I Vote No on VOTE (Videotaped Observations for Teacher Evaluation)

I Vote No on VOTE (Videotaped Observations for Teacher Evaluation)

Stephen Krashen

The New York Times recently ran two articles on videotaped observations for teacher evaluation. One of the articles reported that Bill Gates has invested $335 million on research to evaluate this approach ("Teacher Ratings Get New Look, Pushed by a Rich Watcher," Dec. 3).

Research uses a bogus measure: The goal of the Gates-funded research is to find correlations between teaching practices observed on the videotapes and achievement. Achievement will be measured by the use of value-added scores, gains on standardized tests. The use of value-added scores has already been thoroughly criticized as being unstable and invalid as a measure of teaching effectiveness. The Times did not mention the controversy surrounding the use of value-added ratings, sending the incorrect message that the use of this method is perfectly fine.

The expense: If they are "validated," the use of videotaped observations by school districts promises to be extremely expensive. The estimated cost, according to a private company quoted in the Times, is about one million dollars per year ($1.5 million start-up, $800,000 per year) for a district with 140 schools and 7000 teachers. Extrapolated to the entire country, using a conservative estimate of 10,000 districts in the US, this amounts to about ten billion dollars. (Assuming $150 per teacher, and about 40 million teachers in the US, the estimate is six billion dollars per year.) Paying this much money to private companies for cameras, software, etc, makes no sense at a time when school districts are suffering huge financial problems.

Unnecessary: Despite constant claims in the media, there is no evidence that there is a serious crisis in teacher quality in the United States. When we control for poverty, American students score at the top of the world on international tests. This means there is no serious problem in teacher quality, teacher education or teacher evaluation.

Conclusion: Videotaped observations for teacher evaluation (VOTE?) is another red herring, a distraction from the real problem. The real problem is poverty, and the real solution is protecting children from the effects of poverty. Spending an extra six to ten billion per year on nutrition, health care, and school libraries makes more sense than spending it on video-taping teachers.

I vote no on VOTE.

Sources:

Value-added measures: Sass, T. 2008. The stability of value-added measures of teacher quality and implications for teacher compensation policy. Washington DC: CALDER. (National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Educational Research.); Kane, T. and Staiger, D. 2009. Estimating Teacher Impacts on Student Achievement: An Experimental Evaluation. NBER Working Paper No. 14607 http://www.nber.org/papers/w14607;Papay, J. 2010. Different tests, different answers: The stability of teacher value-added estimates across outcome measures. American Educational Research Journal 47,2.

When we control for poverty: Bracey, G. (2009). Education Hell: Rhetoric versus reality. Alexandria, VA: Educational Research Service; Payne, K. and Biddle, B. 1999. Poor school funding, child poverty, and mathematics achievement. Educational Researcher 28 (6): 4-13.

Nutrition, health care: Berliner, D. 2006. Our impoverished view of research. Teachers College Review 108 (6): 949-995; Coles, G. 2008/2009. Hunger, academic success, and the hard bigotry of indifference. Rethinking Schools 23, 2.

School libraries: Krashen, S. 2004. The Power of Reading. Heinemann Publishers and Libraries Unlimited.

Boston Cutting Property Deals with Charters as Charters Recruit Top Scorers and Private School Students

What is that smell wafting up over the Charles River this morning?  Oh, it's the stench of corruption as a whole bunch of public schools are shuttered, kids are dispersed, communities blown up, and fat cats in in the corporate foundations get ready to carve up the empty school properties for their corporate welfare charter schools.  

After I reported that Roger Clap Elementary School would be spared from closure, the Boston Public Schools “Redesign” site appeared to be updated with a list of proposed closures and mergers. And now, about 10 minutes later, the list is gone.
We were able to grab the list before it disappeared. Here it is:

