The Negative Truth about Positive Psychology

Chris Hedges has a nice intro to the corporate culture brainwashing technique mastered by CIA consultant, Dr. Martin Seligman. As I have noted elsewhere, this is the same intervention adopted by Feinberg and Levin for the children of the poor in KIPP, Inc. schools, where children are trained to ignore their poverty through a double whammy application of learned helplessness followed by unending doses of learned optimism. And it is no coincidence that the philanthro-capitalists are lined up in support of this new psychological and cultural reform masked as education reform. The new eugenics has arrived at the same time that the funding piece has been put in place to make sure that the poor receive the treatments they require in the segregated, corporate-run schools that our President is so keen on.

There is even a middle class child version of this corporate cultism sponsored by Pepperidge Farms called "Fishful Thinking." Get it? So while encouraging more consumption of these tasty morsels of grease and salt, moms can learn how to continue the mind control techniques on their unsuspecting children at home. If they are lucky, these children will be so optimistic by the time they are adults, they will never notice that the world is burning up around them.

From the Hedges piece, published originally at Truth.dig but clipped here from Common Dreams:

. . . . The driving ideology of corporate culture is a blind faith in the power and virtue of the corporate collective. All quotas can be met. All things are possible. Profits can always be raised. It is only a question of the right attitude. The highest form of personal happiness, we are told, is when the corporation thrives. Corporate retreats are built around this idea of merging the self with the corporate collective. They often have the feel of a religious revival. They are designed to whip up emotions. Office managers and sales staffs are given inspirational talks by sports stars, retired military commanders, billionaires and self-help specialists like Tony Robbins who tell them, in essence, the impossible is always possible. And when this proves not to be true it is we who are the problem. We simply have to try harder.

The belief that by thinking about things, by visualizing them, by wanting them, we can make them happen is magical thinking. The purpose, structure and goals of the corporation can never be questioned. To question, to engage in criticism of the corporate collective, is to be obstructive and negative. We can always make more money, meet new quotas and advance our career if we have enough faith. This magical thinking is largely responsible for our economic collapse since any Cassandra who saw it coming was dismissed as "negative." This childish belief discredits legitimate concerns and anxieties. It exacerbates despair and passivity. It fosters a state of self-delusion. And it has perverted the way we think about the nation and ourselves.

Corporate employees, like everyone else, are gripped by personal dilemmas, anxieties and troubles. They are not permitted, however, to ask whether the problem is the corporate structure and the corporate state. If they are not happy there is, they are told, something wrong with them. Real debate, real clashes of opinion, are, in the happy world of corporatism, forbidden. They are considered rude. The corporations enforce a relentless optimism that curtails honest appraisal of reality and preserves hierarchical forms of organization under the guise of "participation." Corporate culture provides, as Christopher Lasch pointed out, a society dominated by corporate elites with an anti-elitist ideology.

Positive psychology, which claims to be able to engineer happiness and provides the psychological tools for enforcing corporate conformity, is to the corporate state what eugenics was to the Nazis. Positive psychology is a quack science that throws a smoke screen over corporate domination, abuse and greed. Those academics who preach it are awash in corporate grants. They are invited to corporate retreats to assure corporate employees that they can find happiness by sublimating their selves into corporate culture. They hold academic conferences. They publish a Journal of Happiness Studies and a World Database of Happiness. There are more than a hundred courses on positive psychology available on college campuses. The University of Pennsylvania offers a master of applied positive psychology program chaired by Martin Seligman, considered the father of the discipline, and author of "Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment." The School of Behavioral and Organizational Sciences at Claremont Graduate University offers a Ph.D. and M.A. concentrations on what it calls "the Science of Positive Psychology." Degree programs are also available at the University of East London and in Milan and Mexico City.

Dr. Tal D. Ben-Shahar, who wrote "Happier: Learn the Secrets to Daily Joy and Lasting Fulfillment," taught hugely popular courses at Harvard University titled "Positive Psychology" and "The Psychology of Leadership." He called himself, when he taught at Harvard, the "Harvard Happiness Professor."

"There is mounting evidence in the psychological literature showing that focusing on cultivating strengths, optimism, gratitude, and a positive perspective can lead to growth during difficult times," Ben-Shahar has stated.

Positive psychology therapy instructs patients to write a letter of gratitude to someone who has been kind to them. Patients pen little essays called "You at your best" in which they are asked "to write about a time when they were at their best and then to reflect on personal strengths displayed in the story." They are instructed to "review the story once every day for a week and to reflect on the strengths they had identified." And the professionals argue that their research shows that many of their patients have "lastingly increased happiness and decreased depressive symptoms."

Ben-Shahar pumps out the catchy slogans and clichés that color all self-improvement schemes. ‘‘Learn to fail or fail to learn," he says, and ‘‘not ‘it happened for the best,' but ‘how can I make the best of what happened?' "

He argues that if a traumatic episode can result in post-traumatic stress disorder it may be possible to create the opposite phenomenon with a single glorious, ecstatic experience. This could, he says, dramatically change a person's life for the better.

Those who fail to exhibit positive attitudes, no matter the external reality, are seen as maladjusted and in need of assistance. Their attitudes need correction. Once we adopt an upbeat vision of reality, positive things will happen. This belief encourages us to flee from reality when reality does not elicit positive feelings. These specialists in "happiness" have formulated something they call the "Law of Attraction." It argues that we attract those things in life, whether it is money, relationships or employment, which we focus on. Suddenly, abused and battered wives or children, the unemployed, the depressed and mentally ill, the illiterate, the lonely, those grieving for lost loved ones, those crushed by poverty, the terminally ill, those fighting with addictions, those suffering from trauma, those trapped in menial and poorly paid jobs, those whose homes are in foreclosure or who are filing for bankruptcy because they cannot pay their medical bills, are to blame for their negativity. The ideology justifies the cruelty of unfettered capitalism, shifting the blame from the power elite to those they oppress. And many of us have internalized this pernicious message, which in times of difficulty leads to personal despair, passivity and disillusionment.

This flight into the collective self-delusion of corporate ideology, especially as we undergo financial collapse and the pillaging of the U.S. treasury by corporations, is no more helpful in solving our problems than alchemy. But there are university departments and reams of pseudoscientific scholarship to give an academic patina to the fantasy of happiness and success through positive thinking. The message that we can have everything we want if we dig deep enough inside ourselves, if we truly believe we are exceptional, is pumped out daily over the airwaves in advertisements, through the plot and story lines of television programs and films, and bolstered by the sickeningly cheerful and upbeat banter of well-groomed television hosts. This is the twisted ideological lens through which we view the world.

"From my two years at the company: positive psychology is a euphemism for spin," Vasquez went on. "They try to spin their employees so much they can't tell right from left, and in the process they forget they do the work of three people, have no health insurance, and three-quarters of their paycheck goes to rent."

This ideology condemns all social critics, iconoclasts, dissidents and individualists, for failing to seek fulfillment in the collective chant of the corporate herd. It strangles creativity and moral autonomy. It is about being molded and shaped into a compliant and repressed collective. It is not, at its core, about happiness. It is about conformity, a conformity that all totalitarian and authoritarian structures seek to impose on the crowd. Its unrealistic promise of happiness, in fact, probably produces more internal anxiety and feelings of inadequacy than genuine happiness. The nagging undercurrents of alienation, the constant pressure to exhibit a false enthusiasm and buoyancy, the loneliness of a work life in which one must always be about upbeat presentation, the awful feeling that being positive may not in fact work if one is laid off, are buried and suppressed.

There are no gross injustices, no abuses to question, no economic systems to challenge in the land of happy thoughts. In the land of happy thoughts we are to blame if things go wrong. The corporate state, we are assured, is beneficent and good. It will make us happy and comfortable and prosperous even as it funnels billions of taxpayer dollars into its bank accounts. Mao and Stalin used the same language of harmony and strength through the collective, the same love of spectacles and slogans, the same coercive power of groups and state propaganda, to enslave and impoverish millions of their citizens. And, if we do not free ourselves from the grip of this ideology and the corporate vampires who disseminate it, this is what will happen to us.

Chris Hebdon assisted with reporting this story.

Teach For America, British Style

Teach First, a program in England modeled after Teach For America, is profiled in the most recent edition of the Economist. Those familiar with the TFA propaganda talking points will find this article unsurprising:

1. Teachers come from the bottom 1/3 of "the class"

2. Tormer Teach Firsters are eager to start their own school (the British equivalents of YES, KIPP, IDEA - the alphabet soup of charter chains started by former TFAers)

3. Alternative path credentialing (with those "boring" classes - you know, child psychology, education and social foundations, school and society, theory classes) is not needed by the chosen few graduating from prestigious universities,

4. and the, "All Children Can Learn!" mantra that wipes away any collective responsibility for how we treat our children and the living conditions created by neoliberal globalization.

Yes, every child can learn - if we provide them adequate healthcare, prenatal care, nutritious food, violence- and drug-free neighborhoods, and psychological stability. But we don't. Instead, we'll hear more TFA propaganda about the inadequacy of current teachers and the do-gooders looking to make a pit stop out of the teaching profession on their way to bigger salaries and more glory.

From the Economist (my bolds):

Those Who Can

Jul 30th 2009 | CANTERBURY
From The Economist print edition

Education reforms will never work unless teaching attracts more high-fliers

“I SET up a Fantasy Football competition between some of my toughest pupils,” one young man explains. “They get goal-keeping points for good attendance, and defence points for behaving well. Good punctuation and spelling translate into their midfield performance, and coming up with good ideas, into attack.” Around the room, pens scribble furiously. “Pupil X hated me,” a woman tells the group; she describes how she changed that with weekly phone calls to his parents and postcards praising his (intermittent) good behaviour. More notes are made.

This is the Teach First summer institute: six weeks in Canterbury, a southern cathedral city, at the end of which nearly 500 new university graduates will teach full-time, for £15,000 ($24,500) a year, in some of England’s toughest schools. The 360 who started the programme last year are here too, handing on to the raw recruits their tips for coping with bad behaviour and keeping lessons fresh, and demonstrating to their tutors what they have learned. In another year, those old hands will be qualified teachers, trained on the job and in tutorials and summer schools.

The result is a general sense that the country’s teachers have been scraped from the bottom of the barrel. That makes it unlikely that ambitious graduates will consider joining the profession, or stay in it if recession persuades them to do so briefly.Recruiting the right kind of teachers has been difficult in England for some time, and though recession has brought temporary relief, the task is getting bigger as those hired to teach the baby boom near retirement. Head teachers, worn down by constant official policy changes and an avalanche of paperwork, are retiring early. A study in 2007 by McKinsey, a consultancy, concluded that countries whose students perform well tend to recruit teachers from the top of the class. But a recent report by Politeia, a think-tank, found that the bar for getting into teacher training in England is, by international standards, unusually low. Trainee teachers can resit basic literacy and numeracy tests as often as they like—and 13% need at least three goes at the latter. Around 1,200 each year graduated with the lowest class of degree, a third.

Modelled on Teach for America, a programme founded in 1989 that now trains 4,000 teachers a year, Teach First aims to reverse this vicious cycle by creating a route into teaching for high-fliers. Applicants are screened for leadership and communication skills, and the successful ones promise to teach for two years in “challenging” schools: those where few pupils get good exam results or where more than 30% are poor enough to receive free school meals. Such schools tend to have the least qualified teachers and to suffer from high turnover. One summer-school participant is about to start teaching mathematics to 15-year-olds who have had 22 teachers in the subject in the past three years.

Unlike government recruitment drives, which tend to present teaching as appealing, even easy, Teach First describes the job as tough and demanding because the right people are those who are attracted by the most daunting tasks. Few at the Canterbury summer school think they would have considered teaching without that approach: the standard one-year postgraduate course is, they say, “too slow”, “too theoretical” and “boring”. Strong links with businesses, including prestigious graduate recruiters who often scoop up those who decide not to stay in teaching, help bring them in too. Some employers, like HSBC, a bank that is one of the charity’s biggest donors, guarantee those who leave after their two years a first-round interview.

Since 2003, when it received 1,300 applicants for just 200 places, Teach First has grown fast. Nearly a tenth of Oxford’s class of 2009 will be Teaching First this autumn. The programme already has its first head teacher, Max Haimendorf, hired to lead a new school in London after just three years teaching. It expects to take on 850 recruits in 2012, making it one of Britain’s largest graduate recruiters. To date almost three-fifths have stayed on after their two-year stint, which means that retention of teachers is almost as good as with traditional routes into the classroom.

Around 40,000 people train to teach each year in England. Making Teach First the main way to do so would dilute the programme’s prestige—and there probably aren’t enough adrenalin junkies out there, anyway. Rather, the programme hopes to change the profession less directly. As Teach First becomes better known, teaching will start to be seen as a job for ambitious go-getters. It should help with the shortage of school heads, too. And if the Conservative Party wins the next general election, as seems likely, Teach Firsters may help to make its slightly half-baked plans to open hundreds of new schools a reality. Brett Wigdortz, the charity’s founder and chief executive, says that many participants tell him they would be keen to set up and lead new schools.

Those who do not stay in education will also be influential. Business leaders are apt to bemoan the awfulness of Britain’s school-leavers, but since few went to sink schools themselves, or send their own children to them, the remedies they prescribe are not notably informed. That should change as more executives are drawn from the programme’s ranks.

Teach First’s most important contribution, though, may be to shake up education research and policy. “New teachers bring fresh eyes to education,” says Mr Wigdortz. “Our chair of trustees, Dame Julia Cleverdon, often tells participants to keep a notebook and write down everything that strikes them as crazy in the first few months—because a year in, those things will seem normal. And two years in, when they have gained in experience and confidence, they should get that notebook out and start changing those things.”

Almost all education-policy documents and research papers these days start with a reminder that a child’s family background is by far the strongest influence on his educational achievement. This evident truth could spur teachers to greater efforts to lean against that wind; instead, it is generally used to explain away poor children’s weaker performance. Teach First challenges such defeatism. “We believe educational inequity is a solvable problem,” says Mr Wigdortz, “and that the way to solve it is to get the best people teaching in the most challenging schools.”

Commentary on "Race to the Top"

From Substance News:

Editorial: The Reagan Legacy and the Obama Agenda, or A Race at Risk
Jim Horn - July 28, 2009

Soon after Ronald Reagan came to Washington, he began wondering aloud in prepared speeches if the push for civil rights had damaged American institutions such as schools during the previous two decades. In 1983, the year of A Nation at Risk, came this: “The schools were charged by the federal courts in the correcting of long-standing injustices in our society—racial segregation, sex discrimination, lack of opportunity for the handicapped. Perhaps there was just too much to do in too little time.” As William Raspberry noted in 2004, it was not a coincidence that Reagan chose, in 1980, to announce his presidential campaign embracing “states rights” in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964. The symbolism could not have been mistaken.

A year after Reagan’s 1983 speech and the accompanying doom and gloom projections of A Nation at Risk came the Supreme Court decision in Milliken v Bradley, which struck down the inter-district busing plan that was put in place to achieve desegregation of Detroit schools. By 1986 school integration had peaked in the
U. S. and resegregation of schools had begun, with school integration from that point forward on a steady march backwards—a march that remains unchecked today, as resegregation and apartheid schooling have become the silent, unquestioned norms across America. And so the push for equality in education that the Civil Rights Movement spawned became displaced by the reemergence of market-based cult of efficiency in education. Inspired by white racism and corporatism, the new get-tough reform agenda introduced a sea change that overnight made the prospect of “educationally excellent and economically poor” even more of a statistical oddity than it had ever been before.

And so it was that the accountability through high stakes testing that took hold in the Reagan Era helped solidify the return to apartheid schooling, since test scores then and now were and are as predictable, as Alfie Kohn has pointed out, as the sizes of the houses in the neighborhoods where the tested children live.

With no one wanting to buy a home in a neighborhood with low-scoring schools and the constant threat of school closure now under NCLB, the segregation of the poor has taken on new urgency as schools and communities seek to shed the poor who bring test failure with them to any school they attend.

Ostensibly to raise test scores in these resegregated schools for the urban poor, there has emerged a curriculum caste system based predictably, once more, on family income and wealth. In most of the poor, the brown, and the black schools of America, children are targeted victims of an anti-cultural, low-level regimen of test prep and regurgitation of facts—the bulimic curriculum, if you will.

In the middle class leafy suburbs, however, children are engaged as they always have been in minds-on and hands-on projects that stimulate creativity and problem solving. It is a higher-order thinking curriculum, as opposed to an anti-thinking one, with those who have always been at the top of the race now deciding once more the rules for the new “Race to the Top.”

We might have expected something to be done about these crimes against poor children when a young African-American President came to Washington. Though it is still early in the Obama Administration for sure, it is not too early to see clearly and tragically that the policies that Mr. Obama and Mr. Duncan are embracing will only accelerate the resegregation of American schools, while deepening of divisions within the curriculum caste system that high stakes testing enables and encourages. And while Mr. Duncan is to be credited for his tireless PR tour aimed at generating excitement about the $4.35 billion in lubrication for the various state vehicles in the new “Race to the Top,” those willing to say already know who is going to win that race.

The winners will not be urban poor children, who will be further segregated now in the corporate charter schools that will be seeded and nurtured from the $4.35 billion. Where poor parents heretofore at least could attend a public meeting and have their voices heard in a public forum, these new non-profit charters that often hire for-profit outfits to run them, operate under the unregulated thumbs of CEOs whose unquestioned authority is not to be, well, questioned.

And even though Mr. Obama assured the readers of the Washington Post last week that decisions for funding the Race to the Top “will be based on what works,” a study released by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University last month found that only 17 percent of charter schools nationwide produce better results than the public schools they would replace. Not only that, but minority children are suffering the most in the charter schools that are worse (37%) or no better than (42%) the public schools. Yet, in Mr. Duncan’s words, states that refuse to lift charter caps will be “at a competitive disadvantage.”

The winners of the Race to the Top will not be teachers, who will be further humiliated by having meager pay raises to their embarrassingly low salaries now dependent upon test score production work. Again, in Mr. Duncan’s words, “states that explicitly prohibit linking data on achievement or student growth to principal and teacher evaluations will be ineligible for reform dollars.” It doesn’t take a genius to figure out what effect this will have on which teachers will end up with the lowest test performing students.

Among the winners will not be the embattled teaching profession, since Mr. Duncan prefers the marginally-prepared and the alternatively-certified teachers to those with real credentials based on both content and pedagogy expertise. Mr. Duncan and his philanthro-capitalist patrons (Gates, Broad, Waltons, Dells, Fishers, etc.) prefer those semi-skilled, disposable, historically-blank, and pedagogically-ignorant recruits who must depend upon the teacher-proofed parrot learning models promoted as Direct Instruction in the urban schools.

The winners will not be poor parents who would like schools for their children just like the schools attended by children in the leafy suburbs, schools with school libraries, sports facilities, drama clubs, music and band, art rooms, high tech shops. Mr. Duncan and the Oligarchs in charge of crafting federal education policy believe in the expansion of that crusading entrepreneurial spirit that can turn a shutdown pizza joint in a strip mall into a thriving school grounded by the philosophy of “no excuses.” No library? No excuse. No supper when you get home from a ten hour school day? No excuse. No health care? Same.

The winners will not be those who believe that local education decisions should be made locally by elected school boards. Mr. Duncan has come out publicly in favor of one-man mayoral rule of urban “public” school systems. No nosy parents, please, and no school board members to provide oversight or to impose those burdensome regulations.

The winners will not be those who cherish the notion of state and local curriculums that can be adjusted to the needs of local communities: Mr. Duncan has $350 million to get the ball rolling on national testing, which is the centerpiece for an impending third generation of doing more of the same failed reforms and calling it something different.

The winners will not be those who express reservations about the development of a K-20 student and instructor data surveillance system that may or may not be used ethically by CEO wannabes in the administrative offices of the new corporate welfare schools.

On the US DOE website, the final sentence in the press release for the “Race to the Top” states that “it represents a historic opportunity to restore America's global leadership in education.” The truth is that America’s “leadership in education” has never been in jeopardy in the leafy suburbs. As Gerald Bracey has pointed out for the past twenty years, take out the high-poverty school children from the comparisons, and America ranks right up there with the top high flyers on international test scores in math and science, or any other testing criterion. So the new version of more of the same with the added benefit of corporate control of public schools is once again masked in the fear-mongering rhetoric that has driven the eugenicists and efficiency zealots for the past hundred years.

