The New New Federalist Plan to Crush Teachers and Public Schools

Here is the conclusion of George Will's most recent tribute to Arne Duncan for moving forward on Obama's plan to re-focus the war against teachers and public schools down to the state level, whereby Obama can then be shielded from blame for the anti-union, anti-democratic, and anti-civil rights actions that his own federal policies encourage:

Regarding grades K through 12, federal education policy — if such there must be — should permit, indeed encourage, 50 laboratories of educational experimentation. Federal policy should be confined to providing financial rewards contingent on improvements confirmed by national metrics — Duncan’s single goal post.


The Education Department sits at the foot of Capitol Hill, where many new legislators consider “federal education policy” a constitutional oxymoron. They have a point. They might, however, decide that the changes Duncan proposes — on balance, greater state flexibility in meeting national goals — make him the Obama administration’s redeeming feature. 

Take Tennessee as a prime example.  As one of the first two states to land big money ($500 million) from Race to the Trough Top,  the State set out immediately to remove the cap on charter schools and to promote them as the prime school turnaround option, to undergird its test-score analysis and archival systems, and to begin to hurriedly design a teacher evaluation system based on test scores. 

Bill Sanders, testing guru and former adjunct professor at UT, has moved back to Nashville from the SAS campus in North Carolina to be close to the action.  So far Sanders has remained mum on the fact that the National Academy of Sciences has nothing good to say about using value-added modeling for assessment of anything or anyone involving high stakes.  But, then, for some teachers don't matter--it is only the students' test scores that matter.

Now combine these developments with the corporate-funded election success by Tennessee Tea Party Republicans who now suddenly control both State Houses and the Governor's Chair, and you have a perfect storm aimed squarely at sweeping away the teaching profession, teacher preparation, collective bargaining, due process, retirement, school governance and oversight. 

In short, public education as we know it will cease to exist if these guys prevail, with the federal government doing nothing except to help the process along with huge infusions of cash.  Here is a list of pending legislation now zooming through the legislative chambers in Nashville:

HB130, abolishes teacher unions’ ability to negotiate conditions of employment with school districts.

SB102, eliminates Tennessee Education Association-selected positions on Tennessee Consolidated Retirement System board of directors.

HB159, prohibits public employees having dues deductions for either political action committees or dues, if the organization engages in political activity “in any way.”

HB145, blocks Tennessee Education Association from recommending appointees to the Tennessee Financial Literacy Commission board of directors.

These guys make Fathead Christie in New Jersey look a Deweyean progressive. 

And don't expect the new governor, Bill Haslam, to veto any of these draconian measures if they are voted through.  As CEO and majority owner of Pilot Oil (yes, the ones you see on every interstate), Haslam is the corporationist's poster boy.  Here are few of his holdings that he dumped prior to his election in order to avoid ethics questions:

The multimillionaire Knoxville mayor sold stocks of U.S. tobacco giants Lorillard Inc. and Philip Morris International, several oil companies, Canadian payday loan company Cash Store Finance Services Inc. and Amazon, the Internet retailer that refuses to collect sales taxes from customers on behalf of states such as Tennessee.

He also got rid of investments in two major state contractors, CVS Caremark, which manages state pharmacy benefits, and United Health Group, which owns TennCare contractor AmeriChoice.

Good folks.

So, yes, there is a new new federalism, or is that feudalism?  Unless people organize in every state, a piece of the national juggernaut will be show up in every state. 

Today there are signs that teachers are hitting back, suing a local school board that could not wait for the new laws crushing collective bargaining to go into effect.  That's a start.  Now if the prostisuits who run the AFT and NEA would come out their spider holes and say something, that might help.  Oh, I forgot--they're listening to Arne and Bill Gates.

2010 Bunkum Awards Announced

From the National Education Policy Center:

2010 was a banner year for bunk, leading to a new record of 24 reviews. Yet our awards can recognize only the true crème de la crème of bunkiness. This year’s victors include contributions from perennial frontrunners like Fordham, Heartland, and Heritage, but surprise winners included the South Carolina Policy Council Education Foundation, which until now had toiled unrecognized in the minor leagues. And we also were compelled to open the contest to an important new competitor – the U.S. Department of Education – which seems poised to contribute exceptional bunk for the foreseeable future.

You can read about the "winners" here. Enjoy.