• Merge Lee Academy with Lee Elementary, create a K-8
  Lee Academy would become a K0-1 program and Lee Elementary would operate a Grade 2-8 program. Both would exist in the same building as they do today.
• Merge Alighieri and Umana
  These schools would merge to create a K-8 in the Umana building. The Umana is also scheduled for a major renovation within the next two years, so the K-8 would be phased in.
• Merge Urban Science Academy and Parkway Academy of Technology and Health
  These schools would merge to create one school, led by USA. The programs would stay in the same building.
• Merge Brook Farm Business & Service Career Academy and Media Communications Technology High School
  These schools would merge to create one school. The programs would stay in the same buildings.
• Merge Excel High School and Monument High School
  These schools would merge to create one school, led by Excel. The programs would stay in the same buildings.
• Expand Holland Elementary
  Add one K1 classroom.
• Expand Trotter Elementary
  Add one K1 classroom.
• Expand King K-8
  Current East Zone ELC K1 and K2 students move to the King.
• Relocate Community Academy of Science and Health
  Relocate program to the Cleveland Building in Dorchester (East Zone).
• Unite and expand TechBoston Academy
  TechBoston Academy will become a unified Grade 6-12 program at Dorchester Education Complex, and increases high school seats.
• Move Dorchester Academy
  Program moves from Dorchester Education Complex to the Wilson Building.
• Close East Zone ELC
  Current K1 and K2 students are relocated to King K-8 if they choose
• Close Fifield Elementary
  Students have priority for available East Zone schools, after sibling preference is taken into account.
• Close Middle School Academy
  Program moves to the current Gavin building
• Close Emerson Elementary
  Regular education students have priority for available seats in the North Zone, after sibling preference. Cape Verdean SEI students move together to a different school.
• Close Farragut Elementary
  Students have priority for available seats in other North Zone schools, after sibling preference.
• Close Agassiz Elementary
  Students have priority for available seats in other West Zone schools, after sibling preference.
• Close The Engineering School
  Students have priority for available seats in other high schools, after sibling preference.
• Close Social Justice Academy
  Students have priority for available seats in other high schools, after sibling preference.
• Clap Elementary becomes our first “Innovation School”
  Students remain in the school but the program gets a “fresh start.” Apply for Innovation School status granted under new state law.
• Convert Gavin Middle School to “Up Academy”
  Current Gavin students are guaranteed enrollment in UP Academy as long as they fill out a simple application form. Incoming 6th grade students can apply from anywhere in the city.

A BPS spokesman confirmed the list was published prematurely and the information is correct.
Update: Afer BPS made the list officially official tonight, I see a new item:

• Expand Dearborn to a 6-12 STEM program
  Dearborn Middle School will become a 6-12 STEM program, focusing on Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics.

And while the BPS tries to figure out how to close the 63 million dollar hole in its budget largely created by the $55 million it will pay out to charter schools, the corporate charters are already sending recruiting letters to high-flying students from the closing public schools, while getting ready to put out the welcome mat for private schoolers, too.  Special ed and ELL students?  Need not apply.

The Globe has a story this morning about backroom deals to carve up the real estate before the announced closing even reached the parents and kids affected:

The Boston Teachers Union is accusing city and school leaders of “meeting secretly’’ last week to offer charter school officials the chance to lease city schools slated for closure, even before parents and students at those schools knew their fate.

In fliers that its 7,000 members will receive today, the union said charter school leaders “are salivating at the possibility of leasing ‘surplus’ Boston School buildings.’’

Richard Stutman, president of the Boston Teachers Union, said he was taken aback by the meeting.

“I don’t get shocked by much, but I was shocked that they met with these folks prior to a School Committee vote and having meetings with the schools,’’ Stutman said yesterday. “This is an economic decision, and this is a decision based on, I think, trying to give charter schools what they’ve desperately needed, which is space.’’

School Superintendent Carol R. Johnson recommended Thursday that more than a dozen schools close or merge as a way to plug a potential $63 million budget gap in a time of declining enrollment and charter school growth. The system has about 5,600 empty seats throughout the city and the suggested capacity reductions would shrink that number by about one-quarter.

The day before Johnson made her recommendations, her staff met with city and charter school leaders to start strategically planning for the growth of charter schools in Boston, instead of just ignoring them, school officials said. The group discussed about two dozen issues, including transportation and students learning English. Capacity was only a sliver of the discussion, school officials said. . . .

You expect this kind of corrupt privatization in areas where disaster capitalism has used economic or natural emergencies to rush in with its shock and awe solutions, but here in the shadows of MIT and Harvard?  How unseemly, indeed.  Tsk tsk.

