Getting a Rise from the Risible: Tilson and Buck Tag Team

Whitney Tilson was so exorcised yesterday by the post I did on David Brooks's lies about KIPP that he has made it the centerpiece of his daily email round-up of all the news that he deems of use to the corporate crusade to segregate and psychologically sterilize brown and black poor kids in corporate welfare charter schools.

Here's Mr. Tilson in his email to fellow hedge fund managers who specialize in tax-sheltered corporate giving to other corporations that are running the corporate charter schools and collecting the tax dollars to run them (what a deal):

. . . . I’ll be curious to see how Ravitch responds to David Brooks critique of her.  So far, her only response that I’m aware of is to tweet a link to Jim Horn’s blog post (http://twitter.com/#!/DianeRavitch/status/87517206040158210) entitled Lies, Damn Lies, and David Brooks, which wins the award for Most Idiotic and Demonstrably False Post of the Year (no wonder Ravitch likes it so much!).  In it, Horn questions whether KIPP students get exposure to:

“chess programs, Shakepeare [note that Horn can’t even spell it correctly], philosophy, or physics in a KIPP school.  Not even chief hedge fund KIPPster propagandist, Whitney Tilson, would make up such an obvious lie.  The amount of argument, on anything, in a KIPP school or one of KIPP's knock-offs, is between negligible and none, and if Shakespeare or philosophy is ever mentioned, it is most likely on one of the thousands of worksheets these children fill out every year.  Has KIPP ever fielded a chess team or dance team?  Not even a mention on any of KIPP's websites, much less in a news article.”

3) Fortunately, I don’t have to rebut this delusional lunacy (hey Jim, why don’t you actually VISIT a KIPP school before writing about them???), as Stuart Buck, on his blog, The Buck Stops Here, does it for me, quickly finding eight separate KIPP web sites that talk about how students are exposed to a rich curriculum, including, chess.  Here are the first three examples Buck cites:

Not a mention of chess or dance on any of KIPP's websites? How about the following:

1. KIPP's mainpage:

After a long day of hard work, KIPPsters enjoy the chance to express themselves in creative ways. Music, art, sports and dance are just a few examples of the programs available in KIPP schools across the country. Many KIPP schools have activities such as basketball, track, lacrosse, step teams and chess clubs. These extracurricular opportunities work together with our academic programs to create a well-rounded experience for our students.

A look inside the music program at KIPP Academy in New York City demonstrates the benefits of KIPP's strong arts curriculum. KIPP Academy students play everything from classical pieces to modern R&B and pop music, and the orchestra has performed across the nation. In New Orleans, KIPP McDonogh 15 has an incredible jazz band, while in Los Angeles KIPP Academy of Opportunity has an extraordinary, high-energy drum line. These KIPP schools exemplify KIPP's commitment that students will work hard while still having fun.

2. From KIPP Delta's website:

On April 17th, engineering students competed in an electric car race in Pensacola, Florida and won. There were many different participants in high school and college level.  Also on April 17th, a group of students competed in the state chess tournament. 

3. Part of a list of activities on the KIPP TEAM (New Jersey) website:

Drumline
Chess Club
Film Club
Yoga Club
Fight Club

An impressive list of five schools out of 100 with at least an example of extracurriculars for KIPPsters "after a long day of hard work," as the KIPP Home Office likes to put it.

Still nothing curricular has turned up on Shakespeare, physics, philosophy, or argument, even with the help of crackerjack grad student, Stuart Buck, who is working on a doctorate with Jay Greene and the scholars of the Walmart-funded Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas.

Buck, too, is a published author, with a book (Acting White: The Ironic Legacy of Desegregation) that, no doubt, is one of the common readers for the hedge funders' corporate education book club.

