Bloomberg's New Privatization Plans for New York Public Schools

Last spring we noted Bloomberg's latest round of intensive $5 million dollar meetings with a small army of corporate socialists to work out the details for the next steps in privatizing New York's public school system. Central to those powwows were Chris Cerf, former head of Whittle's Edison Schools and Michael Barber, who earned the reputation as Tony Blair's education "hit man" for his efficiency is shutting down British schools that were not meeting the national test targets.

Three years ago big-hearted Bill and Melinda Gates provided the seed money to plant private management groups in 50 city schools to take on part of the responsibility for curriculum, instruction, and hiring in those schools. Those grants will dry up next year, which is one reason Bloomberg's planning sessions this past April had some immediacy attached to them. It seems clear now that the privatizers have come up with a short list of options for 07-08, none of which has received public airing, and all of which are intended to use public money to pay private firms to begin the real takeover of New York's public schools.

It will, no doubt, require another public outcry to send these high-dollar corporate welfare artists packing once again, as they were in 2001 when Whittle launched his first failed raid on city schools. This time the best that Bloomberg's PR machine can produce goes something like this: These Gates-funded private groups have been stymied from true effectiveness in their work by having to partner their decision making with public education people. What they need to be truly effective is full public funding and responsibility, which will, in turn, make them accountable to, who else, Bloomberg's office. It is not control that they seek, but accountability. But they can only become accountable if they achieve control. Got it? Here is the way that Bloomberg smoothie, Garth Harris, frames the notion of private outfits running public schools:

“We are not abdicating any of our responsibility, but what we are doing is sharing some of that management responsibility,” said Garth Harries, the chief executive of the department’s Office of New Schools. “What we are trying to accomplish is greater accountability for partners that are involved in the schools over time and an alignment of management.”

Garth is in charge of Bloomberg's Office of New Schools. New schools, indeed.

Spellings, the Cash Cow

Margaret is on the road again, this time in Dallas to spew the phony party-line rhetoric about caring for black children, while promising to the faith based fundamentalists part of the unregulated $1,000,000,000 a year that nows goes out mainly to private tutoring firms:

"The U.S. government, of course, is never going to get into the business of worship. But we certainly can and do and must support what President Bush calls the armies of compassion, the people who are saving lives, the people who are doing our most important social-service work."

"If you want to run a high-quality secular tutoring program, we're not going to ask you to change your identity or take your crosses off the walls. We're just going to ask you, 'How are you serving the children?'"

Onward Christian voting soldiers!

Reading Experts Find Their Voices, Finally

Better late than never, I say. This was put up on the ARN listserv this morning:

This op ed piece will be published in the Albuquerque Journal on Tuesday, October 10.

Every Child Left Ignorant or No More Excuses

Dr. Rick Meyer, PhD Reading Professor, UNM
Dr. Kyle Shanton, Reading Professor, NMSU
Dr. Priscilla Gutierrez, Outreach Specialist
New Mexico School for the Deaf
Dr. Anne Calhoon, Reading Professor, UNM

The recently released Inspector General report regarding Reading First programs (one of the central components of No Child Left Behind, specifically directed at struggling readers) indicates favoritism, mismanagement and widespread corruption are operating at the highest levels of the Department of Education. Every person in this state who has a school aged child, grandchild, niece, nephew, or pays taxes should be outraged.

Reading First was designed to provide money to states to teach reading to students and insisted on a higher level of accountability from schools in return. But instead of providing real support to states, the Reading First program became a sham that reaped huge profits for favored publishing companies and researchers, such as CTB McGraw Hill, and the University of Oregon Center for Teaching and Learning. This last group is largely responsible for the infamous DIBELS test (a five-minute test that demands children say non words such as pag or ret, after which the children may be categorized as 'at risk'). Students are expected to read nonsense words within poorly researched phonics programs in order to get ready for the DIBELS. Children are really learning that reading can be nonsensical. Interestingly, the authors of DIBELS just happen to also sit on the "Expert Review Panel" set up by the Department of Education to approve Reading First grant applications. Little wonder that solid teaching resources or programs that teachers had used previously were now relegated to the "dirtbag" (Reading First director's word) category, in favor of programs that use scripts, carnival clickers, and stop watches. The Expert Panel made sure that accountability became nothing more than test scores that could be manipulated for their own economic and personal advantage.

