Chicago Charter to Students: "Track Me" or Pay Up!

"Track Me!" takes on a whole new dimension when students and their parents are fined for failing to kowtow to every total compliance whim of the slimebags who run the corporate charter reform schools.  In Chicago, these crooks are taking in hundreds of thousands in fines every year from some of the poorest families in Chicago.  Where the hell is the ACLU or the lawyers of the Advancement Project???  Helloooo.

The piece below on the Ignoble Network of Charter Schools is from Melissa Harris-Perry's page.  When you download the 990 from 2010, check out the salaries on p. 7.  In 2013 this one outfit, alone, will soak up $70 million in Chicago education funds intended to support public education:

Chicago charter schools rake in thousands in ‘disciplinary fees’

Traci G. Lee, @traciglee

9:40 pm on 01/03/2013

A student at Noble Street College Prep does classwork at the school in Chicago in February. (AP Photo/M. Spencer Green)

As public funding for Chicago charter schools increases, so do questions about accountability and governance within these publicly-funded–but privately-run–institutions.

According to the Chicago Public Schools’ 2013 budget, charter schools will receive nearly $483 million in funding, up more than 13% from funding in 2012. The resources are significant for the expanding charter school network within the city–particularly Noble Network of Charter Schools–which serves nearly 8,000 students across a dozen campuses. The organization’s most recent non-profit filing shows that Noble receives the lion’s share of CPS funds allocated to charter schools, and they are expected to receive $69.9 million in 2013.

But a recent report raises red flags on the lack of accountability at one of Noble’s charter schools. Marsha Godard, a parent at Chicago Bulls College Prep, told DNAinfo Chicago that she paid nearly $2,000 in fees to keep her son at school:

Godard said her son, Tavonta Gray, 16, had been suspended 15 times. Held back as a freshman last year, he was required to take a summer behavioral session in order to return this year—at a cost of $1,400. Godard estimated he has also rung up about $300 in fines this year along with additional ones last year.

Godard’s son was fined for various offenses, including an unkempt appearance and not making eye contact. Other items in Noble’s strict student code include ”chewing gum, possessing soft drinks or energy drinks like Red Bull, eating chips, not tucking in a shirt after being warned and carrying a permanent marker.”

This is not the first time the Noble Network has received criticism for the fees. In February,parents protested the Noble Network for charging fees as disciplinary action. According to theChicago Tribune, Noble raked in approximately $200,000 in disciplinary fees  in 2011 and almost $400,000 since the 2008-09 school year.

Under Article 27A of the Illinois Charter Schools Law, charter schools in the state “shall not charge tuition,” but are permitted to charge “reasonable fees for textbooks, instructional materials, and student activities.”

Angela Montagna, a spokeswoman for Noble, defended the fees, telling DNAinfo that it engaged parents. “When it’s in their pocketbook, they’re much more involved.”

Chicago charter schools have also been the target of labor unions, who have argued that expanding charters is a union-busting tactic.

For Rhee and Corporate Reform Schools, the Gig Is Up

The Face of Corporate Reform Schooling

From Stan Karp:
Former Washington, DC Superintendent Michelle Rhee and her organization, Students First, will be the subject of a PBS documentary tonight. Despite misrepresenting her own teaching career, presiding over an extensive cheating scandal, and getting poor results during her tenure as Supt., Rhee has become the media face of corporate education reform. She recently released a “state report card” grading states on the basis of how thoroughly they have adopted proposals for test-based teacher evaluation, charters, and privatization. States with more funding equity and better academic performance generally received lower grades than states that passed legislation advancing Rhee’s political agenda. In NJ, Rhee has been a favored ‘reform’ partner of the Christie Administration. Her Students First NJ affiliate is “Better Education for Kids” a lobbying group backed by Republican hedge fund billionaire David Tepper.

The Education of Michelle Rhee

Frontline, PBS Documentary, airs Tuesday 1/8

‘Frontline’ raises questions about test-score tampering under Rhee

Washington Post

The Empire Michelle Rhee Built

Esquire

Michelle Rhee’s new state reform report card

Valerie Strauss, Washington Post

NJ Touts Educational Reforms But Earns ‘D’ on One Nationwide Report Card

NJ Spotlight

Parent report card for Michelle Rhee and Students First

NYC Public School Parents

Rhee Can't Play Both Sides Anymore

Jersey Jazzman

NJ Department of Education pitches 'softball' newsletter to hide knuckleball reforms

Marie Corfield, Blue Jersey

NJDOE monthly newsletter for educators

NJDOE Teacher Advisory Panel

Comments on C. Chomsky (1969): Stages in language development and reading exposure

“… perhaps wider reading should find a place in the curriculum”: Comments on Chomsky, C. 1969. Stages in language development and reading exposure. Harvard Educational Review 42 (1): 1-21.