Joel Klein Steps Into Role as Oligarchs' Bomb Thrower

While Joel Klein was Chancellor of NYC Schools, there was no one besides Bloomberg that teachers hated more within the five boroughs.  With his saccharine smirk that elevates an arrogance born of ignorance and an utter disdain for educators, Klein played McChoakumchild to Bloomberg's Gradgrind with true Dickensian authenticity. 

Now that Klein is spending more time with his family in the wake of the great New York test score fraud, he has yet ascended to the boardroom of News Corp, where he gets his marching orders from Murdoch's top propaganda artists, who live by the dictum that the masses fall more readily for the big lie than the small one.

And so it is that Klein has been set upon any unsuspecting and gullible public, here and abroad, to spew the Oligarchs' big lies to anyone willing to listen:

Clearly both the Mayor and the former schools chancellor, Joel Klein, have a different idea of what makes a good teacher. Over the weekend, Klein deplored that fact that it was easier to execute a killer than fire an incompetent teacher. “Five to 10 percent are not remotely capable,” Klein told the London Sunday Times. “It’s easier to prosecute a capital-punishment case in the U.S. than terminate an incompetent teacher.”

Nice metaphor. . . .

Vonnegut & suggestion for NCTE policy

Here is what Kurt Vonnegut and his friend Bernard O'Hare told a German soldier when they were liberated from a POW camp after World War II: "… America … was going to try harder to give everyone work to do, and to ensure that our children, at least weren't hungry or cold or illiterate or scared to death." (Timequake, p. 142).

This is precisely our position (Krashen-Ohanian NCTE policy suggestion, re-posted below): Try to end poverty and meanwhile protect children from the effects of poverty.

The NCTE (National Council of Teachers of English) invited suggestions for its policy platform for 2011.

Suggestion for NCTE Policy Platform

Submitted by Stephen Krashen and Susan Ohanian

January 18, 2011

Single sentence summary: The NCTE platform should focus on removing the overwhelming barriers to student learning: food insecurity, lack of health care, toxins, and of special interest to us, access to books.

NCTE's Educational Policy Platform this year deals with removing the serious obstacles many children face that make real learning impossible. All of these obstacles are the result of poverty. The problem of poverty is so serious that it is useless to discuss details of language arts pedagogy unless we protect students from the powerful negative effects of poverty.

Many studies have documented how poverty impacts school performance: "Food insecurity," lack of health care, exposure to environmental toxins, and lack of access to books all have devastating effects on student's ability to learn.

The latter, lack of access to books, is of special interest to NCTE, as well as to other organizations concerned with literacy development and libraries: Without access to books, wide self-selected reading cannot happen. Wide reading for pleasure is the bedrock of the language arts. It is responsible for development enough competence in reading, writing, vocabulary, grammar, and mechanics that make higher levels of literacy possible.

The US has the highest rate of child poverty of all industrialized countries, which accounts for our less-than-spectacular scores on international tests. American children who live in middle class neighborhoods and who attend well-funded schools score at the top of the world.

The NCTE platform this year is that we are in no position to debate the subtleties of instruction such as the content of the literature standards. Our discussions of what is on the menu must wait until people are no longer starving.

The NCTE Platform: Make sure that no child is left unfed, all children have adequate health care and all children have access to a wide variety of reading material. Only when this is accomplished can we return to the business of what goes on in the classroom.

The Problem with Those Who Defend School Segregation at the Beginning of Black History Month

Last updated 02/03/11

It doesn't surprise me to see one of the "thought leaders" from Education Sector, that neoliberal chop shop for bad ideas, offer an undisguised apologia for segregated schools, but it does raise even my eyebrow to see that Kevin Carey chose the first day of Black History Month to post his prosaic word chiseling entitled "The Trouble with Desegregation."

As pressure builds among civil rights groups for the Obama Administration (Kevin serves on one of Arne's Committees) to do something for those deemed too poor to matter even as Team Obama panders to those too big to fail,  Carey has been sent out to make the case that no one at his sludge think tank or anywhere else knows what to do about segregated schools.  Here's his utterly unimaginative and ignorant premise:

. . . .the lack of attention to education-based desegregation strategies doesn’t stem from a lack of commitment to the goal, or from disbelief in research supporting desegregation’s positive effects. Rather, there are some basic structural and logistical barriers in place that nobody has figured out how to overcome. 