It should come as no surprise, then, that Republicans are lined up in support of the continuation of the Reagan legacy of dumping equity and equality agendas for more corporate-controlled back-to-basics anti-education policies for the poor, which are built upon behavioral interventions that seek to re-engineer the minds of urban school children. In fact, global warming and skyrocketing energy costs could set off a race to the top of a very altered global economy that may require our own homegrown versions of the Chinese and Indian workers whose schooling methods we are keen to emulate for the lower classes of our own disposable children whose race for the foreseeable future will be to support the “Race to the Top” by the race at the top. 

Shop at Gap Inc, Support TFA

For the next four days you can use this coupon to get 30% off all Gap Inc. clothing (all Gap, Old Navy, and Banana Republic stores). Added bonus: Gap Inc. will donate 5% of what you spent to Teach For America. It's American consumption with an extra dash of misguided philanthropy: head to malls in the leafy suburbs or metropolitan temples of consumption to buy clothing made by unfairly compensated overseas laborers (or outright child labor, of which Gap Inc. has a mighty impressive record) and then donate a little extra to support temporary laborers looking for a short gig in public education before jumping to more lucrative sectors (or starting their own charter school). Parents affluent enough to shop at Gap stores can rest assured that their little Jimmy or Jenny are wearing hip clothing while their purchase subsidizes ill-prepared teachers for America's urban schools serving mostly non-white students.

Bloomberg Solution to Homelessness: Export the Poor

In a continuing attempt to turn Gotham into a Disney version of itself, the Little Prince has decided to offer one-way plane tickets to anywhere for the poor. Can you imagine how test score will zoom in New York City if Bloomberg and Klein can export all the poor children? Now that's reform. From the Guardian:

New York has found a novel, if expensive, way of dealing with its overcrowded shelters – buying one-way tickets for homeless families to leave the city.

Under the initiative, by the administration of the mayor, Michael Bloomberg, hundreds of families have been given plane, rail, and bus tickets and even petrol vouchers to leave the city. One homeless family of five was given $6,332 (nearly £4,000) worth of travel costs to Paris, according to the New York Times.

The city justifies such costs because it argues the alternative is more expensive. It costs New York's taxpayers $36,000 to put up a homeless family in a night shelter for a year.

Families can qualify for the tickets if they have a relative in another part of the world, including the US, who says they are willing to house them.

Since the $500,000-a-year scheme was launched in 2007, 550 homeless families have been paid to leave the city. None have come back.

"We want to divert as many families as we can that need assistance," Vida Chavez-Downes, a city official said.

"We have paid for visas, we've gone down to the consulate, we've provided letters, we've paid for passports for people to go. Anyone who comes through our door."

Critics have dismissed the initiative as a gimmick.

Arnold Cohen, head of a New York campaign group, Partnership for the Homeless, told the New York Times: "The city is engaged in cosmetics. What we're doing is passing the problem of homelessness to another city. We're taking people from a shelter bed here to the living room couch of another family. Essentially, this family is still homeless." . . .

Pearson eCollege, Privatization Outfit Announce Partnership in K12 Education Expansion; A Preview of the For-Profit Future

Peppered with neoliberal, market-based logic and blatant doublespeak, the NonPublic Educational Services, Inc, is teaming up with Pearson's eCollege to "enter into new online markets," and achieve "greater, measurable success for NESI and its students." From the PRWeb [my bolds]:

Pearson eCollege and NonPublic Educational Services, Inc. (NESI) Partner to Increase K12 Online Education Opportunities

NonPublic Educational Services, Inc. to Use Pearson eCollege to Enter New Online Markets

Denver (PRWEB) July 22, 2009 -- Pearson eCollege and NonPublic Educational Services, Inc. (NESI) have announced a multi-year partnership to increase online K12 education opportunities for a wide range of high school students, including students from military families. NESI will use Pearson eCollege's integrated education technology environment to offer high school students a complete online learning solution, leading to greater, measurable success for NESI and its students.

Pearson eCollege is the leading global provider of online education technology, content solutions and support services at hundreds of successful blended and fully online academic programs and institutions. NESI, which operates education and training programs and services for K12 students and members of the US military, selected Pearson eCollege because the company offers more than just a learning management system--Pearson eCollege combines on-demand cloud computing capabilities with Pearson's world-class content, digital media and academic services.

Partnering with Pearson eCollege will enable NESI to enter new online markets serving more students with capabilities unmatched by any other provider. These new opportunities include an international, dual-degree program that allows high school students outside the US to earn both a local in-country degree and an online degree from Richard Milburn High School (RMHS), a subsidiary of NESI. For the past five years, RMHS has operated a summer credit recovery program for the Department of Defense Education Authority (DODEA) serving high school-age dependents of US serviceman living abroad. RMHS offers a 12-month credit recovery program and a full academic year program for US high school students. NESI and RMHS are also developing other online programs to serve evolving student needs for flexible online education options.

"We needed a partner who was willing to work directly with NESI, creatively and collaboratively, to create online learning solutions for our students. Pearson eCollege is a breath of fresh air," said Rochelle Schneickert, Division Vice President at NESI. "They were the only provider willing to support our concept for best-in-breed online education delivery. With Pearson eCollege, we now have a learning environment partner that provides the most reliable learning network available, student information service (SIS) integration, support services we know we can trust, and a vast choice of curriculum."

"Both Pearson eCollege and NESI continually invest in services that enhance student achievement," said Matt Leavy, CEO of Pearson eCollege. "Our partnership with NESI will offer greater access to education opportunities via our connected learning environment, helping more students to compete in today's competitive, technology-driven marketplace."

"We researched several online platforms before deciding that Pearson eCollege was the smart choice," said Greg Shield, director of the Milburn High School Online programs at NESI. "NESI chose a proven industry leader with a comprehensive solution that included the technology we needed. The Pearson eCollege cloud-computing model reduced the overall risk of delivering courses online."

About Pearson eCollege
Pearson eCollege enables educators to achieve measurable success for academic programs through on-demand solutions that advance and improve the teaching and learning experience for learners in multiple types of educational institutions and programs. Pearson eCollege provides integrated technology and services, content solutions and multi-level user support that help students reach their academic goals. Pearson (LSE: PSON, NYSE: PSO), the global leader in education and education technology, reaches and engages today's digital natives with effective and personalized learning, as well as dedicated professional development for their teachers. Pearson is dedicated to helping people of all ages to learn at their own pace, in their own way. In addition to Education, Pearson's primary operations include the Financial Times Group and the Penguin Group. For more information, visit www.ecollege.com orwww.pearson.com.

The for-profit privatization outfit - pardon me, "NonPublic Educational Services, Inc." - does include a few nonprofit charter schools, but majority of their work if mighty lucrative: NCLB tutoring, military training, and for-profit schools. I'll let the privatizers to explain their current financial stake in education. Right from their website (it's from the Military section, but describes the entire organization's financial statement; my bold):

Corporate Experience

RMHS Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of NESI, was founded in 1975 to provide educational and management services in nonpublic and nontraditional settings across the nation. In 2006, RMHS and NESI employed more than 1,000 personnel and achieved total consolidated revenue over $30,000,000. The company is incorporated in the Commonwealth of Virginia, with corporate headquarters in Woodbridge, Virginia and Salem, Massachusetts Currently, NESI and RMHS are managing instructional support programs in 30 locations within 12 states, and internationally in Korea.

Looking at their map of operations, you'll notice their K12 experience is right in states where NCLB has ripped open the moneybags for privatization outfits (although I suppose you could say NCLB opened up additional funding for privatization in every state). Thirty million per year - and they know the Obama/Duncan plan includes even more potential payouts as the DOE searches for operators of the 5000 new schools Duncan hopes to see turned over.

It should not be a surprise to see for-profit enterprises teaming up with the US Military to provide educational services and training. In fact, many of the neoliberal and neoconservative reformers would love many of the aspects of the Department of Defense's educational arm, the DODEA: high level of discipline, strict academic standards and curricula across all schools, and the "all kids can learn" positivism (note: the majority of their students live on military bases and have full medical and dental care, food, housing, and other essentials either provided for free or for low cost - which is certainly not the case for the rest of America). An Education Sector intern recently gushed about the DODEA's K-12 education system without the slightest consideration bit of irony.

But this isn't about education; it's all about profits, expanding markets, creating good little worker bees, and the assault on all things public. We have former corporate CEO's investing in online MBA programs, textbooks ignoring global warming even in one of the nation's most progressive cities, and former charter school proponents jumping to the online schooling gig where they can find even higher salaries as they schlock online software and data programs. "All children can learn!" is the simplified drumbeat that permits the denial of vast social injustices of poverty, inadequate healthcare, environmental toxins, and the oppressive nature of American society as currently constructed - all in the name of profits or small government. Such is the logic behind the new wave of hyper-efficiency, technology-driven reforms, and standardization preached by the various school reformers. Pearson and the NonPublic Educational Services, Inc. couldn't be much happier.

Explaining the Mumbo Jumbo to the Dumbos

The proudly-stupid Governor Mitch Daniels of Indiana had this to say the other day about that citified, new-fangled college talk that them there teachers is using on our kids in Indiana:

“Arne Duncan could not be superintendent or principal in Indiana,” Daniels said of Obama’s education chief and former superintendent of Chicago schools. “He doesn’t have the right credentials.” The governor enunciated “credentials.”

Asked about how the Ball State University teachers college will have to adapt, Daniels explained, “When the Professional Licensing Board begins starting next week to redefine what is required to get a teaching license in Indiana, the schools of education are going to have to make some major changes of their own. They are not going to need as many people teaching what to me is mumbo jumbo. We’re going to expect students who want to teach spending much more of their time studying the subject they are going to be teaching in the schools.”

There are good reason besides credentials that Arne Duncan should not be a superintendent or a principal, not the least of which is his promotion of an entirely unethical and abusive use of tests in schools. But this post is to offer the anti-education capitalists in charge of U. S. education policy a basic primer in some of the coursework regularly offered as part of accredited initial certification teacher preparation programs. Most of these course descriptions are from Alverno College, one of the top teacher ed programs in the country. A few are California Lutheran University. If Governor Mitch had his way, we would dispose of this kind of unnecessary mumbo-jumbo.

Social and Cultural Foundations in Education 3 credits

The historical, social and cultural foundations of American education, as seen through a historical narrative, with an emphasis on the diversity of contemporary schooling. Major philosophies of education which have informed American education and how they affect schooling in a society of multiple cultures. Fieldwork required.

Theories of Teaching, Learning and Development 3 credits

Theories of teaching, assessment and development of learning. The influence of those theories on content, methods, and classroom environment, including the use of technology, and their application in improving academic achievement for all students. Fieldwork required.

Human Development and Learning
(3 credits)
Students examine theories that address the development of cognition, emotion, and motivation as they apply to learners of various ages, cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds, and learning needs. Students evaluate the application of theories in diverse learning environments, building an understanding of the dynamic interaction between and among teaching, learning, and assessment in work with adolescents and young adults.

General Methods of Teaching
(4 credits)
Studying a variety of instructional models and learning theories, students plan and implement differentiated instruction and assessment, reflecting both the Wisconsin Model Academic Standards and the Wisconsin Teacher Standards. Students analyze multiple classroom settings to design model learning communities focused on student engagement and learning. They design, evaluate, and use technology to enhance learning environments, and they address the teacher as professional by developing an initial philosophy of education. To provide an opportunity to apply their learning with regard to instructional design, students are assigned a minimum of 20 hours in a field experience in which they work with diverse middle and/or high school learners.

Literacy in Early Childhood
(3 credits)
Students examine the scope of an early childhood literacy curriculum, focusing on emergent literacy, oral language, reading, writing, and literature. Among components integrated in this course are phonics, spelling, and sight vocabulary. Students learn to make sound decisions, teach literacy learning strategies, select appropriate materials, and design developmentally appropriate learning experiences and assessments for the early childhood learner.

Curriculum, Instruction, and Assessment
(3 credits)
Prereq. LTM 611 ; LTM 612
Students learn to see the connections between large curricular goals and the assessment of student learning in the classroom. Employing a process called backward design, they identify performances that capture the big outcomes and design both appropriate instruction and meaningful performance assessment using specific criteria. They explore assessment-as-learning, a formative approach that includes criteria, self-assessment, and feedback to guide learning.

Fundamental Concepts of Mathematics 1
(4 credits)

This course, which integrates the learning of mathematics with methods of teaching, is designed for students who are preparing to teach at the elementary school level. Students study the mathematical structures and operations related to sets, whole numbers, integers, rational numbers, and real numbers. They use the properties of these systems to develop algorithms for the operations defined in each of the systems. They explore the use of manipulatives and technology in building understanding of concepts. Through the study of national, state, and local standards, and contemporary mathematics curriculum projects, they learn teaching strategies. They also gain experience with professional practices such as the development of lesson plans, unit plans, and assessment instruments designed for a variety of learning styles. Throughout the course, students evaluate themselves on their ability to analyze and solve problems as well as on their ability to communicate mathematics effectively.

Science and Social Studies in the Elementary Curriculum
(4 credits)
Prereq. LTM 611 ; LTM 612
In this course, students explore methods of teaching science and social studies at the elementary school level. Drawing upon previous experiences in lesson and unit planning, they incorporate science, health, social studies, and technological content knowledge with process skills and assessment strategies. Students design integrated learning experiences based on appropriate frameworks linking science and social studies to other content areas, including art, mathematics, and language arts.

The Learning Organization and Social Change
(3 credits)
Students draw upon a range of disciplines and theories to examine organizational culture, including patterns of leadership, authority, and communication and their impact on the climate of the organization. They analyze case studies of organizational change, identifying sources of success and failure. Critiquing varied approaches in particular settings, they develop proposals for achieving goals for ongoing growth and improvement.

Arts and Movement in the Elementary Curriculum
(2 credits)
Prereq. A 135 or MU 101
Students make meaningful and effective connections among the arts - music, art, dance, and drama - within the integrated elementary curriculum. They develop practical abilities in the integration of the arts and movement across the curriculum and apply teaching and learning theory in the design of developmentally appropriate lessons, the meaningful incorporation of technology, and the use of assessment strategies.

Literacy in Middle Childhood, Early Adolescence, and Adolescence
(4 credits)
Prereq. LTM 611 ; LTM 612
Students study the process, methods, and materials of literacy development in order to facilitate literacy in middle childhood and adolescence, recognizing the range of student needs they may encounter, including those of the non-native speaker of English. In addition, they develop approaches to the integration of language arts across the curriculum. Students learn to interpret standardized assessment information as well as to develop meaningful classroom assessments of literacy.

Portfolio Assessment
(0 credits)

The LTM 640 portfolio assessment demonstrates LTM students' readiness for student teaching. Students prepare a folder that documents their proficiency in the ten Wisconsin Teaching Standards and the Alverno graduate education abilities. The portfolio review process consists of two parts. First, an internal assessor (Alverno faculty member) and an external assessor (administrator, teacher) evaluate the portfolio against established criteria. Second, the assessors conduct an interview with each student in which the student highlights several artifacts, presents and comments on an electronic demonstration of teaching effectiveness, and answers questions on teaching, learning, and assessing in general and on portfolio contents in particular.

Educational Inquiry: Research in Action
(3 credits)
Prereq. AC 613
Students examine the nature of systematic inquiry by using an action research perspective as they address questions related to improvement of their practice. Focusing on the context of learning environments, they explore the assumptions and applications of varied methodological approaches. They develop skills in conceptualizing researchable questions and in designing research projects appropriate for their own professional practice and specific setting.

Student Teaching
(9 credits)
Prereq. LTM 640 ; Praxis II

Student teachers demonstrate the ability to apply their knowledge in the design and implementation of content-area lessons and in the establishment of appropriate relationships with learners that support growth. They develop a portfolio documenting their work and its impact on student learning as well as a professional development plan to guide their growth as beginning teachers. Student teaching is a full-time, full-semester commitment, based on the calendar of the local school.

If it isn't clear by now, Governor Mitch, how right you are about this mumbo-jumbo, perhaps it is time to visit one of these John Dewey Commie Camps to get a firsthand look at the indoctrination of American teacher candidates. Get some firsthand facts so that you can impress upon the people of your state how they would be so much better off with your cutting edge thinking on all matters educational. Who knows--you could be the next Republican Education President. Hard shoes to fill, Governor Mitch, but I think you have it in you.

Union Suits and Corporate Bosses

On Craig Gordon's new blog, he has this on, yet, another example of betrayal from union leadero who have chosen a place at the trough over the interests of education:

Posted July 27th, 2009 by Craig Gordon
California’s Democratic legislature and Republican governor have just agreed to a budget dealing new, devastating blows to poor and working people and another gift to corporations and the rich. It delivers $9 billion in cuts to kindergarten-through-university public education, and eliminates billions more in services to the families of low-income students. All proposals to mitigate the damage with new taxes, including a modest tax on oil production, were dropped. So naturally the California Teachers Association went all out to lobby for the budget’s approval. And when it passed Friday, CTA thanked “our many members who have reached out to Legislators and the Governor to ensure education is not forgotten during the budget crisis.”

Confused? You wouldn’t be if you’d been following CTA over the years. CTA regularly pumps up its membership to “fight” for school funding and then lets the air out in the name of pragmatism. In 2004 CTA affiliates around the state joined in the campaign to collect signatures for a ballot initiative to increase taxes on commercial property to fund public schools. After all of the time, effort, and $3.4 million of members’ dues had been spent qualifying the initiative for the ballot, CTA pulled the plug. The following year it repeated the scenario, this time announcing its withdrawal at a press conference flanked by manufacturers and commercial property owners who thanked CTA for backing off of progressive taxation that would have “severely damaged business, costing jobs and threatening our economy.” (Sacramento Bee, 8/5/2005) . . .

Do read on.

For Charter School Teachers It's A Race to the Bottom

Sam Dillon of the New York Times gives us a closer look at the Race to the Top. Looks like Arne Duncan and the BRT's plan to run roughshod over teachers and unions might be hitting some bumps in the road. In the race to the bottom for working Americans why should teachers be treated better than everyone else? Let the debate begin!

As Charter Schools Unionize, Many Debate Effect

CHICAGO — Dissatisfied with long hours, churning turnover and, in some cases, lower pay than instructors at other public schools, an increasing number of teachers at charter schools are unionizing.

.....But the unionization effort raises questions about whether unions will strengthen the charter movement by stabilizing its young, often transient teaching force, or weaken it by preventing administrators from firing ineffective teachers and imposing changes they say help raise achievement, like an extended school year.

Let's see now, where do you think this administration will come down on the question of whether unions will be good for charter schools? Hmmm....

Jeb Bush Gives Obama, Duncan Two Thumbs Up

Jeb Bush's appearance at the National Forum on Education Policy, a gather looking to explore "how education can be an engine to ignite the economy" [all videos here]:

Highlights (lowlights):

What he'd do to improve public education (aka disaster capitalism applied to public education):

More school choice across the board. Create it, make it chaotic, if you will. To me, the chaos will create huge opportunities for a whole new set of people to join in this important process [ie his for-profit ventures and other "edupreneurs"] to make sure children gain a year’s worth of knowledge, rigorous knowledge, in a year’s time.

On education reform, Arne Duncan:

“I think for the first time in my political life at least, there seems to be more consensus than disagreement across the ideological spectrum about education reform. I’m very encouraged about Secretary Duncan’s advocacy of challenging the status quo, and I’m excited that Republicans seem to be not wanting to get into a food fight about this but to join forces and to find common ground.”

Access to education = internet access (so-called "compassionate conservative," digital style?). Forget about the reasons we have such an inequitable system; just plug in your computer!

“We can create a customized learning experience for each and every one of America’s 50 million students. Technology makes a lot of things possible. It tears down what is the single greatest barrier to a quality education and that’s access. Demography doesn’t have to define your destiny because your address no longer limits your options. In fact, if your address is a web address rather than a physical address the world is your…uh…access. You can access the highest quality possible. With the internet, you don’t have to be in the same room with the teacher to learn. Technology makes it possible for students to access knowledge across the town, across the state, across the country. In fact, we should be open enough to recognize in a global economy that it should be across the world.”

