Brent Staples Leads NY Times Editorial Thought Disorders

In a New York Times editorial entitled "Confronting Segregation in New York Schools," education non-expert Brent Staples begins well enough by talking about efforts to desegregate NYC's segregated schools.  Such an editorial is among other recent ones at the Times that attempt to distinguish the Editorial Board's corporate education plan from the same one embraced by the Trump Administration. 

Near the end of the editorial, however, Staples cannot help but to veer back to the same old rutted road that he has traveled so many times before. 

It is not enough for those fighting segregation to implement a number of strategies to increase diversity in the schools.  This is especially true when such efforts threaten to upend the Times-approved plans to turn the profession of teaching over to the corporate psychology paternalists who would replace educators with neurological re-programmers who have been indoctrinated in the Seligman/Duckworth/KIPP methods of cultural sterilization and behavioral neutering.

. . . critics argue that Mr. de Blasio should take a more urgent approach to remaking schools that continue to fail low-income black and Latino students. That means strengthening the teacher corps where possible and replacing it where necessary.

The most glaring need for replacement is at the New York Times Editorial Board, but replacing an education ignoramus with someone knowledgeable would put in jeopardy the support at the Times for failed Wall Street education policies that have succeeded only in creating whole new industries that prey on the poor, berate their character and cultures, and accelerate the resegregation of American schools.

Mr. Staples: Here's What Happened to Black Teachers

As the chief education spokesman for the New York Times editorial board, Brent Staples' support for corporate education polices most often goes unsigned in his editorials.  This week, however, Mr. Staples has an editorial piece in the Times that asks, "where did all the black teachers go?"

For almost three decades, Brent Staples has refined the New York Times' editorial policy on education to support, unfailingly, the corporate education reform agenda that began in Charlottesville, VA almost 30 years ago.  It was in 1989 that GHW Bush called together the nation's governors to meet with the nation's leading CEOs to set a national education agenda designed to put corporations in charge of making education policy based on Reagan market ideology, and to put governors in charge of implementation of that policy. 

The year after in 1990, Brent Staples joined the Times editorial board.  It was the same year that one of the governors leading the Charlottesville Conference, Lamar Alexander, was named Secretary of Education and charged with promoting education privatization policies to end the "public school monopoly." The other governor in charge at the Charlottesville Conference, Bill Clinton, was elected President in 1992, which began the school privatization effort in earnest. 

Clinton used the bully pulpit to advance charter growth, and by the time Clinton left office the nation was seven schools short (1,993) of meeting Clinton's goal of 2,000 charter schools in the U. S. by the year 2000.

As a black man embracing white racist policies, Staples voiced support for the white elite corporate education policies and policy talk that has for centuries blamed the shiftless poor for their impoverished and oppressed conditions and their lazy and ignorant black teachers for falling short of expectations on standardized tests designed to humiliate anyone outside the white middle class for which the tests were normed.

With Clinton, accountability demands began to be ratcheted up with more testing, so that by the time GW Bush was appointed President in 2000 by the Supreme Court, Brent Staples, as the voice of the Times on education, was ready to embrace a multi-prong frontal assault on the disenfranchised and the public school teachers that serve them. 

Thinly veiled as a social justice initiative that would "leave no child behind," the NCLB Act put the Business Roundtable and the oligarchs with tax-sheltered corporate foundations in charge of making education policy to test, label, demonize, and shut down thousands of public community schools in favor of corporate charter schools. 

In New Orleans, hundreds of black teachers lost their jobs almost overnight when disaster capitalists took over NOLA public schools after Katrina.  Tens of thousands of others around the country lost their jobs as well, just as they continue today to lose them wherever charter school operators replace credentialed teachers with pedagogically-ignorant, culturally-irrelevant, and empathy-free Ivy Leaguers devoted to turning impoverished black and brown children into robotic versions of middle class white kids. 

Staples and the Editorial Board applauded the creation of a new category of white male overseers and white female missionary teachers to staff the corporate charters, which were charged by their paternalist philanthrocapitalist bosses with dehumanizing and culturally sterilizing the children of the poor, while grinding out, from the surviving high scoring charter children the test results that would be used to justify charter expansion. 

Today there are almost 7,000 charter schools, and thousands more KIPP Model schools planned and funded by nearly $400 million in federal funds each year and the tens of billions of dollars annually from starving state education funds.

Now Brent Staples, near retirement age, asks in his most recent signed editorial piece for the Times, "what happened to black teachers?"  What happened, indeed!

