelle Rhee: If Full-time Test Prep Doesn't Work, Let's Try Some More on Saturday

Desperate to show some improved test scores in the Spring, Fenty-Rhee are pulling out all stops with gimmicks to make sure that the children sitting on the bubble get extra test prep. The ones above or below the bubble? Not interested. From WaPo:

D.C. public schools will launch a weekend academic program this month to help more than 7,500 students at 91 schools pass standardized tests in the spring, Mayor Adrian M. Fenty and Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee announced yesterday.

Saturday Scholars, a 14-week program that will cost $1.5 million, is designed for students who are on the verge of passing the reading and math tests but need extra help, officials said. The program is voluntary and will take place on Saturdays at 47 schools citywide starting Jan. 26.

The announcement came one day after Fenty (D) and Rhee held 23 hearings on their school closure proposal, which has raised concerns among some parents who question the academic benefits of closing and combining schools.

By August, 27 of the city's academically troubled schools must have undergone an academic overhaul to meet requirements of the federal No Child Left Behind law.

Rhee said the Saturday program is one way to help schools satisfy the federal law, but she said it also will lift the achievement of the school system's students. In addition, Rhee said, it is meant to address parent concerns that the number and range of special programs differ from one school to another. . . .

NY's Mayor Gradgrind and Mr. M'Choakumchild Announce New Dropout Incentive

Obviously Mayor Gradgrind believes the only way to end illegal immigration in a business-friendly way is to grow our own supply of desperate, undereducated, and impoverished underclass citizens to do their work when the supply of exploited foreigners is cut off.

The new 8th grade proficiency test, aimed to further discourage the poor, will be key in obtaining that political end.

From the NY Times:

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg on Thursday unveiled strict new criteria for promotion to high school that could, if current testing patterns hold, put nearly a quarter of New York City’s eighth graders in danger of spending an extra year in middle school.

The new policy, which Mr. Bloomberg announced in his State of the City address, would require next year’s eighth graders to score at a basic level on standardized English and math exams, and to pass their classes in core subject areas in order to be promoted. It is stricter than similar policies that the mayor has put in place in the third, fifth and seventh grades, all in an effort to end the practice of social promotion, in which students are moved ahead despite academic problems.

The mayor has staked his legacy on his ability to overhaul the city school system, and when it comes to judging his work, the most crucial figure is the high school graduation rate. The rate under Mr. Bloomberg has edged up, but roughly half the city’s high school students fail to graduate in four years.

The new eighth-grade policy effectively acknowledges that the city’s middle schools share the blame for the dropout problem. “What this is designed to do is to candidly announce that the middle school has ownership of the high school readiness challenge for each one of our students,” Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein said on Thursday at a briefing. “There is no purpose to go to high school if the function of high school is not to complete it successfully.” . . . .

Any translators for M'Choakumchild's koan?

New Research from Civil Rights Project

From the Civil Rights Project:

Honoring Martin Luther King, Jr.

Honoring the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr., two new studies were released today that are part of the Initiative on School Integration, recently created by the CRP/PDC after the Supreme Court’s June 2007 decisions limited voluntary integration in our nations’ schools. The Last Have Become First: Rural and Small Town America Lead the Way on Desegregation, by Gary Orfield and Erica Frankenberg, is the latest in a series of CRP annual reports on desegregation trends. Are Teachers Prepared for Racially Changing Schools? by Erica Frankenberg and Genevieve Siegel-Hawley, reveals the challenges for teachers and school leaders as they face many different kinds of situations with regard to race, ethnicity and class. January 18, 2008

Inaugural Issue of "The Integration Report"

The first issue of The Integration Report, a new biweekly web "toolkit" launched today, links readers to the most up-to-date integration news and illuminates key issues in diversity at our nation's K-12 schools. The Integration Report is part of CRP/PDC's new Initiative on School Integration, made possible with the support of the Open Society Institute. January 15, 2008

Still Looking to the Future - School Integration Manual

Honoring the nation's celebration of Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday, The CRP/PDC and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF) release Still Looking to the Future: Voluntary K-12 School Integration; A Manual for Parents, Educators and Advocates. This Second Edition of The Manual provides valuable guidance and information about how communities and school districts can promote racial diversity and address racial isolation in schools nationwide. Download the manual here or request a hard copy from LDF by sending an email to manual@naacpldf.org. January 15, 2008

New Spellings Propaganda and the Mysterious and Phony PBS Link

Armstrong Williams, eat your heart out. ED is no longer farming out their covert propaganda but, rather, producing it in house as fake newscasts through something called ED TV. The latest effort by Spellings and her the-not-ready-for-4-AM players features a one-hour infomercial for NCLB.

When you go this page from ED's website, you will see PBS listed promimently as an outlet for this most recent fake news program with a NewsHour-looking set, the round interview table, and Doris McMillan (from McMillan Communications) playing the role of newscaster.

After watching this first episode via a webcast, oh my god, I could not believe that PBS could have anything to do with this, even though they are listed on the front end as partner and at the end with the claim of PBS member stations as contributing partners. I called PBS TeacherLine to get details on the broadcast schedule, and as I had a hunch, PBS TeacherLine knows nothing of a relationship with ED to show or produce Education News Parents Can Use.

When I dug a little further, I found out that PBS TeacherLine was created by the generosity of an ED grant in 2000. It remains a mystery which one of ED braintrust came up the bright idea to list PBS as a partner in this most obvious propaganda series.

Parents to Shut Down Michelle Rhee's Privatization Plan?

From WaPo:

D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee said yesterday that she intends to make "significant changes" in her school closure proposal, but she declined to say whether any of the 23 schools would come off the list, as numerous parents are demanding.

In tackling this highly charged issue, Rhee is facing her biggest challenge to date in her seven-month tenure, and using unprecedented powers in a school system now under the control of Mayor Adrian M. Fenty.

The chancellor is facing mounting criticism from parents, teachers and some D.C. Council members who say she and Fenty (D) are shutting them out of the decision-making process. That tension is illustrated in tonight's competing public assemblies on the closure proposal: Two council members will host a citywide "Peoples Meeting" that parents called for in opposition to 23 simultaneous hearings that Rhee has scheduled.

As of last night, the "Peoples Meeting" was winning the battle for participants, with 100 scheduled to attend the session at the District Building. Only 75 had registered for the 23 hearings across the city. . . . .

This is likely the only real social studies lesson DC children have had all year. Might this unit be called "Fight the Power?"

The Crash of the Phoenix Fraud

While a Federal court has decided on restitution for stockholders based on a jury's determination of fraud, one has to wonder if there will ever be restitution to the tens of thousands of youngsters recruited by bounty hunter "counselors" to waste their money in an effort to attain a credential of marginal value.

From the AP via the NY Times:

PHOENIX (AP) — The Apollo Group Inc., the company that owns the University of Phoenix, fraudulently misled investors in 2004 about student recruitment policies, a federal jury decided Wednesday. The panel ordered the company to pay shareholders about $280 million.

Jurors said Apollo officials “knowingly and recklessly” made false statements in a news release, a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission and four conference calls with market analysts. By doing so, jurors said, Apollo violated federal securities laws.

The verdict, which comes after a two-month trial in Federal District Court in Phoenix, specified that the company pay certain investors $5.55 a share.

Apollo, based in Phoenix, reported $780.7 million in revenue in the first quarter. The company said it had not decided whether to appeal.

Shareholders claimed that Apollo misled investors four years ago when it kept secret a 2004 Department of Education report that criticized the University of Phoenix’s recruitment policies. The report concluded that the university paid enrollment counselors solely based on the “recruiters’ success in securing enrollments,” which violated federal regulations.

The shareholders singled out a former chief executive, Todd S. Nelson, and a former chief financial officer, Kenda B. Gonzales, as the Apollo officials who failed to inform investors about the report. Investors had sought $5.55 a share in restitution, which company officials estimated would total $280 million.

Schools Where Half Graduate Now Moving to College Prep?

It is really the saddest and most persistent reality in the long history of urban education reform : as one foundering reform is replaced by another lined up to take its place, each high-sounding plan remains persistently blind to the effects of poverty that assure its failure beforehand and the failure of each subsequent reform.

Now in school systems where only half of the students graduate in four years, plans are underway to turn all these schools in college prep academies. Another grandiose sweet smelling illusion that ignores the unassailable truth that continues to be stringently denied by those hoping to staunch the hemorrhage with a never-ending supply of expensive band-aids.

ENDING POVERTY WILL ALLOW EDUCATION REFORMS A CHANCE TO SUCCEED, WHEREAS IGNORING POVERTY WILL ASSURE THEIR CONTINUED FAILURE. Hoping to end poverty by improving education places the cart exactly in front of the horse.

Another blind example from the NY Times:

BOSTON — At Excel High School, in South Boston, teachers do not just prepare students academically for the SAT; they take them on practice walks to the building where the SAT will be given so they won’t get lost on the day of the test.

In Chattanooga, Tenn., the schools have abolished their multitrack curriculum, which pointed only a fraction of students toward college. Every student is now on a college track.

And in the Washington suburb of Prince George’s County, Md., the school district is arranging college tours for students as early as seventh grade, and adding eight core Advanced Placement classes to every high school, including some schools that had none.

Those efforts, and others across the country, reflect a growing sense of urgency among educators that the primary goal of many large high schools serving low-income and urban populations — to move students toward graduation — is no longer enough. Now, educators say, even as they struggle to lift dismal high school graduation rates, they must also prepare the students for college, or some form of post-secondary school training, with the skills to succeed.

In affluent suburbs, where college admission is an obsession, some educators worry that high schools, with their rigorous college preparatory curriculums, have become too academically demanding in recent years.

By contrast, many urban and low-income districts, which also serve many immigrants, are experimenting with ways to teach more than the basic skills so that their students can not only get to college, but earn college degrees. Some states have begun to strengthen their graduation requirements.

“This is transformational change,” said Dan Challener, the president of the Public Education Foundation, a Chattanooga group that is working with the area public schools. “It’s about the purpose of high school. It’s about reinventing what high schools do.”

What is required, educators say, is nothing less than revolutionizing schools built for another century, when a high school diploma was a ticket to social mobility in a manufacturing economy, and students with only basic skills could make it into the middle class. But the task is daunting, and the outcome uncertain, experts say.

“We don’t know yet how to get everyone in our society to this level of knowledge and skills,” said Michele Cahill, a vice president at the Carnegie Corporation, which, along with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, is financing many of the new efforts. “We’ve never done it before.” . . . .

ENDING POVERTY WILL ALLOW EDUCATION REFORMS A CHANCE TO SUCCEED, WHEREAS IGNORING POVERTY WILL ASSURE THEIR CONTINUED FAILURE. Helloooooooooooo.

We don't need no stinking civics lesson--can't you see we're taking a test!

From the Houston Chronicle:

Some Texas schools are considering passing up on a front-row seat in a democracy lesson during the March 4 primary to keep their campuses visitor-free and church-mouse quiet during the opening day of the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills.