Please Share This with Your Congressman, Senator, and Even Mitch Daniels

Professor Wong is a naturalized American citizen who teaches at Michigan State. It may be downloaded here.

Gates/Dell/Walton Purchase Share of Charter Authorizer Association

It's not a coincidence that on the same day that Duncan officially announced the start of the "Race off the Cliff," the Gates, Dell, and Walton foundations donated $9.4 million to the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, a pro-charter/privatization nonprofit led by former Renaissance 2010 leader Greg Richmond. From the NACSA website:

NACSA Announces $9.4 Million in Grant Funding

Donors Recognize Need for High Quality Authorizing, Stronger Charter Schools

CHICAGO, July 24 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA) announced today that it has received $9.4 million in investments from three of the nation's preeminent foundations -- the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation -- that recognize the need for consistent standards and accountability in charter school authorizing practices.

"We are pleased that these foundations are investing in NACSA to grow the number of high quality charter schools across the country," said Greg Richmond, President and CEO of NACSA. "The charter school movement is experiencing a powerful confluence of supporters and opportunities as President Obama and U.S. Secretary of Education Duncan work to increase the number of quality charter schools across the country. NACSA is well-positioned to sustain this work and implement sound strategies to ensure that all students have access to excellent educational opportunities."

With the funding, NACSA will launch a national initiative to strengthen the practices of authorizers in targeted cities and states by adopting professional standards and by working with external stakeholders to create a high quality charter sector.

"For nearly 10 years, NACSA has been at the forefront of the quality charter movement, working in cities and states to strengthen the charter sector," said Jim Goenner, Chairman of NACSA's Board of Directors. "This investment will allow NACSA to further its work, expand its capacity, and support effective authorizing by advancing quality standards and practices that will serve as models for the nation."

This is the first time that the Gates Foundation and the Dell Foundation have partnered with NACSA to support quality authorizing practices. The Walton Family Foundation previously invested in NACSA to expand the knowledge base and increase the impact of quality authorizing practices.

"We are sharpening our focus around a set of clear strategies," said Richmond. "NACSA develops high quality authorizing environments that result in a greater number of quality charter schools. These influential foundations are investing in that work."

NACSA (www.qualitycharters.org) is the trusted resource and innovative leader working with educators and public officials to increase the number of high quality charter schools in cities and states across the nation. NACSA provides training, consulting, and policy guidance to authorizers and education leaders interested in increasing the number of high quality schools and improving student outcomes.

SOURCE National Association of Charter School Authorizers

NACSA has also works with the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (board members listed here), has received about a million dollars a year from government sources and another million from the Walton Family Foundation, manages to pay roughly $100,000 salaries to 9 employees/consultants, and includes for-profit ventures like the Edison Schools, White Hat, K-12 Inc, and Connections Academy in their membership. NACSA overseas about half of the nation's charter schools, but also act as one of the de facto PRs/lobbying/training arm of the corporate charter school movement: giving advice to states and education departments on charter oversight, regulations, and authorizations all while taking money from the for-profit education sector and a right-wing, union-bashing foundation looking to push more competition in public education. Conflicts of interest? You bet. Insidious relationships? Check. Corrupt snake oil salesmen pushing test score miracles? Boatloads. Just like the Wall Street banking giants and their army of well-funded lobbyists, the major bankrollers of the corporate charter school movement and their for-profit leeches know that it always helps to buy off the governing bodies when implementing reforms.

Duncan Agenda: Segregated Charters, Unqualified Teachers, and Pay-Per-Score Teacher Pay

From today's Washington Post, the amazing, incredible, and unprecendented Arne Duncan makes his reform by bribery efforts clear. We can only hope that most states will tell Duncan to take his 4 billion in bribes and go to hell with it:

. . . .the program is also a competition through which states can increase or decrease their odds of winning federal support. For example, states that limit alternative routes to certification for teachers and principals, or cap the number of charter schools, will be at a competitive disadvantage. And states that explicitly prohibit linking data on achievement or student growth to principal and teacher evaluations will be ineligible for reform dollars until they change their laws. . . .

Poor KIPP Baltimore, Sighs the Baltimore Sun

What remains of the Baltimore Sun is, ironically, dedicated to assuaging the agendas of corporate bosses who have been responsible for its demise so far. Jesse Alred has some of the details of the Baltimore KIPP story, where KIPP, Inc. pays its Mr. and Mrs. CEO over a hundred grand each per year, while denying that it can come up with the cash to pay teachers what local contracts demands. KIPP is the same outfit that has unlimited tax-credited contributions from Fisher, Gates, Broad and the other oligarchs who use their philanthro-capitalist machines to choke out public schools and teacher unions.

Jesse Alred has some of the details:

The Baltimore Sun on July 21, 2009 published a story about union-management conflict at the KIPP Ujima school.

It seems the KIPP Ujima Village Academy was paying overtime less than the rate set by the labor contract protecting all Baltimore teachers.

The Sun presented both sides in the article but did so in a way to encourage sympathy for the KIPP school.

The title of the article was "Successful charter school cut staff, hours over union contract." The subtitle ran "KIPP Ujima says it can't afford overtime."

The first paragraph ran: "Baltimore's most successful middle school is laying off staff and shortening its school day to meet the demands of a teachers union contract in what is one of the first major disputes over teacher pay between a charter school and a union."

The Sun is balanced in noting the union ignored the contract violation for seven years. The required pay rate for the mandatory overtime KIPP teachers put in is 33% of their regular salary. KIPP had been paying 19%.

Much of the article either heaped praise on KIPP's achievement, recounted its history, or described the potential dangers to KIPP's future if higher pay was required in the future at KIPP Ujima or at other KIPP schools.

The Sun quoted David Stone, the only board member to vote against the union contract's ratification, but not any other board member.

While providing a lot of favorable background information about KIPP, The Sun did not address criticisms of the KIPP model, mainly that it tends to segregate motivated students and committed parents from the rest of the school system--and then declares it is performing better than neighborhood schools on a level playing field.

The article received responses the next day in the form of editorials in favor of the union and for KIPP's management position. Union President Marietta English wrote The Sun created an "innacurate picture" of union activities. She also mentioned the KIPP Director and his wife, the prinicipal at the school, received salaries above $100,000.

KIPP and its allied school reformers are typically flush with cash. Michelle Rhee in D.C. was offering $100,000 salaries to any teacher who would give up tenure rights. Houston-KIPP has raised $100 million in private funds for expansion.

Hopefully the pay increases, which seem fair considering how hard these young teachers work, will become the norm through the charter network and help reduce KIPP's high teacher turnover rate.

Favorable treatment for KIPP, without nuance, seems to be a trend in the media.

Here are links to the three articles.
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/education/bal-kippletter0721,0,6153655.story

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/letters/bal-kippletter0721b,0,3839406.story

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/education/bal-kippletter0721,0,6153655.story

Cornel West and Carl Dix on Obama: Accountability, the Privatization of Public Problems, and Class Warfare

From today's DemocracyNow! with Amy Goodman:

AMY GOODMAN: I began by asking Cornel West and Carl Dix to comment on the significance of President Obama becoming the first African American president. This is Carl Dix.

CARL DIX: I’m a sixty-year-old black man, which means I have decades of experience with white supremacy. I remember when the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education outlawing segregation in education, Baltimore, Maryland, closed down the public swimming pools, because they saw the writing on the wall, and they’d have to integrate them, and they could not—they were not going to subject white kids to the indignity of swimming in water that had touched the bodies of black kids. That’s how thick this racism has been, and it’s continued on the way down. But that’s just something I remember from my childhood.


So I understand why people got into it, but I did see where this could go. And see, a lot of people say, “Well, look, a lot of black youth are going to get inspiration and hope from Obama being in the White House.” But then, the question I pose to them is, what will happen to that inspiration and hope when it collides with the continuing reality of white supremacy, male supremacy, imperialist, you know, overseas adventures, that remain the defining reality of America?


And see, what is coming around on this is that black youth are more and more being blamed for the situation that the system puts them in. And you look at Obama’s last two Father’s Day speeches, he gets into this thing of, you know, the youth got to pull up their pants. The absent dads got to be involved in their lives. You’ve got—the parents got to turn off the TV and make sure the kids do their homework. In other words, the onus for the youth not achieving is being put on the youth themselves and their parents. And what’s disappearing in that are the continuing obstacles that this system puts in the way of black, Latino and poor youth who want to achieve. So, in other words, the people are being blamed, and who better than Barack Obama, the first black president, to blame black youth for their plight? If George Bush does it, people would say it’s racist. But when the first black president does it, it actually draws people into it.


AMY GOODMAN: Do you share that criticism, Professor West?


CORNEL WEST: Yes, I think Brother Carl Dix is hitting the nail on the head. I think, at the same time, there’s ways in which, at the symbolic level, to break the glass ceiling at the very top of the American empire, the White House. Powerful, symbolically. Brother Carl and I are saying there’s too many brothers and sisters—red brothers and sisters on the reservations, white brothers and sisters poor working class, brown brothers and sisters in barrios, black brothers and sisters in chocolate cities—who are stuck in the basement. You’re stuck in the basement, you break the glass ceiling at the top.


The obsession is keeping track of Obama in the White House, a white house primarily built by black slaves. What about those who are still locked at the bottom, when you have policy team—neo-imperialist policy in foreign policy, neoliberal in economic policy—that’s reproducing the conditions of those stuck at the bottom across race? And at this point, you see, you can’t allow race and him being the first black president to hide and conceal the very ugly class realities of poor and working people. And that’s precisely, I think, why we’re trying to generate some motion, some momentum and some movement.


AMY GOODMAN: Do you share Carl Dix’s criticism of President Obama’s Father’s Day speeches?


CORNEL WEST: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. I think that it’s quite telling that he would give personal responsibility speeches to black people, but not a lot of personal responsibility speeches to Wall Street in terms of execution. And when you actually look at the degree to which issues of accountability for poor people—but where’s the accountability when you’re bailing out these Wall Street elites, $700 billion? That’s socialism for the rich. That’s your policy. Don’t then go to these folk who are locked into dilapidated housing, decrepit school systems, many on their way to a prison-industrial complex, and talk about their fathers didn’t come through. And we know the fathers got problems. We understand that. But there are structural institutional challenges that he’s not hitting, hitting head on.

A similar criticism is laid out by Henry A Giroux in, "Children of the Recession: Remembering 'Manchild in the Promised Land.'"

Bill Gates Among Top Quartile of Aspiring Wizards

One of Obama's bosses on education is making news noise again, with his corporate-spun notions on how to make the next generation of children the servants of Microsoft. Among his favorite ideas is turning urban education over to the KIPP-inspired brainwashers and prison guards trained in the happy talk pop psychology of CIA advisor, Dr. Martin Seligman, whose mind fix for the poor is viewed as the affordable solution to a social fix that is much too expensive for the richest men in the world to consider. Never mind that these KIPP testing chain gangs have teacher and student attrition rates that make such "schools" entirely unsustainable beyond the boutique model within which they now grind out their test scores while turning poor children into automatons.

Another of Bill's favorite ideas is a pay-per-score plan that rewards good teaching. What is good teaching? Well, good teaching produces good test scores. And what makes good test scores? Well, it's good teaching, of course. As the good professor explained about the origin of turtles, it's turtles, then, all the way down.

. . . .Fixing what is wrong with American learning, Gates said, requires new ways of looking at its problems.

Teachers are rewarded for "seniority and master's degrees," he said, and that is not the best way to ensure educational quality.

Critical in determining whether a student will drop out of high school, he said, is whether he or she connects with a good teacher in the fifth to eighth grades and develops a passion for lifelong learning.

A quality teacher would boost scores by 10 percentage points in a single year, Gates noted. "What that means is that if, in the United States, for two years, our teachers were all top-quartile teachers, the differences between the United States and the very best scores in the world would go away," he said. "We should identify those teachers, we should reward them, we should retain them, we should make sure other teachers learn from them."

The economic-recovery money creates new opportunities for public and private partnerships. . . .

And how would Bill have our teachers crank out the highest test scores in the world? Simple, he would have all teachers improve so that they would produce test scores that would put them in the top quartile of test score producers, i. e., test score producers such that they would be more effective than 75-99% of all teachers. Even for a duplicitous jerk like Bill Gates, this is an astonishing expectation to put on teachers, here or in Timbuktu. Here's why, as patiently explained by Richard Rothstein in Class and Schools . . . (2004):

. . . improving teacher quality so that all teachers rise to the top quintile of effectiveness is a fanciful goal. Policy makers who cite Dr. Sanders [or Bill Gates] do not appreciate how unattainable is a 40 percentile gain--voving teachers from about the 50th percentile in effectiveness to about the 90th [or 87th]. This is more than what researchers call a full standard deviation. In no field can a policy reform reasonably aim for such enormous gain.

And here is an analogy that Rothstein offers to "help think about whether we can possibly recruit or train teachers to be as good as the 90th [or 87th] percentile group:"

In 2000, real median household income in the U.S. was $42,000 a year. The 90th percentile income was $112,000 a year, nearly three times as much. We could imagine radical labor market or macroeconomic policies that might raise typical household incomes up to, say, $45,000 or even $50,000 in a few years. But policies to move the median to $112,000 are unimaginable. Improvement of 40 [or 35] percentile points up a distribution is not a real world aspiration (p. 65).

The value for Gates and the other Oligarchs of such fanciful thinking comes from putting the achievement bar at an unachievable level. In doing so, teachers, students, administrators will never do enough to satisfy the corporate bosses who stand on the sidelines with their junk science, their media scourges, and their big scary threats about China and India and Korea eating our lunch. See NCLB.

If Gates had his way, of course, none of us on this side of the curtain would know enough to peek backstage. That is not the case, however, yet. In fact, you can come out from behind the curtain now, Mr. Gates: your balloon is ready to take you aloft.

Gates on the Alignment of Common Core Standards, Curriculum, and Testing; the New Education Marketplace

Today, Bill Gates went in front of the National Conference of State Legislators and claimed national standards, merit-pay, high-stakes testing, a common curriculum, and innovation will unlock the "powerful market forces in the service of better teaching." The billionaire tech nut is overly intoxicated after chugging the Chubb and Moe/Milton Friedman competition kool aid, full-on convinced we'd have a better education system with more standardization and competition, fewer teachers, and a hell of a lot more computer time. Absent from his rant is any mention of poverty, the lack of healthcare for millions of children, or the joblessness created by Wall Street style capitalism (which certainly hurts our children). Gates' entire speech is worth reading (available here), but here is one key snippet:

Fortunately, the state-led Common Core State Standards Initiative is developing clear, rigorous common standards that match the best in the world. Last month, 46 Governors and Chief State School Officers made a public commitment to embrace these common standards.

This is encouraging—but identifying common standards is not enough. We’ll know we’ve succeeded when the curriculum and the tests are aligned to these standards.

Secretary Arne Duncan recently announced that $350 million of the stimulus package will be used to create just these kinds of tests—next-generation assessments aligned to the common core.

When the tests are aligned to the common standards, the curriculum will line up as well—and that will unleash powerful market forces in the service of better teaching. For the first time, there will be a large base of customers eager to buy products that can help every kid learn and every teacher get better. Imagine having the people who create electrifying video games applying their intelligence to online tools that pull kids in and make algebra fun.

There can also be—and there should be —online videos of every required course, taught by master teachers, and made available free of charge. These would help train teachers. They would help students who need some review or just want to get ahead. Melinda and I have used online videos when we’ve helped our own kids on some of their school work. They are phenomenal tools that can help every student in the country—if we get the common standards that will encourage people to make them.

If your state doesn’t join the common standards, your kids will be left behind; and if too many states opt out—the country will be left behind. Remember—this is not a debate that China, Korea, and Japan are having. Either our schools will get better—or our economic position will get worse.

Fenty Moves to Ax Oversight and Evaluations of Rhee Regime

Last year when Adrian Fenty put forward the names of Fred Hess and Kenneth Wong as potential independent evaluators of the Fenty/Rhee Regime, council members noted that Hess had lost an election as President of the Michelle Rhee Fan Club and that Wong had publicly declared his support for educational dictatorships for the urban poor. Their names were pulled.

A year later Council proposed the independent National Research Council provide an unbiased evaluation of the Fenty/Rhee Cabal. And now Fenty wants to eliminate the funding to pay the evaluators, as well as funding to provide staff for ongoing oversight of his corrupt, corporate fiefdom. Again, the question remains--how long will the Oligarchy allow Bill Turque to report such stories?

By Bill Turque
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Mayor Adrian M. Fenty has eliminated funding for an independent evaluator assigned to assess the progress of public school reform under Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee, according to the revised 2010 budget he submitted to the D.C. Council late Friday.

Fenty (D) also reversed a series of other budget measures, approved by the council in May, that sought to divert some of the mayor's control of education to other agencies. They include the shift of staff and funds from Deputy Mayor for Education Victor Reinoso to the D.C. State Board of Education, which would be established as an independent agency. The board would house the office of the ombudsman for public education, which is responsible for investigating complaints and answering questions from parents.

The proposed moves reflect the council's discontent with what some members see as a lack of transparency and accountability in the mayor's efforts to transform the District's struggling public school system. The ombudsman's office, for example, is supposed to file monthly reports but has not done so since March. The ombudsman, Tonya Vidal Kinlow, resigned in December and has yet to be permanently replaced.

Chairman Vincent C. Gray (D) and the council are free to restore the funding cut when they vote on the revised budget July 31. But speaking to the council Monday at a hearing on Fenty's plan to close a two-year, $666 million revenue shortfall, city administrator Neil Albert urged that the governance structure established in 2007 remain intact.

"Our education reform efforts are demonstrating real results," Albert said, "and we strongly believe that, rather than changing course with the established structure, we should maintain momentum forward."

Albert did not directly address the school evaluation, which Fenty is required to submit annually under the law that established mayoral control. He also has the option to skip the yearly reports and deliver a five-year independent assessment by September 2012.

In May 2008, Reinoso recommended two prominent education scholars for the project, Frederick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute and Kenneth Wong of Brown University. But the plan stalled when Gray raised questions about their independence. Hess wrote an op-ed piece for The Washington Post in 2007 praising Rhee. Wong testified in favor of the mayoral takeover.

When Reinoso didn't offer other candidates, Gray decided to move on his own. This past May, he included $325,000 to hire the National Research Council, one of four nonprofit organizations that operate under the National Academies umbrella, to conduct the evaluation. The money would cover about 20 percent of the total cost, with the NRC raising the rest from private sources.

Fenty spokeswoman Mafara Hobson said Monday that the mayor was still committed to an independent evaluation but did not elaborate.. . . .

The Little Dictator Who Couldn't

With the current Depression an inescapable reality of our lives, the continued political rule by the Oligarchs whose unrestrained greed delivered us into this mess is suddenly under the microscope. Could it be that we as a country will actually begin to question whether or not our lives should be given over to building a global corporate structure that benefits a handful of the mega-rich, while oppressing hundreds of millions of workers who are treated as disposable chattel? Could it be that the phony wizards who have bought our loyalties will finally be exposed as the power-hungry merchants of greed who serve only their gas-filled egos and their own financial self-interests? From the New York Times:

By A. G. SULZBERGER

The mayor wanted members of the State Senate to be dragged back to Albany. Instead, nearly a dozen of them showed up on the front steps of City Hall on Sunday.

In the increasingly acrimonious battle over mayoral control of New York City’s public schools, 10 senators, all of them Democrats, held an hourlong news conference, ostensibly to demand that Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg make some concessions before they consider extending his control.

All of the senators spoke, and they proclaimed the issue too important to be sidetracked by political rhetoric. Then some proceeded to vilify the mayor, calling him everything from a dictator to a yenta to a plantation owner.

“The days of being intimidated are over,” said Senator Eric Adams of Brooklyn. “We will not surrender our children, and he needs to understand that.”