Having gone to segregated schools, himself, up through grade 4, Staples was handpicked in 5th grade to attend the all-white William Penn School in Chester, Pennsylvania.  There at the William Penn Elementary, in a school with the social capital and educational resources to allow his talent to shine, his voice to develop, his aspirations to open up, he flourished.  In fact, he won scholarships that allowed him to advance his education, so that today he holds a PhD in Psychology from the University of Chicago.

If Mr. Staples were growing up today in a poor urban environment, such an intellectually precocious 5th grade child from a poor family would most likely end up in another segregated school like the punishing KIPP Model charter schools, where children in educationally-minimalist environments are beaten down until they become compliant and malleable enough to be molded by corporate happiness training into aspiring robots.

Black teachers, Mr. Staples?  Black and brown teachers who have not absorbed the white racism that imbues the KIPP Model schools want no part of this brave new world of total compliance training and child cruelty that you continue to support, as you hide behind the anonymity that your editorial board position affords you, except on the days that you put your name on a piece that pretends to care.

New York Times Editorial Fails Another Fact Check on Charter Schools

The NYTimes Editorial Board is one of the most reliable voices for the corporate education losers who continue to double down on testing accountability policies and privatization schemes that now have decades of evidence to substantiate their failure.  Today's entry is on charter schools, which has this nugget:

The editorial states:

"A study published earlier this year shows that the typical New York City charter student learned more reading and math in a year than his or her public school peers."



This is simply a lie. Even if you give credence to the CREDO study, which has been critiqued for sloppy documentation and unexplained use of something called 
"days of learning," the results shows no impact for New York City charters in Reading (0.00), while showing significant charter impacts in Math (0.11) (see p. 53 of linked report). 



Given the Wall Street resource advantage that charters have and the fact that they accept fewer special education and ELL students, one would expect big differences in both reading and math, especially when the matched public schools are often the poorest in the district. 



And what is totally masked by measuring "charter impact" are the deepening knowledge proficiency gaps between the poor and the middle class. The result: children are left further behind in corporate charters that use total compliance and zero tolerance methods that no middle class parent would ever allow.

In Search of An Accountable Education Editor at the New York Times

Brent Staples has long been the education editorialist at the New York Times, and his function as a rubber stamp for corporate education reform has assured his continuing tenure there.  His opining never fails to parrot the Business Roundtable talking points on education,  a subject for which the privatizers are the least prepared to talk about sensibly--other than ethics, of course.  Staples does so in a unique patronizing fashion that assumes his audience is as dumb on education issues as he pretends to be.  His conscious and willful neglect of the facts makes the New York Times a laughingstock among informed readers and a misleading yellow rag for those who are not.

His latest on the unscientific and discredited scheme of teacher evaluations based on test scores offers no surprises.  It is presented here with my reactions interspersed for those who may, out of no fault of their own, believe the postulations of a disingenuous parrot. 

The Chicago teachers’ strike was prompted in part by a fierce disagreement over how much student test scores will weigh in a new teacher evaluation system mandated by state law. That teachers’ unions in much of the country now agree that student achievement should count in evaluations at all reflects a major change from the past, when it was often argued that teaching was an “art” that could not be rigorously evaluated or, even more outrageously, that teachers should not be held accountable for student progress.

There is no such widespread agreement among teachers.  The "leadership" of both unions wheedled and bullied their way to getting Rep Assembly members to go along with deals that sold the union membership down the river on teacher evaluation.  Weingarten is now in Chicago trying to pretend to support a strike against a policy she approved that the membership does not agree with.  That's where things stand.  The NYTimes should conduct a survey with some of its vast resources to ask the nation's teachers and parents how they feel about teachers evaluated based on test scores.  Teachers are not afraid of assuming responsibility for student learning--that's why they courageously chose teaching as a career.   Deciding their future based on a discredited mismeasure of learning, however, negates that responsibility to children and parents.

Traditional teacher evaluations often consist of cursory classroom visits by principals who declare nearly every teacher good, or at least competent, even in failing schools where few if any children meet basic educational standards.

As a result of this system, bad things can happen. High-performing teachers who have an enormous impact on student achievement go unidentified, and they often leave the district. Promising, but struggling, young teachers never get the help they need to master the job. And disastrous teachers who have no feel for the profession continue as long as they wish, hurting young lives along the way.