Leaders of some Houston-area school districts, including Katy, have informed Harris County officials that they're reluctant to fill their normal role as polling sites because of this year's scheduling conflict.

"Sites that are normally used as polling locations may not be available because of administrative policy that prohibits visitors on school campuses during testing," said Hector de Leon, spokesman for the County Clerk's Office. "However, at this point, the use of schools as polling locations has not been ruled out."

Questions remain about whether public schools can refuse to serve as voting locations, an issue state leaders are trying to iron out.

The matter came to a head this week when the Fort Worth school district officially rejected Tarrant County's request to use 34 campuses as polling places. The district softened its stance on Friday, however, agreeing to allow voting on some campuses or help the county find sites nearby. . . .

High Quality Teaching Declining Since NCLB

From AScribe Newswire:

COLLEGE PARK, Md., Jan. 15 (AScribe Newswire) -- New research by University of Maryland Education Associate Professor Linda Valli provides clear evidence that the No Child Left Behind Act's focus on high-stakes testing has "actually undermined the quality of teaching in reading and math." Valli says that declines her research found in high quality teaching are directly related to "the pressure teachers were feeling to 'teach to the test'. Of course this runs counter to the stated idea of NCLB, which is for students to achieve rigorous standards. It is not what we set out to find, but it is what we discovered."

In a recent interview by the College of Education's Bruce Jacobs, Valli talked about her research and recent appointment as the inaugural holder of the Jeffrey and David Mullan Professorship in Teacher Education-Professional Development at the University of Maryland.

Q - Congratulations on your appointment. What was your reaction to being selected?

My initial reaction was amazement. I am thrilled to have this opportunity to pursue further work in strengthening teacher education. I feel real gratitude to Jean Mullan for being so generous and for affirming the importance of teacher preparation.

Q - What are your plans for this new position?

I am now finishing up a five-year study on fourth and fifth grade reading and math instruction, trying to better understand what good teachers do to help students who are struggling at grade level. Teachers-in-training often understand teaching concepts but do not know how to implement them in the classroom. I will use my new professorship to work with my colleagues here in the department to create computer-simulated experiences of teacher learning - classroom scenarios where pre-service teachers would have to decide what to do based on teacher theory and best practices. These new teacher training tools will help us put into practice what we have learned from our latest research.

Q - What have you learned from that research?

We started planning the study in 2000, before the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act and the subsequent emphasis on testing. We were simply looking for good teaching practices, but what we found during the study was the shift to high-stakes testing actually undermined the quality of teaching in reading and math. Our data show that what we would call high-quality teaching decreased over that period of time. There were declines in teaching higher-order thinking, in the amount of time spent on complex assignments, and in the actual amount of high cognitive content in the curriculum. We believe these declines are related to the pressure teachers were feeling to "teach to the test." Of course this runs counter to the stated idea of NCLB, which is for students to achieve rigorous standards. It is not what we set out to find, but it is what we discovered.

Q - Much of your work over the years has focused on what you call "challenging environments" for teachers. How do you define "challenging?"

One challenge for teachers today is they need to know how to teach a much more racially, ethnically and linguistically diverse range of students - students coming from an increasingly broad range of relatively disadvantaged or advantaged backgrounds: children in poverty, children whose first language is not English, children from well-off families. Another challenge is, because of NCLB, teachers are now called upon to produce very concrete outcomes for students that work against good teaching. Their jobs are increasingly stressful and dissatisfying. They often don't feel supported, they feel the expectations are unrealistic, and they feel they are not able to establish good, human teaching relationships with students because everything is so driven by testing. The task for teacher educators is to help teachers meet these new challenges in ways that are healthy for both them and their students.

Q - How do you see teacher educators accomplishing this?

It is increasingly important for us to help teachers create supportive communities in their schools, to involve parents and to find oases of support among other teachers and administrators. New teachers need to anticipate the necessity to do that. They cannot survive in today's challenging situations without that kind of support. Without it they will continue to flee to higher income suburban schools. It's just too hard for them. That is why I think our simulated environments will be so important as a way of preparing teachers for what they will face.

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

Prof. Valli is the inaugural holder of the Jeffrey and David Mullan Professorship in Teacher Education-Professional Development at the University of Maryland. Find the release at http://www.education.umd.edu/news/news2007/wnr0709MullanEndProf.html . Her research looks at what constitutes good quality teaching.

Edwards Still the Only Electable Democrat

A clip from Jayne Lyn Stahl at Huffington Post:

So, maybe the media has timed out on John Edwards. Maybe the pay for view press has decided to shrink the contest for the Democratic presidential nomination to two candidates, but this would be premature evacuation. Every contender with the stomach for it has the right to remain in the race for as long as he or she wants without the benefit of primetime postmortems.

Isn't it bad enough that we try, and convict, those who are only suspected of committing a crime on our TV newscasts? Is this any way to run a democracy? Yeah, into the ground, I think.

If we, in this country, weren't so insistent upon novelty, and looked instead to competency, John Edwards would be, by far, the clear leader as the nominee of the Democratic Party. Yet, in keeping with their time-honored tradition, the Democrats will instead show their uncanny ability to foul it up all just when a victory is most needed, and instead of delivering an end to a war which has lasted longer than Vietnam, we will, yet again, deliver a nominee who is guaranteed to pull an LBJ and keep fanning the flames of war in the name of bringing the boys home. The lies are the same; the only thing that's changed is the calendar.

While it's true that any Democrat nominated must secure as many crossover Republican votes as possible, if we think of government as a large ship, what happens when all the weight is in the center?

As long as any candidate places his, or her tonnage solely in the middle, the ship of state must sink. That was John Kerry's problem; not willing to go out on a limb, sticking with the tried and true -- is this what it means to be experienced? But, even more daunting for him, Kerry wasn't a fighter. If Kerry were a fighter, he'd have held out for every last vote to be counted, in Ohio, and we would not have had a second term of George W. Bush who didn't even deserve a first term.

It would be ingenuous to think, even for a minute, that only the experienced stick with the tried and true. No one who is unprepared, or unwilling, to take a risk belongs in the Oval Office, in the first place. George Washington took risks; John Adams, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy -- even Richard Nixon took risks; not all risks are created equal, after all.

Make no mistake, whether one likes Hillary Clinton is beside the point just as whether one likes Barack Obama is also beside the point, the only candidate who has stated emphatically that he will withdraw all troops from Iraq is John Edwards. The only candidate not beating the war drums with respect to Iran or Pakistan is John Edwards.

Moreover, the only Democratic contender not luxuriating in generalities and abstractions is John Edwards. And, ultimately, the candidate, besides Dennis Kucinich, who poses the greatest risk to the corporate lobbies, and big business in Washington, is John Edwards. Edwards is a fighter which is what the Democratic Party needs if it's to win the presidency in 2008. Edwards will fight for economic equity, he will fight for the working man and woman in this country at the expense of the corporate elite. He will see to it that more of our sons and daughters are in college than on the front lines of battle.

Yes, and go figure, John Edwards just happens to be the guy the corporate media machine is intent on writing off, trying to figure out how to siphon off his votes while they're ratcheting up John McCain. Well, guess what, winning one or two primaries doesn't make a presidential candidate anymore than losing one or two breaks one. . . .

Georgia Charter School Stores Investigated as Home Office Shuffles Managers

What could the problem be--this business model worked great for Pizza Hut and Burger King??

From the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

By DIANE R. STEPP
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 01/14/08

Top executives of one of Georgia's largest charter school operators have been summoned by state charter officials for a meeting today at the Department of Education to discuss "operational issues."

The Arlington,Va.-based company manages four schools in Cobb and Marietta. All have lost their principals to resignations or reassignments since June as well as the company's southeastern regional director.

The latest was Reginald Flenory, principal of Imagine International Academy of Smyrna. He was hired in February to head one of Imagine's two new start-up schools in south Cobb. He cited family issues as his reason for leaving. Kennesaw Charter Schools' former principal Catherine Montini, hired in August, lasted less than four months.

"We have concerns when we see a lot of turnover. You've got to have stability for a school to move forward," said Andrew Broy, state Department of Education charter director. . . .

Parents and Teachers Standing Up in Olympia, WA Against WASL

From the Olympian:

Education WASL battle continues

The issues: One major issue that doesn't look likely to go away is the fight over high-stakes testing for high school students. Last year, lawmakers delayed a requirement that seniors pass the math WASL in order to graduate. Similar pressure will be brought to bear by teachers groups, parents and skeptical lawmakers to suspend the reading and writing requirement for graduating seniors this year. Also on tap: Washington Education Association requests for belated cost-of-living pay raises to cover increases teachers didn't get in 2003-04, when raises for all state-paid workers were skipped to help balance the budget without general tax increases. Lawmakers also are likely to keep talking about school-funding issues and ways to bolster math instruction.

What's at stake: For this year's high school seniors, the right to graduate with classmates is one concern. But so is the education establishment's effort to raise learning standards, elevate student performance and make Washington more prepared to compete economically.

The players: The WEA long has had questions about using the WASL as a graduation test, and in October the state Parent Teacher Association took a position against using it as a graduation requirement. The business-oriented Washington Roundtable, Gregoire, state schools Superintendent Terry Bergeson and other advocates of higher performance have been adamant in wanting to push forward with testing.

Likely outcome: The testing has survived many attacks over the years, and Gov. Chris Gregoire gets the last word with her veto pen. Chopp put it this way: "I think there are going to be vigorous discussions about keeping the WASL as a graduation requirement. That doesn't mean we do away with it. … The governor has been very clear on that."

DC Charterizing Depends on School Closures

Parents are getting up, standing up in DC against the Fenty-Rhee plan to convert public schools into corporate and Catholic charter chain gangs. From WaPo:

. . . .The demonstrators said they plan to boycott the 23 assemblies Thursday. They said they will instead attend "The People's Meeting" that evening at the Wilson Building.

Opponents also have have questioned the legality of the Fenty administration's meetings, asking whether they can be considered official public hearings without the participation of city leaders. Fenty signed a mayoral order Jan. 9 delegating authority to two dozen senior education officials to "chair" the meetings.

The well-organized assembly was an indication that Fenty and Rhee face strong, vocal opposition to the school closings. The administration says the closing of under-enrolled schools is the first step in education reform, to be followed by the creation of consolidated schools with special programs, such as those for gifted and talented students.

Leslie Saravia, a 10-year-old fifth-grader in bangs and ponytail, timidly read her speech from notebook paper in English and Spanish as Thomas held the microphone for her. Bob Marley's "Get Up, Stand Up" rang out before she started speaking. "Please, please. I am begging you not to close down my school," said Leslie, who attends John Burroughs Elementary School. "This is my second home."

Lee Glazer, mother of three public-school students, said the proposal targets "children of color." No school on the closings list is in predominantly white Ward 3.

