MA Inspector General Determines Gloucester Charter School "Improperly Approved"

Who would have guessed that Inspector General Gregory Sullivan would have the audacity to offer a decision that challenges the will of the Boston Foundation and the corporate charter school philanthrocapitalists who have bought most State education decisions?

Are we about to see the re-emergence of common sense and legal process in the Commonwealth when it comes to public education? Will elected officials actually start to pay attention to the outpouring of rage by citizens that is showing up at public meetings where corporate disruptors and dismantlers of public education seek to channel public education funds into the anti-democratic charter apartheid schools? It could get interesting.

From the Boston Globe, January 3:

Inspector General Gregory Sullivan has determined that the state improperly approved a controversial charter school in Gloucester last year and believes the board should void its vote, according to a letter his office sent to the governor yesterday afternoon.

. . . .

It was not clear yesterday whether the board and its agency’s commissioner will comply with Sullivan’s findings because they have not seen a copy of the letter yet, according to a spokeswoman for the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.

“We don’t have any comment,’’ said spokeswoman Heidi Guarino. “We need to review it with our legal counsel.’’

. . . .

The inspector general’s office plans to release a report on its findings to the two legislators who requested it, Senator Bruce Tarr and Representative Ann-Margaret Ferrante.

In his letter, Sullivan said that Mitchell Chester, the commissioner of Elementary and Secondary Education, recommended approval of the Gloucester Community Arts Charter School last February in violation of the agency’s own rules and regulations, which he says forbids a commissioner from giving a favorable recommendation against the advice of its own experts.

The department’s charter school office determined a few weeks before the board’s vote that the school’s application did not meet the approval criteria.

Chester’s favorable recommendation has been a lightening rod since a politically charged e-mail surfaced in September about the approval of the Gloucester charter school, and comes at a time when the Legislature is considering a sweeping education bill that is the cornerstone of Governor Deval Patrick’s education agenda.

In the e-mail, dated Feb. 5 - one day after the charter school office rejected all three charter school applications for last year - Education Secretary Paul Reville told Chester that the rejections could cause problems for the governor in getting his education agenda approved by the Legislature by alienating charter school supporters.

“Our reality is that we have to show some sympathy in this group of charters or we’ll get permanently labeled as hostile and that will cripple us with a number of key, moderate allies,’’ Reville wrote.

“It’s a tough but necessary pill to swallow,’’ he wrote.

Chester has repeatedly said that politics played no role in his recommendation, while Reville has said his e-mail has been taken out of context from an ongoing conversation with the commissioner and that he did not lobby any board members to vote favorably on the application.

Yesterday’s letter did not mention the e-mail controversy.

. . . .

The Gloucester charter school has been intensely controversial in Gloucester since the proposal was initially unveiled roughly a year and a half ago, primarily because it would cause the city to lose a big chunk of state education aid to the charter school.

Under state law, students who leave a school district for a charter school take with them thousands of dollars in state aid. In the case of Gloucester, that amount could reach $2.4 million annually when the school is in full operation.

Greg Verga, a city councilor who was School Committee chairman last year, called the inspector general’s determination a “vindication’’ of long-held beliefs that the state board did not follow its own procedures in approving the charter school.

Calling Out Harvard's Graduate School of Education

Below is an open letter from three classroom teachers to the Harvard Graduate School of Education, which has justly earned its current reputation as institutionally allied with the anti-democratic, corporate deformation of public schools and the continued undermining of public education in general. (ht to Monty Neill)

AN OPEN LETTER
TO THE ADMINISTRATION & FACULTY
OF THE HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF EDUCATION
- JANUARY 4, 2010 -
THREE CLASSROOM TEACHERS ASK YOU TO SPEAK OUT

The Harvard Graduate School of Education pursues the goal of training leaders in the field, and will soon offer a new degree in educational leadership. The school's website mission statement reads as follows:

Mission
To prepare leaders in education and to generate knowledge to improve student opportunity, achievement, and success.

Overview
Education touches every aspect of human activity. At the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE), we believe studying and improving the enterprise of education are central to the health and future of society.