This is classic teacher bashing by a disastrous editorial writer.  There is a vast literature and body of best practices on clinical supervision of teachers and teacher evaluations and effective teaching.  In many cases, best practices have been neglected due to constraints on time and other resources by principals or assistant principals where the ratio of teachers to supervisors is 50:1 or even a 100:1.  If urban schools had anywhere near the resources or shared social capital that Montgomery County, Maryland or Westchester County, NY have, then we would see better evaluation systems in urban schools where, now, garbage cans catch rainwater and 50 kids are packed into rooms without air conditioning.  Teacher evaluations based on test scores will do nothing to changes these shameful disparities, and more importantly, it will do have negative impacts on the teacher-student relationship and teacher collaboration.

The more rigorous evaluation systems that have taken root in several states and districts around the country are intended to change that picture. These systems, which take student achievement into account in various ways, are still in their formative years, but they have already opened the door to a different way of doing business. At their best, these evaluation systems are based on the idea that teaching is difficult to master and that high-performers tend to get that way through intensive feedback and help from colleagues.

If these systems are in their formative stages, then why are they being use for high-stakes summative evaluations?  This is the question that the National Research Council asked Arne Duncan in a 17-page warning letter in 2009, but Duncan ignored the warning and mandated this quack system for Race to the Top by putting together a point system that made it impossible to win a grant without a commitment to value added teacher eval based on test scores.  May I quote my colleague, Isabelle Nunez, from the Sun-Times the other day:

"The way that CPS plans to use test scores in teacher evaluation, referred to as value-added, is so incredibly flawed that almost no one with a knowledge base in this area thinks it’s a good idea.

The National Research Council wrote a letter to the Obama administration warning against including value-added in Race to the Top federal grant program because of a lack of research support. The Educational Testing Service, an organization that stands to benefit tremendously from any expansion of testing, issued a report concluding that value-added is improper test use.

These are the people who know the statistics, and none of them thinks the models work. There is a list of obstacles:

One: A correlation does not mean a causality. Researchers have found fifth-grade teacher “effects” on fourth-grade scores using these models. Ridiculous, right?

That’s because the models don’t work. For one thing, there must be random assignment of students for this kind of comparison among teachers to work — and no administration that cared about students would ever do that. There are deep statistical problems, and no way to reduce the amount of error to an acceptable level. The biggest problem of all, though, is that this is a ranking. So half of all teachers will always be below the 50th percentile. That’s math.

This is setting teachers up for failure. This will ensure regular turnover, keeping the teaching force young and inexperienced, afraid and compliant. This is only one of many ways that teaching is being turned from a vocation to a job — and a low-paid, temporary one at that. . . ."

The school system in Montgomery County, Md., established its evaluation and mentoring system more than a decade ago. The system does not specify exactly how much weight student test scores and other data should receive. But depending on the circumstances, the evaluation may include scores from state tests, student projects, student and parent surveys and other data.
It is an intensive program that aims to help both novice teachers and experienced teachers who receive a “below standard” evaluation. The system, which has required a considerable investment of time and money, assigns consulting teachers who work full time assisting a number of colleagues. These master teachers help their charges plan lessons, review student work and also arrange for them to observe other teachers on the job. After a year of support, a panel of teachers and principals can recommend dismissal or another year of support.
The widely praised evaluation system in New Haven also relies on a complex mix of factors. It takes into account year-by-year improvement in student learning, as measured by progress on state and local tests and attainment of academic goals. The system also examines the teachers’ instructional abilities, judged by frequent observations by principals and other managers. Teachers receive regular face-to-face feedback so that they are fully aware of what they need to do to improve.
Some systems give a specific weight to so-called value-added test scores, which try to account for socioeconomic differences by tracking students’ improvement year to year, rather than looking just at their absolute scores. That approach, though, has come under attack by critics who argue that these scores are too often statistically flawed.
Reasonable school officials understand that test scores, while important, do not reflect the sum total of what good teachers provide for their students. In Washington, D.C., where the evaluation system is now in its fourth year, school officials have decided to change the weighting of tests. Originally, value-added scores accounted for 50 percent of teacher evaluations; that has been reduced to 35 percent, with an additional 15 percent consisting of other goals (like the students’ mastery of certain skills) collaboratively arrived at by teacher and principal.
Officials there say they reduced the importance of value-added scores after some of the most successful teachers expressed anxiety about the measure and argued that it might not give some teachers full credit for their work because they teach subjects not covered by the state tests.