Mafara Hobson, a spokeswoman for Rhee, said Ward 3 schools do not have the enrollment decline seen in some schools in other wards.

Several speakers questioned what would happen to the closed schools. Some speculated that the buildings would find their way into the hands of developers and be converted into condominiums unaffordable to middle- and low-income residents. Those accusations spilled over into the hearing.

Parents at the hearing made the case for keeping particular schools open. Burroughs Elementary, which is in Ward 5, had the biggest presence. Gray said organizers had originally requested that the council hear testimony from 288 people in support of Burroughs but agreed to whittle it down to a dozen. Ward 5 has the largest number of schools slated to close, with seven.

Maria P. Jones, head of the Local School Restructuring Team at Burroughs, rattled off the school's statistics. She said that enrollment was up and that Burroughs was among the top 20 elementary schools in math and reading scores. "Why is Burroughs on the [closing] list?" she asked.

Rhee said schools were selected based on their "walkability" and other factors, including declining enrollment. Noting the school system's $50 million utility bill, she said the closures would save money that could go toward teachers and programs.

But several education advocates testified that the cost savings would be less than the approximately $23 million Fenty and Rhee have projected. "If these 23 schools are closed, it isn't really going to save us a lot of money, and it's not going to allow us to do exciting new enrichment programs," said Mary Levy, director of the Public Education Reform Project for the Washington Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs.

Levy put the savings at about $14 million, based on her own analysis. Because finance officials have projected a deficit in the nearly $1 billion school budget, Levy said any savings would probably first be put toward closing that gap.

"Unless the council comes up with some other funding source, there's not just going to be the money there, for anything," Levy said. . . .

20 Years of Miseducation on Global Warming

From MeteorBlades at Daily Kos:

In the hot summer of 1988 - while Americans prepared to decide whether Vice President George H.W. Bush or the "Atari Democrat" – Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis – would replace Ronald Reagan in the Oval Office, James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, testified at a congressional hearing that he was convinced the earth’s atmosphere was warming up, that the warming was caused by human activity, and that severe shocks would result. A three-scenario graph accompanying his testimony sent a clarion warning.

The smears and propaganda began almost immediately from contrarians such as Patrick Michaels and a snake-oil salesman named S. Fred Singer. Eventually, it became known that both men (and others) were part of a well-financed campaign on the part of fossil-fuel companies to persuade Americans (and politicians) that global warming was a hoax and that Hansen and other scientists sounding the alarm were fools or worse.

The hearings in June 1988 weren’t the first time Hansen had said trouble was brewing. Nor were they the first time other scientists had publicly spoken of the potential crises warming might cause. But 1988 demarcated two periods. Before then, the science of climate change was tentative and the political opposition was mostly directly toward keeping data from being gathered in the first place, much less analyzed. Afterward, with the science ever more sure and cohesive, a cabal of petro-industrialists paid aggressive liars to attack the science and, sometimes, the scientists. Chief among those in the crosshairs were Hansen and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the research organization set up in that same watershed year by the World Health Organization and the United Nations Environment Program.

With the express purpose of casting "doubt on the theory of global warming," front groups with misleading names such as the Global Climate Coalition, the Global Climate Information Project, and the Cooler Heads Project (as well as the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the National Consumer Coalition) spread fabrications while their corporate sponsors paid tens of millions of dollars for public relations campaigns, advertising, and contributions to Democratic and Republican politicians.

These slick propagandists were immensely successful. In the ‘90s, President Bill Clinton – under assault by retrograde ideologues over a wide range of issues – chose to invest only a smidgen of his political capital to deal with a crisis many in the chattering classes still claimed was bogus. Throughout the ‘00s, the propagandists’ comrades-in-avarice have directly controlled the federal machinery, censoring, distorting, threatening and dragging their feet. The professional deniers’ favorite targets, from the IPCC to Hansen to Al Gore, have been repeatedly vindicated. Global warming has become the worst nightmare of the deniers and delayers: a household word.

Yet their two-decade-long assault on science and sound policy continues its negative impacts. Key world leaders, even including Mister Bush, say they understand that global warming is a crisis. But their acknowledgement hasn't been transformed into a passionate commitment for what matters: bold action.

Scientific interest in climate change goes back nearly two centuries, but the politics of global warming are only 50 years old. . . .

Charter Schools: "publicly funded private entities" that are resistant to state audit

Unreserved public spending with little oversight was once called Big Government by conservatives. Now that those same tax dollars are flowing to corporations, both for profit and for nonprofit tax credits, bad Big Government has become good Big Corporate Welfare, and it comes highly recommended by the same conservatives who now see state audits and accountability as intrusions on private innovation and initiative. Government meddling, you know.

With larger and larger chunks of American capital going international, the remaining domestic capitalists have to make a living somehow--and the half-trillion that Americans spend on education each year is a prime target for the education-industrial complex that will figure significantly in the Bush legacy that Rudy (911) will carry forward in the unlikely event he becomes president.

From the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle:

(January 12, 2008) — ALBANY — The New York Charter Schools Association and more than a dozen of its members will make their case Friday against having state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli's office audit their institutions.

The association, the New York City Center for Charter School Excellence, and 13 New York City-based charter schools contend that the comptroller does not have the statutory authority to conduct "performance" audits, that is, anything that falls outside of a financial-statement audit.

That can include examining whether they are meeting the goals set forth in their charters, their efficiency and practices they use to safeguard the institution.

"These performance audits are duplicative of the extensive academic review of charter schools already undertaken by the New York State Department of Education, the New York City Education Department and the charter schools' 'charter entities,'" said John Henry, an Albany attorney representing the plaintiffs.

Another argument the groups and schools are advancing is that DiNapoli doesn't have constitutional power to do any auditing of charter schools, which are publicly funded private entities.

Last summer, the Comptroller's Office sent letters to charter schools authorized by New York City's Department of Education about its intent to conduct "performance" audits.

The move was prompted by an audit of the city Board of Education that determined annual reports that charter schools had filed lacked "critical, required performance information." The Comptroller's Office found that the department did not have a formal process to review information or develop corrective action. . . .

Who Needs Gated Schools When You Have Bounty Hunters?

As the houses, cars, and people in the burbs get bigger and bigger, there is an accompanying shrinkage in taxpayer willingness to support increases to fund what was once known as the public good. The result in New Jersey middle class enclaves where the school systems are small enough to have historically maintained segregation? Bounty hunters to locate and roust out cheaters from poor communities who are trying to enroll their children in schools that are not dead end testing factories. What else. From the NY Times:

At 8 o’clock one morning, Juanita Ludwig and Vincent Constantino, employees of Clifton Public Schools, are knocking on the door at a house to check a tip. Someone had said a Clifton elementary school student did not really live there and was sneaking in from another district.

Ms. Ludwig, the supervisor of counseling and student services, explains to the parent who answers the door that the district must check to see that the child lives there most of the time. “We made sure there were age-appropriate toys for an 8-year-old child,” she said. “We explain to the parents that the child must stay at the house at least four nights a week.”

. . . .

And there are many ways to find students who don’t belong. Bounties, detectives, stakeouts with cameras, and hot lines that receive tips from anonymous callers are tools that some school districts use to combat the perennial problem of illegally enrolled students.

. . . .

Under state law, a student a student may legally attend the school in the district where he or she resides the majority of the time. Out-of-district students are required to pay tuition.

Three years ago, the Clark Public School District hired a retired police officer to investigate cases of illegal students. The investigator has parked outside students’ homes to see if they come out in the morning and checked documents like licenses and car registrations.

“The key word here is domicile,” Superintendent Vito Gagliardi said. “The child must live in the house as a primary residence.”

. . . .

Ewing has one full-time attendance officer and four part-time officers, said Raymond Broach, the school superintendent. “It’s a pretty steady issue,” he said. Students have been caught coming in from Bristol and Morrisville, Pa., across the Delaware River.

In Teaneck, Al Schulz, a retired police detective, is attendance officer. Sometimes, he watches to see if students are coming over the George Washington Bridge from New York, said David Bicofsky, the district spokesman.

“You are talking $10,000 to $11,000 a year to educate a student,” he said. “You have to be vigilant for your taxpayers.”

Disordered Goals or Policy Thoughts?

No one, not even the US Dept. of Education, believes that there is the slightest chance that all school children will be at grade level in reading and math by 2014. Yet this remains the central weapon in the NCLB privatization plan and in the Bush reauthorization fantasized for later this year.

When asked about this reality in Florida the other day, here is what Sec. Spellings said:

. . . .Spellings said she saw no reason to deviate from that goal.

"If we blink at this critical moment I think it will be a tragic thing for the country," she told lawmakers. "Why would we expect something different from somebody else's kid than we expect for our own kids? I want my kid on grade level today. I damn sure don't want her waiting until 2014.

From the Merck Online Manual:

Thought disorder refers to disorganized thinking, which becomes apparent when speech is rambling, shifts from one topic to another, and loses its goal-directed quality. Speech may be mildly disorganized or completely incoherent and incomprehensible. Bizarre behavior may take the form of childlike silliness, agitation, or inappropriate appearance, hygiene, or conduct. Catatonia is an extreme form of bizarre behavior in which a person maintains a rigid posture and resists efforts to be moved . . . .

Boss Mike, State Audits, and Buying Control of Public Resources

Yesterday the NY Times had this story on the sweetheart deal underway for turning Randalls Island over to Manhattan's elite private schools. Well, let's be fair--the consortium of private schools would get control of the ball fields there two-third of the time, while the public schools would get them one-third of the time. That sounds about right, don't you think.

Bloomberg obviously has no problem with collecting cash from the big givers whose cash produces tax credits while buying them control of public facilities for their children who would not be caught dead in one of the testing chain gangs that Klein refers to as public schools.

And today the Times has this on an impending state audit for the $315,000,000 in no-bid contracts by the City's Education Department. Sounds like something Boss Mike might not be able to use on his resume for candidate-in-waiting-to-see-if-Edwards-gets-knocked-out for President.

The state comptroller, Thomas P. DiNapoli, is opening an audit of the City Education Department’s increasing practice of awarding contracts without competitive bidding. In the past five years such contracts have totaled $315 million.

To keep down costs, competitive bidding is normally required of city agencies. But although the Education Department is controlled by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, it is by law a state-authorized entity free from some of the more stringent city financial regulations. . . .

"Hard Times" Comes to Pa. High School Students

From Beaver County Times and Allegheny Times:

Published: Thursday, January 10, 2008 7:21 AM EST
Education is supposed to make children think, not churn out better test takers.

In yet one more step toward testing-based factories that will masquerade as schools and wring all the joy out of learning, the state Board of Education is considering the adoption of a statewide graduation test.

The Associated Press reports proponents have said the rules would ensure that all students entering college and the work force meet the state’s academic standards.

The regulations, which would take effect for the class of 2014, call for students to pass a battery of state-approved tests in reading, math, science and social studies that would replace traditional final exams. Failing students would be allowed to retake the tests, but schools would have to provide remedial help for them first.