Our children deserve much more than a program that teaches them reading means barking out words (or nonsense words) as fast as they can. Our children aren't automatons coming down the assembly line beltway. Deep, proficient learning and literacy take time. This requires dialogue between teachers and students, something that is crucial for students learning English. Scripted programs that treat teachers like clerks and children like cogs in a spinning gear are the least desirable instructional option we have, and yet that is what the present structure of No Child Left Behind and Reading First forces upon our schools.

The National Reading Panel's recommendations formed most of the Reading First section of No Child Left Behind. The Panel specifically cautioned against using scripted programs, recognizing their extreme limitations; and cautioned against placing too great an emphasis on phonics, stating phonics must be only a part of a balanced program. The Panel further recognized the critical role the teacher plays in guiding children towards proficient literacy, especially those students from diverse backgrounds. Teachers know their students best, and with ongoing professional development and the appropriate tools, they can teach children to read.

The corrupt officials in Reading First hijacked the Panel's words and transmuted them into an endorsement for programs such as SRA, Direct Instruction, Open Court, and the DIBELS test. All are programs that downplay the importance of the teacher, as well as the diversity of children, and allow little dialogue or deep learning to take place. All are programs that ignore the diversity of our state. Some schools entering their second year of participation in New Mexico's Reading First had to waste precious allocated money to purchase these programs.

New Mexico has one of the highest poverty levels in the entire United States. Everyone here recognizes the critical difference a quality education can make. Without question, our schools are one vehicle for change for the children in this state. And yet billions of dollars have been wasted on ineffective mandated programs that ignore the rich cultural heritage that our students represent and leave them at the lowest levels of thinking and learning, all courtesy of the U.S. Department of Education.

One of the Reading First slogans repeated over and over again was "No Excuses." We couldn't agree more. No more excuses for the lack of oversight with Reading First. No more excuses for wasting precious learning time with nonsense programs. No more excuses for phony baloney "scientifically-based" instruction or accountability. And no more excuses for blindly accepting what we KNOW is counter to best instruction for our students. Demand the best from state and federal legislators for our children. Our children are worth the effort and deserve so much more than what they are getting from the current corrupt Reading First program.

AP: Advanced Placement or Added Pressure

I have never understood why parents, who can afford to have their children take college survey courses in history and literature and science and math, would opt to have their children chocked with facts in high school AP courses as an alternative. It seems like such a loss. Obviously, many of the best public school systems are beginning to do more than wonder about such practices:

This town’s public high school, well known for turning out some of the nation’s finest college prospects, is contemplating a step that would seem to betray its competitive reputation: eliminating Advanced Placement courses.

Scarsdale High School is a place where 70 percent of the 1,500 students take an A.P. course, and many take five and six to impress college admissions officers with their willingness to challenge themselves. But like a few private schools, Scarsdale is concluding that the A.P. pile-on is helping turn the teenage years into a rat race where learning becomes a calculated means to an end rather than a chance for in-depth investigation, imagination, even some fun to go along with all that amassing of knowledge.

“People nationwide are recognizing what an inhuman obstacle course college admission is, and a big element of that is A.P.,” said Bruce Hammond, director of college counseling at Sandia Preparatory School in Albuquerque, which dropped A.P. courses a few years ago.

Across the country, students in, say, A.P. American history who might better understand the Depression by taking time to read “Grapes of Wrath” are instead huffing and puffing through chronological parades of facts and documents.

Mastering that material will give them a better chance to score the all-important 5 on the College Board’s A.P. tests, which would help land them in an elite college and perhaps relieve them of some survey courses. But in that frantic atmosphere, little learning takes place for the zest of it, critics of the A.P. program say.

“The test unfortunately drives what you teach and how you teach,” said Kelley Hamm, Scarsdale’s assistant principal. . .

The rest from the New York Times here.

Straightjacket Teaching and Chain Gang Learning

If the Reading First standardistas and the Direct Instruction thugs get their way, teacher education in this country will resemble what has already happened in Britain. What is the most effective way to brainwash children and to cognitively decapitate them? Brainwash their teachers first. From the Guardian:

October 3, 2006 03:39 PM

Particularly pertinent in light of the new anti-ageism legislation was the TES'front-page headline last week: "New staff teach best: research explodes accepted myth of experience as young teachers outperform their colleagues". But behind the Institute of Education (IoE) and Nottingham University's findings lies a rather different story.