What Staples fails to mention is that in "First to the Top" state, Tennessee, which won the first half-billion dollar RTTT prize, is using composite math and reading test scores to evaluate art teachers and auto mechanics instructors.  State tests count 35 percent of the evaluation, and other tests count 15 percent.  The other half is based on observations.  Just 2 months ago, however, the state concluded that in systems where supervisor evaluations did not match the value-added test scores, the supervisors would have to undergo a re-education that will conducted by an outside contractor run by the Milkens.  Yes, those Milkens.

Many of these new programs are better than the slipshod evaluation systems they replaced. But they are far from perfect. States and cities, like Chicago, will need to keep working at them to ensure fairness, accuracy and transparency.

Finally, something Brent and I can agree on: fairness, accuracy, and transparency.  It's just too bad that he is pimping for a slipshod system that offers none of the above.  The best or even better way to improve an evaluation system that needs improving is not to make it worse.  That is what value-added teacher evaluation does by claiming for itself a respectability that the scientific community is entirely unwilling to provide.

NY Times Continues to Blame Schools and Teachers for Poverty and Penury

The Business Roundtable's Rube Goldberg plan for evaluating teachers in Tennessee (and other venues with RTTT money) has met with almost universal disdain, a response that has brought CEOs running out of their penthouses to dictate responses for the corporate media editorial pages.

The New York Times, which never saw a corporate education idea it didn't like, published its own tribute to the current effort by the Oligarchs of Ed on Saturday, with an editorial in support of Tennessee's ridiculous plan based on "value-added" test scores and an observation instrument that assures that thousands of good teachers will lose their tenure, if not their jobs.  And thousands more will lose their love of teaching.

From the Times education experts on Saturday, which, with a date or two changed, could have been written any time during the past 30 years of school and teacher bashing:

Tennessee’s need to do better was underscored when the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress, also known as the nation’s report card, ranked the state near the bottom in fourth-grade math performance, just ahead of Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi. These dismal results — slightly worse than those reported in 2009 — were made public earlier this month during legislative hearings on the evaluation system.

Yes, Tennessee test scores are abysmal, but, first off, let's at least get their ranking correct.  As you can see the scores from 1992-2011 below, NAEP numbers have been flat for a long time, with the flattest coming during the most recent and most intense test-and-punish period of the NCLB conflagration.

Tennessee NAEP Math
1992--211
1996--219
2000--220
2003--228
2005--232
2007--233
2009--232
2011--233

Tennessee NAEP Reading
1992--212
1994--213
1998--212
2002--214
2003--212
2005--214
2007--216
2009--217
2011--215

Most interesting, too, is the fact that the Sanders Miracle of value-added testing (TVAAS) started in 1992.  This is the same value-added miracle-turned-mirage that corporate water carriers like Brent Staples of the Times Editorial Board want to impose on the rest of the nation.

So with Tennessee test scores pancaked, some other states without the benefit of the Sanders Miracle have moved ahead, thus lowering Tennessee even further: 

Progress from other states [from 2009 to 2011] lowered Tennessee's rankings:
• From 45th to 46th in the nation in fourth-grade math
• From 39th to 41st in fourth-grade reading
• From 43rd to 45th in eighth-grade math
• From 34th to 41st in eighth-grade reading.

Most interesting for those who pretend to believe that more failed corporate education reforms will improve learning in Tennessee, or anywhere else, are facts related to education spending in Tennessee, which exactly matches Tennessee's testing rank among states.  A Compendium of State Education Rankings ranks Tennessee 44th in per pupil spending at $6,855 (based on NEA data from 2005).

Another coincidence, no doubt: a report earlier this year by U. S. News ranked Tennessee's kids, that's right, 44th in "smartness" based on NAEP data. 

And the biggest coincidence yet that relates to Tennessee's ranking on tests?  Only 5 other states (Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi, New Mexico, and Arkansas) have higher percentages of children living in poverty than Tennessee, which is tied with Texas, South Carolina and Kentucky with 26% of its children living in poverty.

So Mr. Staples, you and the other privileged and invested education opinionators of the New York Times Editorial Board need to do more than you have done historically to educate the public on education issues.  Rather than doubling down on another generation of failed reforms that have deformed our public schools, why not examine the facts, rather than dismissing them in favor of foundation press releases?  Why not offer something to the 99% of your readers who are looking for illumination on the issues, rather than diversionary misinformation that you print to serve the hedge fund 1%ers of Wall Street?  Why not, in fact, read the most recent brief by the Education Writers Association, which points to the lack of research to back up the corporate education policies you are pushing?  Why not read, in fact, your own best reporter who has talked to people to Tennessee to expose the house of cards that you continue to prop up?