The war of words escalated as the mayor and Senate leaders settled into an impasse over extending Mr. Bloomberg’s lapsed control of the school system. On Friday, Senate leaders shelved the legislation as they adjourned for the summer — violating their pledge to bring the matter to a vote — citing the mayor’s refusal to submit to any changes to the bill.

During his weekly radio show on Friday, Mr. Bloomberg questioned the intelligence of some of the senators who wanted to scale back mayoral control — including John L. Sampson of Brooklyn, the Democratic conference leader — and called for the State Police to “drag” senators to the Capitol for a vote. Dipping into his Yiddish dictionary, the mayor added that taking the summer off without extending mayoral control would be “meshugenah.”

Several of the senators present on Sunday — including Pedro Espada Jr. and Hiram Monserrate, whose defection from and return to the Democratic caucus bookended the monthlong power struggle that paralyzed state government — cited those remarks during their rebuttal.

“We believe it would be meshugenah not to include parents in the education of our children,” said Mr. Monserrate, of Queens. “As opposed to loosely using the word ‘meshugenah,’ we would also say we don’t need a yenta on the other side of this argument and this debate.” . . . .

Right Wing Sludge Tanks Gush Over Obama's "No Excuses" Philosophy

The education reform antiquarians are pumped over the fact that our first African-American President is more like Bill Cosby than Martin Luther King, more Booker T. Washington than W. E. B. Dubois.

If Obama's image makers think that this is going to impress anyone who voted for him, he needs some new image makers. If this is what Obama really thinks, then it is clear that he has joined those who have chosen to use their "no excuses" tough talk as the ultimate excuse to ignore poverty for another generation, while poor children are sacrificed to the bare-knuckled pedagogy of the anti-culturalist chain gangs. From Petrilli at Fordham Institute, which begins with a quote from the Great Accommodationist:

Obama: . . . .We’ve got to say to our children, yes, if you’re African American, the odds of growing up amid crime and gangs are higher. Yes, if you live in a poor neighborhood, you will face challenges that somebody in a wealthy suburb does not have to face. But that’s not a reason to get bad grades — (applause) — that’s not a reason to cut class — (applause) — that’s not a reason to give up on your education and drop out of school. (Applause.) No one has written your destiny for you. Your destiny is in your hands — you cannot forget that. That’s what we have to teach all of our children. No excuses. (Applause.) No excuses.

You get that education, all those hardships will just make you stronger, better able to compete. Yes we can. (Applause.)

Petrilli: Of course, not everyone is happy with this line of argument. The socialists, for example, detest it. More reason to sing its praises!

It’s true that there wasn’t any policy substance in the speech that was particularly new or different. But we policy wonks tend to overrate policy substance anyway. Here’s an African-American president, speaking to the NAACP, and arguing for reform in our schools and responsibility in our homes and community. This is worth celebrating.

Bracey on "Der Fuhrers Duncan and Bloomberg"

From HuffPo:

Our Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, has been on a "listening tour" where he's done most of the talking. He advocates, repeatedly, that mayors should take control of urban schools. Obviously he cannot take an honest look at his own accomplishments under this governance system or--he'd have to shut up.

The usual rationale a mayoral power grab is it brings more accountability and a clear line of authority. School boards are generally elected in off years and few people vote, allowing special interest groups (usually education unions, some claim) to essentially rig the elections. School boards are fractious and try to micromanage. They are amateurs and prisoners of deeply rooted school bureaucracies.

But do mayors do better? Depends on how you feel about democracy. The Spring 2009 issue of Rethinking Schools, said that, as Daley's man, Duncan "has shown himself to be the central messenger, manager and staunch defender of corporate involvement in, and privatization of, public schools, closing schools in low-income neighborhoods of color with little community input, limiting local democratic control, undermining the teachers union and promoting competitive merit pay for teachers."

The most important corporate involvement involves the 132-year-old Commercial Club of Chicago. Yet that organization recently published Still Left Behind, slamming Chicago's public schools as awful and that the reforms they've endured were designed to make the adults running the schools look good, not improve the lives of children. You could say the Club stabbed Arne in the back except that they did it upfront in the open, without once mentioning Duncan's name. The Club report backs up its case with many data.

If we look at the other most visible case of mayoral control, we see an even more autocratic system in place. When the New York legislature handed control of the schools in 2002 to Mayor Mike Bloomberg and his Chancellor, Joel Klein, it created the Panel for Educational Policy, attempting to establish a "balance of authority." The group is universally referred to as the Panel of Educational Puppets. The panelists, "an investment banker, a lingerie store owner and an expert on electromagnetics among them--rarely engage in discussions with those who rise to address them. They do not debate the educational issues of the day, but spend most sessions applauding packaged presentations by staff. Some have barely uttered a public word during their tenures" (New York Times, April 23, 2009).

And if they do utter a public word, it damn well better be in support of Hizzoner or else they're history. Said Bloomberg, "Mayoral control means mayoral control, thank you very much. They are my representatives, and they are going to vote for things I believe in."

Both Bloomberg/Klein and Daley/Duncan have touted rising state test scores as proof of their success. But analysts in both cities have shown that the rises only show how easy it is to manipulate test scores. In New York, a narrow range of standards is tested and the content from year to year is highly predictable. In Illinois, the state made it easier for systems to meet the standards with new item formats and lower passing scores.

But if one looks at the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), both cities look dreadful and show little progress. This is especially true for black students, the group most affected. Compared to kids nationally in math, for example, NYC's black eighth-graders rank at the 26th percentile, while Chicago's come in at the 18th percentile. In 2003, 9% of NYC's black students were proficient or better in math and by 2007 the proportion had "jumped" to 10%. In 2003, 4% of Chicago's black eighth-graders were proficient or better in math, and by 2007 the figure had risen to 6%. The black-white achievement gap shrank slightly in NYC, but grew in Chicago.

A June 2009 Chicago Tribune article noted that two thirds of all new Chicago teachers leave within 5 years and that half of the teachers in high poverty areas disappear after only three. Hard to have a turnaround with that kind of turnover.

Of course, some of the teachers got a push. Ron Huberman fired the faculty and staff of 16 schools in less than three months after replacing Duncan. If Duncan had worked the miracles his PR machine claimed, Huberman should have been able to spend most of the day smoking cigars, tweeting and embellishing his image on Facebook. Newsweek said the district "is mired in urban woes--and, in some cases, a sense of complacency." Complacency? Daley has had control of Chicago's schools for 13 years and Duncan was there for seven of them, but the test scores above are evidence that they didn't do much to stir anything but the public relations pot.

Bloomberg's authority expired in June, but about then collective insanity infected the Senate and the legislature adjourned for the summer without passing a new authorization. Bloomberg says he will ask the governor to call them back into session until he gets a bill, HIS bill. Checks and balances, anyone?

Obama to the Poor: "No Excuses"

If you don't follow the shenanigans of the aging tribe of right-wingers who have controlled education policy since St. Reagan came to Washington declaring that the schools had been charged with doing "too much, too fast" on Civil Rights, you may find something catchy and new in this generation's version of a Booker T. Washington sermon to the NAACP, whose open proclamation of "No Excuses" to the poor and disenfranchised was covered by the corporate media much the same way as Booker T. Washington's concession speech in 1895 that approved of the segregation that would become the law of the land just a year after with the Plessy decision.

In fact, "no excuses!" is not new at all, but the title of a book by the high-powered Brahmin couple, the Thermstroms, whose 2003 No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning sounded the clarion call to declare all-out war on the deficient cultures of the black, the brown, the poor--anyone outside the acid vanilla values of a shrinking middle class scrambling for the front seats of the global economic bus. It was the official opening of the the 21st Century anti-cultural war against the weak (see Edwin Black for history of the 20th Century version), a war that is being spearheaded by the push for segregated corporate charter boot camps intended to brainwash poor children with the worldview that comes naturally to soccer-playing, carefree lads of the leafy suburbs.

Never mind that these poor children have to dodge bullets to get back to their crowded walk-ups where there is no place to do homework and no supper. It is this crime against humanity that is being celebrated by, yes, our President as the manifestation of the Civil Rights movement of this generation, and it is proof that poverty will continue to be ignored, proof that we as a society are ready to throw away all those children whose souls cannot fit the only mold that is available for their warm little souls to be poured into.

Michelle Rhee's Test Score Pump

Washington D.C.'s model testocracy that Michelle Rhee manages for the Oligarchs is clearly practicing the philosophy of the old glam rocker, David Lee Roth: "It's not how good you are, it's how good you look." Bill Turque, writing for WaPo, has a sketch of the "bubble kids" and "pushouts" story that has helped to put some lipstick . . . never mind (one must wonder how long it will take to get rid of Bill Turque):

By Bill Turque
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 17, 2009

When Mayor Adrian M. Fenty announced the continued growth of standardized test scores for District students Monday, he hailed it as "powerful evidence of the incredible work being done by teachers, principals and most importantly our students."

What Fenty did not say was that the two-year improvement in District of Columbia Comprehensive Assessment System results -- including an average of nearly 15 percentage points in the pass rates on elementary reading and math tests -- was also the product of a strategy that relied on improved statistical housekeeping.

These include intensive test preparation targeted to a narrow group of students on the cusp of proficient, or passing, scores, and "cleaning the rosters" of students ineligible to take the tests -- and also likely to pull the numbers down.

Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee described some of these approaches as the pursuit of "low-hanging fruit."

The initiatives are neither novel nor improper. They've been in the toolboxes of urban school leaders since the inception of the No Child Left Behind Act. The law requires schools to show annual progress toward a goal of all students passing reading and math tests by 2014.

Rhee, who says she would like to see the law amended to emphasize year-to-year academic growth, said this week that much of what she had done was a matter of common sense.

"In our first year, we found that certain basic things were not happening," she said. "There were actions we took to ensure we were maximizing our potential to be successful."

The biggest gains were in the elementary grades, where almost half of those tested were deemed proficient: 48.6 percent in math (up from 40.5 percent in 2008) and 49.4 percent in reading (up from 45.6 percent in 2008). In 2007, fewer than a third of elementary students were considered proficient in either subject. At the middle and high school levels, reading proficiency grew from 39 percent to 41 percent; math, from 36 percent to 40 percent.

Some teachers and parents wonder whether the effort and attention devoted to lifting scores helped the children who need the most attention: those years behind grade level in reading and math skills.

One of Rhee's most widely discussed initiatives was "Saturday Scholars," a 13-week program for about 5,000 invited students whose academic records suggested that they were close to scoring at proficiency levels.

Critics call Saturday Scholars and programs like it "educational triage" that focuses disproportionate attention on students who require the least help.

Kerry Sylvia, a social studies teacher at Cardozo High School, said Saturday Scholars was less about serving children and more about making the adults who run the school system look good.

"There are students in my classes who are struggling with basics, and yet we're pouring all of this money into a program not just focused on tests, but on tests for a few students so the scores will look good," said Sylvia, who is a member of Teachers and Parents for Real Education Reform, a group that opposes some of Rhee's initiatives.. . . .

Texas Conservatives Want to Deny César Chávez, Thurgood Marshall a Place in History

Texas is yet again the scene of controversy in education. This time, conservatives are attempting to rewrite history in their Christian-centric universe where white is right and César Chávez and Thurgood Marshall aren't worth studying (is the objection to Chávez and Marshall some post-Obama/Sotomayor backlash?). From the Wall Street Journal:

The fight over school curriculum in Texas, recently focused on biology, has entered a new arena, with a brewing debate over how much faith belongs in American history classrooms.

The Texas Board of Education, which recently approved new science standards that made room for creationist critiques of evolution, is revising the state's social studies curriculum. In early recommendations from outside experts appointed by the board, a divide has opened over how central religious theology should be to the teaching of history.

Three reviewers, appointed by social conservatives, have recommended revamping the K-12 curriculum to emphasize the roles of the Bible, the Christian faith and the civic virtue of religion in the study of American history. Two of them want to remove or de-emphasize references to several historical figures who have become liberal icons, such as César Chávez and Thurgood Marshall.

"We're in an all-out moral and spiritual civil war for the soul of America, and the record of American history is right at the heart of it," said Rev. Peter Marshall, a Christian minister and one of the reviewers appointed by the conservative camp.

...

The conservative reviewers say they believe that children must learn that America's founding principles are biblical. For instance, they say the separation of powers set forth in the Constitution stems from a scriptural understanding of man's fall and inherent sinfulness, or "radical depravity," which means he can be governed only by an intricate system of checks and balances.

The curriculum, they say, should clearly present Christianity as an overall force for good -- and a key reason for American exceptionalism, the notion that the country stands above and apart.

And some of the suggestions of the panel:

1. Delete César Chávez from a list of figures who modeled active participation in the democratic process:

Two reviewers objected to citing Mr. Chávez, who led a strike and boycott to improve working conditions for immigrant farmhands, as an example of citizenship for fifth-graders. "He's hardly the kind of role model that ought to be held up to our children as someone worthy of emulation," Rev. Marshall wrote.

2. Include more study of religious revival movements:

Evangelist Billy Graham should be included on a list of transformational leaders of the 20th century and students in fifth and eight grades should study the colonial-era religious revival known as the Great Awakening as a force "in shaping a national identity," suggests reviewer Daniel Dreisbach, a professor of public affairs at American University.

3. Replace references to America's "democratic" values with "republican" values:

Reviewer David Barton suggests swapping out "republican" for "democratic" in teaching materials. As he explains: "We don't pledge allegiance to the flag and the democracy for which it stands."

4. Tone down emphasis on the Cold War:

Reviewer Lybeth Hodges, a history professor at Texas Woman's University, suggests revising the standards that set current events in the Cold War framework of democracy versus communism. She calls for adding study of Arab nations and Islam.

Massachusetts and the Patrick Plan: More Apartheid Schooling for the Poor

Horace Mann must be rolling in his grave this morning here in the Commonwealth, where the Common School was born, and where philanthro-capitalism and weak politicians now take a big leap forward in replacing the public schools with corporate charters. Patrick's bow to the Bush/Obama plan to segregate the poor and the brown in test prep total control chain gangs will no doubt earn him enough federal money from Dunc's bribery fund to avoid raising state taxes on the rich as the economy continues to crumble, but we may wonder what effect this capitulation to the Oligarchy will have on Patrick's political future in the Commonwealth.

The timing of this shift toward more charters does nothing to quell the suspicion that Patrick has become another puppet of the Oligarchs, especially with the recent peer-reviewed study out of Stanford showing only 17% of charters in their sample of 2,403 were outperforming public schools, and that poor and brown children were suffering the most in the others that are performing no better (42%) or worse (37%) than the public schools.

With school committees already scratching their heads on where else to cut in order to stay afloat in the current Depression, which is brought to you by the same merchants of greed who are now bankrolling the charter movement, the removal of the charter cap in poor/brown districts could cause school chaos and a political backlash like we have not seen elsewhere in the nation.

Rather than taking the lead in crafting policy to stem the steady resegregation of American schools, it is ironic, indeed, that African-American political leaders are now intent upon throwing gasoline onto the American apartheid fire. Greed and power are, indeed, colorblind. But, then, principles went out the window some time back--otherwise, we would not hear the cacaphonous silence from the the office of once-liberal lion, Ted Kennedy.

May the citizens of Massachusetts send a message that we want to save and improve our public schools, not hand them over to CEO wannabes to run into the ground with the punishing stupidity of the anti-cultural "no excuses" reform schools. Any aspiring governor types out there who will stand up for public education?

From the Boston Globe:

Governor Deval Patrick will unveil a proposal today to nearly double the number of charter school seats allowed in the state’s worst-performing districts, a move expected to trigger a fierce debate on Beacon Hill and send tremors through local school systems.

The proposal, which requires legislative approval, would create an estimated 27,000 new charter school seats in about 30 districts across the state, from Boston to the Berkshires, according to a copy of draft legislation obtained by the Globe. Lawmakers were briefed on the plan yesterday.

Doubling the charter school seats in those districts is far more aggressive than the initial plan Patrick outlined in January, and represents a dramatic departure for a governor who had previously resisted calls to lift the state-imposed limit on new charters.

The governor’s push comes as President Obama is threatening to withhold millions in federal stimulus dollars from states that hinder charter school growth. The US secretary of education, Arne Duncan, will join the governor at a press conference today unveiling the legislation, which will be filed today.

The governor’s office declined to comment yesterday through a spokesman for the state’s secretary of education. . . .

. . . .Education leaders said the scope of the proposed charter expansion is far more dramatic than the Patrick administration had discussed with them as recently as earlier this week.

“I’m surprised and disappointed,’’ said Thomas Scott, executive director of the Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents, contending that the state needs to overhaul charter school funding. “We are stripping the neediest districts of necessary resources.’’

The state’s 62 existing charter schools, authorized under the 1993 education reform act, generally operate independently of local school districts and are not unionized. That has earned them the ire of local education leaders, who lose money to the schools, but have no control over them, and of the teacher unions, who have been key allies for Patrick.

While many legislators see value in charter schools, some are reluctant to support expansion without changing the way charter schools are funded so it is less harmful to local districts, said Representative Martha Walz, cochairwoman of the Joint Committee on Education. She said the committee is researching methods used by other states to fund charter schools and is considering whether to require a change in the formula for funding schools before the limit on charter schools can be lifted.

“If too much money leaves the district for charter schools, students who remain in the district could be disadvantaged,’’ said Walz, who has not taken a position on the governor’s proposal.

The state places a limit on the number of charter schools statewide, as well as limits in individual districts. While about 60 more charter schools statewide can open under current law, many urban districts, such as Boston, are near the local cap, which limits each district’s spending on charter tuition to 9 percent of its annual net school spending. The governor’s proposal would increase that limit to 18 percent, 6 percentage points higher than he proposed in January.

In Boston, the increase would add more than 5,000 seats, enabling many of the city’s approximately 16 charter schools to expand and opening the door for many new charter schools.

Statewide, districts eligible for more charters, chosen because of low scores on state standardized tests, have capacity for another 10,000 charter school seats under current law. Patrick’s proposal would raise that to about 37,000 seats.

Last month, Mayor Thomas M. Menino, a longtime charter school critic, attempted to counter the possible change, advocating creation of a type of in-district charter school that could be controlled by cities and towns, instead of by the state. The Boston school district expects to see about $50 million in state aid diverted next year to charter schools, which will enroll more than 5,200 city children. The Legislature will hold a hearing on Menino’s bill next week.

Earlier this year in his state budget proposal, Patrick attempted to link raising the charter school cap to changes in the funding formula, such as creating a separate pool of state aid for charters. But charter school advocates objected, fearing it could put them at greater risk of state budget cuts, and the governor later abandoned the plan.

That was not the only concession Patrick made to charter advocates in the revised legislation, showing just how much he has warmed to charter advocates, a group that includes several prominent business and civic leaders.

Initially, Patrick had proposed quotas for certain groups of students, such as those who are in special education or are English language learners, but he is now settling for establishing guidelines. Charter advocates worried that quotas would compromise the fairness of its open lottery system for student admission; they still have some concerns about the guidelines.

Glenn Koocher, executive director of the Massachusetts Association of School Committees, said Patrick is conceding far too much to charter school supporters.

“What can it possibly be but another indication that the charter school lobby is dictating state policy?’’ Koocher said. “Districts will lose more money, and the charter schools will laugh all the way to the bank.’’

KIPP Houston, We Have a Problem

Jesse Alred has done a bit of number crunching in Houston, which is the mecca for the KIPP Cult and its spin-off denomination, YES Prep. In line with the CEO reward model upon which these total control camps are based, the administrators at KIPP Houston are much more likely to earn six figure salaries than admins in the public schools, HISD. What about the frontline brainwashers, er, instructors of these anti-cultural cults?

Well, Alred does not include salary info, but he does note that 4 of 10 KIPP teachers and 3.6 of 10 YES teachers say "no" after one year. Not even TFA and its national television advertising campaign bankrolled by the Oligarchs can hope to keep up with that kind of turnover rate. By the way, KIPP and YES are the "no exuses" charter apartheid models that the Obamaites promote as the urban education solution. From the Examiner.com:

. . . . Relative to size, KIPP has more administrators making salaries of $100,000 or more than the Houston Independent School District. KIPP has 262 students for each employee earning $100,000 or more in salaried compensation. YES Prep charter schools, about the same size as KIPP, has 681 students per employee earning $100,000 or over. HISD has 1,472 pupils per employee earning $100,000 or more.

