More Duncan Opposition from the Honorable Congresswoman Judy Chu

A new plan for school improvement that actually makes sense. Call you Congressman to back the Chu Plan as an alternative to the corporate takeover plan.

Congresswoman Announces New Framework and Principles for School Improvement Grants

May 20, 2010 1:22 PM

Washington, D.C. – Congresswoman Judy Chu (D-CA) officially unveiled a plan today to improve our nation's education system using a new framework of school improvement grants, a proposal that is being supported by AFT, NEA, PTA and the National Association of School Psychologists, among other groups.

The Congresswoman's new framework constitutes a radical departure from existing guidelines on School Improvement Grants, replacing the overly punitive and restrictive model with a more flexible, holistic approach and giving schools a broader menu of research-driven options and more time to show improvement. Under the new framework, school closure would strictly be a last resort option.

"The current school improvement grant program is admirable in theory, but some of the tactics haven't been successful in practice," said Rep. Chu, noting as an example the recent mass firings, and subsequent rehiring, of staff at Central Falls High School in Rhode Island. "What we need is a system that promotes flexibility and collaboration instead of tying the hands of administrators, teachers, and parents. We must remove barriers to student success instead of ignoring them.  And finally, we must support teachers and leaders, instead of breaking them down."

That is the approach taken by Rep. Chu's proposed new framework, called Strengthening Our Schools (SOS) (see attached report). The plan would promote flexibility and collaboration between schools, parents, community leaders, businesses and other stakeholders; provide support to students facing crisis, both inside and outside of the classroom, by offering mental health services for behavioral problems, ESL resources and other wrap-around services; and giving teachers the tools they need to reconnect with disengaged students and help improve performance through personalized teacher training and specialized instructional support.

"In the upcoming ESEA Reauthorization I will be pushing for a complete revision of school improvement grants that is based on Strengthening Our Schools," said Rep. Chu, who was joined by representatives of major national education associations, teachers groups, former administration officials, parents and others as she unveiled the details of SOS at the Rayburn House Office Building. "As a Member of the Committee on Education and Labor, I plan to work with Chairman Miller on school turnaround and push for this framework to be adopted in ESEA Reauthorization."

The Congresswoman's plan was lauded by prominent members of the educational field.

The goal of SOS is nothing less than to achieve dramatic improvements in student achievement  at priority schools, said Lily Eskelsen, Vice President of the National Education Association.

"The only way for schools to succeed is if all the adults involved in public education work together collaboratively and make decisions based on our common purpose to give students what they need to succeed," Eskelsen said.

"Congresswoman Chu has developed an excellent framework for redefining the federal role in K-12 education. Her proposals recognize that the path to school improvement is through positive, not punitive, measures. She understands that teachers do their best in atmosphere of respect and encouragement, rather than incentives and sanctions," said Diane Ravitch, education historian and former Assistant Secretary of Education. "The federal role should be to support school improvement, not to mandate closings and firings. She is a breath of fresh air in a stale and nonproductive discussion."

"PTA is appreciative of the opportunity to provide input on the proposal and the framework's
inclusion of family engagement and collaboration with parents," said PTA National President Charles J. "Chuck" Saylors. "We cannot turn around struggling schools without parents at the table."

Howard Adelman and Linda Taylor, UCLA researchers who have investigated many of the successful methods included in the Congresswoman's proposal, lauded the new SOS framework and its holistic, multi-tiered approach.

"Good teaching and, indeed all efforts to enhance positive development, must be complemented with direct actions to remove or at least minimize the impact of barriers, such as hostile environments and intrinsic problems," said Adelman and Taylor in a written statement. "Without effective direct intervention to address barriers to learning and teaching, such barriers continue to get in the way for many students and interfere with teachers' efforts to close the achievement gap."

The goal of SOS is nothing less than to achieve dramatic improvements in student achievement  at priority schools, said Lily Eskelsen, Vice President of the National Education Association.

"The only way for schools to succeed is if all the adults involved in public education work together collaboratively and make decisions based on our common purpose to give students what they need to succeed," Eskelsen said.