NYTimes Editorial Board Embraces New Orleans Abusive Charter Caste System

Education is ground zero in the systemic exploitation of black people in New Orleans--ground zero because public schools are the direct feeder for the necessary, albeit unskilled, labor needed for the tourist-oriented economy. . . . In New Orleans they are building more hotels every day.  Where will the bellhops and maids come from? . . . . Our schools are the way they are because the economy. . . continues to require a labor force to clean, cook, and serve.

  

 --Kalamu ya Salaam, quoted by Buras, 2010, pp. 66-67

In December 2010, the Southern Poverty Law Center released a report filled with grisly and harrowing details of student abuse, miseducation, segregation, and exclusion in the schools of New Orleans.  The first paragraph:

New Orleans students are supposed to be learning in one of the most advanced, innovative educational environments in the country. When it comes to school safety and security, however, many New Orleans schools employ ineffective discipline practices that were discredited by education policy researchers decades ago. School staff react to minor rule violations by forcibly handcuffing children to furniture, brutally slamming them, banishing them from their schools and cutting short their education. Far from keeping New Orleans schools safe, these policies actually reinforce a culture of violence and disengagement from schools and communities.

What has emerged since Katrina wiped out New Orleans Schools is the quintessential corporate education model, with corporate charter schools now constituting 3 out of every four schools in the Big Easy.  This system based on the "portfolio model" was developed under the leadership of Paul Vallas, who became the highest paid superintendent in Louisiana history (over $400,000 annually) at at time when large numbers of children in New Orleans did not have textbooks and teachers bought their own chalk.

While Vallas and his toadies claimed the new charter system was open to all comers, what quickly emerged was a school caste system, with the poorest and neediest children shut out of schools where their test scores could damage the charter brands that were set up as the urban model for the nation.  A clip from an article that appeared in the Harvard Education Review, Summer 2011, by Kristen Buras (click on clip to enlarge):

RSD stands for Recovery School District, and this lower caste of NOLA schools has its own internal caste system as well.  There are the charters and the publics within RSD, with the regular public schools left to take those that even the RSD charters don't want.  A number of these regular public schools will continue to operate, as they are necessary dumping grounds for children who have special needs, lower test performance, or are resistant to the total compliance instructional regime that is based more on behavioral modification and test prep.  The children of these schools of last resort will be contained and miseducated until they can be driven out of school entirely and into the Louisiana correctional facilities.

With these kinds of problems remaining for a system that touts itself as the urban solution to schooling in America, it is disturbing, though not surprising, to see the New York Times come out strong for such an obviously unfair, unethical, exploitative, and oppressive system, without ever mentioning any of the glaring inequities or crimes being committed against children.  Brent Staples as Editorial Board ed guy has always been a reliable rubber stamp for corporate ed reform, but really?  Is this what the New York Times endorses?

Staples' latest press release for corporate ed reform shows up today in today's Sunday edition as its lead editorial, and it begins with a whopper of a lie:

Before Hurricane Katrina, more than 60 percent of children in New Orleans attended a failing school. Now, only about 18 percent do. 

Prior to Katrina's wipeout, the New Orleans Schools reflected decades of malignant neglect, having been left to the African-American population and vastly underfunded after Southern desegregation took hold following Brown v Board of Education.  The white folks simply left the public schools.

The New Orleans public schools, however, were beginning to make strides before Katrina.  Yes, 60 percent were deemed AUS (Academically Unacceptable Schools), but just before Katrina, the State ranked Orleans School District 11th out of 68 districts in terms of annual achievement growth, even though the district remained at the bottom of the barrel in terms of raw scores on the LEAP test.

As for Staples' other claim that 18 percent of kids now attend an AUS school now in New Orleans, that's a magical number--pure fabrication.  The State of Louisiana's Preliminary 2009-2010 Academically Unacceptable List PDF lists 22 New Orleans schools.  Using state data here, I was able to find 5 other New Orleans schools that were also AUS, for a total of 27 schools.  That would be almost 31 percent AUS, but there is a further complication.

Now consider the fact that the corporate-friendly Cowen Institute at Tulane reports [download the report here] that there were 17 schools without data to tell us whether they are acceptable or unacceptable.  So when we divide that 27 schools we know are AUS by the number of schools for which we have data, we get 38 percent as the real percentage of AUS schools in New Orleans.  How Staples got 18 percent, we will never know.  Did he divide the real number in half and add 1?  Or did he just take the purely fabricated number handed to him as truth?