Judge Rules Broad's Stooge, Robert Bobb, Must End Illegal Takeover of Detroit Schools

Bonus Bobb flames out.  From the Detroit News:

MARISA SCHULTZ
The Detroit News
Detroit — The Detroit Public Schools board controls the district's academics, not Emergency Financial Manager Robert Bobb, a judge ruled today in an opinion that found Bobb "chose to ignore the board's academic plan completely" and "failed to perform his duty to consult" with the 11-member body. Bobb's decision to make all academic, educational and social policy for the districts more than 70,000 students "runs afoul" of the legislative intent of the emergency financial manager law under which Bobb was appointed by the governor in 2009, according to Wayne Circuit Judge Wendy Baxter.

"Mr. Bobb cannot usurp the elected board's authority over academics and curriculum matters by creating his own academic system and programs under the guise of facilities or that his contract with the governor required him to march forward in this way," Baxter wrote in her 34-page opinion.

The board members sued Bobb more than a year ago, claiming he overstepped his authority by making academic decisions and failing to consult with them.

As in DC, the next step is for teachers to choose a union president in Detroit who supports democracy, rather than oligarchy.  Easy call: dump Keith Johnson.

From an email forward by Rog Lucido:

COURT DECLARES EMERGENCY FINANCIAL MANAGER’S TAKEOVER OF DETROIT PUBLIC SCHOOLS ILLEGAL

BAMN (By Any Means Necessary) and Detroit School Board Score Major Legal Victory
Against Market-Based Corporate Education Models

Ruling comes on the eve of crucial election in Detroit Federation of Teachers

The Wayne County Circuit Court held today that Emergency Financial Manager Robert Bobb has violated the law for the last 20 months by illegally taking control over the academic affairs of the Detroit Public Schools.

The Court held that Bobb had no legal authority to seize that power. It also declared that he had no educational expertise or experience — that “all [Bobb’s] study in education has emanated from unvetted sources, who may stand to benefit financially should his academic plans come to fruition and who have supplemented his pay.”

Finally, it held that his educational plan was a “fix” that was “short on teaching and learning wisdom,” an opportunity where some “stand to profit shielded …from the eye of public oversight of competitive bids” because of Bobb’s one-man rule.

In the words of the ruling, [Bobb] “was empowered to figure out how to pay for education fashioned by the Board. Instead he created education products he proposed to implement. His business paradigm envisions competitive marketplace schools where parents shop like consumers for the best schools with best being dictated by survival of the fittest principles of caveat emptor [buyer beware]. …Schools will compete for the best students, leaving less gifted children or those that come from households that somehow fail to present their children to school in the optimal ready-to-learn state, [to] fall by the wayside. Only schools with the best teachers will thrive and without encouragement to foster cooperation among and between teachers and schools, the weak perish.”

George Washington, an attorney who represented the Detroit school board, said “This decision is the beginning of the end of Bobb’s illegal dictatorship and of the pro-charter and anti-education policies that he has attempted to force down the throats of Detroit’s students and citizens. We will do everything necessary to enforce this decision.”

The decision comes on the eve of a crucial runoff election in the Detroit Federation of Teachers. Steve Conn, a long-time BAMN member who is a candidate for President on the Defend Public Education/Save Our Students slate, supported the lawsuit and hailed the decision. Keith Johnson, the current President of the DFT, has supported Bobb from the day he was appointed.

Shanta Driver, the National Chair of BAMN and one of the attorneys on the case, said “This decision rejects the educational program and the political methods that U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and plutocrats like Bill Gates and Eli Broad have used in their attempt to destroy public education. The decision and Steve Conn’s election as President of the DFT will vastly strengthen the national fight against Duncan’s pro-charter, market-based competitive education model and will make it possible for us to repair the enormous damage that Duncan, through enforcers like Michelle Rhee and Robert Bobb, has already done to our children’s futures.”

Contacts: George B. Washington (attorney) 313-963-1921; 313-715-4886

Steve Conn 313-645-9340

Joyce Schon (attorney) 313-434-7075

Not Empathetic, Just Pathetic

Put in the fork: 

"As much as the political wisdom may dictate fighting over solving problems, it would be the wrong thing to do," Obama said in announcing the tax deal Monday evening.

Ten Things Charter Schools Won't Tell You, and All Ten You Never Expected to Read in the Wall Street Journal

How this piece by Sarah Morgan ever got past the corporate ed cheerleaders on the WSJ editorial board, we probably will never know.  But somehow it did, and here it is presented, with only brief interruptions:

1. We're no better than public schools.

For all the hype about a few standout schools, charter schools in general aren’t producing better results than traditional public schools. A national study by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford found that while 17% of charter schools produced better results than neighborhood public schools, 37% were significantly worse, and the rest were no different. (Not that public schools are perfect, as many parents know. See our earlier story, “10 Things Your School District Won’t Tell You,” for more.)