What might instead be deduced from this research is not that entrant teachers' dynamism makes for better teaching but that the just-trained teacher knows no better or worse than New Labour's prescriptive methodologies. As a result, they are both more compliant with government tick-box diktat and less jaded by the straitjacketing. (Research carried out by Ofsted arguably substantiates this idea with recently trained teachers scoring twice as well in inspection as their older counterparts trained under a different system - Ofsted's quality criteria heavily determined by government policy). The basis of good teaching in the IoE and Nottingham's research is test scores - including the very same sats results which have been so widely discredited. No wonder then, that new teachers are "better". Driven by the government's fixation with hitting targets, one thing today's teacher training certainly seems to instil are the benefits (in target terms) of teaching-to-the-test.

Autonomy and innovation have been almost entirely squeezed out of teaching today. The optimum teacher in the current system is a sort of automaton. Heavily dictated by rules disseminated through documentation and highly hierarchical in divisions between rule-makers (policy makers) and rule-abiders (teachers), the education system now resonates strongly with social theorist Max Weber's description of the bureaucracy. Particularly resonant is Weber's argument that bureaucratic organisation necessitates the eradication of the "talented amateur" in order to ensure a general level of competence - as Anthony Gidden's put it. In Weber's bureaucracy, the talented amateur is not an asset, staff instead trained to become "experts" in the system. Recently trained teachers, it might be argued, are the "experts" of the New Labour educational bureaucracy. The old teaching workforce, therefore, as non-experts of the new system, cease to be satisfactory.

Pedagogical issues aside, stripping teachers of their professionalism has taken an enormous toll on teacher morale and therefore on teacher supply. Yet the government's strategy to solve this morale crisis has not been to address it and thereby increase retention, but a policy of incessant recruitment. Apart from the huge disruption constant teacher turnover causes for pupils' learning, the government is squandering vast investment on training teachers who leave after a very short period in the profession.

It's worth noting that this research was sponsored by the government. Another piece of research undertaken by the Institute of Education for the government told us that class size didn't matter. Are these government-commissioned studies perhaps providing too many convenient truths for New Labour?

Moral Bankruptcy and Intellectual Repression

The unraveling of the Republican cover-up of the offenses committed by their House colleague and child predator, Mark Foley, will likely be remembered as the Chernobyl of the modern conservative movement. The exploits of Maf54 and the subsequent cover-up all occurred as these same right-wing ideologues were leading the charge to nullify the educational value of the Internet for school children across America. In China they just call it state-sponsored censorship: Foley, as sponsor and chief pedophile of the House Republicans, called their plan protective measures. Here is part of commentary by Larry Magid from back in August that succinctly makes the point that no one now will forget:

(AP / CBS)

(CBS) Last week the House of Representatives passed a well-meaning but ill-conceived piece of Internet safety legislation that could actually make the Internet a more dangerous place for children and teens.

The Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA), approved Wednesday by an overwhelming margin of 410 to 15, now moves on to the Senate. While it's easy to understand why Congress would approve a bill like this, it is ill-conceived because, rather than "deleting" online predators, it deletes the ability of schools and libraries to determine whether kids can constructively take advantage of social networking and other interactive services that are extremely popular among teens. Maybe the law should be called DOTA (the Deleting Online Teenagers Act)?

As a bit of background, I've been working on Internet safety issues since 1993 when I wrote "Child Safety on the Information Highway" for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. I'm on the board of that organization and I also run SafeKids.com and SafeTeens.com and am co-director of BlogSafety.com. BlogSafety is a not-for-profit project that derives funding from social networking sites, including those affected by this legislation.

The bill (H.R. 5319) amends the Communications Act of 1934 "to require recipients of universal service support for schools and libraries to protect minors from commercial social networking websites and chat rooms."

The legislation, said Tim Lordan, Executive Director of the Internet Education Foundation which advises U.S. lawmakers on technology, "lumps social networking sites and chat rooms with previously blocked sites that are obscene or contain child pornography, as if social networking was somehow the same as those horrendous sites."

The bill defines social networking sites as being "offered by a commercial entity; permits registered users to create an on-line profile that includes detailed personal information, permits registered users to create an on-line journal and share such a journal with other users; elicits highly-personalized information from users; and enables communication among users.

Of course, we now know what chief sponsor, Maf54 was doing during the breaks as this Bill was being considered. The rest of the Magin's piece is here.