Since its founding in 1920, the Ed School has been training leaders to transform education in the United States and around the globe. Today, our faculty, students, and alumni are studying and solving the most critical challenges facing education: student assessment, the achievement gap, urban education, and teacher shortages, to name just a few. Our work is shaping how people teach, learn, and lead in schools and colleges as well as in after-school programs, high-tech companies, and international organizations. The HGSE community is pushing the frontiers of education, and the effects of our entrepreneurship are improving the world.

As veteran public school teachers, we are disappointed that the HGSE has not shown the leadership it professes by speaking out against the unprecedented attack on public education. To be sure, there have been courageous voices on your faculty who have defended public schools and the endangered idea of educating the whole child. We know that a thoughtful faculty does not think with one mind, and that there will always be differences about what constitutes the most effective pedagogies or curricula. But we have not heard the HGSE as an institution speak out on issues fundamental to the educational well-being of children and their schools.

These issues include:

• The over-testing of students, beginning as early as 3rd grade, and the misuse of single, imperfect high- stakes standardized assessment instruments like MCAS;

• The expansion of charters through funding formulas that divert resources from those urban and rural public schools charged with educating our most challenged children;

• The stripping away of art, music, critical thinking, creativity, experiential learning, trips, and play periods-of joy itself-from schools so that they might become more effective test preparation centers;

• The use of state curriculum frameworks-and soon, possibly, national standards -to narrow and standardize our schools, an effort that only encourages increasing numbers of affluent middle class parents to seek out for their children the same private schools that so many "reformers" have already chosen for theirs;

• The cynical insistence that all schools be equal in a society whose social and economic policies make us increasingly unequal;

• Merit pay proposals that deny and undermine the essentially collaborative nature of teaching;

• And finally, the sustained media vilification of hard-working, dedicated public school teachers.

These depressing developments have intensified over the past fifteen years. They violate the first principles of humane and progressive education, as we understand them.

We are proud to have served as teachers in the commonwealth where public education began a century before the country itself was founded and where Horace Mann reinvented it a century and a half ago. We have many wonderful public schools in Massachusetts that can serve as models for all schools. No child in our state deserves any less. Certainly all deserve more than a parched vision of standardization and incessant testing. A global economy demands more than multiple-choice thinking. Most importantly, human beings require more.

HGSE administration and faculty, we need you to speak out in defense of our public system of education and against abuses that have been allowed to pass silently as reforms. We need you to remind our leaders, administrators, parents and students-all of us-what it means to be educated.

As young teachers, we were inspired by the words of John Holt, Herbert Kohl, Joseph Featherstone, A.S. Neill, and Paulo Friere. Later, we would read the works of Deborah Meier, Diane Ravitch, Ted Sizer, and Jonathan Kozol. These were powerful voices to encounter. Now we need to hear your voice.

The time for Veritas is now.

Thank you.

Larry Aaronson, Cambridge Rindge & Latin School, 37 years (retired)
Teacher of the Year (Class of 2007)
Recipient, Key to the City of Cambridge for "Outstanding Service" (Mayor)
Recipient, Special Cambridge City Council Citation
Mentor, Student teachers from the HGSE, 1985-2005

Ann O'Halloran, Boston & Newton Public Schools, 30 years (retired)
Massachusetts History Teacher of the Year, 2007 (DOE)
Finalist, National History Teacher of Year, 2007
Honorable Mention, Massachusetts History Teacher of the Year, 2006 (DOE)
Friend of Education, 2009 (Newton Teachers Association)


Bill Schechter, Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School, 35 years (retired)
METCO Recognition Awards, 2001-2005 (L-S METCO Program
"Outstanding Educator" Award, 2002 (Cornell University)
Faculty Recognition Award (Class of 1992)
Finalist, Lucretia Mott Award, 1986 (DOE)
Horace Mann Grant, 1984 (DOE)

larindge@aol.com

ohalloran.ann@verizon.net

schech@rcn.com

Rhee and Her Lawyers Complicate Attempts to Follow the Money

A clip from a recent piece by Bill Turque at WaPo:

. . . .Fenty and Rhee have tried to increase the volume of available information, posting proposed and final budgets for individual schools online. But those who try to follow school spending closely say that reorganizations and changes in program codes still make it difficult to get the answers to basic questions.

