Candlelight Vigil in Support of Southside Lawsuit Against SCS Closure

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Political Cowards Blaming Parents for School Closures

Tomorrow evening the titans of King Cotton in Memphis will decide the next round of public school turnovers to the corporate welfare kings and queens lined up at the public feeding trough.

Superintendent Dorsey Hopson is correct about one thing: closing these schools is not about saving money. If it were, he would be hard pressed to explain the economics of handing over $7500 per child to corporate charter operators hand selected by the "Achievement" School District, which is headed by a former corporate charter kingpin.  See this earlier piece on how the charter takeover cycle works.

For that $7500 per child, the County gets a culturally sterilized child who is taught to answer "how high" when told to jump by white corporate missionary girls from TFA or or MTR who are placed in positions once occupied by teachers.

If anyone were to believe Mr. Hopson on any of his other points, they would have concede that it is the parents'  fault that these poverty-wracked and malignantly neglected public schools should be closed. In fact, Hopson takes this own irresponsibility one step further by making his closure choices contingent upon whether parents have submitted an improvement plan to keep them open:

“The problem is that the population in these communities does not support the schools,” Hopson said. “Again, neither of these proposals addresses the declining population.”

Really? Community schools should be decimated because parents working two minimum wage jobs cannot put together a school plan that can stand up under the scrutiny of lawyers and economists and greedy charter operators?

This rationale ranks right up there near the pinnacle of all time political cowardice, and those who show up tomorrow evening should be taking close notes who not to vote for in the next round of elections.

Shelby County has a chance to do something to address educational inequality and segregation as it redraws boundaries examines its option, but instead of using proven methods to make schools attractive so that parents will come back to them, Mr. Hopson and his handlers have a corporate apartheid solution in mind that destroys the profession of teaching and the art and science of education.

Meanwhile, those claiming that education in Memphis is the civil rights issue of this generation are working overtime behind the scenes to institute the the kind of Jim Crow schooling that Memphis children have not seen for a half century.

Be at the School Board Meeting Tuesday, Feb. 25 at 5:30.  160 South Hollywood.

Public Meeting To Discuss Closing 12 Memphis Schools to Benefit Charter Industry and Gates Plan

A local columnist in Memphis, Wendi Thomas, has a cynical piece today in the Memphis Corporate Appeal on the planned shutdown of 12 more Memphis schools.  

The Shelby County School Board, which represents the interests of the corporate machine, has brought in an economist from Chicago to assure the local media and politicians that the closure of 47 schools in Chicago is fine, because, after all, the closures have not affected test scores in Chicago. How the Chicago researcher knows this is hard to tell, since the closures were only approved at the end of the last school year!  So, school closures in Memphis will be just fine, the illogic goes, because someone said it will not hurt test scores in Chicago.  

The meeting will be at 6 PM today at 160 South Hollywood in Memphis.

Below is a chart that Wendi Thomas posted from the Achievement School District, which attempts to justify the closures on low test scores and low enrollment.   

If low enrollment were a criterion that really mattered in making decisions on closing schools, then almost all the charter school in Memphis would shut down: only one of the 22 charter schools in Memphis has over 400 students, and almost half of the 22 charters have fewer than 100 students.  

Will Shelby County Schools try to make the case that turning over closed public schools to smaller corporate charter operators will improve the "programmatic utilization rate?"  I'd say.

In terms of low test scores of targeted schools that the chart above identifies as  having "less than 40% Proficient," this is another phony criterion being used to justify school privatization in Memphis.  

Note in the chart below that the Memphis average is closer to 30% of students at Proficient.  Are the poorest schools supposed to be better than the average school in terms of test scores??

When we look at the Memphis charter schools in the chart below from the latest State report (2012), we see that very few of the replacement charter schools have proficiency rates over 40 percent.

In fact, we find a number of charter schools'  Math or Reading/Language Arts scores below Wendi Thomas's public poster school of failure, with its 20 percent of children proficient in reading and math. Why is the school board of Shelby County not howling to shut down these segregated charter schools?

Please note, too, the vast differences in the percentages of ELL and SPED students in Memphis charters, compared to Memphis public schools:

Below are my comments on the Wendi Thomas column, which is here if you can get by the firewall.

Let's face it, these planned closures will serve the needs of corporate charter school operators and the local/state political cowards who are flush with Gates cash and federal grants for coming up with this scheme.

Ms. Davis is quick to note that leaving these malignantly neglected schools open will not solve poverty in the community, but she does not acknowledge that closing them will have the opposite effect, as these schools, once closed, will remove the principal sources of any remaining pride in these impoverished communities, These closures will simply add to the reasons for others to flee these areas that could use some of the hundreds of millions that will be outsourced to charter operators to open schools with fewer students.

The charters that replace them will pay corporate foundations to provide charter reform schools that look more like minimum security prisons than schools, with white missionary teachers who work for a couple of years before moving on to grad school. It's not hard to tell who the winners and losers are here, especially since most of the charter reform schools do no better on tests than the shuttered public schools.

What will happen to the empty schools? Easy--they will be handed over the KIPPs and KIPP knockoffs to use for a few dollars a year, if that.

Please note, too, that if the size of the student population were the issue here that most of the charter schools in Memphis should be shut down, since most are smaller than these public schools that are on the chopping block.

Finally, to Ms. Davis's callous calculus in weighing the effects of closure in Chicago of almost 50 schools. To reduce down the human loss and the community disruption to whether or not test scores went up or down as a result seems to me to show a level of indifference that I am unaccustomed to seeing, even in the Commercial Appeal.

