Publishers to Bush on Memoir: "Take Your Time"

Pretty soon we won't have George Bush to kick us around anymore, and the great national nightmare will only be a unforgettable post-traumatic stress disorder.

Bush says that he would like to write about his days in office, but publishers don't seem particularly eager, as reported by HuffPo.

NEW YORK — In less than three months, President-elect Barack Obama will take office and the Bush administration will belong to history. With the president reportedly interested in writing about his White House years, publishers have a suggestion:

Take your time.

"If I were advising President Bush, given how the public feels about him right now, I think patience would probably be something that I would encourage," says Paul Bogaards, executive director of publicity for Alfred A. Knopf, which in 2004 released Bill Clinton's million-selling "My Life."

Meanwhile, there is this that you may read as a bedtime story. Goodnight, Bush.

Can Howard Rich Buy South Carolina?

Before buying influence by tychoons took on the fancy name of social entrepreneurship, New York real estate magnate, Howard Rich, was dishing out cash on both sides of the aisle to advance conservative Norquistian goals of killing off public institutions. His connections to the vast conservative network, detailed in this piece by the Herald-Journal in late September, are aimed at instituting rule by those who rule the markets, and he and colleagues like Internet junk man, Patrick Byrne, have stoked the fires for vouchers and charters around the country for a long time.

In recent times, one of Rich's prime target has been South Carolina, where he has showered the state with thousand dollar checks intended to garner support for the school voucher initiative that he is pushing there. On September 30, Politico reported that a very private Rich, angered by public exposure of his manipulations, had one of his outfits send out a letter to liberals both in and out of South Carolina. Here is a clip:

The letter from Americans for Limited Government says:

As a donor to one or more of these organizations and efforts, you have been able to engage in these activities without notice, operating in relative obscurity. I am writing to inform you that this will no longerbe the case.

Your name has been put in our database. We are monitoring all reports of a wide variety of leftist organizations. As your name appears in subsequent reports, it is our intent to publicize your involvement in your local community. Should any of these organizations be found to be engaged in illegal or questionable activity, it is our intent to publicize your involvement with those activities. You should know that instances of coordinated voter fraud are surfacing all across America and investigations into possible criminal coordination are underway.

Now Columbia's Free Times reports that a group of South Carolinians are dedicated to fighting back and to outing Rich's work across the state:

. . . . In response, the New Democrats say they intend to fight Rich and his “radical social agenda” with the home-court advantage.

In early October the Charleston-based organization launched a “fight Howard Rich initiative” and fired up a web site, fighthowardrich.org, to track which State House candidates have taken money from Rich and his wealthy allies across the country.

The name and shame tour was just one way for the group to educate voters before Election Day about which candidates had taken money from Rich, Knighton says.

And although the Nov. 4 elections are over, the group’s president, Phil Noble, says they aren’t done taking it to Rich. “The New Democrats were here before Howard Rich got here and will be here after he leaves,” Noble says.

The New Dems say they will track members of the General Assembly who benefited from Rich’s largesse and won on Nov. 4 to see how they vote on certain bills.

Signs have emerged that the group’s campaign against Rich might be yielding results.

On Oct. 20, S.C. House District 45 candidate Deborah Long, a Republican, returned 12 checks for $1,000 apiece that were donated to her campaign and listed out-of-state addresses tied to Rich, according to the Rock Hill Herald. Long said she sent letters with the returned checks saying she was sending them back because South Carolina is becoming more sensitive to out-of-state contributions.

And on Oct. 31, House District 49 Democratic candidate John King said he too would return a $1,000 check donated to his campaign from one of Rich’s associates. In an email, King called school vouchers and private-school tax credits “irresponsible and indefensible” and said he has always supported public education.

Noble says the goal of the fight against Rich is make South Carolinians aware of Rich and the affect his money has on members of the Legislature. “Whenever [Rich] rears his head we’ll be there to respond,” Noble says. . . . .