 CLICK HERE to see full SOS Report

Republican History: The Great Texas Whiteout of 2010

The Texas textbook Tea Party just wound down, and history will never be the same, or for ten years at least.  All the more reason to save an incredible amount of money by discontinuing the purchase of these super-sized tomes of snooze-worthy pablum that corporations have foisted on school children for 150 years at least. Until states get smart by hiring teachers to create custom texts using the myriad sources available free on the Web or for a minimal charge for educational use, we will have these social antiquarians shaping the future.

Here is the best summary I have found, and, of course, it is not from an American paper, but from the Independent:

By Guy Adams in Los Angeles

The slave trade was in fact the "Atlantic triangular trade". Capitalism, with all its negative connotations, should in future be referred to as the "free enterprise system". And don't even think about buying into the theory of evolution: children must instead be taught that God created Earth using a euphemistically-titled technique known as "intelligent design".

It may sound like the backdrop to a comedy sketch, but these are instead the guiding principles by which teachers in America's second-largest state will be forced to go about the business of education, according to critics of proposed changes to the school curriculum.

After months of increasingly fractious debate, the 15-member school board of Texas is expected today to approve more than 100 pages of new guidelines governing the teaching of social studies. They changes cover everything from Cold War history to the "correct" interpretation of the US Constitution.

The proposed rules stipulate, among other things, that Republican superstar Ronald Reagan should be added to a list of "great Americans". Country music can be described as an important cultural movement, but hip-hop can't. And speeches by Jefferson Davis, the slave-owning president of the Confederacy, should be taught alongside those of Abraham Lincoln.

Elsewhere, the new curriculum changes references to American "imperialism" to "expansionism", and forces teachers covering post-war politics to tell students that Senator Joseph McCarthy's notorious anti-Communist show trials during the 1950s may have been justified.

Most controversial of all is a rewriting of a passage in the syllabus dealing with economics. Previously, it stipulated that eighth-grade students must learn how to, "explain reasons for the development of the plantation system, the slave trade, and the spread of slavery". In the re-worded version, the words "slave trade" were replaced with: "Atlantic triangular trade".

The elected school board includes dentists, housewives, and other laymen who have little teaching experience. Like a growing number of legislators in an increasingly-polarised country they are, however, politically divided: every one of the 10 Republicans on the committee support the proposed revisions; all five of the Democrats oppose them. At stake is education in not just the Lone Star State, but across the entire country. Texas has almost five million students, and is the largest market for new textbooks in the US. It is also one of the few states that gives its school board power to rewrite, rather than just rubber stamp, the curriculum.

In recent years, the board's annual meetings - they review a different subject each year - have turned into a noisy media circus, as lobbyists from both left and right seek to exert influence on the increasingly conservative committee. A record 206 people signed up to testify during this week's hearing.

Among the critics of the proposed changes was Rod Paige, the first African-American education secretary, under George Bush. "In Texas, we've allowed the pendulum to swing backwards and forward," he said. "I'm asking that the swing [should] be narrower and let history speak for itself."

Social conservatives, however, accuse the left of cherry-picking tiny passages from a wide-ranging document to criticise the new syllabus in its entirety.

"Most of the complaints are coming from a liberal fringe," said Jonathan Saenz, a spokesman for the Liberty Institute. "They're making a huge issue out of some very small changes. The people of Texas are simply trying to stop atheists and the extreme civil liberties lobby from taking over their history."

Triangular trade

Taking place from West Africa to America, America to Europe, and Europe back to West Africa, the lucrative international transactions from the 17th to 19th centuries were indeed triangular - and also reliant on slavery. First, slaves were shipped to North America, where they were put to work growing cash crops - such as tobacco - which were exported to Europe. The Europeans who made use of those crops went on to use their goods - such as rum, distilled from Caribbean sugar - to buy slaves in Africa. There have been other examples of triangular trade, but few so ruthlessly efficient.

Eli Broad's Robert Bobb Pleads in Court to Hold On to Bonuses

Wherever big privatization moves are happening in America's urban schools, you will find the hand, or the underhand, of the BBC (Billionaire Boys' Club). Case in point, Detroit, and the Broad Foundation, which runs its own superintendents' indoctrination academy that teaches the corporate junk yard dog style of ed leadership.  