That 38 percent AUS number would still be impressive, were it not for the fact that the corporate ed reformers in New Orleans have contained and segregated the majority of poor test scorers in a handful of schools and then declared the rest superior.  But then selling the charter bill of goods is no different than any other corrupt deal put together by amoral corporate interests with no concern for the well-being of the 99 percent.

New York Times: Corporate Education Reform's Newspaper of Record

Brent Staples of the NYTimes Editorial Board has put his own unique brand of cynical and disingenuous stupidity on the NCLB waiver plan:

The 2002 No Child Left Behind Act focused the country’s attention on school reform as never before, but the law is far from perfect. The Obama administration is wise to address its flaws, since Congress is four years overdue in updating the law.

The Department of Education’s plan gives states that agree to several reforms — including stringent teacher evaluation systems and new programs for overhauling the worst schools — an exemption from many of the law’s requirements. It would permit the states to change the way they evaluate most schools for the purpose of compliance, allowing indicators other than just reading and math scores to be considered. And it would lift the law’s provision that all students be proficient in math and reading by 2014, which was never going to happen anyway because there were so many loopholes.. . . .

This is a masterful piece of dissembling. Notice that Staples does not mention the "stringent teacher evaluation systems" will be based principally on test scores in math and reading and every other subject in every grade, at least twice a year (we're looking for "growth," remember).  And notice that "new programs for overhauling the worst schools" does not mention the fact that Obama and Duncan have given new impetus to the charter "turnaround" option and have now given approval to New Orleans type "Recovery School Districts" that are based on replacing urban public schools with segregated corporate welfare charters at the rate of 5 percent of schools per year.  Ten years equals 50% of American schools, which is just about the percentage of schoolchildren attending urban schools.

Notice, too, that Staples does not mention that this waiver plan only lifts the 2014 proficiency demand if states are willing to drink the poisonous kool-aid brewed up by the oligarchs and hedge funders to corporatize schools.  Notice, too, that the Staples never acknowledges, even now, the impossibility of the 2014 targets, preferring to pretend that "loopholes" are to blame for not achieving the impossible.

And so Staples opines that Obama is wise to address the law's flaws, even as the Times is short on specifics about what those flaws are or were.  Could Staples mean the flaws that were pointed out in his newspaper, the New York Times, even before the "law" ever became law?  From the NYTimes on August 13, 200, in an opinion piece by scholars Staiger and Kane:

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

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

These "flaws" are the ones that Staples and the rest of Editorial Board ignored for almost 10 years as the public schools were blown up every year in every state in order to usher in the era of the segregated corporate welfare charter schools that the Times' Wall Street patrons were and are supporting.  Do you, Mr. Staples and the hedge funders who help you churn out your propaganda, remember the New York Times interview with state officials on July 17, 2001, wherein Missouri Assistant Commissioner, Stephen Barr, called the NCLB proficiency targets "an impossible dream"?  Do you remember the boatloads of research on the explosive effects of this most damaging "bill" that you ignored for the past 10 years?  Do you remember that the New York Times never reported the CREDO study that exposed the fact that only 17 percent of charters nationwide have higher test scores than matched public schools???

With these cheap charter chain gangs free now to expand without restriction in many states, could this be the reason that it is time to stop the school comparisons and begin the "growth model" era, thus making the poverty and opportunity gaps even more invisible than they are today with an NCLB system that even Brent Staples finally admits is flawed.

New York Times Confirms Loyalty to Bloomberg's Charter Propaganda Machine

Brent Staples has been stupid about education for a long time, and today's NYTimes Editorial on charter schools in NYC shows that he is only getting stupider by the day. A recent report on NYC charters showed 51% of students in NYC charters do better in math than the public schools, which means of, course, that in 49% of charters, they do worse or no better than the publics.

In reading, only 29% of NYC charters have higher reading scores than the public schools, which means that in 71% of the charters, reading scores are no better or lower than the public schools.

Now here is how Staples and Co. reports these findings in their corporate editorial today:

. . . .A new study from the center [CREDO] has turned up a brighter picture in New York City, where students at more than half of the charter schools are showing more academic improvement in math than their traditional-school counterparts. The reading numbers were not as strong, but still nearly 30 percent of charters outperformed traditional schools. . . . .