In the draft under consideration, students can demonstrate their proficiency in a given subject by passing the Pennsylvania System of School Assessment tests; a state graduation competency assessment; local exams approved by companies that evaluate educational tests; or Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate exams.

In a rare show of unity, the Pennsylvania School Boards Association and the Pennsylvania State Education Association, the state’s largest teachers’ union, oppose the proposal. The AP reports they and other groups that oppose the new state tests say the revised proposal doesn’t address their objections that the plan places too much emphasis on a single test and undermines local school boards’ policymaking authority.

But there’s a larger matter in regard to this issue: As the result of the federal No Child Left Behind Act, the PSSAs and other standardized exams, test preparation is crowding out learning in America’s public schools.

Education is no longer child driven; it’s data driven. Children aren’t being taught to be lifelong learners; they’re being instructed on how to be better test takers. Teachers are no longer instructors; they’re test preparers. Children aren’t being taught to become thinkers; they’re being turned into automatons that will vomit back what’s been poured into them. It’s not what children learn that matters: it’s how well they score on standardized tests.

As a result, American children spend far too much class time preparing for tests, leaving little room for creative thinking. They read the same books, take the same tests and think the same thoughts — the ones that they’ll be tested on. They are being conformed to think as one.

Thomas Gradgrind would be right at home in American education today. Unfortunately, he was a fictional education-reform ogre of Victorian England.

In Charles Dickens’s “Hard Times,” Gradgrind blustered, “Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts; nothing else will ever be of any service to them.”

American education truly has fallen on hard times. Dickens’s nightmare has become our ideal.

U. S. Secretary of Education Has No Position on Evolution in Science Standards

For all the rhetoric about world-class standards and maintaining scientific supremacy in the world, the underlying theocratic stranglehold of and on this Administration makes the current situation in Florida even more striking to observers who shake their heads at the Reign of the Texas Hillbillies. From the Miami Herald:

TALLAHASSEE -- U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, who is visiting states to tout the benefits of the federal No Child Left Behind Act, stayed as far away as she could from the unfolding controversy in Florida over whether the word ''evolution'' should be included in the state's science standards for schools. The State Board of Education is expected to vote on the new weather science standards next month.

Spellings said it isn't her job to make policy decisions and said it was up to people such as new Florida Education Commissioner Eric Smith. When asked whether the nation's top education official has a position on whether evolution should be a part of science standards, Spellings replied: ``No, I don't.'' . . .

And there's this from Daily Kos:

by DarkSyde
Fri Jan 11, 2008 at 04:26:20 AM PST

From the Florida Citizens for Science (FCS), Taylor County passes a resolution:

[W]e are requesting that the State Board of Education direct the Florida Department of Education to revise/edit the new Sunshine State Standards for Science so that evolution is presented as one of several theories as to how the universe was formed.

One of several theories as to how the universe was formed? Good grief, could they be any more blatant in their scientific ignorance? Evolutionary biology examines how living things change over time, regardless of how the universe (Or the earth) ‘formed.’ Evo is about as relevant to the origin of the universe as geology.

Early indications are that many more counties in the Sunshine State have passed or are considering almost identical resolutions. The inference is that someone is shopping around an anti-science template to perhaps well meaning but nevertheless gullible school board members. Friendly warning: with the help of science champions across the progressive blogosphere and in every local community, FCS is going to find out who's behind this misinformation campaign and drag them into the light of public scrutiny.

In the meantime, if physical reality is something we could change merely by voting on it, why not vote big? How about "Resolved: Cancer is no longer a deadly disease and is instead less serious than a hangnail" or "We the undersigned hereby decree all people can travel faster than light anytime they want to"? If you can answer that question for cancer or relativity, you've answered it for evolutionary biology as well.

A Call for the Repeal of No Child Left Behind

Steve Novick (D) is running for a seat in the U. S. Senate from Oregon. From Op-Ed News:

A Call for the Repeal of No Child Left Behind

By Steve Novick

Six years ago, George Bush signed a law, No Child Left Behind (NCLB), that told the states that every public school student in America would have to meet state standards for proficiency in reading and math, as determined by standardized testing, by 2014. That law said that schools that did not make what the law described as adequate progress toward that goal would face a series of sanctions, the last of which would be "restructuring" the entire school – by, for instance, firing most of the staff, and / or turning operation of the school over to a private management company.

It is no secret that in the past six years, many educators, administrators, parents, and politicians have complained long and loud about the implementation of NCLB. What remains a mystery, to me at least, is why so few members of Congress had the courage and the sense to vote against this law when it was first proposed. For it is, and always should have been, fairly obvious that NCLB was, from the beginning, the domestic policy equivalent of the war in Iraq – a proposal sold on blatantly false pretenses, to fulfill an agenda that had little or nothing to do with the Administration’s stated rationale.

Why do I say that? Well, let’s look at the stated goal of the law: Every child in America must meet state standards for proficiency in math and science by 2014. And yes, they really do mean virtually every child. The Bush Administration has outlined some minimal exceptions, but the law does really mean 100%.

Now, some people have argued that the goal itself was always wildly inappropriate. That the idea that EVERY child should meet state standards by 2014 was always pie in the sky, unless the standards were so watered-down as to be meaningless.

But if you did take the goal seriously, one of the first things you would have done was determine the cost of meeting it. Because, obviously, there will be a cost. You’re not going to get anywhere close to 100% proficiency without reducing class sizes, giving many kids on-on-one instruction, improving professional development programs, experimenting with new curricula and new instructional materials.

If George Bush had come to Oregon, we could have told him that we had already developed a formula for calculating the cost of getting ninety percent of students to state standards. In the 1990’s, a bipartisan commission of very thoughtful Oregonians developed what they called the "quality education model." Today, the QEM tells us what kind of additional investment in class size reduction, new materials, teacher training and so forth we would need to have a good chance of getting 90% of students to state standards in this school year. The answer? About $750 million more a year – to take us from today, when on average about 70% of students meet state standards (with variations by grade and by subject), to 90% proficiency.

Obviously, to get anywhere close to 100% will take a lot more. As any educator can tell you, the last 10% would likely be the hardest. Kids from troubled homes, kids with learning disabilities, kids with severe challenges that will require all the help and support an educator can provide – and even then there is no guarantee of success. It seems safe to say any kind of good-faith effort to get to 100% would have to cost at least another $750 million a year in Oregon alone.

So has the Federal government under NCLB given Oregon and other states the resources to meet this standard set out by the act? Have they given us an extra $1.5 billion in the last couple of budget? No. The entire federal investment in Oregon schools this year is $470 million. In real terms, that’s about a $100 million increase above what the Feds were giving Oregon in the 2000-2001 school year. Put another way, the federal government now provides, total, 9.7% of the funding for public schools in Oregon. In 2000-2001, they provided 7.4%.

Think about those numbers for a minute. We know it would take an extra $750 million a year to get the 90% goal set out in the Quality Education Model - they give us $100 million and say "now hit 100%." They used to provide 7.4% of the funding – they say "we’ll ratchet that up to 9.7%, and in return you have to create Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon: make every child above average, or face the consequences."

Did Bush and his advisors ever really think this would work? It seems unlikely. And Oregon, by the way, is not some outlier; our standards aren’t absurdly high, nor are our students and teachers leading the nation in incompetence. Any state with reasonably ambitious academic standards faces the same kind of problems with Bush’s school law that we do.
So the Bush Administration didn’t really think that they were going to make every student in America above average. What were they thinking? What was their motivation?

I’ll tell you what my mother said at the time. And yes, my mother is, on this issue, a highly reliable source. She was one of the first Head Start teachers. Much later, she got her Ph. D in early childhood education, and became a researcher at the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory. And when this law was proposed, she said: "The purpose of this law is to discredit and then privatize public education. In 2014, they’ll say: ‘See? Public education has failed. They haven’t made every child above average. So it’s time for vouchers and privatization.’"

Does that sound far-fetched? It shouldn’t. Clearly, the real purpose of this law was not its stated purpose, so what other possibilities are there? This Administration has partly privatized Medicare, tried to privatize Social Security, largely privatized the war in Iraq. In the eyes of George Bush, Dick Cheney and their cronies, the purpose of government is to allow the cronies to make a few, or a few million, or a few billion extra bucks. Why wouldn’t they try it with our public education system?

I’ll tell you one person who wouldn’t think it’s far-fetched: Jonathan Kozol. The stated purpose of this law was to help low-income and minority children. The famous author of "Savage Inequalities" has spent decades as a fierce advocate for those children. And in a recent article in Harper’s, Kozol had this to say about the Bush education law:

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.

Kozol points first to the law’s requirement that schools who have ‘failed’ for three years must spend a certain amount of money on ‘supplemental services’ – which, in practice, has largely meant, test-preparation services provided by private contractors. Next, Kozol notes that when schools are forced to ‘reconstitute’ under new management, "it is the profit-making firms, with their superb promotional machinery, that are best positioned to obtain these valuable contracts."

Other people who don’t think my mother’s theory is far-fetched would include everybody who has studied the close relationship between the Bush family and the McGraw-Hill Corporation, and who has read the Inspector General’s report on the conflicts of interest that plagued Bush’s Reading First program, in which millions were steered to McGraw-Hill to buy its scripted phonics-only programs. If the purpose of "Reading First" was to steer money to McGraw-Hill, why shouldn’t the purpose of NCLB itself have been to steer more public money to the private sector? McGraw-Hill, by the way, has also made millions upon millions of dollars as purveyors of tests used in the NCLB regime.

But this isn’t the surprise of what happened with No Child Left Behind. The real question is why did so many Democrats vote for it? Why did only ten Senators – mavericks like Paul Wellstone and Russ Feingold – vote "no"?

I think that in part, it was fear. Just as so many Democrats voted for the war because they were afraid of being called soft on terrorism; and so many have voted to continue funding the war, our of fear of being accused of ‘not supporting the troops’; and so many voted to expand warrantless wiretapping authority because, again, they were afraid of being accused of being ‘soft on terrorism’ – I think many voted ‘yes’ because they were afraid that if they said no, Bush would have attacked them for ‘wanting to leave children behind.’
But for others – including the members of Oregon’s own delegation, who do not lack for courage, but voted for this law – I suspect it was misplaced trust. I think they wanted to believe that on this issue, George Bush was sincere. And I think they also trusted Ted Kennedy. Kennedy was supposed to know this issue, and he worked this out with Bush. Why, I don’t know. We can only assume that he didn’t do his homework. He can’t possibly have consulted with educators, researchers, school administrators, and concluded that a two percent increase in funding would make every child above average. Yes, I know that Kennedy argued for a larger increase in Federal funding – but nobody ever talked about the kind of money it would really have taken to even pretend that this law was intended to succeed.