Obviously, Mr. Carey has developed a case of historical amnesia that leaves him stranded back in the day when Southern governors like George Wallace made the case that the "basic structures" of Southern society demanded "segregation now, segregation forever."  Too, Mr. Carey seem to forget that the U. S. Supreme Court, in its Brown Decision, set aside all the "logistical barriers" put forward by segregationist defense attorney, John Davis, by declaring 9-0 that segregated schools are "inherently unequal."  Here's a clip from Carey:

Most black students–54%–don’t attend school districts that are this large and diverse. For Hispanic students the proportion is even larger: 63%. Tighten the assumptions to, say, 10,000 students and 35% white and the numbers drop even further: 72% and 80%, respectively. Successful desegregation initiatives in districts smaller than this are few and far between. Indeed, are there any?

Most black and Hispanic student attend school districts that are either large and not diverse (Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami-Dade, Houston, Dallas, PG County, and Memphis are all less than 10% white while New York City and Philadelphia are under 15%) or not large. With the media attention given to big-city districts and the huge county-wide districts surrounding Washington, DC and other large east coast metropolitan areas, it’s easy to forget that of the nation’s 14,000 school districts, less than 10% enroll as many as 5,000 students.

A similar argument was offered by John Davis before the Court in arguments leading up the Brown Decision:

. . . . During his argument, he [Davis] turned to realities of Clarendon County . . . to remind the justices of the formidable practical problems involved in desegregation.  Clarendon had 2,800 black pupils and 300 white ones.  How should these children be mixed in a plan for desegregation?  "If it is done on a mathematical basis, with thirty children as the maximum . . . you would have twenty-seven Negro children and three whites in one schoolroom.  Would that make the children any happier?  Would they learn any more quickly?  Would their lives be more serene?" (p. 63, Patterson, 2001, Brown v. Board of Education . . .).

So you see, Mr. Carey, your argument even in more extreme forms has been used and dismissed before, during the era of Jim Crow, nonetheless.  It didn't hold water then any more than it does today.  What it does hold, however, is the attention of those enamored by a morally bankrupt re-commitment to a status quo that elevates a category of social injustice that cannot be rationalized by any crass tradeoffs for improved business opportunities, profits, or budget savings.

In terms of "commitment to the goal" of desegregation to which Carey limply refers, there is little evidence of it.  In fact, the Administration's Race to the Top offered none of its $3.4 billion to systems intent upon school desegregation initiatives, either in planning or implementation.  Rather, RTTT provides hundreds of millions for segregated corporate charters that fuel the resegregation inferno.

The legal precedent that Brown set into motion made integration and inclusion possible and necessary, and these ethical and pragmatic advances cannot now be set aside because of an easy preference for the path of least resistance or fealty to corporate education strategies that pretend there is only one education choice for urban America: segregated corporate charter schools that are more often worse than the struggling public schools they hope to replace.

If Kevin Carey is as truly ignorant as he pretends to be, and thus totally devoid of any knowledge of successful policy strategies for providing diversity in schools, let me offer this short reading list that might add some, shall we say, diversity to Education Sector's reform idea bank, which thus far holds a few dried nuggets that may be exchanged for more standardized testing, more segregative charters, a less professional teaching corps, more useless data storage and surveillance, and national standards that have no grounding in empirical research.

If Carey and his former old boss, Andy Rotherham, had some interests that extended beyond advancing their own shabby career objectives and bank accounts, they would take a few hours to learn something other than what Bill Gates has to teach them.  To that end, see my beginning list below.

What Carey and the, otherwise, "bold reformers" now offer us now are narrow and ossified policy options that fuel the resegregation of American schools and advance an educational caste system based on class and race.  I know we can do better, and our political and social aspirations, in fact, demand that we do.

In another fifty-five years, if the planet is not yet melted, perhaps Black History will recall this time, today, when America made crucial decisions to advocate for all children with the creation of the All Children Advancement Act, rather than continuing the same tired and unjust policies to discard and emotionally sterilize those children whose poverty and isolation we are unwilling to even acknowledge as a problem that American ingenuity could address if given the renewed mandate to do so.


A Few Books to Aid the Imagination, Understanding, and Knowledge Base for Those Aspiring to Reform Schools for Diversity and Achievement for All Children,

Anyon, Jean.  (2005). Radical possibilities: Public policy, urban education, and a new social movement. New York: Routledge.