Publisher's Weekly entire review (my bolds):

Buck, Arkansas University doctoral fellow in education reform, enters the black-white achievement gap debate with a review of anti-academic attitudes among some black students, who dub school achievement as “acting white”; he finds its roots in “what was lost when schools were desegregated.” Buck fears misinterpretation (“no one should read this section as suggesting that we should go back to segregated schools”) as he delineates the costs of losing the schools as community centers, the concomitant loss of black teachers and principals as “academic role models,” and the detachment of black parents and students. “Desegregation,” he argues, then “set the stage for the 'acting white' criticism to emerge in the school setting,” as black students met hostile receptions from white students and teachers. Buck's proposed solutions are implausible—and almost risible: one, since “humans are tribal,” some students should be in “an all-black environment that includes black teachers and principals,” the other to replace individual grades with “regular interschool competitions, supplemented by small rewards for winners on a group basis.” Overstuffed with evidence showing he “examined literally thousands of sources over the past several years,” the result is a repetitive mélange of education philosophy and anecdotal history. (June)

So Whitney, you are half-way there, pal, in terms of the future Dr. Buck's dream of containing the "tribal" urges within segregated camps where the black and brown can be culturally neutered and behaviorally brainwashed with the "small rewards" from KIPP paychecks. If you guys can just figure out how to replace the white missionary temps from TFA with black ones, you will, indeed, have the final solution.

Finally, if I had a chance, I would tell Mr. Tilson the same thing I told a KIPP cultist who showed up at my presentation at AERA, asking if I had ever been to a KIPP school:  Sir, it did not take a visit to the the WW II concentration camps to understand what was going on there.  But even so, most people chose to look the other way.

If NEA and AFT Gave $1 Per Member to the Save Our Schools Rally

Millions of teachers pay hundreds of millions in union dues each year so that bosses, Dennis and Randi (along with their posses of lawyers), can sit with the Political Elites and Oligarchs as they perfect their plans to deskill and deprofessionize teaching, corporatize public schools, reduce resources by hooking children up to computers, and to generally create paper unions that serve the needs of the Oligarchs.

A great example of the doubletalk duplicity and cowardice can be found, or not found, rather, on NEA and AFT websites.  Each organization has purportedly endorsed the upcoming parent and teacher march and conference in DC July 28-31, but how would the millions of teacher members know, even if they scoured AFT's or NEA's websites?  Not a mention, anywhere.

Imagine if NEA and AFT actually publicized their endorsement and gave a fifth of a penny of every dollar they collect from members in dues to transport teachers to DC for this march?  That would amount to about one dollar for every member, or about $4 million.

But then, imagine 4 million members deciding to demand that the best way to be at the decision-making table of the Oligarchs is not to be waiter or the busman, or to shine the shoes of Gates and Broad and the Waltons as they feast.  Imagine, too, if 4 million members decided to make a table based on the principles of a democratic republic, rather than a banana one.

Today Save Our Schools is trying to raise $5,000 to cover expenses for putting together the Washington event.  This is coffee change for Dennis and Randi.  Where is their support?

Here's where the support is.  Just an example: Bill Gates bought his keynote address spot at AFT's Convention last year with a $217,000 grant to AFT a month before the convention. This was followed by another grant as the convention hats were being handed out in July 2010 of $3,421,725 to induce agreement among AFT affiliates with the Oligarchs' agenda.

Do you think AFT could afford to help Save our Schools to come up with $5,000 for poster board?

Online Predator Colleges Go After the Easy Billions in GI Bill

Interview with Senator Harkin from Frontline:

Back in June 2010, you announced plans to hold hearings on for-profit higher education schools. What's behind that decision?

We looked at the increasing amount of money going from the government loan program and the Pell Grant program to these for-profit schools. It just seemed to be a huge spike-up, and we were kind of wondering what was going on there.

“Private equity firms, hedge funds own these schools and are making a lot of profit and not really giving that much of a benefit to these students.”

 

Then we got reports from some students who had been at these for-profit schools and had contacted us about how they felt they'd been ripped off and they hadn't received what they thought they were receiving.

So one thing led to another, and that's why we started to investigate.

When did the issue of vets and for-profits come to your attention?