A host of other studies on charter school outcomes have come up with sometimes contradictory results. As with traditional public schools, there are great charters – and some that aren’t so great. “There’s a lot of variation within charter schools,” points out Katrina Bulkley, an associate professor of education at Montclair State University who studies issues related to school governance. “In fairness to organizations that are running high-performing schools, many of them are very frustrated with the range of quality, because they feel that it taints charter schools as a whole,” Bulkley says.

2. Our teachers aren’t certified.
According to data from the National Center for Education Statistics, charter-school teachers are, on average, younger and less likely to hold state certification than teachers in traditional public schools. In a 2000 survey, 92% of public school teachers held state certification, compared to 79% of charter school teachers. A 2008 survey found that 32% of charter school teachers were under 30, compared to 17% of traditional public school teachers. Charter schools often recruit from organizations like Teach for America that provide non-traditional paths into the profession, and more-experienced teachers who already have jobs in traditional public schools may have little incentive to give up the protection of tenure.

Comment:  Or give up retirement plans, due process, a modicum of academic freedom, a salary that averages 20 percent more than the corporate charters.  It's much more than tenure.

Relying on relatively untrained, inexperienced staff may have a real impact in the classroom. “A lot of them don’t have classroom management skills,” says May Taliaferrow, a charter-school parent.

3. Plus, they keep quitting.
As many as one in four charter school teachers leave every year, according to a 2007 study by Gary Miron, a professor of education at Western Michigan University, and other researchers at the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice. That’s about double the typical teacher turnover rate in traditional public schools. Charter schools typically pay teachers less than traditional public schools do, and require longer hours, Miron says. Meanwhile, charter school administrators earn more than their school-district counterparts, which can also make teachers feel underpaid, he says. The odds of a teacher leaving the profession altogether are 130% higher at charter schools than traditional public schools, according to a 2010 study by the National Center on School Choice at Vanderbilt University. That study also found that much of this teacher attrition was related to dissatisfaction with working conditions.

Higher turnover is inevitable with a younger staff – and the ability to get rid of ineffective teachers, says Peter Murphy, a spokesman for the New York Charter Schools Association. “There needs to be more turnover in district schools,” Murphy says. “Instead, what you have is this rigid tenure system where teachers are not held accountable, and children suffer.”

Comment:  Soooo, Mr. Murphy, because your charter schools are hemorrhaging teachers and public schools are holding on to their experienced teachers, then public schools should end tenure so that firing of experienced teachers can occur, thus causing public schools to have the same problem with inexperienced teachers that charters have?  That's brilliant.

4. Students with disabilities need not apply.
Six-year-old Makala was throwing regular tantrums in school, so her mother, Latrina Miley, took her for a psychiatric evaluation, eventually ending up with a district-mandated plan that stated the girl should be taught in a smaller class where half the students have special needs. The charter school’s response, Miley says, was to tell her she could either change her daughter’s educational plan, or change schools. She moved Makala to a nearby public school – where, she says, teachers have been more effective at managing her daughter’s behavior issues. The school says it can’t talk about specific cases.

Critics say charter schools commonly “counsel out” children with disabilities. While a few charter schools are specifically designed to serve students with special needs, the rest tend to have lower proportions of students with special needs than nearby public schools, according to a review of multiple studies conducted by the University of Colorado’s Education and the Public Interest Center. Charter schools also appear to end up with students whose disabilities are less expensive to manage than those of public school students. A Boston study, conducted by the Massachusetts Teachers Association, found that 91% of students with disabilities in the city’s charter schools were able to be fully included in standard classrooms, compared to only 33% of students with disabilities in the traditional public schools.

5. Separation of church and state? We found a loophole.
Charter schools are public schools, supported by public tax dollars. But among the thousands of charters nationwide are schools run by Christian organizations as well as Hebrew and Arabic language academies that blur the line between church and state. “What would not be tolerated in a regular public school seems to be tolerated when it’s a charter school,” says Diane Ravitch, a professor of education at New York University and the author of “The Death and Life of the Great American School System.” Even if these schools aren’t explicitly teaching religion, “it’s potentially segregation by religious preference,” Bulkley says.