In Detroit, the puppet in charge is Robert  Bobb (Broad Class of '09), who continues defending his case in court to hold on to the $145,000 in sweetener that he collects from Broad and the infamous Kellogg Foundation, whose eugenicist namesake, John Harvey Kellogg, was co-founder of the Race Betterment Foundation and an early proponent of clitoral mutilation using carbolic acid.  One other oligarch providing Bobb's bag bonus money remains unnamed. 

Surely Bobb was not to be influenced to follow the wishes of his patrons when he came up with Detroit's segregation/containment/cognitive sterilization school plan to increase class sizes in Detroit by shutting down 55 schools and to shoving out all the experienced teachers and cutting the pay and benefits of those remaining. Nah, no judge would make that connection.  From the Detroit News:

TOM GREENWOOD
The Detroit News Detroit -- Wayne Circuit Court Judge Susan Borman indicated today Detroit Public Schools Emergency Financial Manager Robert Bobb is entitled to receive part of his pay from private foundations.

The issue -- challenged by the district's school board, a civil rights group and a coalition of teachers who oppose charter schools -- was whether Bobb was in conflict of interest for accepting $89,000 of his salary from a foundation that supports private and charter schools. Bobb receives $280,000 in salary and $145,000 in supplemental income from foundations for fixing the school district's finances.

"There's no evidence Mr. Bobb has any interest in these foundations," Borman said.

Arguing on behalf of the Board of Education was attorney George Washington, who said the constitution trumps the statute allowing Bobb to collect pay from foundations.

"The precedent would be the same as if you had the British Petroleum Foundation paying one-third the salary of oil inspectors," Washington said. "One-third of that salary is being paid by people who want to deconstruct the schools. They believe charter schools and private schools can do better. It's OK to believe that, but it's not OK to pay Bobb's salary.

"This has never been done before in Michigan. Because we don't sell public officials," Washington added. "As far as I'm concerned, this is one step removed from accepting money in a paper bag."

Under his one-year contract extension approved in March by Gov. Jennifer Granholm, Bobb receives $56,000 from the Los Angeles-based Broad Foundation. The Broad Foundation paid Bobb $28,000 last year. The sources of the remaining $89,000 in this year's contract were not identified. But the W.K. Kellogg Foundation said this week it's chipping in $39,000 to retain Bobb in Detroit, compared to $56,000 it gave him last year. It is unclear who else is paying the remaining $50,000. The governor's office has yet to release the names of the other donors.

Borman is expected to issue a ruling next week.

tgreenwood@detnews.com">tgreenwood@detnews.com (313) 222-2023 Detroit News Staff Writer Marisa Schultz contributed

Cutting Imagine a Check

You've got to be kidding. From the Journal Gazette:

Grant to help pay rent at Imagine

Devon Haynie | The Journal Gazette

The Imagine MASTer Academy on Wells Street has received a unique federal grant the school will use to help pay its rent.

As part of the grant, the school will receive $229,800 each year for five years, Jason Bryant, vice president of Imagine Schools, told the board Wednesday. Bryant said Indiana and California were the only states to receive the federal money, earmarked for charter schools. He said Indiana was given $30 million for the program.

“This is a very unique situation, historically,” said Guy Platter, regional director for Imagine Schools. Platter and Bryant said the board will use the money to pay rent so that it can free up money in the schools’ general fund for staff salaries and other expenses.

[Continued]

Remember: Imagine MASTer Academy was put on probation just a few months ago by their authorizer after the good folks at the Journal Gazette wrote up a three-part series on the various troubles with the school [Part 1, Part 2, Part 3].

Imagine MASTer teachers are paid over $10k less than their Indiana counterparts.

Here's a quick rundown of where the money is really going at Imagine MASTer Academy: $342,757 in "professional services" to Imagine Schools, Inc. (the for-profit arm), $746,144 for occupancy (owned by Entertainment Properties Trust), and according to their most recent 990 tax form (07-08), the school was operating $268,711 in the red. For a little more icing on this cake, the 990 also says the school owed $760,513 for "capital lease obligations" to - you guessed it - Imagine Schools, Inc.

The Tea Party's Great White Dope

From Sam Stein at HuffPo:

In attempting to close the book on his controversial statements about the scope of the Civil Rights Act, Kentucky Senate candidate Rand Paul invited another round of intrigue and critique on an entirely unrelated front.