"In all my years of studying DCPS budgets, it has never been more difficult to determine where the money goes," said Mary Levy, former director of the Public Education Reform Project for the Washington Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs.

Rhee promises a more robust effort to consult with school communities. . . . .

New CREDO Study Shows No Charter School Miracles for NYC

New York City's charter schools have plenty of advantages over NYC's red-headed stepchild, the public schools. Most of the charters are in renovated spaces with new equipment and furniture, spiffy new signage, and fresh paint. They enroll smaller percentages of poor students, fewer special education students, and fewer English language learners:

. . . charter schools in New York City have significantly less students eligible for free lunch than public schools. Similarly, charter schools enroll less than 4 percent of English language learners, while public schools enroll a number almost three times more. In North-Central Brooklyn, charter schools enroll 1.3 percent of English language learners, compared with 11.2 percent in public schools. As for special education students, charter schools are enrolling 9.5 percent, while public schools enroll 16.4 percent.

Given these advantages that only Bloomberg's stacked deck and deep pockets can assure, we might expect test scores more in line with the propaganda machine the Joel Klein manages as Schools Overseer. However, a brand new study will be released tomorrow morning showing only 29% of NYC charters outperform the public schools in reading, and barely half of NYC charters outscore the public schools in math. With New York City representing the top of the charter heap, how long will it take for the thrill to be gone on this corporate distraction and waste of public money that continues to block the way to real public school renewal. From the Press Release at Stanford U's CREDO Center:

The CREDO at Stanford report was commissioned at the request of the New York City Department of Education in July 2009, following CREDO’s national report released in June 2009, entitled, “Multiple Choice: Charter School Performance in 16 States.” That report was the first detailed national assessment of charter school impacts. Its longitudinal, student-level analysis covered more than 70 percent of the nation’s students attending charter schools.

Entitled, “Charter School Performance in New York City,” this report drew upon the same methodological approach used for the pooled national study used to measure the effects of charter schooling on student academic performance.

On a school-by-school comparison, the report found that 51 percent of New York City charter schools are showing academic growth in math that is statistically larger than students would have achieved in regular public schools, with 33 percent with no significant difference and 16 percent with significantly lower learning. In reading, the report found that 29 percent of charter schools are showing statistically better gains, with 59 percent with no significant difference and only 12 percent significantly lower. . . . .

LEARN and its ancestors

LEARN is the child of READING FIRST and grandchild of the NATIONAL READING PANEL. And it is more powerful than its ancestors.

According to the Senate version, LEARN includes:

K-3: "…. systematic, and explicit instruction in phonological awareness, phonic decoding, vocabulary, reading fluency, and reading comprehension"

These are the "five essential components" of reading, according to the National Reading Panel, taught the way the NRP concluded they should be taught, by direct and explicit instruction.

The recent article about LEARN in the IRA publication Reading Today explicitly states that LEARN is an expansion of Reading First, Early Reading First, and Striving Readers, all skill-based programs.

And LEARN expands the skill focus to the upper grades:
4-12: " … direct and explicit instruction that builds academic vocabulary and strategies and knowledge of text structure for reading different kinds of texts within and across core academic subjects"

So here is the history:

First was the National Reading Panel, thoroughly destroyed by Garan, Coles, Allington, me, others …

The result was Reading First, based on the National Reading Panel, which failed every empirical test it was subjected to.

The reward for the double failure: LEARN, which expands the failed method to all grades.

LEARN is supported by the IRA and NCTE.

TFA Alums Suffer Exhaustion, Burnout, Disallusionment with TFA Approach to Inequity

At the urging of Wendy Kopp, CEO of Teach for Awhile, er, America, Stanford sociologist, Doug McAdam, completed an in-depth study to find out if TFA alums are more likely to become active, more involved citizens when compared with TFA dropouts and TFA candidates who were accepted but did not serve. And now that Professor McAdams's study is done and his careful findings do not fit the conclusions that Ms. Kopp's postivized mind-meld that she sought to impose upon the world, she has dismissed the study as bunk. Ah, the limits of learned optimism.