We started our investigation last year and started getting data. We found that there was a huge spike-up in the amount of military money going to these schools -- 600 percent increase in just a couple of years -- a huge increase. So we started looking at that, and what we found is just really disturbing.

You described it as a slap in the face. What did you mean?

Well, in Congress, we passed a bill to say that look, the GIs of today -- that's the veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan -- should get the same educational benefits as the GIs of World War II and the Korean War and Vietnam War. And we did that in good faith.

What we didn't count on was the for-profit schools then seeing this as a way of increasing their profits and maybe not providing the best educational benefits. There's private equity firms, there's hedge funds that own these schools, and they are making a lot of profit, and they're not really giving that much of a benefit to these students, and that's why I call it a slap in the face to our veterans.

Look, these veterans get this benefit one time; it's a one-time shot. And if they don't get a quality education that can really help them with their lives, they'll never get it again. But the hedge funds and the private equity firms that own these for-profit schools, they get the profits.

Why would a veteran or an active-duty serviceman or -woman sign up with a for-profit?

There are some benefits to being in the service and accessing distance learning. Even when I was in the military some 40 years ago, the University of Maryland had a great program -- still has a program -- providing distance learning to our troops.

At that time, it was all paper, and now they've moved into the electronic age. So this distance learning can be very helpful to a young person in the service who's stationed in Iraq or Afghanistan or anywhere.

You say that the for-profits, though, are taking advantage of this new money that's come free. Why have they been more successful in growing faster than their competitors in the nonprofits here?

They put more money into recruiting. For example, the for-profits spend upward of maybe 30 percent in just recruiting, in advertising. The nonprofits don't do that. They don't have that kind of access.

And the few for-profits that are in there are going after our GIs -- when I say GIs, I mean those on active duty and those who are now veterans and getting the VA [Veterans Administration] benefits -- both groups are being targeted by the for-profits with very aggressive advertising and targeting.

But there's a couple of reasons why these for-profit schools have targeted the military. Number one, a lot of the times [these students] don't have to go out and borrow additional money. So that helps. Secondly, a little known fact is that we have a 90/10 rule that these for-profit schools can only get up to 90 percent of their money from the government student-aid programs. The other 10 percent they have to get from the students or other sources.

So the student has to go out and take out a loan.

Or something. Well, there's a little quirk in the law that military benefits don't count on the 90 percent side.

So 100 percent can be paid for by the military benefits programs.

Absolutely. So a for-profit school, they want to go out and recruit military people because they can get the military people in, and it doesn't count on the 90 percent. So they could be getting 95, 96, 97 percent of their money from the government, yet still fall under the 90 percent rule.

The for-profits are more expensive. Their tuition is higher than the University of Maryland, for instance, or some of the other schools that have for a long time served veterans. So why would a veteran sign up with a for-profit if he can get a better deal with a nonprofit?

I don't know the answer to that question other than that the for-profits do a much better job of recruiting and advertising than the nonprofits do. Let's face it: The nonprofits don't make a profit, so they're not heavily into advertising and promoting.

Because they don't have the budget.

The nonprofits just simply don't have the budget for it. And the other thing that's happening now is that these for-profits are going after the spouses and children of our GIs. That's who they're targeting now.

But that is legal. That's part of the legislation that you passed.

As I say, it's legal. But are they really providing a good educational benefit to the spouses and the children? That's the real question. And our data shows that that's not happening; that, quite to the contrary, a lot of the spouses and children that are signing up are being taken advantage of. And they're spending their government money, taxpayer money. The hedge funds and the private equity firms are making a big profit, and yet the spouses and the children are not getting a good education.

The schools say that they're doing as good a job as anybody else and that they are serving the underserved.

Are they serving them in a manner where the underserved maybe gets a little few things, but they don't really get a good education?

What's the evidence that they are not giving vets a good education?

We know about the dropout rate. We looked at the number of students they recruit and what their growth is in the student population. But how many did they recruit to get that increase? For example, [one school], in one year they increased their enrollment by 27,000, but they enrolled 371,000 students to get that 27,000 growth.