. . . Anyon makes an argument that educational reform should be a broad set of measures that involve the restructuring of the socioeconomic environment of urban and suburban schools. Anyon argues for some fundamental changes in neighborhood composition, intelligent infrastructure development, changing federal policies to generate wealth creation in urban neighborhoods, and, basically, the provision of greater access for the poor to new places to live in and jobs that pay acceptable salaries. Anyon backs up her arguments with many statistics.. . .--Amazon review

Grant, Gerald. (2009).  Hope and despair in the American city: Why there are no bad schools in Raleigh. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

In a time when it is forgivable and even fashionable to advocate for segregated charter schools as the only alternative for parents trapped by poverty, lack of opportunity, and the malignant neglect of their public school, it is a rare and beautiful thing to encounter a book that evenly and honestly provides solid empirical evidence—evidence that, despite the lessons of history that we continue to ignore at our own peril, high-quality public schools could be available to all classes and races of children in America to choose if we were to exhibit the moral and political will to make it so. Gerald Grant’s Hope and despair in the American city offers us, then, an antidote to our present-day detached recidivism on civil rights, as it presents a close examination of racial and socioeconomic integration success in the schools of Wake County, North Carolina. --Jim Horn review essay

Kahlenberg, Richard.  (2003).  All together now: Creating Middle-class schools through public school choice.  Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press.

In All Together Now: Creating Middle-Class Schools Through Public School Choice, Richard Kahlenberg (senior fellow at The Century Foundation), advocates giving every child in American the opportunity to attend a public school in which the majority of students come from middle class households. He persuasively argues that the only way to make good on the American assumption that public schools will provide equal educational opportunity is by teaching disadvantaged and advantaged children together within the same facilities, with the same faculties, the same curriculums, and the same educational resources. The only way to achieve this socioeconomic integration is to establish a critical mass of middle-class students within all schools. The recommendations offered in All Together Now outline a blueprint for creating middle class schools and draw upon the experiences of current experiments with economic integration in Wisconsin, North Carolina, Connecticut, and elsewhere. Based on these case examples are practical ways to bring about integrated schools for the future, and guidance for successfully overcoming political, logistical, and legal obstacles to an economic desegregation. All Together Now is informative, challenging, and occasionally inspiring reading which is particularly recommended to education reform activists, policy makers, school administrators, faculty members, and concerned parents. --Amazon review

Theoharis, George.  The school leaders our children deserve: Seven keys to equity, social justice, and school reform.  New York: Teachers College Press.

Theoharis' offers an inspired understanding of public school leadership and the necessity of leading for social justice for all students. He uses the experiences of successful school leaders to demonstrate the incredible real life resistance improving schools for all students presents. He articulates the moral imperative we all have to lead for social justice in our practice as public school leaders while giving concrete ideas and inspiration to do so. He has incredible insight into the complexity of leadership and the interconnectedness of social justice within public school positions.  --Amazon review

Parents On Fire in Denver to Recall Corporate Stooge, Nate Easley

When Easley was campaigning to become the swing vote on the Denver Board of Education, he promised to sit down with parents to discuss the continuing corporate efforts to shut down and privatize Denver schools.  He lied.  Now a recall effort is underway.

Other communities should take heart and follow Denver's example.  The greedy fools who want education to follow the Wall Street model will not have their way if parents, teachers, and students continue to organize and to say, Enough!

I say stop watching democracy happen on TV 5,500 miles away in Cairo and start some in your own neighborhood.  Let's bring it democracy home--that's what the cringing corporate cowards are afraid of.

Posted in DeFENSE, Far Northeast, Nate Easley, Near Northeast on 20. Jan, 2011 

The initial steps to put a recall of Nate Easley on the May ballot has started.  A coalition of northeast Denver residents filed the following proposed language for the ballot:

We the qualified voters of Denver Public School District 4 demand the recall of current elected Denver Public Schools Board of Education member Dr. Nate Easley. Our demand is based on Mr. Easley’s activities related to conflicts of interest and allowing these to effect his representation of his District 4 constituency. Specifically, Dr. Easley’s roles as DPS Board of Education president and his job as Deputy Director of the Denver Scholarship Foundation make him subject to undue influence related to his votes as our representative. As a board member, Dr. Easley supervises the DPS superintendent, who also serves as on the DSF Board of Directors, thereby having direct influence over Dr. Easley’s employment. As Deputy Director of DSF, Dr. Easley receives a substantial salary, the threat to which compromises his ability to independently represent District 4. As a result, Dr. Easley has consistently voted for policies that are not reflective of his constituents’ interests, closing schools, supporting an atmosphere of distrust among District employees, and failing to provide sound fiscal oversight of DPS monies.