Reading First Crimes Hit Mainstream Media

Yesterday' WaPo had the first serious treatment of the Reading First debacle to appear in mainstream media. Not to be missed:

By Michael Grunwald
Sunday, October 1, 2006; B01

President Bush's No Child Left Behind Act was premised on three revolutionary goals. The first was to focus on low-performing schools and students; hence, No Child Left Behind. The second was to beef up the federal role in education, enforcing national standards through testing. The third was to bring facts and evidence to the notoriously squishy world of education policy, promoting teaching methods backed by "scientifically based research" instead of instinct and fad. This was the least-publicized goal, but arguably the most vital; the phrase "scientifically based research" appeared more than 100 times in the landmark 2001 law.

The centerpiece of the new research-based approach was Reading First, a $1 billion-a-year effort to help low-income schools adopt strategies "that have been proven to prevent or remediate reading failure" through rigorous peer-reviewed studies. "Quite simply, Reading First focuses on what works, and will support proven methods of early reading instruction," the Education Department promised.

Five years later, an accumulating mound of evidence from reports, interviews and program documents suggests that Reading First has had little to do with science or rigor. Instead, the billions have gone to what is effectively a pilot project for untested programs with friends in high places.

The rest here. Read it.

Educational Genocide and Immigrant Testing

When will educators band together to make the only ethical choice--and say NO MORE!

Educators are using adjectives like "catastrophic" and nouns like "torture" to describe a new English testing requirement affecting immigrant students.

Opposition is growing to a statewide policy that will force students with limited English to take the same reading and writing exam as other children.

In districts with high numbers of immigrants, teachers are scrambling to get hundreds more students ready for January's English Language Arts test for grades three to eight. That exam had been optional for up to three years for children who were still coming up to speed in the language. Now the exemption lasts one year.

"It's catastrophic for the self-esteem of a child who has to sit and endure a test like this," said Eileen Santiago, principal of Thomas A. Edison Community School in Port Chester. "It's equivalent to educational genocide."

Critics of the change say they don't have a problem with testing; they just want the right test used at the right stage in a child's development. The New York state teachers union called the switch "educationally unsound" in a letter to state Education Commissioner Richard Mills. Port Chester and other districts are pushing for a reversal, and superintendents in Rockland County are talking about banding together. Some say the test only sets children up for failure.

The rest here.

Reading First and Margaret LaMontagne Spellings

If there is a core claim that distinguishes every ED response to the emerging Reading First criminal conspiracy, it is that Margaret Spellings came on the scene long after most of the dastardly deeds were committed by Doherty, who has now been selected as the "Michael Brown" to be sacrificed in this debacle. Too bad that this core story line is another lie: Margaret LaMontagne (Spellings) was Bush's chief domestic policy advisor before she became Secretary of Education, and in 2000 she was spokesperson for Reading First and education advisor even before Bush was appointed President, when she and Lyon and Carnine's Oregon mafia built the infrastructure for the crackpot con game that would become the Reading First we now know about. On March 29, 2000 Margaret Warner had the story:

MARGARET WARNER: Bush calls his program "Reading First." It would spend $1 billion a year to do the following:

• Help states develop and administer diagnostic tests to identify which kindergarten and first-grade students need special reading help
• Subsidize special training for kindergarten and first-grade teachers in reading instruction, using research- tested methods such as phonics
• And, subsidize intervention programs for the students who need help including tutors, after-school programs, and summer school.

Schools receiving the federal money would be required to adopt all these elements, and would be held accountable for the results. . . .

MARGARET WARNER: For more on Bush's plan, we're joined by Margaret LaMontagne, Governor Bush's education adviser, and William Galston, senior policy adviser for Vice President Gore and a professor at the School of Public Affairs at the University of Maryland. Welcome, both of you.

Ms. LaMontagne, first of all give us a few more details on this plan. How many students? The handout from the campaign talked about 900,000 students. Is that the scope of the problem? Is that how many students can't read at the grade level in those grades? And would this fully address it?

MARGARET LaMONTAGNE, Bush Education Adviser: Well, that's a good estimate and a good start. I mean, I think one of the things about trying to derive a number about how many kids are really in need of special help to be readers -- because we know that if kids are not on track to be readers by the end of third grade, the likelihood is very high that they won't ever be and that they'll not be able to succeed in school or in life. And so it's a game that's fought and won early.

But one of the things I think about the number is that it speaks to the need for more accountability, more data, but we do believe that approximately 900,000 children would need special assistance to make sure that they're on track to be readers. We've modeled this program after something the governor launched here beginning in '96. The governor called for all children in Texas on grade level reading by the end of third grade. And that was followed by some acknowledgment of reading as a major problem in the country by the Clinton-Gore administration. This is a plan that's developed on a successful model that we've used here in Texas.