The Tea Party favorite, in an interview with ABC's "Good Morning America" on Friday morning, accused the Obama administration of being too tough on BP -- the oil company directly responsible for the massive spill in the Gulf.

"What I don't like from the president's administration is this sort of 'I'll put my boot heel on the throat of BP.' I think that sounds really un-American in his criticism of business," he said. "I've heard nothing from BP about not paying for the spill. And I think it's part of this sort of blame game society in the sense that it's always got to be someone's fault instead of the fact that sometimes accidents happen." . . .

The "Enough Is Enough" Generation Shuts Down Entire UPR System: Parents and Professors Provide Support

The eleven campuses of the University of Puerto Rico have been shut down by students who are calling for an end to the austerity measures that threaten to cripple the gem of higher education in the Caribbean region.  Meanwhile, riot police gather outside the gates. 

From Democracy Now:

NAEP Urban Reading Scores 2009: Measuring Poverty, AGAIN

At the very end of an article in Ed Week that featured various pundits verbally gesticulating on the various meanings that may be attributed to NAEP reading scores comes this nugget below, which, of course, should have led the story.  But then if it had, we might feel the need to do something about poverty, rather than treating it as just another reason to strike out on the noble road to corporate education reform. 

Detroit is dying with 17 percent unemployment, and the corporate solution is more charter schools and holding teachers accountable for the crimes of corporations that have left the children in rags and their parents homeless.

Tom Loveless, a senior scholar at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, offered some cautions about making direct comparisons between the performance of individual districts on NAEP. For one, he said, the exclusion rates for English-language learners and students with disabilities differ considerably across the 18 districts.

Also, he noted that there appears to be a close relationship between the poverty rate of a district’s student population and its performance on NAEP.

In fact, the five districts with the highest NAEP reading scores for 8th graders in 2009 were also the five with the lowest student-poverty rates, as measured by free- and reduced-price lunch count, though they did not match up in rank order.

For instance, Charlotte-Mecklenburg, had the lowest poverty rate for 8th graders of all 18 participating districts, at 46 percent, and Austin’s poverty rate was tied for the second-lowest, at 54 percent.

“Just in terms of the rank ordering of the districts, it’s highly correlated with their free- and reduced lunch [counts],” Mr. Loveless said. “You have to take demographics into consideration.”

CORE

Big day in Chicago with a major union vote taking place. Below is the slate for the Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators (CORE). Be sure to check them out.

If we pull together, we can win!

CORE’s plan for CTU

1. Get everyone on board with a common strategy.

• Get the 5 caucuses and other leaders together in the same place and come up with a series of steps on which we can agree.
• Mobilize our Union into fighting shape for contract negotiations in 2012.

2. Mobilize the union against the Budget Cuts.

• Inform the membership on the specifics of CPS/Chicago waste (TIF budget, the money for charters and turnarounds, the capital reserves, etc.)
• Get teachers out into the public debate. Show the public our side of the story and give confidence to our own members.
• Don’t let CPS divide us—new teachers facing layoffs and veteran teachers facing the threat of re-opening the contract have to fight these cuts together.
• Plan a summer of trainings, outreach and strategy sessions.

3. Fix the public image of teachers and teachers unions.

• CPS sets up many schools to fail and then blames teachers and other school employees. Publicize the root causes of low achievement and organize around solutions to those causes.
• Mobilize the union so the press cannot ignore us.
• Go on the offensive against charters, turnarounds, and CPS privatization schemes. Every major study has found that they DO NOT produce better results!
• Use the alternative media, new media, and web 2.0 to get our message out.
• Use call-in shows, letters to-the-editor, blogs, and similar opportunities to get our side of the story out.

4. Reach out to community groups, parents and students.

• Help every school make connections to community, parent and student groups and ask them to join the fight against the destruction of our schools.
• Enlist other labor unions in the fight.

5. Improve contract enforcement.

• Set clear job expectations for field reps and let CTU members evaluate those who work in the office.
• Get substitute coverage for members so that union delegates and other teachers can learn more about contract enforcement. They will then be empowered to handle routine contract violations directly.