What happened to the other 300-and-some-thousand students? Where did they go? They just sort of paid their money and disappeared.

So it's what you call "churn"?

It's what we call churning. They're churning students. It's a bad business model.

Here's what's wrong with this picture: A for-profit school makes the most profit by enrolling the poorest students. That's why they target the poorest students. Why? Because the poorest students get the most Pell Grants and the biggest student loans, and therefore that money goes to the for-profit schools; they keep that money as a profit. And quite frankly, they don't really have a stake in what happens to that student. That student drops out after a year, they keep the money, and the student's gone.

They would say the longer they keep a student enrolled, the more money they're going to make, so therefore it's in their interest to keep them there.

Well, either that or they churn the students and they make their money on new students coming in.

But to do that, they'd have to spend a lot of money on recruitment.

And they do spend a lot of money on recruitment and advertising.

They say, look, we're serving the underserved; we're serving a part of the population that traditional universities have turned their back on and that it's to be expected that among this cohort there's going to be a high level of dropouts, because you're dealing with people whose circumstances are such that they live more on the edge. What do you say to that?

I would say that if they really want to serve that population, maybe they should make a little less profit and put more of that money into supporting services for these poor students. We do that at other colleges. We do it at community colleges; we do it at our public universities.

There are many programs to help support students who come from those kind of poor backgrounds that don't have the kind of support mechanism to enable them to really get a good education. The for-profits provide very little if any support. They bring in these students; they promise them the sky. They promise them they're going to get great jobs and a good education, and then they're on their own.

You say support services. What should the VA do? What should the Department of Defense do?

First of all, the Department of Defense and the VA has got to start tracking that money and what happens to these students. And through our investigations, we're now asking the for-profit schools to give us a breakdown: How many of these new recruits that they're bringing in are military, and what's happening to them?

Are they cooperating?

We've started asking them for that data, and we'll see if they're going to cooperate. If not, we may have to take more stringent steps.

The VA says they've been overwhelmed with just getting this program up and running and getting the money out the door, and they say that down the line, they need to do a better job of informing students about what their choices might be. Is that acceptable?

That is not an acceptable answer. They need to do a better job of tracking this money and what's happening.
Look, in 20 for-profit schools that we tracked, the amount of military money in four years went from $66 million to $521 million. In four years! That's a 683 percent increase in four years.

Sounds like a good business to invest in.

That's why AMU -- the American Military University -- had been bought by these private equity firms. That's why hedge funds are getting into this business. Anytime you see hedge funds getting into education, you've got to ask, wait a minute, hedge funds are in there to make the biggest profit they can and in the shortest amount of time that they can. And so you've got to really start asking some questions: What is going on here?

As it was explained to us, the mechanism was that the VA relies on State Approving Agencies [SAAs] to certify whether these schools should be eligible for GI benefit money. How good a job are the State Approving Agencies doing, in your view?

We had some of these approving agencies before our committee, and quite frankly, they're not doing a very good job. In many cases, some of these agencies are being paid by the very schools that they're accrediting. So do they want to not accredit a school that's going to pay them?

We found a lot of abnormal behavior out there from these accrediting agencies that went out and gave accreditation to some of these for-profit schools. Through our investigation by the GAO [Government Accountability Office], they found a completely different picture than what the accrediting agency found.

So I think there's some real problems with the way accrediting agencies are established, who pays them. And if the schools they're accrediting are the ones that are paying them, are they really doing a good job of accrediting?

What we found is that in the military program, they just basically give the money to the student and say goodbye. They don't care where they go or what school they attend to. They do no accounting on that; they do no supervision of that; and they don't track it.

So you're a legislator. What are you guys going to do about it?

The reason we've had this investigation going on for about a year is to make sure we've got a clear picture of what was happening. There are other hearings that we'll be doing.

I hope sometime this year we will have a package of legislation that we'll be proposing that will hopefully start to change the picture on these for-profit schools.

We just can't continue to go down this path. Look at it this way: These for-profit schools right now are taking 25 percent of all of the federal student aid money -- 25 percent -- yet they're only covering 10 percent of the students.