Professor McAdams's will soon publish a research article based on the study in the peer reviewed Social Forces, despite Ms. Kopp's bitter disappointment. From Amanda Fairbanks, herself a TFA alum, for the NYTimes:

Teach for America, a corps of recent college graduates who sign up to teach in some of the nation’s most troubled schools, has become a campus phenomenon, drawing huge numbers of applicants willing to commit two years of their lives.

But a new study has found that their dedication to improving society at large does not necessarily extend beyond their Teach for America service.

In areas like voting, charitable giving and civic engagement, graduates of the program lag behind those who were accepted but declined and those who dropped out before completing their two years, according to Doug McAdam, a sociologist at Stanford University, who conducted the study with a colleague, Cynthia Brandt.

The reasons for the lower rates of civic involvement, Professor McAdam said, include not only exhaustion and burnout, but also disillusionment with Teach for America’s approach to the issue of educational inequity, among other factors.

. . . .

The study compared “graduates,” who completed their two years; “dropouts,” who entered the program but left before the two years were up; and “nonmatriculants,” who were accepted but declined the offer. It included 1,538 graduates, 324 dropouts and 634 nonmatriculants. Nearly 45 percent of those sampled returned the 34-page survey.

While Teach for America graduates remain far more active than their peer group, the findings indicate that the program neither achieves an earlier organizational goal of “making citizens” nor produces people who, in great numbers, take their civic commitments beyond the field of education.

. . . .

Ms. Kopp, 42, was curious to know whether something similar was occurring with her corps of teachers. But Professor McAdam, 57, said Freedom Summer was the exception, not the rule.

“Freedom Summer is the odd civic experience, and hardly representative of what happens when young people do service,” he said. “A lot of the impact of any experience is where it’s historically situated.”

Rob Reich, 40, an associate professor of political science at Stanford, shares that view.

“Back in the ’60s, if you signed up for Freedom Summer, it was perceived to be countercultural,” said Professor Reich, who taught sixth grade in Houston as a member of the Teach for America corps. “But unlike doing Freedom Summer, joining Teach for America is part of climbing up the elite ladder — it’s part of joining the system, the meritocracy.”

Part of the joining the system, indeed. Those alums who fall prey to the brainwashing slide with robotic precision into KIPP leadership roles and other juicy spots within the philanthro-capitalist education complex where their assimilation is completed.

RttT Spending vs. Military Contracts

While Duncan and Obama continue to tout the $4.35 billion Race to the Top fund as a historic piece of legislation, the US Department of Defense doled out up to $12 billion in defense contracts on December 24th, 2009 for "a tailored logistics support program for fire and emergency services for military installations" located across the United States.  Here's the announcement of these Christmas Eve contracts, courtesy of Defense.gov.

Okay, okay - so the money is going to fire and emergency services programs, which is far more benign than most of the projects funded with our massive military budget.  How about these projects?

1. $168,700,000 for the H-60 weapons system.
   
2. $159,500,065 to Raytheon for the Block IIA Standard Missile 3 cooperative.
3. $17,607,407 to General Dynamics Land Systems to convert some tanks for Saudi Arabia (wouldn't this money be better spent on, say, the Detroit Public Schools?  GDLS is located in MI).
4. $14,592,978 for "air terminal ground handling services at Naval Support Activity Naples, Italy and Naval Air Station Sigonella, Italy."  This contract could run as high as $124,866,662.  In Italy.  
5. $317,966,076  to Lockheed Martin Integrated Systems for the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization.
6. $175,376,000 for 400 mine-resistant ATVs.
7. $163,800 to Sikorsky Aircraft Corp for four anti-submarine/anti-surface warfare jets.
8. $266,055,622 for Predator/Reaper drones, which have been used in both Iraq and Afghanistan.  
9. $263,581,484 to Boeing for the C-17 weapons system.
10. Up to $750,000,000 for construction projects in Washington.

And those are just ten projects among many that have been awarded by the military-industrial complex in the last month alone (you can see plenty more here).  