6. Improve internal Union communication.

• Establish a letters section, an ‘answers to commonly asked questions,’ and meaningful discussion of key questions that face our union in the Chicago Union Teacher.
• Bring the website into the 21st century. Give members instant access to news, updates, leaflets, and establish a member-to-member discussion board.
• Contract orientation for every new union member.
• Organize calls to delegates at least once a month for information on their school issues.

7. Develop a legal strategy.

• Sue the state of Illinois over unequal funding, as those in other states have done successfully.
• File more disparate impact lawsuits to force CPS to bring back veteran teachers displaced from closed and turned around schools. We have lost two thousand African American teachers in six years.
• Take legal action against large class sizes and other issues.

8. Develop a Political strategy.

• Stop giving money to state and local politicians who hurt us.
• Take on Daley, head-on; not behind closed doors.
• Report cards for elected officials. If you bring charter school pork-spending to the city, you FAIL!

9. Fight for our contract.

• Doing all these things will put us in shape to win against the city by building the power of our union.

For a Union with a clear vision of what we need to be strong again,

VOTE CORE THIS FRIDAY, MAY 21st!

Tea Party Celebrates Two Big Victories This Week

The Tea Party celebrated another victory last evening for the corporate virtue of selfishness and the good ole era of Jim Crow exclusion.  With the nomination of Rand (can you guess the origin of that name) Paul, self-described libertarian, the Tea Party faithful moved another inch toward their twin goals of unrestrained greed and racial purity.

Some people seem shocked at Mr. Paul's public pronouncements in support of legalized discriminatory behavior, but these backward-embracing views are exactly the values that won him the support of the conservative base and corporations like Fox News that continually feed the hatred and misinformation of the base.  It is no surprise that Paul would mention Kentucky one time in his acceptance speech and the Tea Party nine times.  He owes his victory to the powers of unrestrained greed and racist manipulation, rather than to the good people of Kentucky.

This week had another Tea Party victory of sorts, when the Wake County School Board took the official vote to end the largest and most successful diversity school program in America.  It was, after all, the Tea Party's money and organization (and a pitiful voter turnout) that allowed the social antiquarians to establish the Gang of Five Republicans that brought down socioeconomic integration in Wake County Schools. 

The spokesman of the new majority is the dangerous fool, John Tedesco, who listens to enough talk radio to have his talking points down pat, even if they sometimes get a bit mixed-up.  In a recent comment on the return to segregation based on a neighborhood school policy that will mirror the segregated housing patterns of Wake County, Tedesco said:

"We're letting . . .  families go to the school nearer where they live," said Tedesco, the board member. "What's wrong with that?"

In most of Tedesco's public comments, however, he attempts to mask the racism with a saccharine concern for the "all children:" 

"We need to focus on all, all, all students," member John Tedesco said. The district has told some poor students they cannot go to their neighborhood schools, "and I don't think that's fair." 

Yes, yes, all children.  There are other more outrageous examples, such as this one in this clip from the Progressive Pulse that truly captures the Tedesco logic that was in full view leading up to Tuesday night's vote:

It’s one thing to simply be against public policies that intentionallly promote socioeconomic diversity. It’s quite another to purport to base one’s opposition on, of all things, the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education! But that’s just what Wake County School Board member John “Tea Party” Tedesco attempted to do tonight as part of the debate surrounding the Board’s final vote to eliminate diversity as a factor in student assignment.

Tedesco attempted to draw a tortured analogy between the situation of a lower income student in Wake County who is transported to an integrated, lower poverty school further from his or her home . . . to one of the plainitiffs in Brown case who was barred from attending an all-white school near her home becasue of her race.

Here’s Tedesco:

So what we’ve done in this county at some time now, is told many of our children and many of our families even if they live near a school, because their mom and dad doesn’t have enough money in their pocket, they’re not welcome to go to school with their friends and their neighbors. And I just don’t find that fair. I find that inherently unfair. That if a section of children should exceed that fifty per cent or fifty-one per cent or fifty-two percent, that we have to tell that two per cent ‘you got to get on a forced bus ride out of town cause you’re not welcome in your neighborhood.’”

Got that? This is the person drafting THE PLAN to totally remake one of the largest and most successful school systems in the United States: a man who has such a twisted and confused view of American history that he’s willing to cite the most important anti-segregation case ever handed down by the Supreme Court as grounds for intentionally re-segregating the schools!