And when it comes to vets, they're taking 36.5 percent.

They're taking 36 percent of all the money that comes to the military. That's exactly right. But what's happening to these people? Are they getting a good value for the money that they're spending at these for-profit schools? That's sort of the bottom line.

You've been here for a while in Congress, in the Senate, and you've seen a lot of lobbyists come and go. How do they match up, the for-profit school lobby, in terms of their power and capability?

The for-profit school lobby here in Washington is very powerful. And they're powerful on both sides of the aisle, I will add.

A lot of my friends who have been members of Congress in the past are lobbyists for the for-profit schools. The for-profit schools hire a lot of powerful lobbyists. …

But again, that's indicative as to how much profit there is in these schools. I'm not opposed to the profit motive, but how can you call yourself a for-profit school when 95 percent of your money comes from the taxpayers? Is that for-profit? They're just taking advantage of the legislation that we had passed to make these huge profits in these schools.

You have to look at a little bit of the history here. Most of these for-profit schools had their genesis back around World War II. They started out as technical schools [for] a young person who didn't want to go to a four-year college, wanted to be an auto mechanic or a diesel mechanic or an airplane mechanic, or some technical work. Or [for] young women who wanted to be stenographers or court reporters, they went to these schools. And these schools were basically for-profit schools, but they did a good job, because they were training a segment of the population for jobs that the four-year colleges were not doing.

But what happened is they then morphed. As legislation changed and as we got more money into student loans and student grants, people always know how to make a buck. So they morphed into these institutions like the University of Phoenix, in which you can take just about any course you want. And you wonder, does that really lead to a good job or not?

And as they morphed into these huge entities, hedge funds, private equity firms, the geniuses on Wall Street figured out how to make more money out of them. And I'd say probably in the last 20 years they have grown, and in the last several years they've grown exponentially.

Given the power of the lobby, given the amount of money that Wall Street has at stake here, are you going to be able to pass legislation in the current environment that really makes a difference?

Well, I'm hopeful that reason will prevail here and that members of Congress on both sides of the aisle will say this is not sustainable; this is not good. This is taxpayer money. Are these students getting a good value for that? And what about the recruiting techniques, where they go after the poorest students and yet these students don't get any support, and they churn these students every year?

And there's one other thing that we've got to come to grips with here. These poor students are borrowing money. These for-profit schools will go out and recruit them, and they'll say you don't have to do anything; we'll fill out all the paperwork; we'll submit all this, and we'll get you the loan; you won't have to do a thing. And so the student signs their name on the dotted line. They get the loans, and then the student drops out.

The for-profit school keeps the money; the student keeps the debt. And what a lot of these young people don't know is that debt is not dischargeable in bankruptcy; that debt is around their neck for the rest of their lives. They can't get another student loan. They won't be able to get a house or a car or anything else because they've got that debt hanging around their neck, but they have no way to pay for it. And that to me is one of the worst aspects of this.

Read more: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/educating-sergeant-pantzke/tom-harkin/#ixzz1R5T1yCJO

Civil Disobedience and Non-Violent Resistance by Students in Tucson

Phoenix has the only high school Ethnic Studies/Mexican American Studies program in the United States.  Here's what students thought about the racist notion to bring that program to an end.  Below the video is a clip from a piece at HuffPo:

While the occasional spasms of extremist rhetoric and legislative initiative are often dismissed as nutty episodes in Arizona Gone Wild politics, some observers are wondering if state Superintendent of Public Instruction John Huppenthal crossed the line of lawlessness in his latest Ethnic Studies bombshell announcement.


In short: Did Huppenthal commit a felony at his extremely odd press conference this Wednesday at the Arizona Department of Education in Phoenix if he knowingly presented the results of an independent audit of Tucson's Ethnic Studies/Mexican American Studies Program in a false manner, in order to justifying his ruling that the program was out of compliance with the state's controversial Ethnic Studies ban?
 