NCLB Waivers Allow Hostile Corporate Takeovers of Schools

Thanks to Stan Karp for this compilation:

Lawmakers seek to end N.J. takeover of schools

The Record

Paterson would gain control of its public school system for the first time in 21 years under legislation introduced by Democrats that also would limit future state takeovers to five years, lawmakers announced Friday. "It's time for the state to admit that the prolonged takeover of a local school district is a failed experiment, and it's time to return the school districts that have languished under state control back to the people in those school districts," said state Sen. Ronald Rice, D-Essex, who has sponsored the bill with Nellie Pou, D-North Haledon.

N.J. education advocates to Duncan: State's waiver plan is a disaster.

Darcie Cimarusti, NewsWorks

Regional Achievement Centers (RACs) have been set up all over the state, with some of the funding coming from private donors such as the Broad Foundation, to oversee and "turn around" the Priority and Focus Schools, and potentially take over the management of the schools that don't improve within the two year time limit.

School Shutdowns Trigger Growing Backlash

Education Week (subscription required)

As school closures are increasingly used as a remedy to budget woes and a solution to failing schools in many cities, debates are intensifying about their effect on student performance and well-being, on district finances, and on communities and the processes districts use to choose which schools will be shuttered. Student and parent groups in Chicago, the District of Columbia, New York, Newark, N.J., and Philadelphia gathered in Washington late last month to call for a moratorium on school closings and filed separate complaints with the U.S. Department of Education's office for civil rights.  The advent of the federally funded School Improvement Grant, or SIG, program in 2009, brought school closings into the spotlight as one of four turnaround strategies districts could use to revive struggling schools. Only 18 of the more than 3,700 closures from 2009 to 2011 were financed through SIG, according to the federal Education Department, but the program's emphasis on dramatically restructuring traditional public schools is apparent in many districts that are pushing ahead with large-scale closures.

NCLB Waivers and Accountability

Center on Education Policy

The Next Step: Monitoring the Implementation and Impact of Waivers

If the NCLB waivers stay in place, the next few years will be characterized by policy churn. A majority of states will be experimenting with diverse approaches to accountability using waivers, while other states will be maintaining their current systems as the 2014 timeline draws near. During this period, it will be critical for ED, states, and independent groups to monitor how well the accountability systems in waiver states are working, what unexpected issues arise, how well these systems are understood by the people they affect, and what impact they have on student achievement and school performance, among other issues.

What Impact Will NCLB Waivers Have on the Consistency, Complexity, and Transparency of State Accountability Systems? (PDF format, 268 KB) *

Accountability Issues to Watch under NCLB Waivers (PDF format, 80.5 KB) *

Prince Bloomberg Must Obey Law: School Closures Halted

In a rebuke of the Little Dictator of Manhattan, the Courts have ruled. From NYTimes:

A judge on Friday blocked the closing of 19 schools for poor performance, finding the city engaged in “significant violations” of the new state law governing mayoral control of city schools.

The ruling, a setback to one of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s signature education policies, means the city will have to start over in making its case to close the schools, this time, the judge wrote, with “meaningful community involvement.”

Unless the decision is overturned, it will most likely result in all the schools’ remaining open for at least another year. The law requires the closing process to begin at least six months before the start of the next school year.

The decision cleared the path for high school acceptance letters, which had been delayed because of the lawsuit, to go out to eighth graders around the city.

The decision, by Justice Joan B. Lobis of State Supreme Court in Manhattan, was a victory for the United Federation of Teachers and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which joined more than a dozen elected leaders and parents in suing to stop the closings.

They argued that the city had failed to comply with the mayoral control law passed last year, which required the Department of Education to give detailed “educational-impact statements” describing the effect of each closing on students and surrounding schools.

Justice Lobis agreed with the plaintiffs’ contention that the department had issued boilerplate statements, which she found lacked “the detailed analysis that an impact statement mandates.” She found other procedural violations, including insufficient public notification before hearings.

. . . .

“We are thrilled,” said Christine Rowland, a teacher and the United Federation of Teachers’ representative at Columbus High School. “I think there’s a chance now. It was so hard for us to get anyone to listen in the very tight space of time we’ve had.”

The city has closed 91 schools since 2002, many of them large high schools, replacing them with clusters of smaller schools and charter schools in the old schools’ buildings. Mr. Bloomberg credits the closings with significantly improving graduation rates, which average over 70 percent at the small schools and 63 percent citywide.

When a school closes, current students are allowed to stay until graduation, but no new classes are admitted.

The moves have always generated controversy, particularly when schools proposed for closing had shown some progress. For example, 12 of the schools scheduled to close this year received a grade of “proficient” on their last city quality review, and hundreds of students and alumni citywide spoke out in favor of effective programs at the closing schools, like one devised for mothers and pregnant teenagers at Robeson that offers day care and teaches parenting skills. . . .

Arne Duncan's Chicago Charade Goes National

From Democrcacy Now:

When President Obama’s Education Secretary, Arne Duncan, was the head of Chicago’s Public Schools, his office kept a list of powerful, well-connected people who asked for help getting certain children into the city’s best public schools. The list—long kept confidential—was disclosed this week by the Chicago Tribune. We speak with the Chicago Tribune reporter who broke the story and with two Chicago organizers about Duncan and his aggressive plan to expand charter schools.