So there are two lessons to be learned from this. The first is, when an Administration comes in and its first priority is slashing taxes for the wealthiest people – if they think that the biggest problem in America is that rich people don’t have enough money – I think you need to question their motivations on most issues; don’t just trust them on anything. The second lesson is, if you’re casting a vote on as big an issue as revamping the entire public education system, don’t trust anybody else to do your homework for you. Don’t vote until you’re talked to the experts in the field, the people on the ground. I promise you that as your next United States Senator, I will remember those lessons – and remind my colleagues of them, as well.

Now we come to the programmatic part of this speech. Obviously, I think the Bush law whose anniversary we mourn today should be put out of our misery. There is one key part of the Act that we should keep: the requirement that schools collect so-called "disaggregated data," using some sort of evaluation method to determine how various groups of kids are doing. Schools should have to show how the low-income kids are doing, how the African-American kids are doing, how the limited-English students are doing, and so on, so communities can see that data and act on it. And the Federal government, which does provide some money that is supposed to go to low-income students, has a right to ask for that information. But that’s a lot different from a right to demand every school district live up to the Lake Wobegon model, based on a 2% increase in funding.

So once the Bush law – with that one exception – is off the books, what’s next? What do I think the Federal role in public education should be?

For starters, the Federal government could do schools a huge favor by adopting a rational national health care policy. Schools, just like General Motors and other private employers who offer health coverage, are increasingly weighted down by health care costs. If we adopted a single-payer national health care system, public schools could reduce class sizes, free up time for the best teachers to act as mentors, restock their libraries with books, hire more counselors, pay janitors and cafeteria workers a decent wage.

Even if we just did what Ron Wyden has suggested – require everyone to have insurance, and require ALL employers to pay something toward health care – it would help the schools; because right now, schools and other employers that provide health care are paying the freight for those that don’t. When uninsured people go to the emergency room, those costs are shifted to the people with insurance – and to their employers.

Second, the Federal government should fulfill its decades-old, decades-neglected promise to fund 40% of the cost of complying with the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). Historically, the federal government has provided less than half that amount, helping to create an environment in which parents who just want what’s right for their kids too often wind up pitted against school administrators and other parents, in what seems like a zero-sum game.

Third, the U.S. Department of Education should emphasize research and advice, identifying the most promising educational practices in the United States and around the world, and sending ambassadors with that information to school districts across America. Not developing systems of sanctions to set our schools up for failure.

Fourth, it is high time for Uncle Sam to fully fund Head Start, ensuring that every eligible child – every child in poverty – has an opportunity to participate in an enriching pre-school program.

Fifth, the Federal Government, in partnership with states and local districts, should invest in a massive "green school buildings" program – replacing dark, crumbling school buildings across America with new, energy-efficient buildings, maximizing natural light, providing a better learning environment and fighting global warming at the same time. We could call the new green school building program: "Leave No Child in the Dark."

But beyond these priorities, it is clear that we cannot build the education system we need for the future through slogans. Educators, administrators and parents across Oregon and across the nation know the hard work and determination it will take to help our students succeed. It is time for the federal government to be a full a partner in that project, rather than looking for an opportunity to pull the rug out from under our public schools. Thank you.

Authors Website: www.novickforsenate.org

Authors Bio: Steve Novick was raised in Cottage Grove Oregon. Due to failure of a budget levy in 1976, he enrolled at the University of Oregon and graduated at age 18. He then went on to Harvard Law school where he graduated at age 21. After stops in law firms in New York and San Francisco, Steve joined the Environment Division (then known as the "Land and Natural Resources Division") of the United States Justice Department in 1987. He brought successful lawsuits against polluters for violations of the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act. He also served as lead counsel in the notorious Love Canal case. On that case in 1995, Steve and his team negotiated a settlement in which Occidental Chemical repaid the taxpayers $129 million in cleanup costs and interest. Returning to Oregon, Steve worked as policy director for Tom Bruggere's 1996 Senate bid. He then served as chief of staff to the Democrats in the State Senate from 1997 to 1999. Subsequently, he was Executive Director of the Center for Constructive Citizen Action, which spearheaded the fight against Bill Sizemore's Measure 91, which would have cut the State budget for schools, health care and public safety by more than 20%. Steve Novick is now running as a progressive democrat for the U.S. Senate and is giving Oregon the chance to defeat Gordon Smith. He is a true candidate of the people, peace, and the environment.

Holding NCLB Accountable

Press Release from the Civil Rights Project:

NEW BOOK PROVIDES EXAMINATION AND EVALUTION OF THE NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND ACT

Los Angeles—January 9, 2008—A new book from The Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles (CRP/PDC) at UCLA’s Graduate School of Education and Information Studies evaluates and accesses the efficacy of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) test-based accountability in today’s schools. The book, Holding NCLB Accountable: Achieving Accountability, Equity, and School Reform (Corwin Press, 2008), is edited by CRP/PDC senior researcher Gail L. Sunderman.
The pending reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act has generated a spirited debate among educators. In this book, a team of noted education scholars assess NCLB’s performance-based system and discuss options for improving the law. With contributions from Gary Orfield, Linda Darling Hammond, Catherine Snow, Robert Linn, and Daniel Koretz, among others, Holding NCLB Accountable examines themes
of capacity, accountablity, school reform, and the law’s impact on educating all students, especially those from low-income and diverse backgrounds. It responds to critical questions such as the following:

• How do we develop assessments and accountabilty systems that assist rather than interfere with educational progress?

• How do we press for change without being counterproductive?

• How do we create a viable educational agenda that is mindful of state and local capacity?

Harvard testing expert Daniel Koretz argues that the entire NCLB accountabiltiy system is not based on hard evidence. Koretz says, “We know far too little about how to hold schools accountable for improving student performance.”

Jaekyung Lee, associate professor of education at the State University of New York in Buffalo, compares the findings from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) to state assessment results and shows that the federal accountability hasn’t improved reading and mathematical achievement or reduced achievement gaps. “Based on the NAEP, there are no systemic indications of improving the average achievement and narrowing the gap after NCLB,” says Lee. Other contributors suggest that the nation has not focused on the kinds of serious long-term reforms that can actually produce gains and narrow the huge gaps in opportunity and achievement for minority students.

Throughout the book, contributors provide information on what we know and don’t know about educational accountability and what types of accountalbity systems will most improve opportunties for low-performing students while minimizing the negative effects. They provide the groundwork for developing a system of multiple measures, for obtaining evidence on whether NCLB is achieving its aim to increase student achievement and close the racial achievement gap, and tackling the very important issue of whether states have the financial and administrative capacity to meet the law’s requirements and turn around low-performing schools. Finally, contributors examine whether NCLB maximizes its potential for fostering reform in low-performing schools. Taken together, these discussions raise important questions about the law’s effects and offer strong recommendations for designing workable accountablity systems that will lead to coherent efforts to improve schools.

Among the authors’ findings are the following:

• We know too little about what types of accountability systems will most improve opportunities for low-performing students.

• The current NCLB accountability system does not provide the information we need to know how students are performing or what to do to advance students’ learning and improve instruction.

• Evidence that NCLB is working to improve student achievement and close achievement gaps is not promising.

• State education agencies’ capacity to meet the law’s requirements and intervene in low-performing schools on the scale demanded by NCLB is limited.

• Many of the NCLB provisions, including the definition of highly qualified teachers, the design of the testing and accountability regulations, and the reliance on mandates impede school reform and make it more difficult for high schools serving low-income students to do their work.

• Only about 40% of the nation’s high schools that have high dropout rates are identified as needing improvement by NCLB’s core accountability measure (AYP).

The editor and authors of Holding NCLB Accountable recommend:

• More needs to be done to develop an accountability system that is fair, yields information that informs and advances student learning goals, and contributes to improving instruction. This includes, but is not limited to, adopting performance goals that are ambitious but realistic and obtainable, multiple indicators of performance, and realistic timetables for school improvement.

• The high expectations of NCLB must be paired with adequate support and greater investment in capacity building in low-performing schools and districts.

• To offset the disadvantages faced by historically lower performing groups of students, in-school programs and reforms need to be complemented with out-of-school interventions and programs that address nonschool conditions such as housing, poverty, health care, and safety.

• An independent, federally funded analysis of what it takes in administrative and financial resources for states to have a reasonable chance of turning around low-performing schools needs to be conducted. . . .

Cheap Charter Solution Eliminates Retiree Health Care

The new urban model for K-12 education in New Orleans has a new strategy for attracting only the most desperate educators who can't compete for teaching jobs in the suburban public systems that still have benefits for their teachers: Along with no job security, the new poor community solution offers no health benefits for retired teachers.  From the Times Picauyne:

For teacher Dennis Mischler the road to retirement will take an unexpected, last-minute twist.

The 30-year veteran had planned to end his career at Lusher Charter School, where he has taught fifth grade for the past five years. But this school year Mischler faced an agonizing choice. He could spend his last semester teaching at Lusher and forgo retirement health benefits, or move to a non-charter school run directly by the Orleans Parish school system, and retire with medical benefits.

When it became a charter school more than two years ago, Lusher's teachers were placed on a leave of absence from the Orleans Parish school system for three years. District officials said state charter law required that teachers at schools converting from traditional programs to charters be put on leave for the three-year period. That means unless the teachers return from "leave," the retiree health and life insurance benefits they worked toward in the old system will be lost.

The unique predicament illustrates the unanticipated wrinkles that can arise in a school system that transformed into a system of mostly charter schools at unprecedented speed -- and must now try to share a limited pool of money and teachers. It also shows the challenges that charter schools can face in offering the services and benefits that a central office -- and the collective buying power of a large school system -- would have provided in the past.

If he stayed at Lusher, Mischler would still be eligible for the basic retirement benefits through the state retirement system for public school teachers. It's a share of the ancillary retirement benefits, like medical and life insurance, that the Orleans Parish school system provides, but nearly all charter schools do not.

. . . .

Like other employers, charter schools are in no way obligated to offer retiree health care as a benefit. Huffstutler, 61, said the Lusher teachers knew they were taking a three-year leave of absence from the district when the school became a charter. But she's not sure they all realized the ramifications for retirement benefits.

"At some point, the (school) board is going to say, 'We are not going to hire someone back for a semester just so we can pay insurance for them for the rest of their life,' " said Brian Riedlinger, chief executive officer of the Algiers Charter Schools Association, a cooperative that manages nine charter schools. "That doesn't make sense."

. . . .

Some charter operators have studied ways to add more retirement benefits, but cost remains a steep obstacle. Riedlinger said that, for the Algiers Charter Schools Association, "the decision was made early on that it would just destroy us" to offer retiree health benefits. "We knew it was going to be a problem early on," he said. . . .

It's the Poverty and Hopelessness, Stupid!

While merit pay, combat pay, do-gooder pay, and all other symtom treatments fail to solve the teacher retention problem, the dropout problem, or the academic problem, these band-aids also keep teachers from the reason they went into teaching to begin with--to make a difference in the lives of children and to see children grow. These so-called solutions offer more evidence of a persistent, self-imposed blindness that we refuse to give up.