S. Krashen

Carol Chomsky’s analysis of the order of acquisition of complex grammatical construction received a lot of attention when it was first published in 1969. Chomsky studied children’s ability to understand, for example, that the subject of “see” in: “The clown is eager to see” is the clown, but in “The clown is easy to see” the subject of see is not the clown but somebody else.

This study was noticed for several reasons: First, Chomsky found that acquisition of these complex constructions took place after age five, after the age when basic language acquisition is considered to be complete. Second, Chomsky reported that the order of acquisition was similar among children, but there were clear differences in rate of acquisition.

But another result of her work is just as important, and has profound implications: Children who were more advanced, who reached higher levels of syntactic development, had more exposure to books and/or had read more. Exposure to books was measured in a variety of ways, including the number of syntactically complex books the child was familiar with and scores on a measure of familiarity of the content of well-known books, poems and stories from children’s literature (the Huck Inventory). The results were similar regardless of the method used to probe exposure to books.

Chomsky also reported that for younger children (age 6), syntactic development was related to how much the child had been read to. Six year olds with the highest level of development had heard 17,500 words in read-alouds in one week. Those with the least had heard none (Chomsky’s table 5).

For older children (ages 7-10), syntactic development was related to how much reading the child had done. Among older children, those at higher stages reported more reading on their own, more visits to the library and more books taken out of the library (Chomsky’s tables 6 and 7).

Chomsky concludes that her results do not support the direct teaching of syntax. Rather, the implication of her results is to make more language acquisition possible, “ … by exposing the child to a rich variety of language inputs in interesting, stimulating situations” (p. 33). She concludes with this suggestion: “… perhaps wider reading should find a place in the curriculum. The child could be read to, stimulated to read on his own, not restricted to material deemed ‘at his level’ …” (p. 33).

Chomsky’s discovery of a predictable order of acquisition and variability of rate in acquisition has been confirmed for first and second language for a variety of structures, and the relationship between reading and language development has also been repeatedly demonstrated. These robust results, widely published and disseminated, have been ignored by those creating detailed standards that call for a uniform rate of acquisition, and that encourage the use of direct instruction rather than reading.

NOTE: Standards that include grammatical constructions do not consider their natural order of acquisition, but if they did, this would not justify direct teaching along the natural order: The emergence of structures along a predictable order is the result of acquisition via comprehensible input, in this case, reading.

DC Charters Kick Out the Problem Children and Keep the Compliant Ones

A clip from an investigative report by WaPo that details expulsion of 6 year old KIPP student:

. . . .Greenfield said the D.C. school system is far from perfect and too often relies on suspensions, including long-term suspensions of up to 90 days, to deal with bad behavior.

The city’s traditional public schools use long-term suspensions more often than charter schools, imposing nearly twice as many in the past academic year, according to school data. That year, 2011-12, 601 students were suspended from traditional schools for more than 10 days as punishment for a single incident; 327 charter school students received similarly long suspensions.

But unlike expulsion, suspension does not allow a school to give up responsibility for a difficult child, Greenfield said.

She pointed to the case of a homeless 6-year-old her organization represents. He attended three D.C. public schools in preschool and kindergarten before enrolling this academic year in first grade at a KIPP DC elementary campus, part of one of the highest-performing charter organizations in the city. He was expelled in September.

(Donald E. Graham, chief executive of the Washington Post Co., is a member of KIPP DC’s board of trustees.)

School records show that the boy was suspended for a day after throwing a kicking-and-hitting tantrum. His mother met with school staff members to devise a behavior-management plan for the child.

A few days after returning to school, he ran into trouble again— curling up on the floor, wetting himself accidentally and throwing another tantrum. Records show that the episode began in a classroom, where he scratched a child, and ended hours later in the principal’s office, where he threw objects, punched, spit and screamed.