While the Tucson Unified School Board voted today to appeal Huppenthal's decision, the Ethnic Studies teachers' attorney Richard Martinez also announced his intention to file a preliminary injunction to halt Huppenthal's 60-day deadline for the school district to bring the program into compliance or lose 10% of its state funding.

Despite Huppenthal's charges to the contrary, the 120-page audit concluded: "During the curriculum audit period, no observable evidence was present to suggest that any classroom within Tucson Unified School District is in direct violation of the law A.R.S. 15-112."

Huppenthal, who campaigned for the state's top education post last year with the inflammatory slogan that he was "one of us" and would "stop la raza"--raza means race or people in Spanish, and refers to the Mexican American community -- used the audit results by the private Cambium firm as part of his rationale to find the Ethnic Studies Program in violation of the state law for promoting resentment towards a race or class, advocating ethnic solidarity, and using a curriculum designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic race.

But, for example, did Huppenthal violate Arizona Article 38-423, which refers to public officers, and stipulates: "A public officer authorized by law to make or give any certificate or other writing, who makes and delivers as true such a certificate or writing containing a statement which he knows is false, is guilty of a class 6 felony"?

At his press conference and in a written statement, Huppenthal specifically noted:

The materials gathered by, and submitted to, the Arizona Department of Education, as well as the materials the auditors reviewed contained context promoting resentment towards a race or class of people.

In truth, the audit results contradicted every single one of Huppenthal's charges, including his misrepresentation above. According to the audit:

No observable evidence exists that instruction within Mexican American Studies Department promotes resentment toward a race or class of people. The auditors observed the opposite, as students are taught to be accepting of multiple ethnicities of people. -- pg. 55

To be fair, Huppenthal did note that the "two-thirds of the final audit report was beyond the scope of the legal determination I am making today." . . .

LA Times has not done its homework

Sent to the Los Angeles Times, July 3, 2011

The irony of the Times' article on homework ("Homework overload," July 2) is that the Times has not done its homework. Missing is any mention of the extensive research that has been done on whether homework is useful. In fact, readers of "Homework overload" come away with the impression that the topic has never been investigated.

A good place to start: Alfie Kohn's book, published in 2006, The Homework Myth: Why Our Kids Get Too Much of a Bad Thing, which includes an extensive review of academic and non-academic effect of homework.

His conclusion: "Research generally doesn't substantiate the belief that children need to do homework." (p. 71).

Stephen Krashen

Lies, Damn Lies, and David Brooks

David Brooks was the latest Diane Ravitch corporate savager until the New Republic's senior dolt, Jonathan Chait, strode in yesterday in the flyweight division of clueless corporate ed deformer commentators.  I'll get to Chait's thought disorder in another post, but first I must say something about that sweet-smiling fascist-next-door type, David Brooks, whose smarmy swipe at Diane Ravitch has gotten a lot attention among the Business Roundtable ed industry types who can't decide, at this point, whether to wait for Arne Duncan to be burned in effigy in Washington, DC before they take their bags of dirty money and head for the hills.

For, alas, there is a storm brewing among educators and parents against BRT, RTTT, and the Gates/Broad/Walton education oligarchy, as witnessed yesterday in actions by the tepid ranks of NEA delegates, who passed a resolution called "13 Things We Hate About Arne Duncan." 

Ravitch will have her own fun dissecting Brooks's lame attack on her, but it is this snippet I cannot let pass:

In sum, Ravitch highlights a core tension. Teaching is humane. Testing is mechanistic.

This is true, but look at which schools are most distorted by testing. As the education blogger Whitney Tilson has pointed out, the schools that best represent the reform movement, like the KIPP academies or the Harlem Success schools, put tremendous emphasis on testing. But these schools are also the places where students are most likely to participate in chess and dance. They are the places where they are most likely to read Shakespeare and argue about philosophy and physics (emphasis not mine).

Now there have been many exaggerations created by KIPP's multimillion dollar marketing machine in order to frame KIPP's segregated 10-hour a day culture-scrubbing chain gangs as the ultimate child civil rights intervention, but this truly reaches a new level of monstrous myth-making in terms of content.  Most likely to learn chess, read Shakespeare, and argue about philosophy and physics? Whoa, David!