An illustrative clip from an op-ed by Walt Gardner:

Beset by the retirement of veteran teachers and the flight of younger faculty, schools in poor neighborhoods across the country are increasingly turning to combat pay to recruit and retain replacements. But the controversial strategy will not produce the 700,000 teachers they need in the next decade. The bleak outlook has particular relevance for California, where every year 10 percent of teachers in schools serving poor students transfer to other schools. The most recent evidence comes from Dallas, which had only 65 takers for its offer of $6,000 annual bonuses to lure teachers to the city's hard-to-staff schools. Researchers at the University of Texas at Dallas attributed the disappointing results to the amount tendered. They estimated that bonuses would have to equal 45 percent of base pay to attract the number of teachers required. If they are correct, the amount would come to an average of $20,000 for mid-career teachers.

But even that overly optimistic prediction offers only a partial solution because it focuses solely on the recruitment side of the equation. It says nothing about the equally important retention side.

Churn is costly. It forces a school to repeatedly screen new teachers, undermines instructional continuity, and makes students feel abandoned. Massachusetts serves as a case in point. In 1999, the Bay State began offering $20,000 sign-up bonuses to teachers, primarily to lure them to failing schools. After one year, however, one-fifth of these teachers bailed out of the classroom entirely, while many others fled to suburban schools.

Massachusetts's experience does not bode well for Denver. Under a recently implemented strategy known as ProComp, which was funded after voters agreed to pony up an additional $25 million in property taxes, teachers receive bonuses for working in hard-to-staff schools as well as for meeting three other requirements. This likely explains why teacher applications, so far, are up substantially. But it's doubtful that the trend will continue once word travels through the grapevine about the daunting task of educating students with huge deficits in socialization, motivation and intellectual development. . . .

Fenty/Rhee's Divide-and-Conquer Strategy Inspires Parent Boycott

Democracy lives in DC! Fenty, Rhee, and their PR firm thought they would neutralize opposition to Phase 1 of their school charterization plan by having 23 simultaneous "data-gathering" meetings in the schools set to be axed. Parents and teachers aren't buying it, and neither are the local politicians who recognize an important issue when they see it.

Will the boycott lead to calls for Rhee's resignation? From WaPo:

Parents and community activists called yesterday for a boycott of Mayor Adrian M. Fenty's 23 public hearings on school closings set for Jan. 17 and have set up a single meeting that evening for residents to attend instead. Fenty's multiple gatherings, critics say, are an effort to minimize public input.

D.C. Council member Marion Barry (D-Ward 8) said he supports the boycott, and fellow council member Harry Thomas Jr. (D-Ward 5) helped secure the John A. Wilson Building as a meeting site. The mass meeting is a response to public anger over Fenty's decision two weeks ago to cancel a citywide public hearing and replace it with 23 hearings that Fenty (D) said would allow for more detailed discussions. Activists opposed the arrangement because the mayor and D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee would not be able to attend all the hearings.

Parents from some of the schools slated to be closed and community activists formed the Coalition to Save Our Neighborhood Schools. The group has launched a citywide campaign -- including fliers, radio public service ads and church announcements -- urging parents to attend what is being called "The People's Meeting" at the Wilson Building.

Fenty "is on his one-man routine. We're telling parents we don't have to put up with this," said Cherita Whiting, a parent activist and coalition member.

"Parents are not going to sit back and be told what to do," she added. . . .

Federal Court of Appeals Rules NCLB Unconstitutional

While the withering Decider was in Chicago threatening to veto any changes in NCLB that would interrupt the sanctions, shutdowns, and charterizing of public schools, a federal appeals court was ruling 2-1 that NCLB is unconstitutional. Will Spellings and her lawyers eventually appeal? More likely that ED will use this year to invent new ways to push all the public money it can toward the ed industry, which is sure to take a hit after November. Goodbye, yellow brick road.

From the NY Times:

. . . . In the ruling Monday, the appeals court sent the suit back to the lower court, arguing that a passage of the Constitution known as the spending clause requires Congress to give states clear notice of their financial liabilities when they accept federal financing that may fall short of the full costs of complying with requirements from Washington.

“Because we conclude that N.C.L.B. fails to provide clear notice as to who bears the additional costs of compliance, we reverse the judgment of the district court,” the ruling said. It also noted that because the states had been required to spend state and local money to meet requirements of the federal law, their “injury has already occurred and is ongoing.”

David B. Cruz, a law professor at the University of Southern California, said the ruling could leave the district court judge little choice but to rule in favor of the districts and the union.

But the Bush administration could also appeal to the Supreme Court, and Ms. Spellings left open that possibility.

“The federal government is exploring all legal options available,” Ms. Spellings said in a statement Monday. “This decision could undermine efforts to improve the education of our nation’s children, in particular those students most in need.”

Reg Weaver, president of the National Education Association, said the ruling “indicates that if the federal government hands down programs, it’s their responsibility to pay for them, so that’s a victory for the students of America.”

Bush Celebrates 6 Years From Hell

One more year! One more year! One more year!

From the Chicago Sun-Times editorial:

Here are three kids 'left behind'

Bush here to tout his law; better he should see its sad impact

January 7, 2008
President Bush arrives in town today, primed to spread the gospel on one of his key policy initiatives, the No Child Left Behind Law.

The sweeping law expects all children, regardless of race, income or disability, to perform at grade level by 2014.

The goals are lofty, but the reality is jarring. We thought the president should meet some of the children in Chicago who are left behind every day, especially in our high schools.

Meet Denise Ferrusquia, a junior at Kelly High School on the Southwest Side. Many of her classes have 35 students or more.

"There are so many kids that you can't really ask questions or express your opinion so you can learn," said Denise, who hopes to be the first in her family to go to college. "I feel I have to do learning on my own."

The hallways are so packed at Kelly that it's hard to move. "It's a very hostile setting," she said. "Everyone is just angry and trying to get to class."

Denise takes mostly honors classes and is on the student council and debate team. But she fears she can't compete.

"It's not fair to compare us to other schools where it's not overcrowded," she said. "There, the teachers can focus on them more."

Brad Johnson, a recent CPS grad, didn't realize how shortchanged he had been until he arrived at Loyola University Chicago last fall.

"Professors expect me to know a lot of things, and I just don't," said Brad, a 2007 Austin High School graduate. "I thought I had study skills, but now that I'm here, it's been hard. I got straight A's [in high school] without studying."

During his sophomore year, CPS began phasing out Austin, a chronically low-performing school. Two promising replacement schools have since opened at Austin as part of a new CPS-led effort to overhaul failing high schools, but Brad paid a price for sticking it out in a dying school. He couldn't even take an advanced placement class.

Finally, Bush should hear about David Wells, who dropped out of Morgan Park High School. He accepts some responsibility but also blames the school, where he says his teachers were distant.

"When people want you to succeed, that makes you want to succeed, but if you're just sitting in the classroom and kids are talking about smoking and drinking, the focus isn't on work," David said.

David now goes to an alternative public school and is flourishing there. But seats at those schools are limited.

"NCLB doesn't do anything for the huge numbers of kids who have dropped out," said Jack Wuest, director of the Chicago Alternative Schools Network.

It has been six years since Bush signed the landmark No Child bill. Efforts to reauthorize it stalled last year, and he will likely be talking the law up today, touting its accomplishments.

He'll find little to brag about in Chicago high school test scores.

Since the No Child law passed, average state test scores for high schoolers haven't budged. In fact, reading scores for minority students and for poor students are lower than in 2003, a Sun-Times analysis found. There has been meaningful progress on the ACT since 2003, but white student gains outpaced gains made by black and Hispanic students.

Those numbers won't improve, many in Chicago's trenches say, unless the law is changed to address what stands in the way: inequitable funding, overcrowding, violence, truancy and the overwhelming effects of poverty.

"If they're not willing to take these problems seriously ... then NCLB is a waste of time," said Andrew Martinek, a teacher at Gage Park High School, which saw a spike in violence after it absorbed a record number of freshmen in 2006. "They're trying to force innovation without the tools."

Bush's proposals for a reauthorized law include a nod toward some of these problems, including targeted resources for schools most in need, more funding for high schools and more rigorous coursework. But so far, neither he nor Congress has delivered.

The president has argued against "the soft bigotry of low expectations." But setting high standards -- without the requisite help to get there -- isn't any better.

The president is scheduled to meet with business leaders today at the Union League Club.

Charters and Vouchers Starving Ohio Public Schools

From Vindy.com:

YOUNGSTOWN — The city schools lost nearly 500 pupils this school year, but that’s not as large a drop as school officials had anticipated.

The district had expected a loss of about 600, said Dr. Wendy Webb, superintendent.

Youngstown lost 660 pupils last year.

The latest official count shows the city schools have 7,716 children enrolled this school year. That’s down 499 from last year and more than 1,700 from the 9,442 enrolled in fiscal year 2005.

The advent of charter schools, the state’s open-enrollment program and, more recently, the educational choice school voucher plan have taken a heavy toll on the city school district.

Combined, those programs have some 3,500 city school children enrolled this year, a number that has continued to grow annually, creating a severe revenue drop in the process. State subsidies follow the pupils, and those 3,500 are taking approximately $26.4 million with them. Charter schools account for $21.6 million of that amount, open enrollment takes another $3.8 million, and school vouchers account for about $1 million more. . . .

The Heart That the Racists and Chauvinists Can't Touch and That Corporations Can't Own

Special Education Students Left Behind in New Orleans Charter Chain Gangs

When Orleans School Board President, Phyllis Landrieu, thanked God for Katrina, which allowed the building of a charter school system to replace the public one that was washed away, she might have offered in her prayer some mention of the needs of special education students, which she and God both have obviously forgotten about.

These are the children who would come be written off by the advocates for the cheap charter chain gang "choice" solution that was planned by power elites of both political parties as the ultimate solution and national model to educating the poor. These are the children who got the choice of those elites interested in crushing the rights of students and teachers alike in the new decentralized version of school prisons on the cheap.

To be sure, the State of Louisiana has maintained some traditional public schools (Recovery School District) in New Orleans as the control group for the test score comparisons that will show the new charter schools out-performing the traditional schools. Unlike the new charters, the recovery schools do not have selective admissions, the Recovery Schools have higher student-teacher ratios, and they have larger numbers of students with special needs.

Stay tuned for LEAP scores later this year, which will produce banner headlines on how the charters have saved New Orleans children from ignorance. Thank you, Jesus, and pass the offering plate so corporations can get their tax credits for helping to support God's preferred solution.

The Times-Picauyne has a big story today on the struggle by one parent to get special education for her child. A couple of excerpts here:

. . . .Part of the issue comes down to money: Providing strong special education services is not always financially advantageous -- or even feasible -- for charter schools. While a typical urban school system might have a special education administrator who oversees services for 6,000 students, for instance, a typical charter school might have 60 special education students, but would still need an administrator who knows the technicalities of complicated special education laws. Schools that are individually run can't take advantage of the economies of scale present in larger school systems.