Darling-Hammond for Secretary of ED

If Linda Darling-Hammond succeeds Margaret Spellings as Sec., it will be as stark a contrast as President-Elect Obama with the decidedly non-curious George the Decider. How refreshing to think of a top education official with a deep knowledge (or any knowledge) of and commitment to student achievement, educational renewal, teacher quality, research, professional development, public education.

Here is one short list of favorites from CHE, as pathetic as it is with the top candidate removed:

Linda Darling-Hammond, an adviser to Mr. Obama's campaign and an education professor at Stanford University, whose research and teaching has focused on issues of school restructuring, teacher quality, and educational equity. She is co-director of the School Redesign Network, established in 2000 at Stanford University to pursue and promote research that seeks to improve secondary schools.

Arne Duncan, chief executive of the Chicago public-school system, who serves on the Board of Overseers of Harvard College. Mr. Duncan is an adviser and friend of Mr. Obama's, as well as a fellow basketball player. The president-elect has touted Mr. Duncan's success in improving the city's public schools. Mr. Duncan also has helped Mr. Obama expand his appreciation of the potential benefits of charter schools.

James B. Hunt Jr., a former governor of North Carolina who served on the federal Commission on the Future of Higher Education, formed by the current education secretary, Margaret Spellings. A partner in the Raleigh, N.C., office of the law firm Womble Carlyle Sandridge & Rice, Mr. Hunt focused as governor on early-childhood development and improving the quality of teaching. He also serves as chairman of the board of the James B. Hunt Jr. Institute for Educational Leadership and Policy, a part of the University of North Carolina that seeks to improve public education on a national level.

Janet Napolitano, Arizona's governor, who was considered a contender for Mr. Obama's vice-presidential pick. She cannot run for governor again in 2010 because of term limits and may consider a run for Mr. McCain's Senate seat. The daughter of a dean of the University of New Mexico School of Medicine, Ms. Napolitano has used her position as governor to emphasize elementary- and secondary-education policy, signing legislation that offered voluntary full-day kindergarten throughout Arizona.

Andrew J. Rotherham, an adviser to Mr. Obama's campaign and a co-founder of Education Sector, an education-policy research group. He is also a member of the Virginia Board of Education, which sets statewide curriculum standards, and served as a White House policy adviser in the Clinton administration.

Jonathan Schnur, chief executive of New Leaders for New Schools, a New York-based organization that uses educational research to train principals of urban public schools. Mr. Schnur was also an education-policy adviser in the Clinton administration.

It's a Tsunama

It's all blue--and very exhilarating:

1,000 Penn State Students Lined Up to Vote at 7 AM

Watch it. Wow.

From HuffPo:

Best Education Reporting 2008: The Missoulian

Beyond the big corporate desks of the Times, the Post, the Trib, and the Times (LA), there are medium and small town papers around this great country with some first-class reporters who still believe in collecting, writing, and reporting the news without the filters of editorial boards paid for by the education-industrial complex. Even with all the resources available to them, I have not seen anything in the "newspapers of record" that comes close the scope and clarity of this piece on NCLB by Michael Moore (not that one) for the Missoulian:

Educators say No Child Left Behind has blocked progress
By MICHAEL MOORE of the Missoulian

The next Congress has the task of renewing and likely revising the federal No Child Left Behind Act, a law that is applauded in theory and mostly despised in practice.

Passed in 2001, the law embodied the notion of school accountability, then proceeded to set standards that will ultimately categorize nearly every school in the country as a failure.

“Accountability is a good thing, but what the law really is is a recipe for failure,” said Jack Sturgis, a veteran teacher and president of the Missoula Education Association. “The bill is designed to fail public education.”

Said Alex Apostle, superintendent of Missoula County Public Schools: “No Child Left Behind is punitive. It actually makes what we do - and what we do is student achievement - more difficult.”

Nearly every education-related group in Montana has come together to push for changes in the law, which is essentially the current incarnation of the historic 1965 Elementary and Secondary School Act.

“We've all come together and produced a position paper that lays out the problems as we see them,” said Linda McCulloch, state superintendent of public instruction.