6. We don’t need to tell you where your tax dollars are going.
An investigation by Philadelphia’s City Controller earlier this year uncovered widespread financial mismanagement among the city’s charter schools, including undisclosed “related party” transactions where friends and family of school management were paid for various services, people listed as working full time at more than one school, individuals writing checks to themselves, and even a $30,000 bill from a beach resort charged to a school.

Financial scandals have come to light in schools around the country, but what’s more troubling, says advocate Leonie Haimson of Class Size Matters in New York City, is that charter schools have opposed state audits of their finances. The New York Charter School Association won a lawsuit against the state comptroller last year, with the court ruling that the legislature had violated the state constitution when it directed the comptroller to audit charter schools. Charter schools in the state are already overseen and audited by at least two other agencies, Murphy says. “We have never objected to being audited, being overseen, and being held accountable. In fact, this organization has come out in favor of closing low-performing charter schools,” he says.

7. We’ll do anything to recruit more kids…
Walking around New York City, it’s impossible to miss the ads on buses and subways for the Harlem Success academies, Haimson says. The school is legally required to reach out to at-risk students, and it has been opening new schools over the past couple of years. However, some schools elsewhere have gone beyond marketing. A charter school in Colorado gave out gift cards to families that recruited new students, and another school in Louisiana gave out cash.

8. …but we’ll push them out if they don’t perform.
The Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) schools have been criticized for high rates of student attrition, in part because it’s the struggling students who are more likely to leave schools mid-year – so if more students leave charters, that churn could boost a school’s scores. A KIPP study released in June found students leaving at rates comparable to the rate at which students leave traditional public schools – but, according to Miron, that study ignored the fact that KIPP schools don’t then fill empty slots with other weak, transient students the way traditional public schools do. “Traditional public schools have to take everybody,” Miron explains. “Charter schools can determine the number they want to take and when they want to take them, and then they can close the door.”

Miron found there was a 19% drop in enrollment in KIPP schools from grades 6 to 7, and a 24% drop from grades 7 to 8. Some charter schools lose 50% of a cohort each year, Miron says. And in some cases, students can be explicitly pushed out of a charter school for failing to meet the school’s academic or behavioral standards – an option that’s not available to a traditional public school.

9. Success can be bought.
Some of the most successful charter schools are also some of the wealthiest. Harlem Children’s Zone, for example, had over $193 million in net assets at the end of the 2008-2009 school year, according to its most recent IRS filing. The organization’s charter schools spend $12,443 per student in public money and an additional $3,482 that comes from private fundraising. That additional funding helps pay for 30% more time in class, according to Marty Lipp, spokesman for the organization.

It’s great to see schools that have the resources to spend lavishly to help children succeed, Bulkley says, but it’s difficult to see how those schools can then be models for traditional public schools largely constrained by traditional public budgets. “All schools should get what they need,” Lipp says, but adds, “You give two people $10 and they spend it different ways, so it’s not simply about money.”

10. Even great teachers can only do so much.
Much of the public debate over charter schools focuses on teacher performance and the ability to fire ineffective teachers – something that’s more difficult at a traditional public school where teachers are typically union members. While it’s true that teachers represent the most important in-school factor affecting student performance, out-of-school factors matter more, Ravitch says. “The single biggest predictor of student performance is family income,” she says. “I certainly wish it were not so, but it is.” Children from higher-income families get a huge head start thanks to better nutrition, a larger vocabulary spoken at home and other factors, she says. The narrative that blames teachers for problems that are rooted in poverty “is demoralizing teachers by the thousands,” Ravitch says. “And you don’t improve education by demoralizing the people who have to do the work every day.”

Read more: 10 Things Charter Schools Won't Tell You - Spending - Rip-offs - SmartMoney.com http://www.smartmoney.com/spending/rip-offs/10-things-charter-schools-wont-tell-you/#ixzz17MDzMD3K

Stop Wishing: Obama Must Go!

It is one thing for Frank Rich to say it, but quite another for Dr. King's personal counsel to make the case for dumping Obama in 2012.  

A clip from a very important commentary at HuffPo by Clarence Jones, Scholar in Residence, Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University (my bolds):

. . . . However, nothing influenced me more to write this blog than listening, again, carefully to some of the lyrics of Bob Dylan's "Blowin in The Wind."

How many roads most a man walk down Before you call him a man? Yes, how many times must the cannon balls fly
Before they're forever banned?
The answer my friend is blowin' in the wind
The answer is blowin' in the wind.