Between the massive bailouts for Wall Street and the truly obscene military budget, it's no wonder the public schools are starved for resources, roughly 50 million Americans go without healthcare, unemployment hovers around record levels, and childhood poverty is on the rise.

The silence is deafening; organized opposition is nowhere to be found.  The truly progressive - those willing to stand up for a national agenda that puts education, peace, children, and healthcare first - are fragmented, dispersed, and crushed by the agenda of Obama and the Democrats (or they're already so overburdened by the day-to-day grind of teaching, providing health services, or working to craft a better world that political actions and community organizing just don't happen).  We're supposed to cheer on the President as he sends more troops overseas (is Yemen next?), we're supposed to compete for a slice of $4.35 billion in competitive grants for education, and we're supposed to shut-up about single-payer or a public option in healthcare?  Please.  Even the most optimistic and Hope-drunken must have expected more.

Saving Public Oversight of Public Schools in Massachusetts

A public outpouring of support for public education is needed next week in Massachusetts in order to beat back a corporate sponsored bill to impose more unneeded charters and to disempower elected school committees. Call your State Representatives on Monday, please:

By Jim O'Sullivan/State House News Service

GateHouse News Service

Posted Dec 30, 2009 @ 01:34 PM

---

BOSTON —

House leaders are poised send legislation to the floor next week that narrows the scope of major education policy changes approved last month by the Senate, removing key provisions that would shield teachers from dismissal and boost the levels of reimbursement public school districts receive for students leaving to attend charter schools.

The bill, on a tight time schedule due to an application deadline for up to $250 million in federal education aid, keys on the state’s lowest performing schools, setting up state intervention guidelines that could affect 55 schools, senior House members said Tuesday. Limits on what percentage of school spending can go toward charters would double, from 9 percent to 18 percent, in the lowest 10 percent of districts on the performance scale.

The House budget committee plans to poll its members on the bill Tuesday, expecting passage, and intends an amendment deadline early next week, with votes later in the week and a conference committee with the Senate the following week. Gov. Deval Patrick’s education chief, Paul Reville, said Monday that Patrick needed the bill on his desk by Jan. 14 in order for the state to qualify for the federal assistance cut-off date of Jan. 19. Both House and Senate members say they are confident they can meet the Jan. 19 deadline for so-called Race to the Top funds. . . .

You may choose to use some of the talking points from the following op-ed:

By MONTY NEILL,

LISA GUISBOND
AND STEVE BACKMAN
Monty Neill is director of FairTest, where Lisa Guisbond also works. Steve Backman is president of Database Designs. All are on the board of the Boston-based group Citizens for Public Schools.

January 02, 2010 12:00 AM

Sometimes, reforms don't do everything you want, yet move in the right direction. This is not the case with the sweeping new law now racing through the Legislature. This law, if not fundamentally altered, will weaken Massachusetts' public schools and hurt children. What's the big rush?

Its proponents are selling the bill with false claims that changes to Massachusetts public education are necessary to secure federal "Race to the Top" funds. Not only is that mostly incorrect, but districts receiving those funds around the country will need to use the money in specific ways that will not solve their huge budget gaps.

This bill has passed the Senate and will come up in the House in early January. Thousands have called their representatives with concerns, but more are needed to counter the powerful forces backing the bill's passage.

The bill will grant superintendents unilateral power to change teacher contracts, bypassing both unions and local school committees. The bill concentrates enormous authority in the commissioner of education, trusting him to make positive changes. Yet overly concentrating power, removing checks and balances, is as dangerous for democracy as it has been for the U.S. economy.

By blaming teachers and principals for most educational problems, this bill ignores many causes of low academic achievement, particularly the consequences of poverty and unequal and inadequate school funding. It ignores the failure of many district leaders to implement effective teacher and principal evaluation and professional development that improve instruction. In short, it blames the less powerful while absolving the most powerful.

The bill will dramatically expand the number of charter schools in Massachusetts. Contrary to public relations spin, most charters do about the same as other schools, and some do worse. Charters largely avoid students who are more expensive to educate.