That paper is five pages long and details problems the law has created in Montana, where schools never suffered from some of the ailments the law was designed to fix.

“This law is basically designed to deal with large metropolitan school districts - Houston, Texas, to be specific - and it's not very well suited to helping with the problems we have here in Montana,” McCulloch said. “I'm very hopeful that we can see some changes made.”

No Child Left Behind increased the standards of accountability for schools, school districts and states in two areas - reading and math.

Not surprisingly, that's one of the complaints about the law.

“If you are an elementary school teacher and you are supposed to focus on math and reading, that means more minutes,” said Sturgis. “More minutes for reading and math means less minutes for social studies and science and art and music. Why are those subjects suddenly less valuable?”

The law set an escalating series of goals - dubbed AYP, for adequate yearly progress - with the ultimate goal of 100 percent proficiency in math and reading by 2014. The 100 percent means exactly that: One child can fail a school.

That, educators say, is a horrible burden to place on students, teachers and parents.

“It's not possible for all children in all schools to be proficient,” said Gail Becker, assistant superintendent for MCPS. “And it's not fair to put that on the backs of those students and their parents.”

In the most recent round of tests, which take place in March, three of every 10 Montana schools fell short of No Child standards, even though most schools improved year over year. The year before, the number had been one in 10, and the decline is directly linked to the escalating standards of the law.

For 2007-08, the proficiency threshold for reading moved from 74 percent to 83 percent. Math targets climbed from 51 to 68 percent.

For Missoula County schools, districtwide proficiency numbers beat the standards, but 10 of 14 schools failed to meet AYP.

“What's unfortunate is that, even though all our schools showed improvement, it's not enough to meet the targets,” said Becker. “So we're improving our scores, but we're designated a failure.”

That's another complaint about the law. Instead of measuring progress and encouraging improvement, No Child Left Behind sets unachievable goals that even the best districts and schools can't meet.

Montana education groups have this to say about 100 percent proficiency in their position paper:

“If unchanged, it will make every public school a ‘failure,' without helping individual children. This in turn harms public support for education by giving the completely false impression that public schools are not providing a good education.” And that's not true, Sturgis said.

“There is an assumption that we weren't doing the job in this country before No Child Left Behind,” he said. “We are the most productive society in the world, so it's not like public schools have somehow failed this country. Could we do better? Sure. But we're not failures.”

That said, educators don't have a problem with the fundamental idea behind NCLB - accountability.

“This district is all about student achievement,” said Apostle. “And there's no question we need to be accountable in terms of achievement.”

But No Child issued a mostly unfunded mandate about achievement and “high-quality teachers” that schools and districts can't abide.

“The funding for NCLB is widely acknowledged as insufficient to meet the mandates of the law,” the Montana position paper states. “In addition, NCLB expects all students to achieve proficiency, yet the major federal program (IDEA, or special education) to fund one of the subgroups most in need of services to achieve that goal is sadly underfunded.”

That points to another aspect of No Child Left Behind that works in theory but not in practice. The law rightly notes that certain subgroups - the poor, special ed students and Native Americans - need additional help to meet the goals, but does nothing to affect the root causes of problems for those groups.

“If you look across the country, you see schools in the most poverty-stricken areas failing the worst,” McCulloch said. “NCLB rightly focuses attention on the shortfall those children have in performance, but it doesn't do anything about the conditions that create the problem.”

Jack Sturgis has a story about a young girl at Missoula's Hawthorne School, but it could be any school.

She's a smart girl, but nearly everything in her life has gone wrong.

“Her life is pretty miserable, she's homeless some of the time,” Sturgis said. “Her parents are divorced and abusive. We have a whole raft of people working with her and what they want is to let her sit in the back of the classroom and maybe grasp a little bit of what's going on.”

That would probably be a good thing, but there's a problem.

“I would love to do that, if that would make her happy, but there's a problem,” he said. “I have to get her to pass a test in March and she's not going to do that. Everything is stacked against her. So she fails and I fail and the school fails.”