Yes, how many times can a man turn his head
Pretending he just doesn't see?
The answer my friend is blowin' in the wind
The answer is blowin' in the wind.

Yes, how many ears must one man have
Before he can hear people cry?
Yes, how many deaths will it take till he knows
That too many people have died?
The answer my friend is blowin' in the wind
The answer is blowin' in the wind.

Then, I began to think about 1968: about Allard Lowenstein, President Lyndon Johnson, Senator Eugene McCarthy, Sarah Kovner and Harold Ickes of the New York Democratic Party New Coalition who had the courage to lead a grassroots challenge to Lyndon Johnson's re-election.

Lyndon Johnson was one of the greatest presidents in the history of our country. He enacted Immigration reform, bills establishing a National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, a Highway Safety Act, the Public Broadcasting Act, creation of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, a bill to provide consumers with some protection against shoddy goods and dangerous products, Social Security and Medicare, Voting Rights Act of 1965, only to mention a few. But, he squandered and threatened the viable implementation of these legislative achievements by his aggressive pursuit and escalation of the war in Vietnam.

Some of us, like Allard Lowenstein, Sarah Kovner, Harold Ickes, Eleanor French, Blair Clark, decided that Johnson's pro Vietnam policy had to be publicly challenged. Our "agent" for this challenge was Senator Eugene McCarthy from Minnesota. He may have been an "uncertain trumpet" on other domestic issues. However, we worked hard to support his candidacy for President in the New Hampshire Democratic primary as a challenge to the Vietnam policy of President Johnson. McCarthy came in second with 42% percent of the vote against 49% for the President. This precipitated Johnson to announce that he would not seek re-election as the candidate of the National Democratic Party.

When few other public figures of national stature spoke out about Johnson's escalation of the war in Vietnam, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, at New York City's Riverside Church, before a meeting of Concerned Layman and Clergy, on April 4th, 1967, said "A time comes when silence is betrayal." For Dr. King, it was "time to break the silence."

And, so it is with Obama's continued squandering of the extraordinary support he developed for his election as President.

Go and check out the video clips of the panorama of faces that assembled in Grant Park in Chicago after the election results confirmed his victory. Check out the million + people who came to Washington to witness his Inauguration.

It is not easy to consider challenging the first African-American to be elected as President of the United States. But, regrettably, I believe that the time has come to do this.

It is time for Progressives to stop "whining" and arguing among themselves about whether President Obama will or will not do this or that. Obama is no different than any other President, nominated by his national party. He was elected with the hard work and 24/7 commitment of persons who believed and enlisted in his campaign for "Hope" and "Change."

You don't have to be a rocket scientist nor have a PhD in political science and sociology to see clearly that Obama has abandoned much of the base that elected him. He has done this because he no longer respects, fears or believes those persons who elected him have any alternative, but to accept what he does, whether they like it or not.

It is time for those persons who constituted the "Movement" that enabled Senator Barack Obama to be elected to "break their silence"; to indicate that they no longer will sit on their hands, and only let off verbal steam and ineffective sound and fury, and "hope" for the best.

The answer is blowin' in the wind

The pursuit of the war in Afghanistan in support of a certifiably corrupt Afghan government and the apparent willingness to retreat from his campaign commitment of no further tax cuts for the rich, his equivocal and foot dragging leadership to end DADT, his TARP for Wall Street, but, equivocal insufficient attention to the unemployment and housing foreclosures of Main Street, suggest that the template of the 1968 challenge to the reelection of President Lyndon Johnson now must be thoughtfully considered for Obama in 2012.

Rethinking Schools Has Important Piece by Stan Karp

From Rethinking Schools:

Dear Friends of Rethinking Schools,


As Waiting for "Superman" makes its way across the country, the "reform" agenda it promotes is producing both problems and pushback. In a new article now available at NOTwaitingforsuperman.org, Rethinking Schools editor Stan Karp looks at how "Superhero School Reform" is playing out in New Jersey and heading your way:
"In New Jersey, an odd alliance of Oprah Winfrey, Facebook billionaire Mark Zuckerberg, Republican Gov. Chris Christie, and 'rock star mayor' Cory Booker has put Newark, NJ in the forefront of this effort to impose business model ed reform. But the campaign is headed for a district near you, if it hasn't arrived already, and the stakes are high."

Check out the full article here.