Over the summer, the child had been found to have an adjustment disorder related to the stress and instability of living in poverty, his mother said in interviews with The Post, a diagnosis she divulged to school officials after the second tantrum. The Post is not identifying the family to protect the young boy.

“Our appeal to them was to basically not make this another school’s problem, and get the student some help within this system,” said the family’s attorney, Timothy Riveria of Advocates for Justice and Education.

The principal expelled the boy, and a panel of KIPP DC administrators upheld that recommendation, according to school records. The boy then enrolled at Payne Elementary in Southeast, the school closest to the homeless shelter where he lived. He attended that school until the family moved to Florida in late November.

KIPP DC’s chief executive, Susan Schaeffler, declined to comment on the case because of privacy concerns. . . . .

The TFA PR Machine Even Works in the Critics

Walt Gardner has a post on the TFA PR machine, and in it he shows exactly how effective the TFA PR machine is by perpetuating the lie that TFA teachers perform as well as, or better than, professionally-prepared teachers.

The protracted recession has caused many graduates from top-tier schools to put their real career plans on hold and take their knowledge and skills to the classroom through TFA. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they perform as well as, or even slightly better than, traditionally certified teachers. To the extent that such performance helps students who otherwise would be shortchanged, I commend TFA. But let's not forget that there is hubris associated with TFA ever since it was the subject of Wendy Kopp's senior thesis at Princeton.

Come on, Walt, you can do better than that.  Just in case your google machine is broken, here is this sidebar from a Barbara Miner piece in Rethinking Schools, just to get you started on the right track:

Are TFA Recruits Better Teachers? The Mathematica Study One of the controversies swirling around TFA is the teaching quality of its recruits. To answer this question, Kerci Marcello Stroud, TFA’s communications director, pointed me to a 2004 Mathematica study on Teach for America. She specifically noted that the conservative education policy journal Education Next gave the report an “A” for methodology and that three other studies, including a 2005 study by Linda Darling Hammond and others from Stanford University, received a “C” or lower. I went to the Mathematica study and, quite frankly, wondered why TFA was promoting it. I imagined how the Onionmight summarize the study: “Teach for America goes up against the worst teachers in the country—they’re both awful!” The Mathematica study involved 17 schools across the country, 100 classrooms, and nearly 2,000 students, and thus could be considered a representative, one-year snapshot. The study’s executive summary notes that the control group for the TFA teachers consisted of other teachers in the same schools and at the same grades—teachers with “substantially lower rates of certification and formal education training” than a nationally representative sample of teachers. In addition, the study said that many of the control group teachers had no student teaching experience at all and were less prepared than the TFA recruits. The Mathematica study, using the Iowa Test of Basic Skills, found that there were statistically insignificant differences in reading achievement for students in the TFA and control classrooms. In math, students in the TFA classrooms faired slightly better—equal to one month’s extra teaching. The Mathematica study also found, however, that TFA teachers “had no substantial impact on the probability that students were retained in grade or assigned to summer school.” A closer look at the math and reading results shows that neither the TFA group nor the control group was even beginning to close the achievement gap. In math, the TFA teachers bumped their student math scores from the 14th to the 17th percentile. The control group stayed flat at the 15th percentile. In reading, both the TFA and control group teachers marginally raised reading scores, from the 13th to the 14th percentile for the control group, and from the 14th to the 15th percentile for the TFA recruits. This, as Center for Teaching Quality head Barnett Berry notes, “is essentially virtually no gain at all. These [TFA] students were still reading more poorly than 85 percent of their peers nationwide, and well below grade level.” Teach for America boasts about its impact, noting on its webpage: “[O]ur corps members and alumni work relentlessly to increase academic achievement.” Yet in a study touted by TFA, the students of corps teachers remained far below their national peers and made only marginal gains. Darling-Hammond’s Houston Study "Does Teacher Preparation Matter?” is a peer-reviewed, scholarly evaluation of the effectiveness of the TFA approach, published by Linda Darling-Hammond and three other Stanford University colleagues in 2005. Reading through the study, one can see why TFA doesn’t like the results. The study is a longitudinal, six-year look at data from Houston representing more than 132,000 students and 4,400 teachers, on six different math and reading achievement tests. (TFA has sent recruits to Houston since 1991, and this year has more than 450 corps members teaching there.) “Although some have suggested that perhaps bright college graduates like those who join TFA may not require professional preparation for teaching, we found no instance where uncertified Teach for America teachers performed as well as standard certified teachers of comparable experience levels teaching in similar settings,” the study states. The study also found, however, that teachers who gained certification, including TFA teachers who became certified by their second or third year of teaching, increased in effectiveness. At the same time, few of the TFA teachers stayed in the Houston schools for long. Based on district data, the study notes that “generally, rates of attrition for TFA teachers were about twice as high as for non-TFA teachers.” For instance, of those who entered in the 1998 school year, 85 percent had left the Houston public schools after three years, compared to about 55 percent of non-TFA teachers. ­ —B.J.M.