But the real Tedesco can be seen here in this clip speaking up to the microphones at, yes, a Tea Party rally back in April, just shortly after the initial vote to end socioeconomic integration in the Wake County Schools.  Note the wildly popular return to segregated schools is masked by the phrase of "ending a generation's worth of social engineering." 

Warning: do not read this Forbes piece if you recently finished eating:

What Educators Are Learning From Money Managers
Daniel Fisher, 06.07.10, 12:00 AM ET

Brownsville Elementary School in Brooklyn is surrounded by neighborhoods with the highest murder rates in New York City. But inside the charter school at 10:30 a.m. everything is tranquil. Dressed in identical uniforms of green polo shirts and khakis, students walk carefully along tape strips in the halls before sitting down at their desks. Except for controlled bursts of excitement, as when a teacher asks kids to yell out their goals for a lesson, classrooms are hushed in concentration. Children perform tasks like organizing papers on their desks and placing pencils next to their books with precision.

The emphasis on polite manners and discipline is straight out of the 1930s. Except for what is going on behind the scenes: From quiz scores to homework and attendance records, every detail of a student's performance at Brownsville Elementary is fed into computer databases where teachers and administrators examine the constantly unfolding record and quickly adjust lesson plans and individual teaching strategies in response. Achievement First, the New Haven, Conn. nonprofit that operates Brownsville Elementary and 16 other schools in Connecticut and New York, is more like an information-driven company than an old-fashioned school district. "We're obsessed with using data on an ongoing basis," says Douglas McCurry, Achievement First's co-chief executive and a frequent presence in school halls. "Schools are fundamentally undermanaged."

American education is, as always, in a state of crisis. In the past four decades spending per pupil (adjusted for inflation) has gone up 2.6 times, but sat scores have not budged. Despite the $661 billion a year this country puts into public K--12 education, we are churning out a nation of mediocre graduates ill equipped to meet global competitors. Thousands of teachers are being laid off. Central Falls, R.I. fired all of its high school teachers (half will be hired back); in Kansas City, Mo. half the schools are closing. Reformist politicians in Florida, Colorado, Washington, D.C. and New Jersey are confronting teachers' unions and the sacred rights of tenure and rising compensation.

Away from the angriest national debates, however, a quiet revolution in American public education is occurring at organizations around the country like Achievement First. Most were launched by idealistic liberals with dreams of social equality. But with annual budgets exceeding $50 million, sophisticated computer systems and hundreds of employees, they are starting to resemble corporations--tracking and responding to minute changes and putting resources to efficient and innovative uses. The question is whether these strategies can be writ large, like Wal-Mart, to work in thousands of schools with millions of students nationwide. There are plenty of doubters.

...

Can best practices be replicated across America? "It's pretty much the same recipe you would have had putting a school together in 1910--an execution-based model," says Frederick Hess, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and author of Education Unbound (ASCD, 2010). He has doubts. "It's bumping up against natural limits." Whereas Wal-Mart can achieve superior results with the workforce it finds in any region, Achievement First and its peers rely on young, inspired teachers coming out of training programs like Teach for America. [Ken's note: I included the Hess quotes only to provide some context for the Wal-Mart/TFA comparison.]

...

It's lamentable how many defective products the U.S. education industry sends out of its $660 billion factory. But it's encouraging to see that there are ways to boost the output.

The Forbes followers, corporate stooges, and hedge fund-backed "reformers" will always define students as products, learning as test scores, and good schools as quiet schools. That's their model, the only way they're capable of thinking (and, hence, the only way they can "solve" the problems faced by public schools). It's a form of intellectual sterilization reserved only for the poor, black, and brown - not for the children in affluent suburbs or private schools like Sidwell Friends. Most educators - particularly those with real classroom experience and knowledge of child/human development - are smarter than these crooks and corporatists, but their wisdom is disregarded in favor of "data" and "scientific management" imposed by MBAs and their ilk. The fact that schools like this are pushed by "idealistic liberals with dreams of social equality" is yet another piece of convincing evidence that liberalism has severe limits, and certain branches of liberalism are practically indistinguishable from the neoconservative/ultra right-wing philosophy that disdains any forms of social progress and genuine equity.