Bonuses for most KIPP administrators are very low compared to HISD, but not for its founder and Superintendent, Mike Feinberg. His 2008-2009 bonus was $34,000, larger than every HISD administrator except for Superintendent Abelardo Saavedra. Ms. Kathleen Gil, KIPP's Assistant Superintendent for Instruction, received $26,100, more than all but two HISD administrators, Dr. Saavedra and Dr. Karen Garza. Dr. Garza's bonus was $29, 070.

KIPP-Houston serves 2,358 students whose parents apply for admission. It is the size of a large HISD high school. HISD has responsibility for 198,769 students zoned to its schools. HISD also serves a more diverse range of students in terms of learning abilities. HISD has twice the percentage of students who need special education services than KIPP-Houston. . . .

Also from the Examiner:

. . . .About one in nine teachers leave HISD each year. The annual turnover rate is 14.6%. The typical HISD teacher remains the district for an average of 9.4 years and has 11.7 years of teaching experience. Statewide, teachers stay with their districts an average of 7.4 years.

Two of five KIPP teachers leave their jobs each year. This is a turnover rate of 40%. KIPP teachers have an average of 1.7 years of service in the charter network and an average of five years total teaching experience.

Yes Prep teachers have slightly fewer teachers leaving each year than KIPP. Its turnover rate is 36.8%, still much higher than HISD and statewide turnover. The average YES Prep teacher stays with the charter network for 1.3 years and has 4.6 years of teaching experience.. . . .

Shelton Brings Wall Street Accountability to Duncan's Office of Innovation and Improvement

The news of hefty profits and bonuses at Goldman Sachs shouldn't come as a surprise given the investment bank's involvement in various sectors of the financial system. In what is certainly not solely a Democratic or Republican conspiracy - but rather a bipartisan example of the ruling elites' love of neoliberal economic principles - multiple Goldman Sachs employees have hopped into high-level regulatory or policy divisions without any serious concerns being raised. Under the guise of a Harvard academic program, Jeffery Peck advocated for Wall Street interests while operating as a lobbyist for the Wall Street-funded, Hank Paulson-approved Committee on Capital Markets Regulation - a misnomer rivaling NCLB or Bush's compassionate conservative. But this kind of corruption - the private sector using government posts and academic institutions to grease the wheels of the for-profit secotr - extends into the Department of Education as well.

Take Jim Shelton as a prime example. He was tapped to run the Bush-created Office of Innovation and Improvement under President Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. Prior to being selected by Duncan to run part of the DOE, Shelton started a for-profit education management organization that was bought by the Edison Schools. He headed the East coast division of the NewSchools Venture Fund, worked at the Gates Foundation, and dabbled in for-profit education yet again at Mike Miliken's Knowledge Universe. McKinsey, Edison, NSVF, Gates, Knowledge Universe: and now he gets $650 million to drive reform.

The various MBA schools that teach education entrepreneurship (mostly Stanford and Harvard) publish their studies about start-up organizations in the for-profit and non-profit field. Wanna know what happened with Shelton's creation, LearnNow? A Stanford case study (for academics, not to be viewed by the general public: here is a link to purchase the article for $6.95) discusses the fiasco. LearnNow had received some funding from the NewSchools Venture Fund back in 2000. NSVF quickly realized they were way in over their heads in attempting the for-profit model (Knowledge Universe was the original funder). LearnNow wasn't making any money and the need for expansion (and profits) left the company on the brink of collapse. NSVF came to the rescue less than a year after their initial investment to help the group raise more funding. NSVF couldn't let the EMO fail because it would hurt the NSVF brand and the charter school movement as a whole (always good to have deep pockets behind you). They recruited Dan Pianko - a former Goldman Sachs employee, I kid you not - to work out the finances and agreed to have regular contact with NSVF regarding budgets, etc. In the end, NSVF realized it was best to exit the for-profit EMO market. They sold their LearnNow stock to the Edison Schools crew (making a little profit despite the model's failure) and have not invested in for-profit schools ever since. Shelton managed to climb the corporate ladder after this dramatically unsuccessful "innovation." He had the backing of corporate America and the philanthrocapital world in his previous work; now he gets a hefty chunk of taxpayer dollars.

To Arne and Randi: Not With You, and Against You

While Weingarten paraded her new Slogan (With us, not to us) pinned to her by the Oligarchs, the teachers of the AFT asked real questions that activated the overactive driveling gland of the Secretary. For someone who has reached his level by consistently lying through his big white caps, it must have taken a special pump of the drivel gland to tell these teachers, "Trust us." Anyone who trusts these Broad/Gates/Fisher controlled goons to help, rather than bury, public education is an idiot--period. From WaPo:

By Nick Anderson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Sue from West Virginia wanted to know: How do you evaluate teachers fairly in a merit-pay system? Cynthia from Minnesota asked what's next for the No Child Left Behind law. And teachers from Baltimore and Boston asked why charter schools seem to get special treatment.

To them, and about 2,000 others gathered at a Washington hotel yesterday for the American Federation of Teachers conference, U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan offered variations on the same answer: Trust us; we'll work with you.

But in his unusual town hall-style appearance before the teachers' group, Duncan urged the union to join the Obama administration's push to build support for a new wave of school reform as Congress prepares to reauthorize the 2002 No Child Left Behind law.

Merit pay, also known as "pay for performance," typically involves linking teachers' salaries to student achievement. It is probably the most sensitive issue that President Obama has raised with teachers' unions that campaigned for his election last year.

"You have to do this with teachers. You have to bargain it with the union. You can't do it unilaterally. That's the first thing," Duncan said.

And, he said, "don't pit teachers, professionals, professors, against each other."

On charter schools, which are independently operated but publicly funded, Duncan said: "I don't want them to get a free pass. . . . What you're asking for is fairness, for equity, and I couldn't agree with you more." He added: "To be clear, I'm not a fan of charters. I'm a fan of good charters."

Duncan and Obama have pressed repeatedly this year for states to ease policies that limit the growth of charter schools. That, too, is a hot button for teachers, because many charter schools are not unionized.

As he sat on a stool yesterday next to federation President Randi Weingarten, Duncan, in a gesture of solidarity, wore a button the union had distributed to the audience: "With us, not to us."

The slogan alluded to pledges that Obama has made to seek union involvement in pay-for-performance plans. The administration has proposed more funding in the next fiscal year for programs that experiment with merit pay.

Duncan and Weingarten made clear that teachers should be ready for such experiments.

"When we say, 'With us, not to us,' it means we have to be on the field," Weingarten said. "We have to be engaged."

The federation is the nation's second-largest teachers' union, with 1.4 million members, many of them in large cities such as New York and Washington.

In a speech July 2 in San Diego to the National Education Association, the largest U.S. teachers' union with 3.2 million members, Duncan challenged educators to be open to linking pay to performance and to experiments that could reduce job tenure protections. That address drew some boos. Yesterday, his audience responded more favorably.

To a Chicago teacher who wanted to know what would be done about social problems outside school that affect academic performance, Duncan said: "We all have to be part of the solution."

A New Jersey teacher asked why bilingual education gets little respect. "We have to remove that stigma," he said.

An Illinois teacher queried Duncan about standards for paraprofessionals. "Great question," he said. "One I haven't done a lot of work on.". . . .

Charter Teachers 230 Percent More Likely to Leave Than Public School Teachers

From Ed Week's Debbie Viadero:

Here's an interesting statistical nugget I picked up yesterday at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association: The odds that a teacher in a charter school will leave the profession are 230 percent greater than the odds that a teacher in a traditional public school in their state will do so.

The disturbingly high figure comes from a study by a pair of researchers from Vanderbilt University in Nashville. David A. Stuit and Thomas M. Smith analyzed federal data from the 2003-04 school year on 14,428 teachers from charters and traditional public schools in 16 states.

In the charter schools, nearly a quarter of the teachers ended up leaving by the end of the school year, 14 percent of them leaving the field altogether and 11 percent transferring to another school.

By comparison, the average turnover rate in the regular public schools in the same states was around 14 percent. Half the departing teachers were leavers and half were switchers. . . .

Fordham Fellow, AEI Adjunct Praises DFER, Duncan

The neocons over at the American Enterprise Institute - where Lynn Cheney is an education expert along with scientifically-based racism proponent Charles Murray - certainly love to attack public schools. AEI adjunct/Fordham Fellow Andy Smarick has words of criticism for Duncan and DFER: they're not doing enough to ram reform down the throats of states, districts, and teachers. The $100 billion stimulus package, Smarick claims, has "bought" 150 new charter schools via Duncan's "Race to the Top" pressure, which means each charter cost $667 million. [Check out this explanation for why conservatives have embraced charter schools and are letting go of the voucher idea] Smarick remains skeptical of DFER's early approval of Duncan, but he certainly approves of the reform proposals they are pushing. From the AEI journal/blog:

Stimulating Charter Schools — Much More Could Be Done

By Andrew Smarick

July 13, 2009, 12:14 pm

The vast majority of American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) education funding was designed simply to save jobs and plug budget holes, but the generally reform-minded Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has been trying to make sure that as much of the stimulus funding as possible is used for improvement and innovation (for more, see here).

He lacks sticks in this battle, but he does have one relatively small carrot. He can direct $4.35 billion to the states of his choosing. So he is telling them, “If you want this money, enact reforms; otherwise, you’ll be left out.”

So is this strategy working? Are Secretary Duncan’s threats causing states to change policies?

About a week ago, a group called Democrats for Education Reform weighed in. DFER is an exciting and increasingly important organization, pushing the Democratic Party to get serious about education reform. The group issued a press release hailing the positive influence of Duncan’s tactics, declaring it an “early policy success.” They accurately point out that some states are moving in the right direction. Connecticut, for example, made some important changes in the areas of funding and teacher quality. Overall, however, I think DFER overstates the cumulative effect and claim victory a bit too early.

From the Houston Miracle to the Chicago Sham

From USA Today:

By Greg Toppo, USA TODAY
New research from a Chicago civic group takes direct aim at the city's "abysmal" public high school performance — and puts a new spin on the academic gains made during the seven years that Arne Duncan led the Chicago schools before he was named U.S. Education secretary.
The Civic Committee of The Commercial Club of Chicago, a supporter of Duncan and Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley's push for more control of city schools, issued the report June 30. It says city schools have made little progress since 2003.

Its key findings stand in stark contrast to assertions President Obama made in December when he nominated Duncan as Education secretary.

And though the findings are by no means as explosive, they're reminiscent of revelations from Houston in 2003, when state investigators found that 15 high schools had underreported dropout rates under former superintendent Rod Paige, who by then was George W. Bush's Education secretary.

In December, Obama said that during a seven-year tenure, Duncan had boosted elementary school test scores "from 38% of students meeting the standards to 67%" — a gain of 29 percentage points. But the new report found that, adjusting for changes in tests and procedures, students' pass rates grew only about 8 percentage points.

Obama also said Chicago's dropout rate "has gone downevery year he's been in charge." Though that's technically true, the committee says it's still unacceptably high: About half of Chicago students drop out of the city's non-selective-enrollment high schools. And more than 70% of 11th-graders fail to meet state standards, a trend that "has remained essentially flat" over the past several years.

Even among those who graduate, it says, skills are poor: An analysis of students entering the Chicago City Colleges in fall 2006 showed that 69% were not prepared for college-level reading, 79% were not prepared for writing, and 95% were not prepared for math.

"Performance is very bad, very weak," says Civic Committee president Eden Martin.

Obama also said Chicago students' ACT test score gains "have been twice as big as those for students in the rest of the state." Again, technically true — ACT data show that Chicago students' composite score rose 0.9 points from 2002 to 2006, while Illinois' score rose 0.4 points. But Chicago students' composite score of 17.4 was lower than the statewide average of 20.5.

Timothy Knowles, who directs the University of Chicago's Urban Education Institute, says the report highlights "a highly irresponsible state reaction" to the federal No Child Left Behind law.

"In essence," he says, "many states have lowered (passing) scores on standardized tests to create the public appearance they are meeting federal standards. This practice sells children short — and the states that engage in it are, ironically, leaving themselves behind."

Knowles says Chicago schools are moving in the right direction, with "some extraordinary new schools" and promising performance from black and Latino students, for instance. "However, the Civic Committee report reminds us these successes are fragile … and there is unambiguous evidence that Chicago has miles to go before it sleeps."

Duncan spokesman Peter Cunningham says Chicago schools "made significant gains across a range of indicators" under Duncan. "While we still have a long way to go, it is absolutely misleading and irresponsible to suggest that there has not been progress."

Blogger Alexander Russo, who writes about Chicago schools, says the findings show that nearly 15 years into mayoral control, the city school system "isn't nearly as improved as many have been led to believe."

"What I find particularly appalling is that Duncan and Obama — supposed champions of transparency and using research rather than ideology — have cited Chicago's inflated test scores, even though they knew the increases were exaggerated."

Top-Ranked Finland Offers Reason for Rejecting National Testing

From ABC:

An international educator has criticised the practice of national testing of schools for literacy and numeracy.

Pirjo Sinko from the Finnish Board of Education has addressed a national conference in Hobart for teachers on literacy and reading.

Finland is ranked top of the literacy table for developed countries, and has rejected the practice of national testing and ranking the performance of schools.

Ms Sinko says national testing can be harmful for teachers.

"If teachers are not feeling that [students] are on their side, that they are against their work, and tests are taking too much time and they are teaching for tests nor for kids ... I think that it's not reasonable," she said.

Ms Sinko also preached the benefits of equity in schools for improving literacy levels.

She attributes the success to the provision of equal oppportunites for students regardless of socio-economic background.

"Our educational system can guarantee that they are getting as good teaching in the capital area as in the northest [sic] part of Finland so we are not talking about bad or good schools," she said.

"We don't have any elite schools and school is free."

DFER Guest Blogger Explains Innovation

The DFER blog was recently left in the hands of attorney/banker/entrepreneur-turned-educator Leigh McGuigan. She assisted the Bloomberg/Klein dictatorship in NYC before moving to the Cleveland schools to work in the Office of New and Innovative Schools. Like many so-called reformers operating outside of the traditional public schools, McGuigan pulls in a very handsome salary: $170,000 per year, paid for by the Cleveland and Gund Foundations. What does a high-roller like McGuigan think about innovation in public education? From theDFER blog:

July 10, 2009

Leigh McGuigan: On Innovation

I am finishing my week of blogging with one of my favorite topics: innovation. We talk about it constantly, indeed, we worship at its alter. How many times have we heard (and said) that we will transform education through innovation?

Yet as a proud former "Senior Executive for New and Innovative Schools," I can say on good authority that hardly anything we did in our "New and Innovative Schools" was really innovative.

Wait - the head of the Office of New and Innovative Schools says she didn't do anything innovative? Then what was happening in the "New and Innovative Schools?"

Granted, we did a lot of things that were much less dysfunctional than regular district schools. Principals got to hire their own teachers and were able to hire external candidates as well as internal ones. Almost every school had an extended year, extended day, or both. We had five single gender schools. We pushed very hard on parent engagement and asked parents to sign agreements acknowledging their responsibilities. Our high schools were small and all had strong themes that engaged students and were pervasive throughout the school, including Science, Technology, Engineering and Math ("STEM"), Science and Medicine, Architecture and Design, and Early College. Our charter schools included a KIPP-like middle school and a credit-recovery high school where students learned on-line in a supervised setting. We had some, mostly modest, grant support that could be used at the principals' discretion to support student learning.

Ah - so innovation equals longer school day and year, principal hiring (and presumably firing), printing up contracts for parents to sign, avoiding comprehensive high schools, and pushing online learning for struggling students. Sounds like the playbook from the KIPP Kult and Christensen/Chubb & Moe crowd. And right on cue...

...

I'd love to see some actual, disruptive innovation in education, as described by Clayton Christensen in "Disrupting Class." Here are a few ideas I'd like to try:

Take two or three groups of 15 middle or high school students and pair each group with an excellent, experienced, courageous teacher. Give each group a copy of the relevant state learning standards. Embed each group in a creative and fast-paced organizational culture - say one group with Apple, one group with Facebook, and one group with the leading developer of on-line gaming (and isn't it telling that a lady who claims to know educational innovation doesn't even know who this is?).Give all the adults some "skin in the game," with much glory for the winning group and real commitment by the organizational sponsors (maybe the companies give employee commitment rather than educational grants that year). Then let the groups compete to figure out how to design a way for the students to learn the most, with the only condition being that at the end of 6 months everyone in the group must meet the state standard for proficiency in the relevant learning standards. If they do it, they can spend the next 3 months on any projects that interest them and get credit for the school year. If they don't, they have to go back to regular school.See what they come up with. Then build on it to create an entirely new model for school.

Who can we look to for inspiration for innovation? Corporate America, of course. Take the new national standards (certainly approved by the business world), team up with corporate America to educate our children (Apple, Facebook, and a video game company), escalate the competition, and - of course - keep all the testing.

What does McGuigan think about testing? On her very own website, McGuigan dismisses the notion of teaching to the test, suggests test anxiety can be overcome with additional testing practice, embraces the high-stakes/competition aspect of testing, and trumpets the "competing in the global economy" line that seems to obliterate any semblance of critical thinking (for an added bonus, check out two of her sources: a Heritage Foundation "all kids can succeed, forget about poverty" document as well as an evaluation of assessments by Gerald Tindal, one of the University of Oregon professors who sat on the notoriously corrupt Reading First Panel).
And then McGuigan goes for an all-out neoliberal assault on the teaching profession:

Try the modern version of the old apprenticeship model. Let a group of proven teachers advertise themselves to students, taking on only those students whochoose them, and paying them only for the students that they take on.Make them completely responsible for the students' educations, with access to good technology and the flexibility to work out the best education plan for each student.Test the students occasionally to be sure that the teachers are getting results, and rate the teachers publicly. The best, most motivated teachers could take on as many students as they could handle, while others might choose to take on fewer and work less. You could offer differential compensation based on students' needs and starting points. Students could stay with their chosen teacher for many years. Run the whole enterprise out of one building so everyone would have a home base, access to equipment and technology, and some group learning, social and extra-curricular activities. This is how many professionals that we trust with children's lives already work--think pediatricians, psychologists, dentists.]

Try the modern version of the old apprenticeship model. Let a group of proven teachers advertise themselves to students, taking on only those students who choose them, and paying them only for the students that they take on.Make them completely responsible for the students' educations, with access to good technology and the flexibility to work out the best education plan for each student.Test the students occasionally to be sure that the teachers are getting results, and rate the teachers publicly. The best, most motivated teachers could take on as many students as they could handle, while others might choose to take on fewer and work less. You could offer differential compensation based on students' needs and starting points. Students could stay with their chosen teacher for many years. Run the whole enterprise out of one building so everyone would have a home base, access to equipment and technology, and some group learning, social and extra-curricular activities. This is how many professionals that we trust with children's lives already work--think pediatricians, psychologists, dentists.

(Thanks to my brilliant, innovative, young friend Jonathan Skolnick of New York City schools for this idea. Jonathan calls this is the "piano teacher" model. He points out that "piano teachers have created a successful model in which they take on as many or as few students as they want and can attract. They don't have piano teachers' degree mills that force them into needless debt, and they don't even need a piano teachers union! A new piano teacher can ease into the job, building a practice over time. Everyone talks about how we need to pay teachers more, but what if it's actually the opposite? What if we paid "teachers" less but allowed them to be responsible for only 10 students per year? This would allow stay-at-home moms, busy professionals, and college professors to get involved in teaching. I guess city kids don't deserve private lessons, just government-distributed mediocrity." You can see why I love Jonathan.)

Build school around a sport rather than the other way around. We already know that sports engage kids much more powerfully than school does. So set up a separate school for the football or baseball team. Put a great coach in charge. Make it the coach's responsibility to ensure that all team members are making educational progress. Let the coach and players figure out how to integrate learning into the sport, rather than how to integrate the sport into learning. (Thanks to Coach Ted Ginn, founder of Ginn Academy in Cleveland and one of my biggest heroes, for showing me how very powerful this idea could be, especially for young men of the inner city.)