Follow the Gates Money

A graphic worth considering from Adam Bessie:

Follow the Gates Money

Adding Value to the Worthless?

Why Embrace 19^th Century Assessments for the 21^st Century?

Guest Commentary by Stephen Stollmack

Public education is part of the conceptual framework of this country. Most accept the basic format of a homeroom teacher keeping the younger children all or most of the day, phasing into different teachers, each one responsible for one of the menu of subjects laid out for every child based on his or her age.  Most probably recognize that their children are facing an environment much different from the one they grew up – with ‘high-stakes testing, on-line classes, entirely new Standards for developing classroom modules based on significant advances in the knowledge-base for most every subject and increases in class sizes due to budget cuts and the list goes on and on.  At the same time, college costs are going through the roof while we are hearing that approximately 25% of college graduates can’t find full-time jobs. Even parents who are aware of these changes are unsure of how education needs to change to ‘keep up with these times.’  

High dropout rates, budget cuts, and pressures being exerted by the government (to convince parents that the corporate owned or controlled school model is better) all combine to make taking sides difficult.  Further, with their jobs demanding more and more time and effort, most parents find it hard to keep informed on complex education issues, such as:  implications for teaching of what science has recently uncovered about how humans learn; the arguments for and against privatization; where to draw the line against further increases in class-size; the pros and cons of basing teacher pay and job security on how their students answered some multiple choice questions; or the use of computerized online course modules with technical assistants to replace teachers.  

Making all these issues more difficult is the fact, as stated by Robert Freeman,[1] that we still have not resolved the struggle between the two dominant education models:

One model views schools as a process of cultural birth, of bringing forth a new generation of children who will carry on - replicate - the culture. The other model views schools as a machine, an industrial process not unlike an assembly line. Its purpose is to mass produce "factors of production" -- well trained obedient inputs that can be used in the manufacture of wealth.

The government (at federal, state and district levels) is exerting pressures on schools to accept the latter model -- the Industrial Model view.  One’s judgment, among these two models, depends on how one views the future. For example, information that robots are going to do most of the ‘work’ (even diagnostic tasks) in the future has to affect how you feel about which education model is more appropriate.  With the cost of College being so high, people with moderate to low incomes have to consider whether the expense is worth it especially when the Bureau of Labor Statistics is reporting that most new jobs will not require a college degree.[2] One has to wonder; ‘what kind of jobs are they thinking about for the next generation of HS graduates and what will the future job market look like?’

The view (of the future) that I see includes:  

·       Further consolidation of companies which produce and distribute the goods (we feel to be essential for our lives) into internationally centered production and distribution centers;[3]

·       Growth of Human Resource (HR) management companies that ‘mine’ and manage the stream of HS and College graduates (directing them -- according to their grades and test scores -- to one or the conglomerates they contract with); these HR companies will also link to and network Post Secondary Schools with districts that feed them HS graduates and they will grow based on their reputation for obtaining and interpreting student test score data from state and district run databases (such as those being ‘rolled out’ by the about forty some Race-to-the-top (RttT) grant states).

·       Centralized multi-national banks with the conversion of all currency into a unified credit system;

·       Databases maintained by every state populated with test scores, classes taken, grades, health records, DNA profiles, incarceration and arrest records, and psychological and socioeconomic data for each student;

·       More and more collusion between the private sector and local school districts.

All this suggests how difficult it is to guess what our president is thinking about by supporting all this testing on one hand while admonishing teachers not to ‘teach to the test’ on the other. 

I have puzzled over this question for months going through periods where I would rant at his image and swear that I was not going to vote for him.  But I kept coming back to the feeling that he was a good person who must identify with the terrible plight of young black and brown k-12 students, who obviously (by virtue of his warnings of about not teaching to the test) knew that too much testing and the use of test results to evaluate teachers, at the very least, has and will continue to foster cheating, deterioration of student views of the value of their education, to high levels of tension and a to a general reduction in the likelihood of producing graduates capable of rational and logical problem-solving thinking or the confidence to voice or logically test their own intuitive solutions. 