McCulloch, Becker and Sturgis all said the law takes almost no notice of how children differ, how they learn differently, how some measure of improvement for a child might be an incredible accomplishment rather than a failure.

“It does a pretty poor job of recognizing that kids are all different,” McCulloch said.

Special education students, the Montana consortium argues, deserve special attention, but they should be evaluated based on a plan designed specifically for each child, not by some broad, federal standard. The same is true of children in poverty, children who are still learning English and some ethnic minorities.

“While we strongly support focusing on subgroups of children such as ethnic minorities, the AYP structure means they can be blamed for the failure of a school,” the Montana position paper states. “This has already caused increased racial tension in Montana. Education should make it easier for us to live together, not harder.”

While NCLB recognizes the disadvantages of some students, it's created a dynamic where some of the best students get less attention from teachers who are trying to rescue the low achievers.

“It's a pretty simple equation,” Sturgis said. “If you spend more of your time at the bottom, you're ignoring the top.”

So, what should be done with a law that purports to fix a problem but really just meddles with the symptoms?

Some educators nationwide are asking that No Child Left Behind be scrapped in favor of starting over.

Sturgis, McCulloch, Becker and Apostle don't go that far, but it's clear they'd love to see the Montana congressional delegation push for changes.

Better funding for federal requirements would help, of course, but Montana educators are suggesting more sweeping revisions. Here are the ideas, as set forth in the position paper signed by seven Montana education groups, including McCulloch's office:

Change the 100 percent proficiency.

Find a way to determine whether the focus on math and reading is harming students in other subjects.

Look at the requirements for “highly qualified teachers,” which create hiring difficulties for Montana's small, rural school districts.

Restore local and state control.

Don't stigmatize subgroups such as special ed students and Native Americans.

When there are consequences for schools that perform poorly, make them helpful instead of hurtful.

“We feel like those changes would make the law useful,” McCulloch said. “I'm hopeful and I think people in Montana, both Democrats and Republicans, would like to see the law change for the better.”

Sturgis wants the big changes, of course, but he also wants the small ones, the ones that help the girl at Hawthorne.

“You can't fix her problem with test scores,” he said. “You've got to look at the whole child. She's more than just her reading and math scores, and her success or failure is not measured by how she does on those tests.”

Reporter Michael Moore can be reached at 523-5252 or at mmoore@missoulian.com.

Margaret Spellings Beats the Bushes For Work

From the Wall Street Journal:

Many of the roughly 3,000 political appointees of President George W. Bush are beating the bushes harder than expected for post-election employment.

. . . .

One high-level Bush appointee who has yet to launch his job search said colleagues are alarmed by the weak job market. "They are getting a lot less than they expected," he said.

Education Secretary Margaret Spellings, for example, has signaled possible interest in leading a business, one knowledgeable person says. But a mid-sized industrial business seeking a CEO recently declined to consider her because of her lack of corporate experience, as well as her close ties to the president, that person says. Ms. Spellings has been advising President Bush on education issues since he was governor of Texas. A spokeswoman says Ms. Spellings intends to remain in education. . . . .

How about something entrepreneurial that fits your credentials, Secretary Spellings. I'm thinking, umm. Got it:

Maggie's Fireworks and Bait Shop
Crawford Texas
We say, go fish!

Send us your own suggestions. We will pass them on.

Why an Obama Win Marks the Beginning of the Contest

The new President will be inundated with suitors from various camps vying for his attention on education issues, and most of them do not represent real change, or any change at all for that matter. In fact, most are recipes with the same snake oil base that has been used in the past reform remedies, treatments that surely have made a lot of money for the hucksters who sell them, even as the patients suffer the force feeding and turn sicker and sicker. We must remember that most of the “progressive” education reformers now lining up to root their way to the Washington feeding trough are no less self-interested than the conservatives who are currently planning extended holidays from the monies they managed to extract from the federal treasury over the past eight years.