Most of our urban districts are spending in excess of $13,000 per student. Why can't we take this money and redeploy it to fund completely new models? These models could build on what we know engages children, using the teaching power of video games and relying on talented, committed adults who know how to motivate and communicate with children and are willing to be fully accountable for their learning. We have a natural and appropriate reluctance to experiment with children, and that is as it should be. But with high schools that are dangerous, mind-numbing places, with graduation rates under 50%, and elementary schools where less than a third of students are proficient, what, really, do we have to lose?

The anti-union, anti-teacher bias comes out pretty strongly in this last passage. The business model of reform (schools are an "enterprise" that resembles a market) demands teachers actually "advertise" themselves to their students (the consumers); teacher "quality" (measured by testing) is published so parents/students can choose the best teachers; and teachers could be paid less while untrained (and non-union, of course) labor is brought into the market. Build schools around sports teams, embrace video games as educational tools (hell, the military already does this with first-person shooters and other simulations), and experiment on poor children. Could you apply these ideas in an affluent suburb? Not a chance. But DFER is all about creating the newest generation of docile worker bees, corporate CEO's, and surplus soldiers for America's (and yes, now Obama's) Imperial Wars.

Former Banker/Entrepreneur Describes Innovation to DFER Community

The DFER blog was recently left in the hands of attorney/banker/entrepreneur-turned-educator Leigh McGuigan. She assisted the Bloomberg/Klein dictatorship in NYC before moving to the Cleveland schools to work in the Office of New and Innovative Schools. Like many so-called reformers operating outside of the traditional public schools, McGuigan pulls in a very handsome salary: $170,000 per year, paid for by the Cleveland and Gund Foundations. What does a high-roller like McGuigan think about innovation in public education? From the DFER blog:

July 10, 2009

Leigh McGuigan: On Innovation

I am finishing my week of blogging with one of my favorite topics: innovation. We talk about it constantly, indeed, we worship at its alter. How many times have we heard (and said) that we will transform education through innovation?

Yet as a proud former "Senior Executive for New and Innovative Schools," I can say on good authority that hardly anything we did in our "New and Innovative Schools" was really innovative.

Wait - the head of the Office of New and Innovative Schools says she didn't do anything innovative? Then what was happening in the "New and Innovative Schools?"

Granted, we did a lot of things that were much less dysfunctional than regular district schools. Principals got to hire their own teachers and were able to hire external candidates as well as internal ones. Almost every school had an extended year, extended day, or both. We had five single gender schools. We pushed very hard on parent engagement and asked parents to sign agreements acknowledging their responsibilities. Our high schools were small and all had strong themes that engaged students and were pervasive throughout the school, including Science, Technology, Engineering and Math ("STEM"), Science and Medicine, Architecture and Design, and Early College. Our charter schools included a KIPP-like middle school and a credit-recovery high school where students learned on-line in a supervised setting. We had some, mostly modest, grant support that could be used at the principals' discretion to support student learning.

Ah - so innovation equals longer school day and year, principal hiring (and presumably firing), printing up contracts for parents to sign, avoiding comprehensive high schools, and pushed online learning for struggling students. Sounds like the playbook from the KIPP Kult and Christensen/Chubb & Moe crowd. And right on cue...

...

I'd love to see some actual, disruptive innovation in education, as described by Clayton Christensen in "Disrupting Class." Here are a few ideas I'd like to try:

Take two or three groups of 15 middle or high school students and pair each group with an excellent, experienced, courageous teacher. Give each group a copy of the relevant state learning standards. Embed each group in a creative and fast-paced organizational culture - say one group with Apple, one group with Facebook, and one group with the leading developer of on-line gaming (and isn't it telling that a lady who claims to know educational innovation doesn't even know who this is?). Give all the adults some "skin in the game," with much glory for the winning group and real commitment by the organizational sponsors (maybe the companies give employee commitment rather than educational grants that year). Then let the groups compete to figure out how to design a way for the students to learn the most, with the only condition being that at the end of 6 months everyone in the group must meet the state standard for proficiency in the relevant learning standards. If they do it, they can spend the next 3 months on any projects that interest them and get credit for the school year. If they don't, they have to go back to regular school. See what they come up with. Then build on it to create an entirely new model for school.

1. Who can we look to for inspiration for innovation? Corporate America, of course. Take the new national standards (certainly approved by the business world), team up with corporate America to educate our children (Apple, Facebook, and a video game company), escalate the competition, and - of course - keep all the testing. What does McGuigan think about testing? On her very own website, McGuigan dismisses the notion of teaching to the test, suggests test anxiety can be overcome with additional testing practice, embraces the high-stakes/competition aspect of testing, and trumpets the "competing in the global economy" line that seems to obliterate any semblance of critical thinking (for an added bonus, check out two of her sources: a Heritage Foundation "all kids can succeed, forget about poverty" document as well as an evaluation of assessments by Gerald Tindal, one of the University of Oregon professors who sat on the notoriously corrupt Reading First Panel).
2. And then McGuigan goes for an all-out neoliberal assault on the teaching profession:

3. Try the modern version of the old apprenticeship model. Let a group of proven teachers advertise themselves to students, taking on only those students who choose them, and paying them only for the students that they take on. Make them completely responsible for the students' educations, with access to good technology and the flexibility to work out the best education plan for each student. Test the students occasionally to be sure that the teachers are getting results, and rate the teachers publicly. The best, most motivated teachers could take on as many students as they could handle, while others might choose to take on fewer and work less. You could offer differential compensation based on students' needs and starting points. Students could stay with their chosen teacher for many years. Run the whole enterprise out of one building so everyone would have a home base, access to equipment and technology, and some group learning, social and extra-curricular activities. This is how many professionals that we trust with children's lives already work--think pediatricians, psychologists, dentists.

4. (Thanks to my brilliant, innovative, young friend Jonathan Skolnick of New York City schools for this idea. Jonathan calls this is the "piano teacher" model. He points out that "piano teachers have created a successful model in which they take on as many or as few students as they want and can attract. They don't have piano teachers' degree mills that force them into needless debt, and they don't even need a piano teachers union! A new piano teacher can ease into the job, building a practice over time. Everyone talks about how we need to pay teachers more, but what if it's actually the opposite? What if we paid "teachers" less but allowed them to be responsible for only 10 students per year? This would allow stay-at-home moms, busy professionals, and college professors to get involved in teaching. I guess city kids don't deserve private lessons, just government-distributed mediocrity." You can see why I love Jonathan.)

   Build school around a sport rather than the other way around. We already know that sports engage kids much more powerfully than school does. So set up a separate school for the football or baseball team. Put a great coach in charge. Make it the coach's responsibility to ensure that all team members are making educational progress. Let the coach and players figure out how to integrate learning into the sport, rather than how to integrate the sport into learning. (Thanks to Coach Ted Ginn, founder of Ginn Academy in Cleveland and one of my biggest heroes, for showing me how very powerful this idea could be, especially for young men of the inner city.)

   Most of our urban districts are spending in excess of $13,000 per student. Why can't we take this money and redeploy it to fund completely new models? These models could build on what we know engages children, using the teaching power of video games and relying on talented, committed adults who know how to motivate and communicate with children and are willing to be fully accountable for their learning. We have a natural and appropriate reluctance to experiment with children, and that is as it should be. But with high schools that are dangerous, mind-numbing places, with graduation rates under 50%, and elementary schools where less than a third of students are proficient, what, really, do we have to lose?

5. The anti-union, anti-teacher bias comes out pretty strongly in this last passage. The business model of reform (schools are an "enterprise" that resembles a market) demands teachers actually "advertise" themselves to their students (the consumers); teacher "quality" (measured by testing) is published so parents/students can choose the best teachers; and teachers could be paid less while untrained (and non-union, of course) labor is brought into the market. Build schools around sports teams, embrace video games as educational tools (hell, the military already does this with first-person shooters and other simulations), and experiment on poor children. Could you apply these ideas in an affluent suburb? Not a chance. But DFER is all about creating the newest generation of docile worker bees, corporate CEO's, and surplus soldiers for America's (and yes, now Obama's) Imperial Wars.

Charter Schools Building Big Bankrolls from Unspent Special Ed Money

No oversight, no accountability, plus corporate control: you betcha. From the Morning Call:

By Marion Callahan | OF THE MORNING CALL
July 10, 2009

Through their local school districts, taxpayers pay millions of dollars to educate special education students enrolled in Pennsylvania's increasing number of charter schools.

But state officials say a big chunk of that money is never spent on special education, a charge that some area charter schools are disputing.

Gov. Ed Rendell is now proposing to change how special education is funded for charter schools to prevent them from ''amassing reserves at taxpayers' expense,'' said Michael Race, a spokesman for the state Department of Education.

The state reports that of the $78 million set aside for the 127 charter schools for special education instruction in 2007-08, only $50 million was spent for that purpose.

''A school might get $15,000 to provide special education per pupil, but it only spent $10,000, so they are basically making $5,000 off that student,'' Race said. ''If you receive special education money for your charter school student, you either spend it on the student or you give it back to the taxpayers. . . .

Schnur (New Leaders for New Schools) Whispers in Obama's Ear; Broad and Emanuel Agree

From Politico:

Who Can Hook You Up With a White House Job?

A key voice in the Obama administration’s decisions about filling top education posts is candid about his less-than-perfect record when it comes to executive recruitment.

Back in 2000, Jon Schnur was looking for someone to head up the Chicago branch of his fledgling nonprofit for training inner-city principals, New Leaders for New Schools.

“People told me the most talented person I could find was someone named Michelle Obama,” Schnur recalled. “I was able to reach Barack Obama, who put me in touch with her,” but the future first lady couldn’t be persuaded.

“She had other engagements at the University of Chicago. It didn’t work out,” Schnur said.

A domestic policy staffer in the Clinton White House and adviser to Vice President Al Gore’s 2000 presidential bid, Schnur later advised Barack Obama in the U.S. Senate and during his presidential campaign last year.

Schnur’s suggestions, on both education policy and personnel, are closely heeded by the Obama White House, according to administration officials. “He played an important role — from the secretary job on down the line,” one top official said. “He helped a lot of people land.”

Schnur, 43, is close to Education Secretary Arne Duncan, a former Chicago schools chief, and sources said he promoted Duncan for the Cabinet job.

Philanthropist and Democratic donor Eli Broad, who funds Teach for America and Schnur’s principals program, said he considered Schnur a counterweight against the “bunch of academics” on Obama’s education transition team. Soon after the election, Broad said he told Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanuel that “the education secretary should not be an academic or ex-governor. ... He said, ‘I assure you. We’re going to have a practitioner.’”

“There are a number of people who could have been absolutely outstanding secretaries of education, but I don’t think there’s anybody who could have been better than Arne Duncan,” Schnur said in an interview. “He lived it. He understood what it took to move student achievement for high-poverty kids. ... The personal confidence you see the president having for Arne is just so important.”

Schnur continues to have an impact on decisions, in part because he has Duncan’s ear, officials say. Duncan touts Schnur’s “critical role” in the transition and says he expects to work closely with the education reform advocate in the future.

For his part, Schnur stresses that his main advice has been on policy issues but acknowledges putting forward names for various slots. He won’t discuss whom he’s lobbied for, but reform types continued to land top-level jobs.

Schnur’s involvement in Democratic politics has occasionally made for heated exchanges with his older brother, Dan, a prominent Republican strategist who was the communications director for Arizona Sen. John McCain’s 2000 presidential bid.

“We try to keep it pretty civil most of the time,” Dan Schnur said.

Given Jon Schnur’s connections and impact, many in the education world were stunned in May when the Wisconsin native announced plans to return to his New York-based organization — passing up an offer to be Duncan’s chief of staff. Schnur said his two children — and one more on the way — with his wife, Elisa, were part of the calculus, but a bigger factor was his conviction that education reform in America will ultimately be a bottom-up endeavor.

“I can have the most impact in this path of education reform by trying, in a handful of cities around the country, to prove you can achieve exceptional results and then really transform that by scaling it up,” Schnur said.

The "bunch of academics" is presumably Linda Darling-Hammond and anyone who questioned Broad's business reform model for public education. Obama supposedly said he'll find a "practitioner" - but Duncan only has real experience in a) his jump shot, b) repeating his various lines and lies over and over, and c) working with wealthy elites to systematically privatize education while weakening public schools. Which experiences come in handy in Duncan's new role?

A Question for Arne's Army

A couple of charter school gems from Arne's recent speech to the NEA:

"charter schools they need to police themselves or their progress will be stalled"

"charter school operators and authorizers to get much more serious about accountability. They must not protect third-rate charters. Those schools need to close."

So let's see: while public schools are subject to restructuring or shutdown or charter conversion by the Federal government, charter schools, on the other hand, must "police themselves" and "get more serious." The question, then: as Duncan is extremely eager to shut down 5% of the lowest-performing (poorest) public schools, is he as eager, or even willing to entertain the idea, to shut down the 37% of bogus charter schools that are underperforming the public schools that these charters were intended to replace?

Raytheon Enters Education Research Field; Gates Provides Seed Money

Heard the line about not having enough engineers and scientists available to keep America on top in the global market? Get ready to hear it again. Raytheon - yes, the same Raytheon that is the world's leading producer of missiles - recently donated a sophisticated modeling program to help figure out how to engineer an education system capable of creating more and better STEM graduates. Raytheon makes the "staying competitive in the global economy" argument for reforming education - which they blame for not producing enough STEM workers. Question for Raytheon: are you aware of how painfully boring STEM subjects are for a large chunk of the population, particularly those who had negative experiences with math at the younger grades - like those drilled in many old school math environments seen in test prep academies and authoritarian classrooms that you're pushing in your education engineering project?). Raytheon's brand of fearmongering and bashing of public education for STEM issues is without merit, as explained by Gerald Bracey in this 2008 post.

But Bill Gates is interested. Interested enough to provide seed money for the project. Can you say education-military-industrial complex?

From the Defense News (my bolds):

New Raytheon Program Analyzes 'STEM' Candidates

By ANTONIE BOESSENKOOL
Published: 8 Jul 2009 19:03

Raytheon and the Business-Higher Education Forum unveiled an open-source computer modeling program July 8 focused on math and science education. The program is designed for use by educators, policy makers and researchers to aid education policy and planning decisions.

The defense industry is bracing itself for growing shortages of skilled engineers and scientists as older workers prepare to retire and are not replaced at a full rate. The program, which Raytheon engineers started developing in 2006, looks at roughly 200 variables to judge the likelihood a student will graduate with a degree in one of the "STEM" subjects - science, technology, engineering or math - and enter industry or become a teacher in one of those fields.

"We decided to use the same methods that had been applied to large, complex engineering systems," Swanson said. "These tools help us determine what systems designs will work and be cost-effective and which should be abandoned because they have limited capabilities or high cost or worse yet, just won't work over time." The program is intended to help effective educational methods rise to the top, said Raytheon Chief Executive Bill Swanson. Whereas a lot of ideas have worked locally, there is no "one size" for all educational systems. In looking at how to model the use of effective educational methods, Raytheon used the same systems engineering, modeling and simulation it uses for defense programs, Swanson said.

The model itself looks like a group of spiders, mapping a person's education and career from birth to retirement. It looks at the short- and long-term impacts of changing certain variables and produces a graph showing changes in the number of college graduates in STEM subjects as a result.

The model also looks at variables such as teacher pay, class size, student interest in science and math, teacher attrition rates and gender differences over the course of a person's education from kindergarten to college.

Raytheon gifted the program, called the U.S. STEM Educational Model, to BHEF. BHEF in turn launched the program into open-source use, which means users can suggest changes and research to improve the model. The model is based on research including test scores and localized studies, yet more research is needed, panelists at the unveiling said.

"There are many areas where we need much more research. … to help fill in some of the gaps. In the meantime, we often make assumptions," said Brian Wells, chief system engineer at Raytheon. Raytheon and BHEF are hoping researchers and users of the program will add research. That research, and changes suggested in the open-source environment, will be reviewed by other users, speakers at the unveiling said.

The program can be downloaded for free at www.STEMnetwork.org. Vensim Simulation Software from Ventana Systems is needed to run the software.

The program will be overseen by the STEM Research and Modeling Network, a partnership between Raytheon, BHEF and The Ohio State University. The partnership got some "seed money" from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, but more funding, perhaps a few million a year, will be needed in the future, depending on what other initiatives the network decides to pursue, such as educational awards, said Brian Fitzgerald, executive director of BHEF.

The BHEF is an organization of executives from Fortune 500 companies, university presidents and foundation leaders who focus on educational issues and enhancing U.S. competitiveness.

The Only Education Reform That Matters This Year: Health Care

While Arne's army of oligarchs continues its multi-billion dollar war against the public schools, and while their insipid ideas rot into lame notions under July's Washington heat (pay per test score plans and cheap charters that make jobs for out of work corporate crooks), the only reform of the year that has a real chance of reducing the achievement gap is being hijacked by the same oligarchs who rail against socialized medicine, while cutting backroom corporate welfare deals with Big Little Man, Rahm Emmanuel.

With 72 percent of the American people are in favor of a public option like Medicare, Tough Man Emmanuel is intent on trading the welfare of the citizenry for the corporate welfare once again. If the President allows this health care plan to become another corporate feeding trough that leaves the poor without quality health care, he will have assured his legacy as the Booker T. of his generation and as the first African-American president to be a one termer. The line is drawn, and this is one that Obama cannot straddle.

Meanwhile, the utter irrelevancy of the U. S. Department of Education remains breathtaking in light of the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to push for policy that will affect academic achievement more than any stupid or smart test that could be choked down the throats of sick children without health care.

From the Times:

WASHINGTON — The deals, trumpeted loudly by the White House, would each help pay for a sweeping overhaul of the health care system.

First, it was a broad consortium of health industry groups — doctors, hospitals, drug makers and insurers, all promising to slow the growth of medical spending by 1.5 percent. Then, it was the big drug makers, promising savings of $80 billion over 10 years, by lowering the cost of medicine for the elderly.

On Wednesday, it will be major hospital associations, pledging to save more than $150 billion over a decade. And a deal with doctors is said to be on tap next.

In each case, the Obama administration hailed the agreements as historic. But what has been little discussed is what the industry groups will be getting in return for their cooperation, whether or not the promised savings ever materialize.

The short-term political benefits are clear. Senior White House officials say the deals are building momentum that will help propel the health care legislation past potential opponents in the private sector and on Capitol Hill.

Rather than running advertisements against the White House, the most influential players in the industry are inside the room negotiating with administration officials and leading lawmakers, like Senator Max Baucus, chairman of the Finance Committee.

“The very groups we have been talking to have been the most vocal opponents of health care reform; they are now becoming the vocal proponents for health care reform,” said Rahm Emanuel, the White House chief of staff.

But some lawmakers said the deals, while seemingly helpful, could raise false expectations by obscuring how much the industry is demanding for its concessions.

“I’m delighted to hear that people are stepping up to help reduce costs,” said Senator Christopher J. Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut, who is leading the Senate health committee, “but I want to know what the ask is, and the ask sometimes can exceed the value of your cost savings.”

Senator Olympia J. Snowe, Republican of Maine, who could provide a critical swing vote, said she had not signed on to any of the White House deals. “It’s one thing for the president to reach that agreement, but it’s another thing for Congress to reach that agreement,” Ms. Snowe said. “We have yet to evaluate what are the specifics and particulars. So it’s uncertain. It could be helpful. I just don’t know.”

As part of their deal with the White House, pharmaceutical companies say they won an agreement from Mr. Baucus to oppose efforts by House Democrats to sharply reduce what the government pays for drugs for some Medicare recipients previously covered by Medicaid. . . .