What else was Reading First spokesperson and education advisor, Lamontagne-Spellings, talking about that evening in 2000? No Bush plan would be complete without a plan to destroy the public schools with vouchers. Over to you, Margaret and Margaret:

MARGARET WARNER: So, under the governor's plan though, if a school was in this program and after two or three years not many of their students were reading a lot better, what would happen?

MARGARET LaMONTAGNE: We would allow portability and up to $1500 per child to be matched by the state and to flow to the parents so that they could make a difference choice. I think what the governor laid out yesterday that expands on his previous proposal is that we're willing to put some skin in the game to make sure that we have as few kids as possible portable but at some point in time we have to say, if kids are not getting opportunities in public schools, then they need options.

AYP has always been a device to manufacture the failure necessary to usher in vouchers. For Spellings to deny innermost knowledge of what was going on at ED before she was promoted to Secreatary is just as believeable as any other lie emanating from the failed government in the White House.

Update7:40 pm:
And who was named to direct the expert policy group that would stage the transition at ED in January, 2001? You guessed it, same Margaret who now pretends to be out of the loop when the ED corruption mold was poured. Check out this list: Can you guess how many have already been exposed as crooks? (pdf) Washington Education News January 18, 2001 (January 17-18, 2001:

Transition Team
President-elect Bush has appointed a 31-member advisory group to assist Secretary nominee Paige in his transition to USDE. The group is to provide input and related outreach for the policy coordination group appointed earlier. The group includes Lamar Alexander (former USDE Secretary), Norman Augustine (Lockheed Martin), Keith Bailey (Williams Companies), Frank Brogan (Lt. Gov. of Florida), John Chambers (Cisco Systems), Sharon Darling (national Center for Family Literacy), Williamson Evers (Hoover Institution), Chester Finn (Fordham Foundation), Floyd Flake (Edison Schools), Howard Fuller (Institute for the Transformation of Learning), Lisa Graham Keegan (Chief in Arizona), Gene Hickok (chief in Pennsylvania), Phyllis Hunter (Texas Reading Initiative), Robert King (State University of New York), Reid Lyon (NIH), Mitch Maidique (Florida International University), Bruno Manno (Annie E. Casey Foundation), John McKernan (former governor of Maine), Charles Miller (Meridian Advisors, Ltd.), Darla Moore (Rainwater, Inc.), Lynne Munson (American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy), Diana Natalicio (University of Texas-El Paso), Susan Neuman (Center for Improvement of Early Reading Achievement), Hugh Price (National Urban League), Diane Ravitch (New York University), Ed Rust (State Farm Insurance), Ted Sanders (Education Commission of the States), Andrew Sorenson (University of Alabama), Paul Vallas (Chicago Public Schools), Maris Vinovskis (University of Michigan) and Mark Yudof (University of Minnesota).

The policy experts named by Bush are: Margaret LaMontagne (Bush’s senior education advisor in Texas), who will direct the group; Sandy Kress (attorney and former president of the Dallas school board), as the chief adviser; William Hansen (Education Finance Council); Sarah Youssef (from the campaign, formerly with the Heritage Foundation); Christine Wolfe (staff of the House Education and Workforce Committee); Becky Campoverde (same); and Nina Shokraii Rees (Heritage Foundation).

Spellings' Crooked and Corrupt Commission to Control Higher Ed

From Bob Serry at Huffington Post:

The same folks who brought you Katrina Relief--Bush administration hacks and Republican party loyalists--now want their K-Street cronies to regulate the entire U.S. college and university system. These appointees and apparatchiks are proposing lock-step federal regulation and oversight over all colleges and universities--and tracking every single student's lifelong educational record--in order, they say, to better help consumers.

Yeah, right. . . .

. . . Let's be clear about this initiative: It represents a frontal assault on the U.S. higher educational system, under the guise of reform. The Bushites want to pull the purse strings on these supposedly liberal bastions of progressive thought, and to get dissenting people to kowtow and shut up along the way. Don't be fooled by the Trojan-horse cover language in the report claiming that what the Commission really wants to do is to make college more affordable and user-friendly. Don't be distracted if a few accommodating academics voice support for the proposal, or parts thereof (if the support is strong, however, follow the money trail). Basically the same folks who dismantled FEMA (and have been trying to do the same with other public agencies and institutions) now want to bring their politicized incompetence to all of higher education in America.

The rest here.