So what does this mean?  Once the language is approved, then community has 60 days to collect 5,363 signatures to place the issue on the ballot.  At that point, candidates who choose to run against Easley can step forward and collect their own signatures (they only need 50) to appear on the ballot as the replacement candidate.

THIS IS WHERE YOU COME IN. We need help to collect signatures from eligible voters, and you don’t need to live in northeast Denver to help. 

This is also a great opportunity for parents to speak up about concerns they have, about the turnarounds in Montbello, as well as what’s coming to near Northeast Denver.  Read the Denver Post article about the recall here.

Will you join us?  Click here to RSVP.  We can’t set the course aright for our schools without your help.  Please help us stand up and say “No More”! 

And here is the post from HuffPo on the 26th:

If you haven't been paying attention, it may surprise you to know that Denver faces one of the rarer political events in our democracy: recalling a representative from office. It will not surprise anyone that the recall effort is associated with another of Denver Public Schools Board of Education members. This time, however, the effort is not aimed at Andrea Merida, the most polarizing of DPS' board members. It is directed at the Board's president, Nate Easley.

Unlike the attempt to recall Merida, the community of NE Denver seems to be energized around getting rid of Easley. Their reasoning is pretty simple: because of a personal conflict of interest, Easley does not represent his constituents effectively.

The issue of conflicts of interest is at the forefront of Colorado politics at the moment, what with the controversy surrounding recently elected Secretary of State Scott Gessler. Upon taking office, Gessler decided that his government paycheck would not allow him to adequately provide for his family. So, like any good Republican, Gessler will keep a part time job as an attorney practicing election law.

Easley's plight is similar, except that school board representatives do not get paid. Easley works as the Deputy Director of the Denver Scholarship Foundation, an organization intimately associated with the Denver school system. In fact, District superintendent Tom Boasberg has an active leadership role on the foundation, as does Boasberg's closet school board associate, Theresa Peña. Together, Boasberg and Pena could exert tremendous professional pressure on Easley, who needs a paying job to feed his family.

On the other hand, as Board president, Easley is directly responsible for Boasberg's employment status at DPS. He oversees the preparation of Boasberg's professional evaluation. He has significant influence in Boasberg's compensation package. In theory, Boasberg should think of himself as reporting directly to Easley as long as Easley is Board of Education president.

As is typical in DPS, however, the tail wags the dog. Easley operates like Boasberg's henchman. If Boasberg wants it, Easley delivers. Nowhere is this clearer than in far Northeast Denver, which Easley represents.

In November, Easley voted to support closing schools, opening new charter schools, magnet schools, all with significant community opposition in Montbello and Green Valley Ranch. According to community members, they reached out to Easley on the issues surrounding the plan, and he was unresponsive.

Specifically, Easley missed multiple meetings with groups of community members, which is never a good policy for an elected official. Community members also point out that Easley has failed to notice meetings whereat school board members have discussed public business and made policy decisions, which has just fueled the fire of distrust between Easley and those he represents. Parents cite a general lack of accountability with Easley, who, they say, does not respond to emails or phone calls.

Far NE Denver resident Donna Moore, told me, "That's what Easley was elected to do - meet with us and represent us on the school board. He can't be bothered to do that, so he's got to go."

Most galling to some community members, however, is the belief held by some that Easley used Denver Scholarship Foundation funds to hire someone to interact with the community of NE Denver. In September, a CU Denver student sent an email to a group of community members, stating that he was attending meetings on Easley's behalf and that he was being paid to do so.

"Isn't that money [DSF funds] supposed to be used to help send our kids to college?" asked Jackie Skalecke, a far NE Denver resident and parent of a child at Montbello High School.

At a meeting held last Saturday, approximately 40 community members were volunteering to lead signature gathering efforts on the precinct level in NE Denver. Packets of registered voters sorted by precinct were available, and spirits were high. Plans were made to begin contacting registered voters by phone to facilitate the collection of signatures beginning this weekend.

"It's a lot of signatures, but I know we can do this," Skalecke told a group of parents.