Jay Mathews is corporate media's expert on KIPP, and not even Mathews, in all his fawning over Levin and Feinberg in his book and in his endless promotion at WaPo or in interviews, even mentions chess programs, Shakepeare, philosophy, or physics in a KIPP school.  Not even chief hedge fund KIPPster propagandist, Whitney Tilson, would make up such an obvious lie.

The amount of argument, on anything, in a KIPP school or one of KIPP's knock-offs, is between negligible and none, and if Shakespeare or philosophy is ever mentioned, it is most likely on one of the thousands of worksheets these children fill out every year.  Has KIPP ever fielded a chess team or dance team?  Not even a mention on any of KIPP's websites, much less in a news article.  (There is a news story this week on KIPP's latest corporate madrassa in Jacksonville getting an "F" on Florida's new school rating system that asks children to write).

No doubt Brooks would like to assuage his under-developed neoliberal conscience with the self-delusion that the children in KIPPs and the KIPP wannabes have given up their childhoods for something, at least, of some value.  After all, a real education might take some of the bad taste off the years of psychological brutality and behavioral neutering that these children suffer as they learn the Seligman way of absorbing any level of abuse heaped on them as preparation for the Oligarchy's global economy.  Sorry, David, that's just not the case.  If you want to find schools with rich curriculum, go where the rich are.  Try Westchester County, or Bethesda, where you live, David.  The real question, David: would you send your own children to these schools that you tout as most likely to teach Shakespeare, philosophy, and chess?

Alfie Kohn speaks out against academic jibberish

"… there are ways that researchers can maximize their impact on public policy. First, they can make more of an effort to publicize their findings and those of their colleagues … To communicate those findings, of course, requires that we speak and write in a language that is widely understood. Some scholars have slipped so far into the stylized talk – excuse me, discourse – of academia that important ideas are rendered virtually incomprehensible to most people. Because it sometimes seems that scholarship is valued by other academics in direct proportion to its inaccessibility, some individuals may have an instinctive aversion to writing in simple sentences even if they could remember how to do so. The reality is that we contribute usefully to a discussion about testing when we explain clearly why higher scores do not necessarily signal better learning. We do not contribute usefully when we ramble on to a general audience about point-biserial correlations – or, for that matter, about liberatory praxis."

(Aflie Kohn, 2003; Professors who profess. http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/professing.htm)

Chomsky's insight and the discussion of national standards and national tests

"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum - even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there's free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate." Noam Chomsky

Clear example: Vigorous debate over the content of the standards and national tests. Should we require specific 18^th century British novels? If so, which ones? Excluded from the discussion: Should there be national standards and national tests?

Smells Like. . .Another Strawman Argument

Genuine dialogue feeds the essence of a free and democratic society as well as a classroom dedicated to human agency and democratic principles. But this foundational principle veers away from its fertile possibilities and toward corrosive results when the voices driving the dialogue stop being informed and slip into predictable patterns that fail all sides of the debate.

As a New York Times columnist, David Brooks is the steward of a privilege held by few, which makes his recent column on Diane Ravitch's role in the current education reform debate even more troubling.

Brooks is no amateur in the education market place of ideas, having spurred the robust charter school miracle narrative that is mostly ideology and public relations. Like his hasty and inaccurate claims of "miracle," Brooks' rebuttal of Ravitch fails for a recurring reliance on the strawman argument as well as sweeping and simplistic claims not supported by evidence.

Early in his confrontation of Ravitch, Brooks lets the reader know more about himself than Ravitch: "She picks and chooses what studies to cite, even beyond the normal standards of people who are trying to make a point. She has come to adopt the party-line view of the most change-averse elements of the teachers’ unions: There is no education crisis. Poverty is the real issue, not bad schools. We don’t need fundamental reform; we mainly need to give teachers more money and job security."