. . . .

At John McDonogh Senior High School, a traditional school in the Recovery School District, at least one out of every six students had a disability such as autism, blindness or mental retardation that entitled them to special education services on the official student count date. But at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Charter School for Science and Technology, a Recovery District charter school, one in every 40 children was a special education student at the count date. And at Benjamin Franklin High School, a selective charter school overseen by the Orleans Parish School Board, recent statistics show that one in every 200 students qualifies for special education.

These figures do not include gifted and talented students, who also qualify for exceptional children's services under state law. At Franklin, for instance, about 75 percent of the children are gifted and talented.

The numbers are fluid, and educators say there could be many unidentified special education students in the city's charter and traditional schools, or ones who have been identified since the count date.

"It's hard to just look at the data and say, 'This school has 11 special education students, and this school has 20,'¤" said Doris Hicks, principal at King. "We've gotten a lot of students that probably were in special education before Katrina, whose parents saw it as an opportunity not to put them in because of the stigma they perceived."

'Encouraged' to leave?

Activists report they are hearing fewer complaints this year of charter schools outright turning away special education children, but they say some charter operators have found subtle ways to discourage children with special needs from staying.

"I've heard of cases where charter schools have taken special education students and then gently encouraged them to leave because they can't provide the services," said Karran Harper Royal, an activist on special education issues.

Smith wrote in her blog entry that she knows of one charter school that "did a blitz for speech-only students," so it would appear to have an appropriate number of special education students, and could avoid taking those with emotional and behavioral disorders. She said the only special education student turned away at McDonogh was a kindergartner in a wheelchair who would not have been able to access the auditorium, principal's office, computer labs or school nurse if the school had accepted her. . . .

The Final Push To Resuscitate the Dying NCLB

The Bush visit to Chicago this coming Monday will launch the final offensive offensive to save the NCLB school privatization act. NPR, radio's non-profit corporate media, had on ed industry promoter for the Washington Post, Jay Mathews, to explain how "NCLB is here to stay," regardless of whether or not Congress acts to reauthorize in '08--which is highly unlikely. And on this coming Thursday, Bush's Gal Pal Spellings will speak at the National Press Club to urge, no doubt, the "tweaking" needed to make NCLB perfect.

The strategy for this final offensive will be to push reauthorization as the only avenue to change NCLB. Remember everyone wants change, right? What the Bushies know that they don't want anyone else to know is that the political tsunami that is to be unleashed next November will wash away all the corrupt memos, the bare-knuckled directives, the paid PR propaganda, the national voucher plans, the corporate tutoring initiatives, the charter school federal grant proposals, the published threats, the insane sanctions, the irrational regulations, and the rest of the Kill Public Schools agenda, which was the entire conservative education plan going all the way to St. Reagan.

Bush Set to Celebrate NCLB Failure in Chicago

From FairTest posted at Common Dreams:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
January 4, 2008
12:01 PM

CONTACT: FairTest
Dr. Monty Neill (617) 864-4810 or
Bob Schaeffer (239) 395-6773

Bush Chicago Visit Highlights NCLB Failure

WASHINGTON, DC - January 4 - President Bush’s upcoming trip to Chicago to mark the sixth anniversary of signing “No Child Left Behind” (NCLB) into law will actually underscore the failure of the controversial mandate, according to education reformers.

“The federal government’s National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) contradicts Bush Administration statements about NCLB’s impact in Chicago and across the country,” said Dr. Monty Neill, Executive Director of the National Center for Fair & Open Testing (FairTest). “Recently released NAEP Trial Urban District Assessment (TUDA) data show that Chicago has made slower test score progress than the average large city. Nationally, NAEP reading scores have stagnated since the passage of NCLB, and the rate of improvement in math has slowed.”
“In fact, Chicago is an example of NCLB’s lack of effectiveness,” Dr. Neill continued. “The law has failed to raise academic achievement significantly in that city, in other major urban areas or in the nation as a whole. A comprehensive overhaul of the law is necessary to improve educational quality for all students, particularly those in low-income urban areas.”

A detailed report co-authored by FairTest and local education reform groups Parents United for Responsible Education and Designs for Change concludes that Chicago embraced NCLB-style “reforms,” including a heavy reliance on sanctions attached to standardized exams, even before the federal law was enacted. But, overall, city public schools have not made promised academic gains: some improved, others stagnated. The greatest improvements in performance took place in schools that most strongly resisted the NCLB ‘test-and-punish’ approach.

FairTest also initiated the Joint Organizational Statement on NCLB, a set of principles for overhauling the federal law which has been signed by 142 national education, civil rights, religious, parent, disability, civic and labor groups. FairTest facilitates the Forum on Educational Assessment, which works to implement the joint statement.

The report Chicago School Reform: Lessons for the Nation, coauthored by FairTest is online at http://www.fairtest.org/ChicagoReportExecSum2007.html

The Only Dem in the Top 3 Without A Hundred Million in Corporate IOUs

Guess Who's Coming to New Hampshire?

Plotline: A young Harvard-educated black attorney running for President meets a new generation of white-guilty voters who are looking for a way to vote for the same kind of safe corporate-approved DLC candidate their parents voted for--but different in a way that makes it seem like their vote constitutes a rebellious, idealistic act.

They strike up a color-blind relationship based on a belief that their bond will allow everyone forget a 400-year history of racism, oppression, and terrorism against the other black people. Meanwhile, black voters become, not lovestruck, but carried away by their own desperate hope that the photogenic black attorney, played passionately and reverentially by Barack Obama, will, indeed, do something more for black folks than his campaign handlers have thus far even suggested.

Believing that skin color, which is invisible, and the promise to make deals with corporations, also invisible, is the kind of life that both sides are looking for, a marriage is planned. But first consent by a very large, boisterous, and secretly-racist family must be sought. Will the family's racism stay hidden, will it surface to block the wedding, or will the fact that all of this just happened too fast become reason enough to postpone the wedding for eight more years? What kind of scary scene will Uncle Dick's family make? Stay tuned.

Klein's Report Card Celebration, Weprin's Inconvenient Truth, and Little Andrew's Sad Fact

A big day for the Bloomberg-Klein Test-Close-Privatize Plan for NYC Public Schools. At least until Assemblyman Mark Weprin came to the microphone. From the NY Times:

It was supposed to be a day to celebrate the city’s best schools. The schools chancellor, Joel I. Klein, trekked to Public School 46 in Bayside, Queens, to announce that the schools that had received the highest marks on the city’s new school report card were to receive a windfall of extra money.

But when he invited Assemblyman Mark Weprin to the microphone, Mr. Weprin, a Queens Democrat, seized nearly five minutes of the news conference to lambaste the grading system and the Bloomberg administration’s focus on standardized testing to measure achievement.

“Our schools have turned — I know the chancellor is standing here, but — to Stanley Kaplan courses in a lot of ways,” Mr. Weprin said, referring to a large test preparation company.

Lacing his comments with apologies for being “impolite,” Mr. Weprin said, “Too much focus is trying to get the right answers on tests and not enough focus on, in my opinion, on learning. And a good teacher doesn’t just teach how to get the right answers, a good teacher inspires, and a lot of that is being lost in our schools.”

Mr. Klein looked down with a bit of grimace, particularly as parents and teachers who were gathered in the back of the room burst into applause.

“Well, as you can imagine,” Mr. Klein said when he returned to the microphone, “I don’t believe that is an accurate view of what is going on.” He added, “I think learning knowledge is a key part, coupled with challenging our children to think, to be creative and to be imaginative.”

Then, with his voice rising, he added: “And yes, to test them on it, so that you know what they know and what they don’t know. If we don’t do that, we aren’t educating our kids.”

. . . .

Asked by reporters to respond to Assemblyman Weprin’s comments, the school’s principal, Marsha Goldberg, sidestepped any debate. “What we do here is that we balance,” she said. “I am not going to say that we never do test prep; obviously we do.” She added: “Our children here feel valued and loved. And we celebrate all their successes whether it be academic or nonacademic.”

Mr. Klein, who toured the school before the news conference, emphasized in his remarks that the school did more than the basics, and had robust arts, music and computer programs. In one fourth-grade class, he encouraged students to tell him what they liked about the school. And he seemed surprised when Andrew Xu, the first boy to raise his hand, replied, “They help us get ready for the state ELA test.” Andrew, 9, was referring to the test for English Language Arts to be taken next week by all students in grades three through eight. “They teach us what methods to use and how to write.”

Andrew trailed off as he tried to elaborate, “Oh, I don’t know how to explain it.”

Whew! National Academy of Science Says Science Should Be Taught in Science Class

First published in 1984, this new edition of Science, Evolution, and Creationism has more pictures and is longer. And creationism is still not science. From the NCSE website:

The National Academy of Sciences and Institute of Medicine recently released Science, Evolution, and Creationism, a book designed to give the public a comprehensive and up-to-date picture of the current scientific understanding of evolution and its importance in the science classroom. In a January 4, 2008, press release, National Academy of Sciences President Ralph Cicerone was quoted as saying, "Science, Evolution, and Creationism provides the public with coherent explanations and concrete examples of the science of evolution. The study of evolution remains one of the most active, robust, and useful fields in science."

As its title suggests, the book also addresses creationism in its various forms, including young-earth, old-earth, and "intelligent design" creationism, and concludes, "No scientific evidence supports these viewpoints." Observing that "[c]reationism in its various forms is not the same thing as belief in God because ... many believers as well as many mainstream religious groups accept the findings of science, including evolution," Science, Evolution, and Creationism also quotes both leading scientists of faith (including Francis Collins and NCSE Supporter Kenneth R. Miller) and religious leaders and groups (including the late Pope John Paul II and the over 10,000 signatories of the Clergy Letter Project), who see no conflict between their faith and science.

Science, Evolution, and Creationism takes a decidedly firm line on the necessity of including evolution in science education, warning, "Many teachers are under considerable pressure from policy makers, school administrators, parents, and students to downplay or eliminate the teaching of evolution. As a result, many U.S. students lack access to information and ideas that are both integral to modern science and essential for making informed, evidence-based decisions about their own lives and our collective future. ... Given the importance of science in all aspects of modern life, the science curriculum should not be undermined with nonscientific material."

The third edition of a publication first issued in 1984 (as Science and Creationism), Science, Evolution, and Creationism is twice as long as the second edition, issued in 1999. The current book was written by a committee including a number of NCSE Supporters and members and chaired by NCSE Supporter Francisco Ayala, the Donald Bren Professor of Biological Sciences at the University of California, Irvine, and the author most recently of Darwin's Gift (Joseph Henry Press, 2007). Copies of Science, Evolution, and Creationism are available from the National Academies Press (call 202-334-3313 or 1-800-624-6242; or visit the National Academies Press's website), for $12.95; a PDF version is also available for free download at the National Academies Press's website.