The petition to recall Easley was approved by the Denver Election Commission at 1:00 PM today, January 26.


People interested in seeking information about the recall effort or wishing to participate should email info@defensedenver.com.

Edubabblers drowning out real educators

Ashley Hastings posted this to the comments following Stanley Fish's op-ed in the NYT, 1/31/11: THIS COMMENT IS GETTING A LOT OF RECOMMENDATIONS. The 76 so far include mine. Way ahead of others.

"I know Obama's heart is in the right place when he urges young people to become teachers; but I am finding it harder and harder to see why anyone would want to go into teaching, given the outrageous abuse the profession is enduring from the politicians, the press, and the choruses of amateur edubabblers that are drowning out the voices of real educators at every level."

Fish's op-ed:

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/31/race-to-the-top-of-what-obama-on-education/

Dear Mr. President: Don't Send Us Unprepared Temporary Missionaries to Teach Our Children

From WaPo:

By Valerie Strauss

This letter was just sent to President Obama by more than 50 organizations -- including education, civil rights, disability, student, parent, and community groups -- about legislation in Congress that would allow teachers still in training to be considered “highly qualified” so they can meet a standard set in the federal No Child Left Behind law.

Dear Mr. President:

As organizations concerned with promoting educational quality and equity, particularly for students who have traditionally been least well served by our educational system, we are deeply committed to the development of well-prepared, experienced, and effective teachers for all communities, and to ensuring that every student has a fully prepared and effective teacher.

On behalf of the nation’s 50 million elementary and secondary students, we write to you with a sense of urgency about a critical issue that threatens the welfare of many of them.

We are deeply concerned about a provision inserted in H.R. 3082, the Continuing Resolution for government funding passed in December, which undermined the federal definition of a “highly qualified teacher” in the No Child Left Behind Act by allowing states to label teachers as “highly qualified” when they are still in training – and, in many cases, just beginning training – in alternative route programs.

This provision – inserted in the law without notice to concerned public stakeholders and without public debate – codifies a Bush-era regulation that was challenged by parents of low-income students of color in court because their children were disproportionately taught by such under-prepared teachers and because the regulation removed the obligation of states and districts to disclose and rectify the inequity.

The provision seeks to reverse the recent federal appeals court ruling these parents obtained, which held that the regulation patently violated NCLB’s unambiguous requirement that only fully prepared teachers be deemed “highly qualified” and that, as such, teachers still in-training must be publicly disclosed and not concentrated in low-income, high-minority schools.

Our concern with this provision (and with any federal policy that reinforces the unequal allocation of fully trained and certified teachers to all students) is that it disproportionately impacts our most vulnerable populations: low-income students and students of color, English language learners, and students with disabilities who are most often assigned such underprepared teachers.

Further, this provision hides this disparate reality from parents and the public by disingenuously labeling teachers-in-training as “highly qualified” and hindering advocacy for better prepared teachers.

Research confirms what logic and experience dictate: that teachers-in training are significantly less effective in supporting student achievement than those who are fully trained when they enter teaching, and that the negative effects are particularly pronounced for students whose success depends most acutely on fully-trained professionals.
We believe that students with the greatest needs should have the best-prepared and most effective teachers to support their success, and that pursuit of that goal should be the purpose of federal policy.

In the coming weeks, we will propose specific actions to the Administration and the Congress that can achieve this goal, including repeal of this provision and development of a transparent definition of teacher quality, along with a set of policies that will allow the nation to put a well-prepared and effective teacher in every classroom. We will work tirelessly and in concert to see that policy is enacted that will support high-quality teaching for every child.