Mixed in with his snarky tone, according to Brooks, Ravitch is not offering evidence-based commentary on education; she is simply a mouth-piece for the unions (a weak swipe for a journalist of his stature akin to putting babies and kittens in a TV commercial), a cherry-picker posing as a scholar, and a defender of the status quo that wants us to pay teachers more without asking for any school reform.

If any of his claims were accurate, Brooks would have captured the entire argument in the above passage, but the truth is a bit more complicated—primarily because he establishes a complex strawman in the above characterization in order to have an argument.

Setting aside the people involved in the education debate, Brooks is voicing the powerful but false talking points now driving the education debate:

• Anyone disagreeing with Bill Gates, Arne Duncan, Michelle Rhee, and company is a defender of the status quo. (The truth is that many passionate educators and scholars both disagree with the new reformers and are calling for significant and radical education reform.)

• Anyone acknowledging the primary influence on the lives and educational outcomes of children—poverty—is a shill for teachers' unions and those hordes of greedy teachers draining the U.S. as we speak. (Yet, a basic knowledge of the history of education reveals that public education has been demonized and under the weight of "crisis" discourse since the mid-1900s; and the evidence is clear that poverty outweighs teacher quality in student outcomes.)

• Public education is clearly a failure because we can identify charter schools that excel despite serving high-poverty populations. (Unless we consider the evidence that exposes charter schools—like private schools—produce a wide range of quality, just as public schools do.)

These talking points resonate with an uninformed public and have become powerful tools for our political leaders to keep anyone from considering deep education or social reform—radical reform that would confront the role our ruling elite has played in both the inequities of our society and our education system.

And we cannot discount the role of the media—including commentators such as Brooks—in perpetuating the status quo while claiming to be speaking against it, in speaking against ideology and shoddy use of evidence while being ideological and careless with claims of evidence.

Brooks has every right to challenge Ravitch; in fact, such weighty conflicts of personas and ideas have the potential to raise the debate and help insure that at some point we truly address social inequity and education failures. But we need Brooks to do his homework more carefully.

So here are some assignments.

Do accountability, standards, and testing produce the educational reform and outcomes we are seeking? (Read Incentives and Test-Based Accountability in Education.)

Are Hoxby's and CREDO's work on charters as simple and clear as Brooks claims? (Read "Review of How New York City’s Charter Schools Affect Achievement" and see the Hoxby/CREDO debate.)

While Brooks appears to have committed to the talking points coming from Duncan, Gates, and Rhee, we must give him credit for some abrupt and convoluted ingenuity toward the end of his piece on Ravitch: "If your school teaches to the test, it’s not the test’s fault. It’s the leaders of your school."

If we set aside the many careless errors in reasoning and evidence Brooks offers throughout his commentary, we must pause at this final comment and recognize that, again, Brooks is telling us way more about himself than Ravitch.

And what do we discover?

Like the entire crew of new reformers in education, Brooks fails this debate because he appears incapable of even imagining the life of educators who rise each morning and walk into real schools with real children and have to choose between doing what they know those children want and need or fulfilling state and federal mandates that promise only one thing—to label every person in every school a failure.

Like the entire crew of new reformers in education, Brooks fails this debate because he appears incapable of even imagining the life of anyone not benefiting from the life of privilege that he and the reformers themselves enjoy.

Poverty is no excuse, and teaching to the test is the work of shoddy administrators—who could have imagined it was all so simple?

[Originally posted at The Daily Kos]

Please sir, more tests! Feds now want to test pre-K children

The US Department of Education is planning the most massive and expensive testing program ever seen on the planet, far exceeding the already unacceptable level of testing demanded by NCLB. The feds are adding interim tests, possible pretests (to measure improvement), are encouraging testing in all subjects, and now they have announced plans to test pre-kindergarten children ("kindergarten readiness tests; http://bit.ly/kabuqh). I assume we will soon see plans for pre-school readiness testing.

There is no evidence that the new tests will help children. If they fail, students and teachers will suffer, but testing companies will keep their profits and will get to try again.