Among the prominent edu-suitors now flexing their elbows will be, of course of Andrew Rotherham, who is anchored at the Progressive Policy Institute, which, of course, is no more progressive than the republocrats of the Democratic Leadership Council that created it. And over the years, Rotherham has showen an impressive bipartisan ability to soak funds from both sides of the aisle. For instance, he and an illustrious Board that included Lisa Graham Keegan raked off millions early in W’s reign with the Education Leaders Council, which was the subject of an DOE OIG Report (pdf) in 2006 that found a consistent misuse of federal education grant monies by the bipartisan gang who ran ELC before its office was shuttered and its website went 404. Did they ever return the money?

Rotherham, too, has been a stalwart front man of the charter school corporations, a supporter for a de-professionalized teacher corps, and a fan for the gutting of unions. While it would seem that Rotherham could become a charter-supporting sidekick of the new president, we must remember that Obama actually has some genuine concern for the children of urban schools--which could present some awkward moments in any discussion with the EduWonk. Look for Rotherham to call for national standards, some cheap variety of value-added testing, teacher pay based on test scores, and more charter school chain gangs for communities where white liberals don't mind cutting the education budgets by 20 percent. Here's to the middle class!

A leading competitor for Obama's attention will be Marc Tucker, who long ago crafted a ridiculous K-22 education blueprint based on a labyrinth of high stakes tests that determine which curriculums students study and which colleges students get to attend, where they will study to pass more high stakes tests (see posts here and here for the dope on Tuckerism). If there were anything funny about his efficiency maze, it might be called the Monty Python Game of School. With humor missing, however, only absurdity remains.

That has not stopped three states of very different political stripes from dusting off some pieces from the Tucker Kit. Utah, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire (the good, the bad, and the cranky) now constitute the oddest of alliances to subject their schools to elements of another grand experiment that will prove, once more, that it is easier to run into a brick wall than to figure a way over it.

There will be others who will get hearings with the new President's team, and it could be that there are better contenders to morph the current federal policy of mass stupidification into something that testocrats, closet racists, the delusionists at Ed Trust, and the bean counters all can like even more than the current Bush plan. I am hoping that Linda Darling Hammond gets a shot as Secretary.

It took eight years to dig this hole, so the next President will not be starting at ground level. In a geographic sense, it is as the Kaplan education rep for the Washington Post, Jay Mathews, notes, "the next president will be like Bush." The next President will inherit the same 19th Century educational philosophy, organizational structure, and race science used to sort the haves from the never hads. What Mathews and many others have forgotten, however, is what Obama continues to remind us of: change will not happen on Election Day. It will only happen over the next four, or maybe 8 years, as people make the case for something better, do the work to build coalitions, do the work to implement change, are patient and persistent in evaluating the results, are brave enough to point out the stupidity where it exists, and then push on to create a more perfect Union--or at least a more humane and effective schoolhouse. So yes, Obama "will be like Bush" on the day he takes office. After that day first day, however, nothing will remain like that again--forever.

But only if You Vote.

Michael Moore on Bill Maher

Charter Schools: Where Everyone Goes to School All the Time

It took me a while to figure it out, but now I am beginning to see the genius of Margaret Spellings at work on the dropout epidemic. How wrong I have been! How could any of us have foreseen her farsighted support of charter school management companies as the ultimate solution to the attendance issue. It seems that no one misses school in Texas charter schools, and no one drops out! I feel like such an idiot:

Texas officials want a refund for millions of tax dollars from schools that allegedly inflated attendance records, part of a national problem of absenteeism at schools operated by for-profit corporations.

Seven charter schools have more than $16 million in debts to the Texas Education Agency for allegedly inaccurate and inflated attendance reports, debts the state may never recoup. The state wrote off another $9 million in debts after 20 charter schools went out of business.

There is a national trend of states hiring companies to operate special "dropout-recovery" programs for students who are failing in the regular public schools. In most states, but not in Texas, these special schools are paid per student enrolled, not for how many students attend class . . . .