Respectfully,

Action United
Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment
Alliance for Multilingual Multicultural Education
American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education
American Association of State Colleges and Universities
American Federation of Teachers
ASPIRA Association
Association of University Centers on Disabilities
Autistic Self Advocacy Network
Bay Area Parent Leadership Action Network
California Association for Bilingual Education
California Latino School Boards Association
Californians for Justice
Californians Together
Campaign for Fiscal Equity
Campaign for Quality Education
Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning
Center for Teaching Quality
Citizens for Effective Schools
Coalition for Educational Justice
Council for Exceptional Children
Council of Parent Attorneys and Advocates
Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund
Easter Seals
ELC, Education Law Center
FairTest, The National Center for Fair & Open Testing
Higher Education Consortium for Special Education
Justice Matters
Latino Elected and Appointed Officials National Taskforce on Education
Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law
Learning Disabilities Association of America
Los Angeles Educational Partnership
Movement Strategy Center
NAACP
National Alliance of Black School Educators
National Center for Learning Disabilities
National Council for Educating Black Children
National Council of Teachers of English
National Disability Rights Network
National Down Syndrome Congress
National Down Syndrome Society
National Education Association
National Latino/a Education Research and Policy Project
National League of United Latin American Citizens
Parent-U-Turn
Parents for Unity
Philadelphia Education Fund
Public Advocates Inc.
Public Education Network
Rural School and Community Trust
RYSE Center
School Social Work Association of America
Teacher Education Division of the Council for Exceptional Children
Texas Association for Chicanos and Higher Education
United Church of Christ Justice & Witness Ministries
Youth Together

cc: Arne Duncan, Secretary of Education, U.S. Department of Education

Why, Laura M. Claverie, Do Tell Us About KIPP

From the sweeping veranda of her Garden District home, Laura Claverie likes to sip a long cool drink with the well-liquored ladies of the New Orleans Junior League and imagine a time when the help will be as well-behaved and attentive as those staring and chanting children they have just visited over at KIPP Central City on the other side of the expressway, you understand.

As a Southerner myself, I am quite familiar with the bored and preening privilege of the Junior Leaguers, those ladies whose husbands control enough wealth in their respective communities that their Christian women, between breast implants, spa treatments, and botox injections, can go about the town getting their names in the newspaper for acts of charity.

As a result of their good works, these ladies are given over, after a few mint juleps, to offering opinions on any number of matters of social import, all unearned by any real knowledge of how the world operates outside their cognitive and social bubbles that are as impervious as the wrought iron fences that keep any wandering winos off the front lawn.

Laura, pictured above vamping for a photo spread with other Junior Leaguers for the Summer 2005 issue of Lagniappe, has drawn the duty as KIPP Ambassador, which obviously involves bringing her white lady friends after lunch at the Pontchartrain over to the contained and segregated children of KIPP Central City who then parrot their routines for these tight smiling white faces of New Orleans' social elite.

Here's Laura's piece from the Times-Picayune, proving that she is doing her job, or should I say, work. Job sounds so plebeian, don't you know:

KIPP school is a gem

Saturday, January 29, 2011

For the past year, I have had the distinct privilege of being an Ambassador for KIPP New Orleans Schools. I bring friends to area KIPP schools to see the phenomenal education the young students are being given.

After a recent visit to KIPP Believe College Prep on Carrollton Avenue, a friend told me, "I live three blocks from this school and had no idea what a little gem this was!" After the KIPP Central City tour this week, two of my friends asked how they could volunteer or help in any way. 

What is it about the KIPP schools that is so impressive? 

In each school I have toured, the students are enthusiastic about learning, articulate in expressing their ideas and points of view, have high goals for the future and want to achieve the best life has to offer.

They accept the longer school days, week and year and respond to the loving discipline and structure the talented teachers give them. Parents support their education and are involved in the schools in every capacity. 

My beautiful Garden District home is five minutes from KIPP Central City. In the eyes of these children, I don't see a future filled with violence and drug use, like the neighborhood that surrounds the school. I see a future for our city and country that is industrious, innovative, educated and respectful of others.

KIPP schools are a gift to our children and our city, and I am most grateful. 

Laura M. Claverie
New Orleans

Dept of Education's Solution: More Tests

The Department of Education's Solution: More Tests

Sent to the NY Times, Jan 31, 2010

One article in the Times described the profound problems children are facing in school because of the economy ("Teacher, My Dad Lost his Job. Do We Have to Move?" 1/31). Another described the conflict over whether beginning teachers will be fired when New York cuts the education budget ("Bloomberg Presses Cuomo on Teacher Seniority Rule," 1/31). Articles also appear regularly about cutbacks in public and school libraries.

Meanwhile, the US Department of Education is spending huge sums for increasing testing far beyond the already unacceptable amount done under No Child Left Behind. According to the department's Blueprint, as well as speeches by Arne Duncan, they are planning pre- and post-tests to measure gains during the year, interim tests during the year, and are encouraging testing all subjects, not just reading and math.

The Department of Education clearly thinks that weighing the animal more frequently is more important than feeding it.

Stephen Krashen