Stan will be speaking on these same issues in Portland, OR on December 10 at a talk entitled, "Who's bashing teachers and public schools and what can we do about it?" The event is jointly sponsored by Portland Area Rethinking Schools and the Portland Association of Teachers. Event details here.

Also if you haven't read it already, check out Barbara Miner's "Ultimate Superpower," a detailed look at the money trail behind the film and its overlapping marketing and political campaigns. In an October blog post, Diane Ravitch wrote: "I urge you to read this account by Barbara Miner, who is deeply suspicious of the billionaire hedge fund managers and foundations behind this movement."



The NOTwaitingforsuperman.org website and Facebook page continue to gather reports, resources and reactions from the nationwide response to the film. Rethinking Schools initiated this campaign to invite educators, parents, students and activists to talk back to the film and its attacks on teachers, unions and public education. Thousands have responded. You can join them on the web here or on Facebook here — and get a 20% discount on all Rethinking Schools subscriptions and publications.

Thank you for supporting Rethinking Schools,
Bob Peterson, Editor

Seniority and teacher layoffs: A red herring

Seniority and teacher layoffs: A red herring

The LA Times joins the current trend of discounting seniority in teacher evaluation and, of course, in laying off teachers ("When layoffs come to L.A. schools, performance doesn't count," December 5).

Their example shows the opposite.

The Times presents the case of teachers who had been at a school for two years, were apparently successful (at raising test scores), and were dumped in favor of teachers unfamiliar with the situation, resulting, according to the Times, in a disastrous decline in academic performance and student behavior.
But this is an argument for experience, otherwise known as seniority, not against it. 

The Times also quotes one teacher who protests the laying off of new teachers because it "would destroy not only these new teachers but also the community and the relationships they had built with the students."
Again, this is an argument for retaining experienced teachers, the ones who have built relationships with the community and students over many years. 

Seniority and performance
The Times mentions, in passing, that "seniority is largely unrelated to performance." The research on the impact of seniority that I have seen is based on the use of standardized test score improvements, otherwise known as value-added measures. Nevertheless, the results are interesting. In an interview (The New Advocate, "Teacher seniority under fire "September 12, 2010), researcher Michael Hansen said that improvement between year 3 and 25 was four percent, which he regarded as "trivial." But if valid, it means that more experienced teachers are slightly more effective. The only reason to ignore seniority as a criterion for retention in hard times is financial.
Hansen also pointed out that "This trend is actually common to most professional fields." The obvious implication is that if seniority is to be abandoned in retaining teachers, it should be out the window everywhere, based on quantitative evaluations similar to value-added, including writing newspaper articles. 

The value-added "debate"
The Times also commented minimally on the use of value-added testing, mentioning only that "The approach is controversial because test scores alone are an imperfect measure of a teacher. Unions and some experts say it generates flawed results and encourages instructors to 'teach to the test'." This is only a tiny concession to the substantial amount of research questioning the use of value-added evaluations. The Times defends their use of value-added not by refuting the research but only by stating that the Obama administration and many districts use it. 

This is not a response. Remember when you told your mom that all the other kids were doing x, so why couldn't you? Remember her response? If all the other kids decided to jump off a bridge, would you?

The Times managed to take a swipe at other means of evaluating teachers: Value-added, the Times claims, is "one way of bringing objectivity to otherwise subjective evaluations — usually based on brief and infrequent observations by administrators." This may or may not be true: The Times does not mention any studies on the duration or frequency of administrator observations. Or, of course, on their effectiveness.

A red herring
Finally, there is no discussion of the major question: Why are any layoffs necessary? Why are schools short of money while the Department of Education spends billions for the creation of unnecessary new tests (far more than we have ever seen before)? The entire discussion of who should be laid off and who not is a gigantic red herring, diverting us from the real issue.

KIPP Segregation: A Single School Choice Without a Voice

Mike Feinberg has a reputation as an impulsive brat and bully in a china shop (even as documented by the worshipful Jay Mathews), and the Feinberg op-ed in the Houston Chronicle today shows there is no reason to doubt it.  Not only is he audaciously reckless in calling for public funding of property and buildings for all corporate charter schools in Texas, even as KIPP sits atop a pile of several hundred million dollars from the philanthrocapitalists, but he also demands that all of Texas' "parental choice" charters, the ones with black and brown and poor kids anyway, be converted to the psychologically-sterilizing, apartheid KIPPs or KIPP knock-offs such as the YES College Preps.