Connecting the Dots: Standardized Testing and the Charter Chain Movement

There's a huge push for standards, innovation/entrepreneurship, charter school chains, and taking ideas "to scale." These ideas are tightly connected. To see how they're connected, take a peek at the NewSchools Venture Fund's 2008 annual summit (the entire thing is worth reading; Michelle Rhee and New Leaders for New Schools are both given awards). My bolds:

Audience members asked the panelists what else it would take to create a healthy [entrepreneurial capital] market. Panelists noted that K-12 public education is an enormous, fragmented, market, where ventures often take longer to mature than in other sectors. Kaplan pointed out that more effective capital markets exist in sectors where the demand is aggregated, such as in pre-K or postsecondary education. In these markets, money follows the consumer and 'you can start to build bigger, better, more professionally-run schools' that, in turn, open up access to more capital from interested investors who see the potential of these models. Conversely, K-12 education is subject to local control, which prevents aggregated demand, explained Shelton. Kaplan added that this construct leaves few incentives to invest in K-12. 'In investing, he reminded the audience, 'there are no extra points for degrees of difficulty.'

This pattern raises the question: is there a way to aggregate demand in the K-12 space? Shelton poisted that one way to go about this is to segment K-12 education into separate service markets, but that concept is undermined by the fact that vey little is known about what truly works. As a result, individual entrepreneurs and companies often are prone to building systems and structures that are highly tailored to the immediate needs of their organization and their student population. 'People legitimately believe that this little thing that they're going to do is going to make the difference,' Shelton explained. 'Even if it is not getting funded, people would rather cobble together their own customizable system, perfectly matched to their specific needs.' Cole suspected that this focus on specific details may be the result of competition among this relatively small group of entrepreneurs. 'In so many cases these leaders are seeing each other as competitors,' she said. 'Because there are scarce resources and they're going after many of the same funding sources, they can't figure out how to collaborate.'

This problem may be particularly acute among nonprofit education ventures, which do not experience the same level of competition imposed on for-profits by the market. 'In nonprofits, we don't measure each investment against results,' explained Shelton. Cole pointed out that this allows nonprofits to continue securing grants and to stay afloat even when their results are poor, which deters them from seeking mergers or alternatives business models. Kaplan noted that this is a sharp departure from for-profit space where, in his words, 'if someone knew a cheaper better way to do something, they would grab it.' The nonprofit market also fails to reward the most effective ventures. 'There's a fundamental disconnect between performance and access to capital,' Shelton explained, which means that, 'even a high-performing venture is not ensured that it will receive sufficient dollars in the current market.' What the market needs, Shelton suggested, is general agreement on the metrics and definitions of success, especially student achievement metrics and organization efficiency.

Shelton is now sitting in Duncan's Office of Innovation and Improvement, which is the "nimble, entrepreneurial arm of the U.S. Department of Education" created under President George W. Bush. Shelton's experience in education began as the co-founder and CEO of LearnNow, a for-profit charter chain that managed to be sold to Edison just before Edison's Philadelphia debacle (and the ensuing stock collapse, the Florida public employee pension fund's purchase of the stock, and Jeb Bush tomfoolery). NewSchools Venture Fund was one of LearnNow's biggest supporters, and NSVF walked away from the deal with a cool million in profits (they managed to sell their stock for a net gain around the time of the aforementioned Edison turmoil). From there, Shelton hops on at Edison, works for NSVF as their East Coast leader, jumps over to the Gates Foundation, and now lands in Duncan's DOE. I suppose we should look at what this guy said in the past - he is, after all, a public employee who just happens to be sitting on the $650 million "Race to the Top" fund. The other two panelists certainly give us some insight into how education entrepreneurs think as well.

You'll also notice Shelton's comments on local control of education, which he claims gets in the way of "aggregated demand." In other words, the corporate charter school movement has a more difficult time orchestrating their hostile takeover of public education with pesky local control and democratic forms of control over education. Mayoral control, minimizing the role of school boards, and allowing for more authorizers of charter schools (as described here by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools in a report arguing for the deregulation of charter school authorizers. Notice the number of Education Sector contributors; NewSchools Venture Fund's former CEO and current board member sits on the Ed Sector board) would sure make it easier for these innovators and edupreneurs.

Shelton reveals how the standards movement is connected to the charter chain movement when describing the role of test scores: "What the market needs, Shelton suggested, is general agreement on the metrics and definitions of success, especially student achievement metrics and organization efficiency." National standards, like the ones currently being created by Achieve, the College Board, ACT, and the Gates Foundation, would sure make it easy to spread curriculum and materials to the wave of ill-prepared teachers in the various charter chains.

Shelton repeats an iteration of the privatization movement, this time targeting only part of the school system rather than the entire school (Shelton probably learned this during his experiences through LearnNow and Edison): "Shelton poisted that one way to go about this is to segment K-12 education into separate service markets, but that concept is undermined by the fact that vey little is known about what truly works." In other words, we have no idea what works - but we have the backing of various philanthrocapitalists willing to fund our experimentation on urban youth.

For all the talk of competition (between students within a school, schools within a district, and states within the nation), one presenter brings up how bad competition can be for these start-up companies. They're competing for the same resources and just cannot figure out how to work together. Education entrepreneurs consistently gripe about the lack of competition in education, but once they get their foot in the door they start whining about competition: "'Because there are scarce resources and they're going after many of the same funding sources, they can't figure out how to collaborate.'" It seems to me that if this competition for scarce resources makes it difficult for edupreneurs to collaborate (which the presenter notes is a negative), why would we want schools, students, and communities competing against each other? Collaboration is not only a highly desired ability in many areas (personal relationships, work settings, etc), it's an absolute necessity if we're going to deal with global climate change, war, poverty, etc. But we're told we need to compete. Why? Because China and India are pumping out hundreds of thousands of engineers that will be capable of threatening our reign over the rest of the globe (Bracey debunks the numbers here).

The privatization becomes a little more opaque, this time under a President who ran on a platform promising for transparency and a shift away from the policies of the Bush Jr. years. But hey - dontcha think a Palin Presidency would be a hell of a lot worse?

From the Digital Divide to the Digital Diversion

A second offer showed up in my mailbox this morning for a new book by Terry Moe and John Chubb on the glories of cyber ed, which is viewed by the financiers and lawyers in charge today of education policy as the ultimate solution to education for the poor and working class. From cyber charter elementary to cyber college, a new educational caste system has been devised that will offer two very different types of educational experiences, one grounded in the sterile isolation and alienation of the flat screen, and the other based within the warm incandescent community of other middle class minds and bodies exchanging the breaths of privilege and mutual care.

The poor rural and urban students will avail themselves of the former, and the economically privileged will continue their well-heeled traditions with the best teachers, real campuses, and the best apparatus that money can buy. Meanwhile, the poor will have laptops and modems, we may presume, provided by Gates and Dell, and charged off at an exorbitant rate to the taxpayer as part of the new world of the cyber charter and the cyber college. Think of it: following graduation, the poor will even find minimum wage jobs online, so that they may live their entire lives without having to get dressed! Think of the cost savings.

The selling of this distinctly dystopian future is something else, again. It is wrapped in the threadbare reform rhetoric that no one believes anymore, insulting as it is to the intelligence of anyone able to read. Moe and Chubb have teamed up once more to promote the Oligarchs' solution of corporate-run testing factories, the online variety no less, as the way to achieve what the Finns have achieved by honoring the teaching profession, creating world-class standards, funding their school, nurturing their students, and getting rid of high stakes testing. Finland, for instance, does not use test scores to determine how much to pay teachers.

And even though the "reformers" have wasted the past 25 years with a test-til-you-puke strategy that continues to not work, that reality is lost on these fools, who have their eye on a prize that has nothing to do with student learning or quality schools--but on filling the pockets of the ed industry leeches looking to increase their share of tax money intended for education. In fact, the continuation of the test factory failures of the past 25 years holds open the door to the continuation of another generation of reforms dreamed up by the same ad agencies that sell you all the other modern day remedies you have come to count on not to work.

From the Wall Street Journal:

. . . . In response to "A Nation at Risk," Terry Moe and John Chubb in 1990 published "Politics, Markets and America's Schools," which identified special-interest groups -- mainly teachers unions -- as the culprits in preventing the reforms urged in the report. Now Messrs. Moe and Chubb have returned to the subject with "Liberating Learning," a more optimistic sequel. The authors believe there exists a magic bullet that is capable of shattering the unions' political power and, at last, bringing the sort of reform and excellence to U.S. K-12 education that might make U.S. students competitive with Finnish teenagers. The ammunition? Technology.

Mr. Moe is an academic researcher at the Hoover Institution; Mr. Chubb, an executive with Chris Whittle's for-profit education venture, Edison Learning. They think that technology -- particularly online education -- holds two potentially dramatic benefits. One is simply a general improvement in education as students from "anywhere -- poor inner cities, remote rural areas, even at home" gain access to high-caliber instruction. More important, the authors say, is technology's ability to destroy the political barriers that prevent education reform.

Despite much public rhetoric about the urgent need to improve American education, despite the investment of billions of dollars in schools, little progress has been achieved. Why? Messrs. Moe and Chubb blame the "politics of blocking" -- the thwarting of such simple reforms as paying teachers for performance. Many states prohibit even gathering data that link individual teachers to the test scores of their students.

Technology, the authors say, may enable the circumvention of political blocking. They make their point forcefully, with copious and surprising examples. In 1995, for instance, Midland, Pa., a declining steel town on the Ohio border, launched the Pennsylvania Cyber Charter School. Today the online school serves 8,000 students throughout the state. And the classes aren't just digital correspondence courses -- there are textbooks and live educators, including "synchronous teachers," who work with students through instant messaging, voice and interactive whiteboards while the kids are engaged with their lessons online. Advisers are required to communicate with students' families at least once a week by email and once every two weeks by phone. . . .

There is one thing that may get in the way of this brave new cyber world of education for the disenfranchised, and, as always, it has to do with the greedy over-reaching that has characterized this generation of corporate bottom-feeders. Here is the latest from Pennsylvania, where the lawyers of the Agora Cyber Charter School are using up the money they have taken from the taxpayers to file numerous lawsuits to block the State from bringing a halt to their corrupt gravy train. From the Inquirer:

With the state poised to pull the plug over alleged mismanagement, an online charter school based in Devon is fighting back in not just one court, but three.

One week after the Pennsylvania Department of Education began the process of revoking its operating charter, the Agora Cyber Charter School has filed lawsuits in federal, state, and county courts challenging the action and seeking the return of public money the state had diverted from Agora into an escrow account.

The litigation - filed Monday in U.S. District Court in Philadelphia, Commonwealth Court in Harrisburg, and Chester County Court of Common Pleas - is the latest salvo in a dispute over the school's management contract with a company owned by Agora founder Dorothy June Brown.

Agora, which opened in 2005, enrolls 4,400 students statewide who receive online instruction at home.

The Education Department, which oversees the 11 cyber charters in Pennsylvania, alleges that Agora's board of trustees violated the operating charter by contracting out management services. To make matters worse, state officials say, the company, Cynwyd Group L.L.C., is controlled by Brown.

Cynwyd was to be paid $2.8 million from Agora's $41 million budget this academic year - although, according to the Education Department, most of the management work was performed by another company, K-12 Pennsylvania L.L.C.

On June 11, the state told Agora's board to cancel the Cynwyd contract and to resign in 10 days. When the board did neither, charter-revocation proceedings were begun and a two-day hearing in Harrisburg was scheduled for next month.

The Education Department already had started to divert Agora's local, state, and federal funds into an escrow account, to prevent money from flowing to Cynwyd.

In court documents filed this week, Agora's board contends that education officials had known about the Cynwyd contract since 2006 but raised no objections until April 29.

Joel L. Frank, an Agora attorney, is asking the courts to halt the revocation proceedings and to return the money, which he contends was withheld in violation of state law.

"We will review the complaints and respond in a timely manner," Leah Harris, an Education Department spokeswoman, wrote in an e-mail yesterday.

School districts, she added, have been asked "to place their tuition payments to Agora into an escrow account from which the costs of the students' education will continue to be paid. All federal funds will be paid to Agora. There is no intention on the part of [the department] to withhold federal dollars from Agora."

Despite the revocation proceedings, state officials have said Agora is expected to operate in 2009-10.

Also on Monday, Agora's board sued K-12 in Chester County Court. Although the state maintains the escrow fund, the trustees contend that K-12 has had some access to the money in order to pay bills, and they are seeking an accounting.

Henry E. Hockeimer Jr., the attorney who represents K-12, said that under the escrow procedures, the state must preapprove all Agora bills paid by K-12. Any expenditures, he said, "have been for the educational needs of the students."

K-12 Pennsylvania is a subsidiary of K12 Inc., a for-profit education company in Herndon, Va.

The cyber school's finances also are under scrutiny by the Philadelphia School District inspector general and by federal investigators as part of a general criminal probe of local charter operations.

Clayton Christensen and the Innosight Institute:Fixing Public Education

Various factions of the education world are abuzz with the ideas proposed by Harvard Professor Clayton Christensen and his colleagues in "Disrupting Class," a relatively new book about education reform. Just to be clear, Christensen's background includes a previous stint in the business world, a position at Harvard's business school, and a position as an elder in the Mormon church. As far as I can tell, Christensen hasn't spent any time with children in an education setting.

Like many education reformers, Christensen is totally out of touch with both reality and good teaching. He and his colleagues believe most teachers simply stand at the front of the class and lecture. This might be the case for ill-prepared teachers, but experienced educators know students need to be involved in lessons instead of acting as spectators in the creation of knowledge. Consistently describing current teaching trends as "monolithic," Christensen believes computer-based learning is the key to education reform. In a bastardized understanding of Howard Gardner's multiple intelligences (and somehow Gardner agrees with him), Christensen believes every child could learn if we used more student-centric teaching methods (sound good, but Christensen really means plopping a child in front of a screen and keyboard in their solo experience of education. Sure, kids might interact with each other in the virtual world, but Christensen's views imply drastically reducing face-to-face interaction). I'm all for child-centered pedagogies and the reasonable use of technology in the classroom, but there is certainly reason to be skeptical of an education system that relies on computers as the primary delivery method. Christensen never addresses the potential social impacts of his take on education reform.

But computer-centric learning will not be willfully adopted by educators. Rather, online and computer-centric learning will gain strength through providing educational opportunities for students who have difficulty in traditional classrooms. Christensen and his pals suggest this new form of learning will eventually overtake traditional public education; half of all high school courses will be taken online by the year 2019 and continue to expand as the online school market thrives. For an added twist, Christensen and his colleagues repeatedly mention Apex Learning, an online learning company started by Paul Allen. Allen, in case you were unaware, co-founded Microsoft with Bill Gates.

Christensen's theory of disruptive innovation suggests that teachers will never implement his concept of "student-centered learning" because it would put the teaching profession at risk. The computer-centric learning Christensen and his colleagues drool over is attractive for reasons having more to do with eliminating teachers and weakening the teachers' union than anything else. While I'm not here to criticize religious beliefs, Christensen's vision fewer teachers and student-centric learning mimics his experience in the Mormon church: there are no paid professional leaders (aka teachers), and Christensen feels sorry for religions that employ paid laborers. Everyone is expected to be both a teacher and student (great idea), but the show is not guided by someone who is specially trained (teachers). You can read more about this in an essay he wrote, "Why I Belong, and Why I Believe." Just to reiterate, I'm not criticizing religion - I'm just noting a comparison that may be relevant to Christensen's beliefs about education reform.

The following is a recent critique of the reform efforts, particularly the stimulus funding. Christensen co-wrote the piece with Michael Horn, co-founder of the Innosight Institute and one of Christensen's co-authors of "Disrupting Class." You'll notice the fawning over TFA and New Leaders for New Schools, two groups on the forefront in the corporate reform of public education. From CNN.com:

Commentary: Don't Prop Up Failing Schools

(CNN) -- Historically the federal government has been a small investor in the nation's education system. With the recent economic stimulus bill, however, this changed virtually overnight.

There is great danger in the sudden and massive amount of funding -- nearly $100 billion -- that the federal government is throwing at the nation's schools. District by district, the budgetary crises into which all schools were plunging created the impetus for long-needed changes.

The most likely result of this stimulus will be to give our schools the luxury of affording not to change. This is borrowed money that we're pumping into our schools, and it comes at a price. Charging education isn't changing it.

That our schools need to change should not be surprising. Just walk into your local school and enter a classroom. Odds are high that it won't look too different from a classroom from a generation or two ago.

Sure, there might be some computers in the back of the room and perhaps an interactive white board instead of a chalkboard, but chances are high that students will still be sitting at desks lined up in neat rows with a teacher at the front delivering the same lesson on the same day to all the students. This might be acceptable if society and the skills many people need to succeed in today's economy hadn't changed either, but they have.

While U.S. schools stand still, the rest of the world is moving forward, and this has a price tag -- not just for individual children, but also for the nation.

We urge the federal government to consider four criteria when creating new programs or grants for states and districts to help transform an outdated education system into one fit for the 21st Century.

First, don't fund technology that simply shoves computers and other technologies into existing classrooms. We've spent well over $60 billion in the last two decades doing just that, and there is now overwhelming evidence that when we do it, the current unsatisfactory system co-opts the technology to sustain itself.

Second, don't fund new school buildings that look like the existing ones. If the architecture of new buildings is the same as that of existing schools -- designed around teachers delivering monolithic, one-size-fits-all lessons to large batches of students -- it will lock students into another century in which the physical infrastructure works against the flexibility needed for student-centric learning.We should instead use technology funding to bolster new learning models and innovations, such as online-learning environments, to level the playing field and allow students from all walks of life -- from small, rural communities to budget-strapped urban schools -- to access the rich variety that is now available only to children in wealthy suburban districts.

Instead, invest in bandwidth as an infrastructure of change. The government has a productive history in investing in infrastructure that creates change and innovation -- from allocating land to those building the transcontinental railroad and the land-grant colleges in 1862 to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency funding the creation of the Internet.

To allow all districts to realize the power of online learning to advance us toward a student-centric system, the federal government should help deliver broadband capabilities necessary not just for today's needs, where schools already lag, but also in anticipation of tomorrow's.

Third, don't fund the institutions that are least likely to change. Our research shows that institutions are good at improving what they are structured to do, but that transformative innovations that fundamentally change the trade-off between cost and quality -- disruptive innovations -- come from start-up institutions.

This means that there is a high probability that spending money on existing schools of education will only result in their doing more of the same, for example. Meanwhile, there are a host of disruptive training organizations that are providing comparable educators at lower cost, such as Teach for America, the American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence, and New Leaders for New Schools.

Alternative certification, including alternative programs from existing schools of education, has grown at a 29 percent compound annual growth rate since 1997. The government must embrace this and back the winners, not defend the old institutions.

Fourth, direct more funds for research and development to create student-centric learning software. Just a fraction of 1 percent of the $600 billion in K-12 spending from all levels currently goes toward R&D.

The federal government should reallocate funds so we can begin to understand not just what learning opportunities work best on average but also what works for whom and under what circumstance. It is vital to fund learning software that captures data about the student and the efficacy of different approaches so we can connect these dots.

Transformation of any existing system isn't an easy process, but ignoring the laws of innovation, although it may be perhaps politically expedient in the short run, will only make it more difficult.

When the federal government directs future funds toward education, having these principles in place will go a long way toward making sure we're not simply charging education, but that we have a fighting chance of changing it.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Clayton Christensen and Michael Horn.

Christensen and his colleagues are the type of "educators" that whittle education down to a teacher, textbook, or - in the near future - software companies depositing information into the "empty" minds of students (Freire's critique of what he describes as banking theory; Christensen takes the banking theory digital). Each student, on their own path of customized education, might interact with their peers occasionally, but the majority of the time appears to be spent in solitary education confinement. Formative assessment - a wonderful idea when used properly - becomes nothing more than preprogrammed computer-based feedback loops in this technology-centered classroom (can you see how this would be a heck of a lot easier to take this "to scale" with common standards in all 50 states?). I'm all for technology use in the classroom - let's just keep it reasonable.

Jeb Bush loves Christensen's ideas (read his recent foray into education reform ideas here). So does the Gates Foundation's Education Director Vicki Phillips, NYC's Joel Klein, and Harvard MBA types. The idiots march on, this time to the tune of another questionable drummer.

Imagine, Inc. Charter Schools and Real Estate

The inherent fetidness of the charter school model is without parallel in the history of American schooling. As the economy continues to sink as a result of capitalist greed, our "leaders" continue to foist on the American people a scheme that epitomizes the corruption and reckless disregard that brought us the current Depression.