NCLB and the Perverse Bubble Child Incentive

NCLB test sanctions provide incentives to ignore children who have little or no likelihood of passing the test, i. e., those with the greatest need get the least help. From ASCD:

A recent study by two University of Chicago economists suggests that No Child Left Behind (NCLB) is leaving many children behind, especially low and high performers. The authors base their findings on two sets of test scores from 5th graders in the Chicago Public Schools: scores from 2002, after implementation of NCLB, and scores from 1998, when a similar reform approach was tried using the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills. Students in the middle of the distribution in both groups made greater gains in reading and math than did either low- or high-ability students. Low-ability students scored the same or lower following the reforms; high-ability students showed mixed gains at best.

The report focuses on the repercussions of accountability systems that tie rewards and sanctions to the number of students in certain groups who cross a predetermined proficiency threshold. The report suggests that accountability systems that place great weight on students who score in the middle provide few incentives for teachers to focus time and effort on the least and most able students. According to the authors, "Schools may find it optimal to ignore students who have little or no chance of reaching proficiency without intensive and costly intervention … and to limit services for gifted children who are likely already proficient" (p. 9).

In addition to problems associated with effort allocation, the report lists a number of other concerns:

• The choice of the proficiency standard will determine how much time teachers devote to students of different ability levels. In fact, "raising standards may actually increase the number of low-achieving children who are ‘left behind’ by increasing the number for whom the standard is out of reach" (p. 5).
• The goal of 100 percent proficiency does not constitute a "credible threat" in forcing schools to effectively address the needs of their less able students. This goal could actually make matters worse for students who are far below grade level in reading and math.
• Although NCLB may have narrowed some achievement gaps in Illinois, many black and Hispanic students "were likely not helped and may have been harmed by NCLB" (p. 5). In the Chicago Public Schools, this may amount to more than 25,000 students.
• Although NCLB calls for highly qualified teachers, the law makes it more difficult for disadvantaged schools to recruit and retain good teachers.

"Contrary to its name," the report notes, NCLB "is not designed to make sure that no child is left behind" (p. 6). In fact, taking into account other U.S. cities that educate large populations of disadvantaged students, NCLB is most likely leaving hundreds of thousands behind.

Left Behind by Design: Proficiency Counts and Test-Based Accountability, by Derek Neal and Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach, is available at http://home.uchicago.edu/~n9na/web_ver_final.pdf.

As Goes the Wealth Gap, So Goes Achievement

The deployment of standardized tests to guarantee the continuation of privilege by those who have it remains one the great unacknowledged shames of education policymakers throughout the world. And as the poor get poorer and their "achievement" goes with it, the powerful who are responsible for deepening that poverty and widening the learning gaps divert attention from their crimes against humanity by blaming the victims and the educators who lamely try to humanize their incarceration.

From the BBC:

Children from the most deprived areas of England are falling further behind in school compared to more affluent pupils, say the Conservatives.

Shadow Schools Secretary Michael Gove highlighted figures showing a widening of the social gap in achievement.

There is a 43 percentage point gap in the proportions of wealthy and deprived pupils achieving five good GCSEs including English and maths in 2007.

In 2006, this gap in favour of the wealthiest was 28 percentage points.

This social divide in exam results shows "the education system is letting down the poorest," says Mr Gove.

Wealth gap

The figures are based on comparisons of the GCSE results of pupils from the 10% most affluent areas and the 10% most deprived.

The growing lead reflects an accelerating improvement in the results of children from better-off families - with 68% of these pupils now reaching the benchmark of five good GCSEs including English and maths, up from 57% in 2006.

Meanwhile, the results of the least well-off pupils have slipped back - down from 29% to 25% reaching this GCSE benchmark.

The government figures show how the link between home background and achievement stubbornly persists throughout children's years in school.

At the age of seven, there is a 20 percentage point gap between the proportion of most and least affluent pupils who have reached the expected standard for reading - 93% to 73%.

By the age of 11, this gap has widened to 23 percentage points for English.

In secondary school, these latest figures for GCSE level show that the gap between richest and poorest grows even further to 43%.

When the school population is divided into 10 bands of affluence and deprivation, the level of achievement rises in precise step with increased wealth in every subject and at every level.

The figures also show that this most deprived group are a major factor in the drop-out rate at the age of 16.

In primary school, those living in these 10% most deprived areas are the biggest single social group. In terms of those studying beyond the age of 16, they are the smallest group, with numbers shrinking by about 90%, and their average A-level point score is the lowest.

These figures reflect the attainment gap using another poverty indicator - free-school meals.

In 11 year olds reaching the expected literacy levels, there is a 21 percentage point gap between pupils who qualify for free-school meals and wealthier pupils who do not qualify.

A spokesman for the Department for Children, Schools and Families said that "closing the attainment gap continues to be a top priority".

"We have invested more than £21bn in child care and the early years since 1997, so that poor children get better chances in early life.

"One to one tuition and personalised support will help every single child achieve the best of their ability at school and we have ensured that in future all young people will stay on in education or training to 18 and beyond."

Rhee: Don't Care Much About Facilities . . .

While Rhee and Fenty work to fire Central Office staff in order to bring on Rhee's team of corporate pre-approved privatizers and charterites, and while 23 schools are closed and and consolidated to make room for new chain-gang charter schools that are on the planning table, the D. C. Schools are trying to figure a way to keep the buildings heated this winter. What does Michelle Rhee or her boss know about facilities? Nothing.

From WaPo:

. . . .The maintenance and repair problems in the District's schools go far beyond heating systems. Students, teachers and administrators in many buildings have endured broken bathrooms, leaking roofs, lead-tainted drinking water, asbestos contamination and rodent infestations, school records show. In some cases, repair requests have gone years without a response.

Some officials say the problems' roots are in the cutbacks in budget and staffing that accelerated during the city's fiscal crises of the past 15 years.

"There hasn't been adequate resources to do any maintenance. Period," said Paul Taylor, who has been deputy director of the schools' facilities department for two years. Moving his hands apart and then closer together, he said: "This is how much you need, this is how much you got. Something is not going to get done."

Sarah Woodhead, who ran the facilities department from 2001 to 2003, said slashed budgets forced her to focus on emergencies and ignore preventive maintenance. "It's not just a risky thing to do; it's a guaranteed failure," she said. "I think it's a tragic situation."

Since 1996, the number of engineers licensed to run the boilers has dwindled from 400 to 140, said John Woodall, secretary-treasurer of the union representing the workers. Licensed engineers are the only school employees who can operate the boilers, and, in the past, each school had its own engineer. Now engineers oversee multiple buildings and boilers.

"Things are set up to deteriorate," Woodall said. . . .

Minnesota Republicans Plan Withdrawal from NCLB Participation

From the Minneapolis Star Tribune:

Legislators have the much-maligned No Child Left Behind law in their cross hairs -- again.

When the 2008 legislative session cranks up next month in St. Paul, Republican senators will be ready to introduce a bill that would end Minnesota's participation in NCLB. The federal program is aimed at forcing schools to improve their students' test scores, and slaps many
of them with penalties if they don't.

"What we want is to make a real firm stand for local control," said Sen. Geoff Michel, R-Edina, who added that he represents Senate Republicans on this issue. "We've had five years of the No Child Left Behind regime, and I think it's safe to call it a failure now. We're giving it an F and trying to take back our schools."

If Business is to Decide What Education Will Be, We Must Decide What Business Will Be

The New York Times has this piece and the CBC this on the millions of disappearing birds that have been displaced and killed off by habitat destruction, pesticides, and other chemicals. Last year a big back page story was the wholesale evacuation of billions of bees from their hives, an unsettling phenomenon that still remains largely a mystery today.

The sad fact that these stories do not resonate or even register on the attention meter of most Americans is the tragic tribute to another generation mis-educated toward satisfying the most crass and debased forms of self-interest, with "self" ontologically roped off by ceaseless standardized competitions for disembodied infobits that disallow the essential development of individual human beings in ways that encourage or even allow community values, democratic values, or ecological values.

Instead, the only value that matters enough to affect what goes on in school is now "economic competitveness for the global marketplace," which serves to instigate among us a socially-atomized clawing toward the top of a treacherous pinnacle that has less and less space for more and more aspirants desperate to get there--or to hold onto their place by pushing others over the edge. Meanwhile, nearly 30 percent of Americans now live alone and never notice that the forsythia is now blooming in many places before New Year's Eve.

Can you imagine how the next generation might come to view the world if our schools injected some concern to ground the rabid consumerism, some care to temper the torpid competition, some connection to inform the caricatured capitalism?

Jane Roland Martin did not come up these three Cs, caring, concern, and connection, in order to devise a new set of courses to add to the curriculum alongside the 3 Rs. She envisioned the possibility of our existing courses developing standards that would infuse the 3 Cs into every aspect of school and every course. For instance, can you imagine that our Earth would be moving now toward the boiling point if previous generations of students had learned the science of caring for the Earth while learning the earth science? Do you think we could so blithely neglect to take note of the imminent extinction of large swaths of species if we had learned that our own lives are connected with the lives of frogs and birds and bees? Is not the continued presumed health of the global economy dependent upon our surviving its success?

These are facts of science, too, but ones that have not been included or that have been marginalized in our education that, instead, focuses our learning earth science in order to more efficiently exploit the Earth's resources for, what else, "economic competitiveness in the global marketplace"--while ignoring the underlying facts that show clearly the unsustainability of our present cultural and economic course. These are the facts we ignore, and unfortunately, the facts we ignore reveal the values we don't have or the ones we prefer to forget.

For me this year, 2008, must point to re-focusing the purpose of education toward the sustainability of life on Earth--which introduces the fourth C, Commitment. I can't think of a better beginning than this essay by Svi Shapiro, It's Time for a Progressive Vision in Education!, in Tikkun. The intro:

The primary debates are an exceptional vehicle to make, as the educational philosopher Maxine Greene put it, “the familiar strange and the strange familiar.” They are, in other words, an opportunity to pose serious questions about the conventional wisdom that guides our public policies and practices, as well as a time to suggest radically different visions for how we might do things in our society and in our world. At least as far as education goes, the candidates have failed miserably in both regards. They have neglected to ask the deep questions about what is really happening in our schools. Nor have they even begun to offer imaginative possibilities for what education might be about in these early but difficult years of the 21st century. This is both sad and troubling, not merely because of the limitations of what these individuals have had to say about this one sector of our culture, but, more importantly, because education in many ways instantiates the root metaphors that guide and structure how we think about the purposes of human life and social relationships. What we have to say about education is intimately bound up with what we say to the young about the meaning of our lives, the aspirations we value for them, and how they should understand their relationships and responsibilities towards other human beings. In this sense education is always about the qualities we favor in human beings as reasoning, moral, and spiritual beings, and about our capacity to teach these to young people. Sadly, the candidates ’ shallow banalities and overwhelmingly predictable discourse about schools has done little to point the public in new and more meaningful directions in thinking about what it means to educate the young in these turbulent times.