The other segregated charters, the lily-white-flight ones with family incomes to match their soaring test scores, will be left untouched, except of course, their building will be paid for by the state and their principals CEOs will be given unconditional authority (like the rest of the charters in Feinberg's fantasy) to hire, fire, and promote without the burden of any consultation with teachers.

And what happens to the parents and children who discover that their choice-without-a-voice school based on an abusive behavioral catechism of total compliance is not what they signed up for when the KIPP recruiters brought their canned pitch into their living rooms?  Well, in that case they don't have a choice except to return to the malignantly-neglected public schools they were trying to escape in the first place.

In Feinberg's dreamworld, charters can't do it all--there will always be the need for the marginally-funded public schools that mimic the lockdown methods of KIPP to accept the discards that could, otherwise, damage the KIPP brand with low scores or a disruptive and stubborn refusal to become miniature corporate automatons.  And if these children can't cut it there in the residual public schools?  Well, there is the other penal system, the one that provides free room and board, an orange jumpsuit, and good jobs for the smiling, postivized guards that Feinberg's human-crushing crucible will crank out.

The fact that our society, even in Texas, could be contemplating Feinberg and Levin's eugenics-inspired brand of containment, segregation, and behavioral sterilization, provides evidence that we have learned nothing from the previous century's dangerous flirtations with fascism.  Our present Gilded Age is as blind now as that one a century ago, with "progressives" like Feinberg and conservatives like Rick Perry both embracing the same "educational" strategies and tactics in an emerging version of a "war against the weak" that has the same goals as the one that swept through America a hundred years ago, the one that inspired a middle-brow madman in another country suffering the bludgeoning effects of economic meltdown and war.

To learn more about KIPP, please see Lessons One, Two and Three.   To learn more about Gates, Broad, and philanthrocapitalism, have your library order this book.

NAACP to Make Wake County a Test Case for Ending Resegregation Efforts

The next few months will be critical for the Gang of Five who are the pawns of the social antiquarians, neocons, and John Birchers who are behind the movement to kill socioeconomic integration and school diversity in Wake County.

Little John Tedesco and Co. are facing a federal civil rights investigation, a review by the Schools' accrediting body, and increasing pressure from the NAACP and other civil rights organizations.  It is time to bring all available pressure to bear, from talking to walking to civil disobedience. 

From the News-Observer:

RALEIGH NAACP officials capped their organization's education conference in Raleigh on Saturday by recasting the local fight over school busing in Wake County as a national referendum on integration and social progress.

The group's representatives said that financial resources of the national organization and local branches will be directed to North Carolina to counter efforts by conservative advocates to replace a diversity-busing policy with a policy of neighborhood schools.

Organizers from around the country next plan to gather in Raleigh on Feb. 12 for a downtown march to press their point that creating neighborhood schools would create what the NAACP and others call de-facto resegregation.

The NAACP held its three-day educational conference here to rally behind the local NAACP branch and draw attention to the political fight brewing over the county's education policy. More than 200 attended the gathering at the downtown Sheraton Hotel to discuss the Wake County school system, which in past years has won accolades for educational excellence.

"We've spent decades bragging about Wake County," said Benjamin Todd Jealous, the NAACP's national president and CEO. "We're going to defend our victories, and this is one of our victories."

Efforts to end busing for diversity here has sparked an investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice's Office for Civil Rights, which is looking into the NAACP's complaints of racial discrimination. NAACP officials said federal officials would begin their probe this coming week.

A national accreditation group, Advancing Excellence in Education Worldwide, is also reviewing Wake County's move to dismantle its diversity policy, with the potential result of loss of accreditation and prestige for the county's public schools.

The Republican majority on the school board was well on its way to abolishing the diversity policy until October, when a school board member changed her mind and sided with the Democrats to block a zone-based assignment plan.

But NAACP leaders are alarmed about the most recent proposal: to reassign more than 6,000 students, most of whom live in Southeast Raleigh but are bused to suburban schools, back to their own neighborhood schools.

Such a move, NAACP leaders said, would create high concentrations of poverty and failure.

As a result of the Wake County controversy, the NAACP's education committee said Saturday it has revised its national agenda to promote such policies as longer school days, year-round schools, universal kindergarten and redirecting public resources to poor children with the greatest needs.. . . .