By MATTHEW HAAG / The Dallas Morning News
mhaag@dallasnews.com
The Texas Education Agency last week approved the opening of a McKinney charter school run by a company that other states rejected over concern about its tax status.

The Texas board of education allowed the for-profit Imagine International Academy of North Texas to run the school even though state law allows only nonprofit organizations to open state-funded charter schools.

Imagine argued that it would use the nonprofit status of an affiliate charter school in Indiana.

State officials said the Texas attorney general reviewed the arrangement and determined that it was allowable before the school was approved.

But school officials in Florida and Nevada have raised questions about other Imagine schools, saying they have not proved they are nonprofit and that public money should not flow into for-profit hands. The company has opened dozens of schools in 13 states.

Multiple calls to the Imagine Schools Inc. headquarters in Arlington, Va., for comment were not returned.

Florida's reaction
In Florida, Imagine intended to open 15 schools.

But the company met heavy resistance from local and state education officials, and withdrew its applications. Florida education leaders questioned whether Imagine was a certified nonprofit or a business attempting to profit from public education money.

"They cannot prove to us that they are a nonprofit. They do not have a 501c3," said Tina Pinkoson, chairwoman of Florida's Alachua County Public Schools, where Imagine applied to open a charter school this year. "They say they can prove it, but we won't believe it until they show us."

The school district's attorney, Tom Wittmer, voiced similar reservations to the school board.

The structure of the school in McKinney, and another campus approved last week in Georgetown, is similar to that of the proposed schools in Florida. According to paperwork submitted to TEA, the charters will use Imagine Schools Inc. for "the opening and ongoing operation of the Academy."

That means Imagine Schools Inc. would receive 12.5 percent of the per-pupil state funding, which is about $750,000 from each of its Texas schools, according to the TEA.

Monthly allowance
The charters would also pay Imagine Schools Inc. monthly allowances, Julia Brady said. Ms. Brady was a founding parent of the McKinney campus and was later hired as school development director of Imagine International Academy of North Texas.

The amount of the monthly allowances has not been set in Texas, but in Alachua, Fla., Imagine Schools Inc. proposed receiving $3,000 a month for 20 years, plus 1 percent to 3 percent of the charter's revenue for up to 20 years.

In return, Imagine Schools Inc. would provide the two Texas charters everything from teachers to budgeting to human resources, the charter applications state.

Both the Texas charters will lease school space from Schoolhouse, a subsidiary of Imagine Schools Inc., Ms. Brady said.

She said the Imagine charter schools are paying for services they need.

"It's hard to find a vendor to lease something or provide loans to a new charter school," Ms. Brady said. "It's essentially a way for schools to tap into an existing company with a strong credit background."

Ms. Brady said the company is not unjustly siphoning public funds.

"I don't see it that way," she said. "Essentially, the local board has contracted with Imagine Schools to set up and start up the charter, paying them for services rendered."

Ken Berger, CEO of Charity Navigator, a nonprofit watchdog group, said the setup skirts the rules.

"The charter seems like a shell corporation created for the for-profit corporation," he said. "It looks like they found a way around regulations."

According to the Internal Revenue Service, Imagine Schools Inc. is not a certified nonprofit – or 501c3. Ms. Brady said the company is expecting to receive the status soon. The company applied for it in November 2005.

Mr. Berger said the process should take months, not years.

Mr. Berger said it's fine for nonprofits to contract with for-profit corporations. But when most of the contract appears to be made with the same company, the relationship becomes "questionable," he said.

"It seems like they are giving oversight duty to Imagine," he said. "It seems like the tables have turned and Imagine Schools are managing them. But it certainly sounds like a questionable arrangement."

Report Highlights Lack of Diversity on Foundation Boards

From the Greenlining Institute:

Over the past several years, increasing national attention has been focused on the need for foundations to become more aware of the opportunities presented by our increasingly diverse nation. In this brief, we present figures on the diversity of the nation’s 46 largest foundations. Over 90% of all foundations and 20% of the largest foundations have little or no paid staff (Foundation Center, 2007‐2), which effectively delegates the ultimate decision on which proposals should receive funding to the handful of trustees that make up the board. Since foundations are most often not held accountable to any entity outside themselves for their funding decisions, most trustees will decide which causes or organizations to fund based on their own notions of which causes are worthy of funding, as well as their personal and professional networks. Having a culturally competent board of informed givers is therefore essential to increasing a foundation’s impact on communities of color.

The entire report is available here. You'll notice a number of significant education donors are given the dubious distinction of zero persons of color on their board of directors, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, and the Annenberg Foundation.

Racism Veiled by Testing Wins 5-4, Again

From the Chronicle:

To Test or Not to Test

A recent Quinnipiac University poll shows that 61% of Americans are against affirmative action for blacks in hiring, promotion, and college admissions. So when the New Haven fire department’s decision to stop using a written test for promoting firefighters because no African American passed the test, the Supreme Court was on firm ground in the popularity contest to overturn a lower court’s approval.

Much of the opposition against affirmative action isn’t about racism or stinginess, but about a charming belief in tests. Certainly, if affirmative action was about giving unqualified people jobs, promotions, or college admissions very few people would or should support it.

Yikes! who would want a black surgeon or, DOUBLE YIKES a female economics blogger?!

If there is a robust metric out there – an indicator that is highly correlated with success in a job or college — then, by all means, let’s use them to separate the competent from the incompetent.

Here is a test:

You are in a burning building. Do you want a firefighter rescuer (choose one:)
a. who passed a written test,
b. who has a sister-in-law on the city council member or is of a certain race,
c. who has proven on-the-job performance and successfully passed simulated fire rescues

Answer class?

The majority chooses c.

Steve Greenhouse of the New York Times reports that there are different ways to assess competency that do far better than written exams. The ability to handle an emergency, lead and motivate a group, and communicate instructions and goals are necessary firefighter captain skills. And down the street from New Haven, in Bridgeport, Conn., the fire department searches for those skills directly by using a battery of labor–intensive simulations and oral exams to promote select rank-and-file to fire lieutenants and captains.

In the labor market employers never really know what the future productivity of their employees will be, so they always search for signs, signals, and indicators to make the best selections. The upside of this Supreme Court decision, and an earlier one on the University of Michigan’s affirmative action admissions practices, could be colleges and employers moving away from test scores and innovating to find better alternatives so we find the best man or woman to do the job and the students who’ll get the most out of college.

That is the glass half full version.

The glass half empty version is that this is a sign that five members of the Supreme Court want to weaken civil rights protections, especially at the work place.

Justice Ginsburg has an opinion about that: “the Court pretends that “[t]he City rejected the test results solely because the higher scoring candidates were white.” Ante, at 20. That pretension, essential to the Court’s disposition, ignores substantial evidence of multiple flaws in the tests New Haven used. The Court similarly fails to acknowledge the better tests used in other cities, which have yielded less racially skewed outcomes.. “

Losing Ground in the Pursuit of Happiness

What does really matter? Aristotle's answer, happiness, and his road to getting there by the steady exercise of intellectual and moral virtue--has been replaced by a detour that would seem to have us decidedly lost. From The Guardian:

Costa Rica is the greenest and happiest country in the world, according to a new list that ranks nations by combining measures of their ecological footprint with the happiness of their citizens.

Britain is only halfway up the Happy Planet Index (HPI), calculated by the New Economics Foundation (NEF), in 74th place of 143 nations surveyed. The United States features in the 114th slot in the table. The top 10 is dominated by countries from Latin America, while African countries bulk out the bottom of the table.

The HPI measures how much of the Earth's resources nations use and how long and happy a life their citizens enjoy as a result. First calculated in 2006, the second edition adds data on almost all the world's countries and now covers 99% of the world's population.

NEF says the HPI is a much better way of looking the success of countries than through standard measures of economic growth. The HPI shows, for example, that fast-growing economies such as the US, China and India were all greener and happier 20 years ago than they are today.

"The HPI suggests that the path we have been following is, without exception, unable to deliver all three goals: high life satisfaction, high life expectancy and 'one-planet living'," says Saamah Abdallah, NEF researcher and the report's lead author. "Instead we need a new development model that delivers good lives that don't cost the Earth for all."

Costa Ricans top the list because they report the highest life satisfaction in the world, they live slightly longer than Americans, yet have an ecological footprint that is less than a quarter the size. The country only narrowly fails to achieve the goal of what NEF calls "one-planet living": consuming its fair share of the Earth's natural resources.

The report says the differences between nations show that it is possible to live long, happy lives with much smaller ecological footprints than the highest-consuming nations.

The new HPI also provides the first ever analysis of trends over time for what are supposedly the world's most developed nations, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

OECD nations' HPI scores plummeted between 1960 and the late 1970s. Although there have been some gains since then, HPI scores were still higher in 1961 than in 2005.

Life satisfaction and life expectancy combined have increased 15% over the 45-year period for those living in the rich nations, but it has come at the cost of a 72% rise in their ecological footprint. And the three largest countries in the world – China, India and the US, which are aggressively pursuing growth-based development models – have all seen their HPI scores drop in that time.

The highest placed western nation is the Netherlands. People there live on average over a year longer than people in the US, and have similar levels of life satisfaction – yet their per capita ecological footprint is less than half the size. The Netherlands is therefore over twice as environmentally efficient at achieving good lives as the US, Nef says.

The report sets out a "Happy Planet Charter" calling for an unprecedented collective global effort to develop a "new narrative" of human progress, encourage good lives that don't cost the earth, and to reduce consumption in the highest-consuming nations – which it says is the biggest barrier to sustainable wellbeing.

Little Mike Bloomberg and the Riots That Never Came

It is done! As Albany continued to wallow on Tuesday without a decision on renewing Bloomberg's choke hold on NYC Schools, the Little Dictator declared that if his reign were to end, parents would be in the streets with torches. The rantings of another Billion Dollar Bubble Boy:

. . . .The effect of the inaction on school governance is harder to predict. For the past few months, Bloomberg has sought to portray the expiration of mayoral control of the school system in its most apocalyptic terms: riots in the streets, a return to the Soviet Union and so on. But in a press briefing yesterday, Bloomberg said his administration "will work hard to shield New York's children and their parents from the chaos." Schools, he said, "will not be padlocked" and summer school will open as scheduled today.

Instead of invoking images of angry mobs on the Grand Concourse, Bloomberg said the confusion over how to run the system would bring in lawyers -- and litigation. "Every decision -- from personnel decisions to policy decisions -- will be subject to litigation and uncertainty," Bloomberg continued.

That confusion arises partly because, as Philissa Cramer observed in Gotham Schools, the school governance law passed in 2002 calls for the law to sunset after seven years but "doesn’t include instructions for reconstituting the old school board or dismantling the current system."

The mayor foresees "a nightmare flashback to the days when politics ruled the schools." But some experts believe he may be overstating the effects of the current law's expiration. While the city would have to reconstitute a Board of Education, they say, that board could decide to continue most school policies and practices while waiting for the legislature to pass a school governance bill.

"If the mayor acts... at least changing the structure on top, then I think it's wrong to foresee any potential litigation," Udi Ofer, the policy director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, has said.

David Bloomfield, an expert on education law who teaches at Brooklyn College, has said the state education law provides for clear lines of authority. Bloomfield sees only two credible circumstances that could lead to litigation: The mayor could file suit against a Board of Education or suits could be filed against the administration if he decides to ignore the resurrected board. . . .

Teachers Reject Grant from Exxon-, Gates-backed Nonprofit

     The Leominster Teachers Association voted 305-47 to reject a grant from the National Math and Science Initiative  (NMSI) intended to improve AP classes.  A number of ed reformers have used this as an example of unions putting adults before kids, but they consistently refuse to show the union's point of view nor do they investigate the funding sources or motivations for so-called improvement programs.

     The NMSI is a relatively young nonprofit.  They were started after a report from the National Academies came out in 2005.  The report, "Rising Above the Gathering Storm," was critiqued by Gerald Bracey in the Washington Post, a must-read article about the statistics cited by the authors.  The so-called "gathering storm," which Bracey reminds us is an allusion to Churchill's recount of the events leading up to WWII, is the tremendous number of engineers and scientists produced by Indian and Chinese colleges (sound familiar?) combined with a more competitive global economy.  Outsourcing and liberalization, according to the authors, is merely a logical consequence of globalization: multinationals will relocate for cheap labor, no apologies made.  The new global world will require a top-notch military establishment, technological innovators, and an army of scientists.  America's dominance in the global economy can only be achieved through more tax breaks for corporations (the "race to the bottom" for cheap labor, tax breaks, and lax regulation - i.e. the fundamental tenants of NAFTA and the WTO), a more rigorous math and science curriculum for our students, and various other neoliberal reforms (patent law, eliminating trade barriers, privatization).  Remarkably absent from the document looking at the future of America - which focuses explicitly on competition rather than cooperation - is any mention of global climate change aside from a few miniscule footnotes.

     The NMSI is funded  primarily by ExxonMobil, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation.  Exxon made a record $125 million donation to get the organization started before Gates ($10 million) and Dell ($5 million) chipped in  (Exxon also provided seed money for TFA in the early 1990s).  NMSI distributes funds in a variety of ways to further teaching in math and science.  Here was the proposal rejected by the Leominster Teachers Association:

     The grant would have offered financial rewards for teachers (up to $3000), students ($100), and administrators (up to $3,000) for high AP test scores.  Most of the grant money would have gone to teachers who could teach AP classes  - which excludes anyone teaching elementary or middle school.  Bernadette Marso, president of the union, said they were open to the additional funding if it contributed to the general fund and could be used to enhance  extracurricular activities for a variety of K-12 students (jazz band camp instead of - as Duncan and NMSI would want - more test prep during the summer).  The union also objected to the grant because it would have involved signing contracts with outside organizations, running against the strength of collective bargaining.  In other words, teachers are saying putting all kids first, not just the AP kids and teachers.  That's what a union is about.  

For Urban Children, Says Duncan, "It is not about the building."

Since the emergence of the new Democratic majority, "liberals" like Miller and Kennedy no longer have the Republicans to blame for an education policy that is not about the children, but about the health of the education industrial complex and the oligarchical control of the work force. So that now with total control of the urban school agenda, there is nowhere to hide for those who previously found cover behind good-ole-girl, Margaret Spellings. Thus, we find Dunc's Department of lawyers and financiers and spin doctors trying to put a Democratic face on an education policy aimed to protect and advance the agendas of corporations intent upon control of the schools, from K thru college.

The latest blathering idiocy came this week as Duncan added "the building" to the long list of what good urban schools are NOT about (he is not talking about the leafy suburbs, of course--just the urban centers that house the disposable children of the poor). For these poor children, the oligarchs have a solution that is 25-30% cheaper than public schools. So now, urban education is

NOT about qualified teachers, for the new corporate charters can hire unqualified "teachers" for much less, and hire and fire them at will;

NOT about elected school boards to provide oversight by the community;

NOT about special education, libraries, drama, or sports fields;

NOT about climate control, comfort, food services or transportation.

So logically, it follows that it is NOT, as Dunc just proclaimed, about "the building." Any boarded up pizza joint in a strip mall will do as a base of operations for the new corporate charters, or any corrugated metal shed that can be thrown up overnight. But then, when you are dealing with the Civil Rights issue of this generation, as Duncan has proclaimed the urban ed reform agenda to be, there should be no limit to cost savings involved, because we all know that it is not about money and ALL about the children.

Well, someone is listening to the fool-speak by the Secretary! Many people are listening, and those who are, don't believe you, Mr. Duncan. A clip from HuffPo by Cameron Sinclair:

. . . .I felt the most exciting aspect of this far-reaching plan was the $5B being set up to encourage and reward states that are proactively pushing reform. Additionally while I can write about the many, many positive things said what worried me, as someone involved in improving school environments, was his comment that 'it is not about the building'. Sorry Arne, while I agree it is about the children and while teacher performance is important - it is ALSO about the building.

Many schools in this country are in utter disrepair and the outdated portable classrooms that dot the landscape of the American school system are harmful to the health of our children. (Just a few hundred miles south of Aspen we know schools built with cancer causing chemicals and rodent infestation issues). The simple fact is when you ask those who are affected by their surroundings - environments do matter. In the 1940s teacher Loris Malaguzzi showed that children learn first through the interaction with the adults in their lives, then with their peers and finally with the environment around them. The environment is, as coined by Malaguzzi, the third teacher. Fifty years on most educators can attest to the fact that when you have a classroom that inspires children learn.

At the 2007 Aspen Ideas Festival having just spoken on a session on rebuilding after Hurricane Katrina I was walking with colleagues from Architecture for Humanity when the issue about the state of school facilities came up. Getting all worked up about the increased risks of cancer for children in older portable classrooms, we started talking about an idea of actually involving students and teachers in the design of the classroom of the future. Not willing to wait to get the green light to innovate a coalition of the willing came together to launch the Open Architecture Challenge: Classroom - An international design competition with one caveat, design teams had to include the end users of the classroom as equal partners in the design process. The goal of this initiative is to serve as a catalyst to build safe, sustainable and smart educational facilities around the world.

This initiative also included an curriculum to bring design and architecture into K-12 schools and hundreds of architects and design firms went into schools around the world to teach the impact of architecture. Additionally a series of webcasts connecting students with architects (from Ghana, Pakistan, UK and US) to talk about the different aspects of how to design. All of this done on a voluntary basis with an aim to design the classroom of the future.

To our surprise more than 1,000 design teams from 65 countries registered. The competition generated hundreds of ideas for building better classrooms around the world--from upgrading overcrowded urban schools in India to re-imagining smarter, more sustainable portable classrooms here in the United States. The stories from each of these teams are simply amazing. Today, less than 100m where Secretary Duncan spoke, an interdisciplinary jury will select finalists from a pool of the top fifty entries.

Once a winner has been announced (the school receives $50K, the design team $5K) all school designs will be available for viewing and download via the Open Architecture Network. All design are under a creative commons license allowing school districts and non-profits to replicate some of the best ideas and shape the classroom of the future. In the fall an exhibition of the best entries will travel the globe and hopefully a number of classrooms will be built from this initiative.

Arne Duncan repeated a number of times in his talk that is role is to listen and to discover some of the most innovative ideas out there. Within in this initiative there were thousands of individuals that not only have something to say about the future of schools, they already designed it.

As Economic Gap Widens - So Goes the Achievement Gap

Summer school is out for the summer.

It's the front page story today in the New York Times. Arne, what was that you were saying about extending the school year? And we thought Brownie was clueless.

Facing Deficits, Some States Cut Summer School

Here's an excerpt:

Since the 1970s, however, the value of rigorous summer school has gained increasing recognition because of research by a Johns Hopkins professor, Karl Alexander, and other sociologists showing that the academic achievement gap widens during summer vacations.

Low-income students who hold summer jobs or are idle, the research has demonstrated, forget more math and reading skills over the summer than their affluent classmates, who often receive intellectual stimulation in the summer from canoe trips, language camps or ballet lessons.

Good Working Conditions and Respect for Teachers - A Foreign Concept

You would never know it, but there was an important meeting yesterday at the National Press Club in Washington DC about education. The title of the meeting was Top-Scoring Nations Share Strategies on Teachers (Ed Week carried the article) featuring speakers from Finland and Singapore, two very different approaches but models of high performance.

The story will never be covered by the corporate owned media in this country because the business leaders and politicians who sat through the meeting have their own agenda - and despite what they might have heard at the meeting, like making working conditions for teachers better or respecting the profession of teaching - there's just no money in that.

Meanwhile, Jeb Bush is busy pushing "technology" as the new panacea for transforming education and propelling the U.S. to its rightful place in the global race to the top. There's lots of money to be made and it's the gift that keeps on giving. Teachers stormed the Hill this week looking for more money for technology - perhaps they should focus more on trying to gain some basic RESPECT.

Here's a clip from the Ed Week story:

Yet in some respects, those two nations have risen to the top in very different ways.

That was one of the lessons that emerged yesterday at what was billed as the Global Education Competitiveness Summit, which brought state officials and business leaders together here to discuss lessons from high-achieving countries that could be applied to U.S. school systems—an omnipresent theme in American education circles these days.

Two of the speakers whose nations are perched at or near the top of recent international