Regular New Bedford schools enroll nearly twice as many students with disabilities and twice as many whose first language is not English as does New Bedford's charter school. The legislation requires charters to file more reports, but it does nothing if the schools fail to enroll more of these students.

It also does nothing if charters keep pushing out kids who are harder to educate. Some charters graduate well under half their enrollees. If these were regular public schools, they would be labeled "dropout factories."

The bill's supporters claim it will improve the state testing program by looking at more than MCAS scores. In fact, it merely provides new ways to use MCAS scores. Though parents intrinsically recognize their children are more than test scores and need more than test prep, this law does not. It still fails to advance a system with varied forms of assessment, as promised by Massachusetts' Education Reform legislation from almost 20 years ago.

Now the state plans to use MCAS scores to rate teachers, which will intensify pressure to ignore untested subjects and teach to the test.

It's understandable when parents who have suffered from inadequate schools look hopefully at promised alternatives. But this scheme will undermine public control yet fail to improve education. The House must reject it.

What Massachusetts really needs is a plan to improve and equalize school resources, which can be done if wealthier communities pay their fair share, strengthen teaching and leadership, ensure parents can be engaged in their children's education, move away from one-size-fits-all testing, and not blindly expand charter schools.

Discarding what works

Sent to NewJersey.com, Jan 2
Discarding what works

The Washington Park Elementary School is spending a lot of money on an untested product while discarding what really works ("Boro students close books and open online learning," Dec. 31). The product is "Study Island," a "Web-based instruction, practice, assessment program."

The only studies that exist on the effect of using Study Island are uncontrolled, poorly described, and unscientific. They would never be accepted for publication in any respectable journal, nor even be acceptable as an undergraduate student paper.

In contrast, the research on the positive impact of reading and libraries on school achievement is scientific and is overwhelming.

For individuals, Study Island cost $49. Think of how many good books a school could buy for that.

Stephen Krashen


Sources:
Magnolia Consulting, 2008. Case study research of Study Island in Michigan. Louisa, Virginia: Magnolia Consulting
Comment: Study Island (SI) schools made better progress non-SI schools on overall standardized test scores, but researchers don't indicate how many schools did SI, whether they were comparable to the non-SI schools in level of poverty, or how well the SI students did the year before they started SI. They might have been higher scoring before the study began.

Study Island, 2006. Solid research equals solid results.
Comment: A higher percentage of students in SI schools in Pennsylvania scored at the proficient or above level in reading, compared to non-SI schools, but no details are provided about the number of schools involved, poverty levels, or previous reading level. In a second analysis, SI schools improved, with 84% achieving Annual Yearly Improvement goals on combined tests in 2004, before doing SI, and 88.5% achieving AYP one year later. Again we are not provided with any other real details.

Magnolia Consulting, 2008. Study Island Scientific Research Base. Louise, Virginia: Magnolia Consulting.
Comment: This document, which reads like an advertisement for Study Island, provides no actual evidence that Study Island works, but, as the title indicates, it cites research that seems to validate the components of Study Island. In other words, there is no research showing that Study Island works, only extrapolations from research.





Boro students close books and open online learning
Thursday, December 31, 2009
BY ANDREA COAN
Passaic Valley Today
TOTOWA — From kindergarten to eighth grade, Totowa students are ditching the books and clicking online to new online learning quizzes, games, and lessons.
Washington Park students recently began using Study Island, a Web-based instruction, practice, assessment program that uses material listed in NJ state standards to formulate material. "NJ state standards are listed in clusters like algebra or numbers and operations," said Principal John Vanderberg. "Study Island is set up with the same clusters as those standards."
Students are largely questioned on areas in the fields of mathematics and language arts and win blue ribbons for good work. Right now, third and fourth graders are doing virtual storytelling with the program.
As they go through the lessons, teachers are able to see where students need help and address it in the classroom. Once students read through several lessons and quizzes, they can advance and participate in a game with the program. Study Island can be used for homework assignments and parents may access it as well.
Although Study Island has been in existence for several years, Principal Vanderberg noted that the program went through many changes. "They did recent updates to the program and I think it is much better now than it was five years ago," Vanderberg said.
Over at Memorial School, the younger students are experiencing online learning with their new program, Reading Street. This program starts with engaging literature and adds instruction and assessments designed for kindergarteners on up. Once again, the program is completely aligned with state standards for reading and parents are able to access it at home with their child to continue learning with it at home. "It was tough at first for the students with not typing skills, but now they seem to get it," said Principal Lindsey.
Washington Park students have had a big technology infusion in recent months. Third and fourth graders are now making podcasts with video, sounds, and photos, on their class work. Third graders created a podcast on landforms in NJ while fourth graders created a podcast on inventions.
With thirty new laptops in the classrooms, students are able to use the computers as microscopes or watch an astronomy simulation. "Google earth is a big thing now," said Principal Vanderberg. "Students learning about energy can pull up Saudi Arabia on Google Earth and see its size and oil production," Vanderberg. Eventually, the new laptops may be used for Study Island as well.

Privatizers Without Borders: The "Reculturing" of Canadian Schools and Beyond

Canadian investigator, George Thompson, has spent some time tracing the connections between the world's most dweebish oligarch, Bill Gates, and the sagging face of academic pomposity, Michael Fullan. These connections are particularly compelling in the schooling disaster that disaster capitalism enabled in New Orleans, with the creation of a corporate charter system that is now being nurtured and grown by Fullan groupie, Paul Pastorek.

Fullan, however, has a long history of how to inspire the screwing up of public education, and since the welcome mat was snatched in Britain, he has been ensconced in Ontario, where he now has the ear of Canadian conservatives as well as other patrons such as Gates. Below is a clip from Thompson's article that appears at The Daily Censored. Do read the whole thing and the other accompanying pieces. What he writes about is not an international conspiracy but, rather, an emerging and real plan for corporate schooling around the globe. Happy New Year.

Premier McGuinty’s Special Advisor on education and the architect of Ontario’s reforms was also a key advisor to the Louisiana superintendent, Paul Pastorek, in directing the post-Hurricane Katrina reforms which led to America’s charter-dominated city.

Katrina had presented an opportunity for what Naomi Klein refers to as “disaster capitalism”; “Within nineteen months,” writes Klein, “New Orleans’ public school system had been almost completely replaced by privately run charter schools.” (The Shock Doctrine, 5) The hurricane was the ideal opportunity to replace the public schools with a new system of charter schools which would serve as the model for a broader movement across America. Danny Weil, author of Charter School Movement, argues that this shows “how public school systems in their entirety are being targeted for sweeping conservative change in the form of a contractualized charter school experiment that is the most radical of its kind in the nation.”

The fact that Michael Fullan, McGuinty’s Advisor since 2004, was also a key player in the New Orleans reform should be the cause of great concern to advocates of public education, for it not only explains the nature of what Fullan has called Ontario’s “large scale” reform, but also the extent to which the province is committed to following the New Orleans model.

When Fullan and OISE (Ontario Institute for Studies in Education) got involved after the hurricane it was clear that they were there to help reform, not rebuild the system. Fullan’s crew was specifically brought in to help save the “gains” made by post-Katrina reform (i.e. the replacement of public with charter schools) and build the “sustainability” needed to ensure the long-term success. While Bush’s NCLB Act had already to some extent provided the necessary “disaster” throughout the U.S. with its provision that all schools that were failing to graduate all students by the 2014 deadline faced restructuring, there was, as yet, no reliable way to capitalize on this impending Bush-made disaster. Many restructurings that had already taken place based on schools failing to meet “Adequate Yearly Improvement” had resulted in charters that were not outperforming public schools. New Orleans was thus an opportunity to develop a working model from the ground up for the large-scale restructuring facing the rest of America in the very near future. And it is clear in the Senate Subcommittee’s blueprint for “A Fresh Start for New Orleans’ Children” that Fullan’s strategies were the key to a “sustainability” that NCLB reforms had so far lacked:

“Even after a decade of whole school reform models and 5 years after the passage of the No Child Left Behind Act, we find educators struggling to maintain gains made once a visionary leader or core team of teachers leave or when a shift in student demographics occurs. In order for the gains seen from these reforms to be sustainable, we must think now about the issue of sustainability. As defined by Fullan, ‘‘sustainability is the capacity of a system to engage in the complexities of continuous improvement consistent with deep values of human purpose.” Through research, we have learned that sustainability is only possible when there is capacity building throughout the system at all levels that is developed intentionally. To this end, the RSD[Recovery School District] and OPSB [Orleans Parish School Board]have jointly entered into a partnership with the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, headed by Dr. Michael Fullan and the Center for Development and Learning in Covington, LA to develop and implement a 5-year plan for systemwide capacity building.

Herein, what Fullan calls “capacity building” would have to take place more effectively than before. Fullan’s strategy of reform differed from other NCLB restructuring approaches, as he revealed during a workshop:

“[the] big feature of our work is to play down accountability in favor of capacity building, and then re-enter accountability later. If you lead with accountability, which most states do, then people are immediately on the defensive and it doesn’t work so well.

Fullan’s studies had revealed that it wasn’t enough for schools to merely be made accountable overnight; key parts of the “capacity building” such as a complete overhaul of professional development and a “reculturing” (Fullan’s term) would enable charters to succeed when subjected to the same accountability as the public system.

Fullan and OISE’s other partner, the Center for Development and Learning, was a pro-charter organization, led by members such as vice-chairman, Kathy Riedlinger, whose husband ran Algiers Charter Schools and who personally saw her salary as a principal more than triple since converting to a charter.

Fullan, the change guru, was now needed for “sustainability” to help make the charter system stay on top. To this end he had clearly become the leader of an experiment in cultural engineering within the state-run Recovery School District, whose June 2007 report reveals:

“The professional-development plan will be based on the research of Dr. Michael Fullan and other experts who focus on how to bring about systematic cultural change. The professional-development plan will work across all levels of the organization including: Teacher Institutes, Principals, School Leadership Teams, System Leadership [and] Policymakers.”

And it is clear that Fullan played the central role in transforming New Orleans teaching, for a message from state superintendent Paul Pastorek on the Louisiana Department of Education website explains:

“The three pillars that Michael Fullan proposes are already being implemented in New Orleans, and there is reason to believe that we are setting the stage for real transformation of the quality of teaching in New Orleans RSD school.” http://www.doe.state.la.us/LDE//misc/pastorek_032707.html

The three pillars of Fullan’s reform model are accountability, capacity building, and partnerships, all of which provide the ideal soil for privatization. Pastorek’s commitment to the Fullan approach is also shown by his investment of $250, 000 in a five month contract with Michael Fullan Enterprises Inc. in 2009 to continue the reforms.

Danny Weil observes that, dating right back to the immediate, post-Katrina period, the man who brought in Fullan, Paul Pastorek, had been the driving force behind a New Orleans education system that would be based on free enterprise:

“[Pastorek] was quickly ushered in to help run the new “reform” effort. Pastorek had come to believe, in concert with [Paul T. Hill at the Center for Reinventing Public Education] and those who held the same conservative free-market ideology, that the problem with ailing school systems was their governance structure that hindered the freedom only found in the marketplace.”

Lest there be any question as to where New Orleans and the state of Louisiana have been headed since Pastorek took the reins, the Louisiana Department of Education website itself boasts in its banner that “Louisiana charter schools outperform public schools.” As the keynote speaker at the 2009 leadership conference of the National Association of Charter School Authorities, Pastorek was hailed for “leading the most significant transformation of a state’s public education in America.” The advertisement elaborates that:

“He has been a driving force behind the development of the charter school sector in New Orleans. Less known to the rest of the nation is Pastorek’s use of charter schools to turn around failing schools elsewhere in the state, in cities like Baton Rouge and Shreveport as well as small towns like Pointe Coupee.”

Pastorek says his involvement with Fullan goes back to when he read Fullan’s Change Forces:

“Dr. Fullan talked about Accountability as the first horizon of education reform, but he observed that while Accountability was necessary, it would only take us part of the way to where we need to be. It was a lever, but it could only leverage so much. More levers were needed. He argued that we needed to move to the Next Horizon of reform. That resonated with me.” . . . .

Do read the rest.