Then I began to think that maybe he sees testing as a chance to level the playing field at least to the point where it might be easier (for the more challenged kids) to move on to the next level (relying on rote memory rather than the ability to reason, abstract and interpret relationships into the future or to different settings) and let the ones who want and can do better find their own way.  I tried but I could not put the words together and I kept falling into traps, and ending up questioning whether or not I was showing signs of ‘racist’ beliefs.

Then I read Deborah Meier’s December 26, 2012 piece[4] quoting material she had written 31-years ago:

“The task of returning testing to its proper place will be difficult….Our belief in democracy–that normal every day people can make sense of their world and learn to make decisions about it– is at stake…There…is arising a renewed interest in educational tracking…and in new legislative proposals to support private education… All these anti-egalitarian trends….are nourished by the renewed focus on testing.”

This wonderful quote continues:

“To the ideologues of the New Right, the focus on testing appears correct and proper, since the free play of market forces ‘naturally’ produces inequality.”

I repeated to myself; “free play of market forces ‘naturally’ produces inequality.”  

It sounded so ‘spot on’.  But then I asked myself, ‘would the ‘new right’ even have considered not endorsing a methodology for measuring teacher performance based on the fact that it might be detrimental to students’ mental growth?’ I don’t think so.  I think that most successful business people attribute their success to in-born capabilities more than to their teachers.  Furthermore, people who belong to organization like the BRT (Business Roundtable) must know that 25% of our college graduates can’t find jobs and be afraid, that even our better students will be getting beat out by those from other countries.  So, this suggests that they would favor reforms that they thought would make the upper half of the ‘bell-shaped’ curve score even higher and forget those at the lower end.  But this argument is also flawed because, in reality, they probably had no clue as to how more testing was going to affect the average student’s ability or apparent intelligence. Support for increased testing simply grew among business leaders because they viewed schools as production units in an industrial system; since they were putting so much money into the system, they wanted proof that those hired to produce the product were doing a good job. 

But, what opinions might Obama have formed while he was rising to power? Did he see an education system that had already been found guilty, in the court of public opinion, of producing an internationally inferior product and did he see the problem as the schools’ apparent inability to get rid of ‘bad’ teachers?  Surely, he would have seen that most of those scoring at the bottom of the ‘Bell-shaped’ curve (and dropping out) were from inner city black and brown families and he probably would have thought that anything that gave minority children a better chance of graduating would be acceptable (for starters) even if it did risk a little regression towards the mean in terms of, say, mental growth or the amount of material learned (if one could measure either).  But, I don’t think this is a good reason to blame him; he is not the problem. 

OK, at first, Obama probably sucked up the BRT-sponsored rhetoric and the themes in movies like ‘Waiting for Superman’ and assumed that the problem was caused by bad teachers and the unions that were protecting them but he also had to have been thinking of the disastrous situations black teenagers were finding themselves in, with approximately half of them either jobless (dropped out or not) or in the military with some sort of a criminal record.  He also had to see how unpopular NCLB sanctions were with states. So, when he saw the problems NCLB were causing, he jumped in with a discretionary funded program which gave states a chance to avoid NCLB sanctions in exchange for them to agree to upgrade their standards and change their tests to reflect those standards. One has to admit, this was a brilliant strategy. Unfortunately, the program also includes the ‘value added’ method for evaluating teacher, principal, and school performance. Anyway, he went for it whole hog and I give him credit for doing that because it jolted a lot of people up off of their chairs and deepened the radicalization of others. 

The value-added methodology is full of invalid assumptions, relies on data that are unreliable and force ‘teaching to the test’ as a survival tactic for teachers. The problem is that our economy forces us to view schools as production facilities.  The Industrial Revolution has entered a new phase which emphasizes the efficient capture and deployment of human resources.  The expansion of student-test data may be seen as necessary for performing cost-benefit analyses on decisions as to whether or not to retain a teacher, but the measure they intend on using is riddled with invalid assumptions and based on unreliable data.  Among a multitude of other problems is the fact that testing kills curiosity, causes a lot of tension and does not build up children’s confidence in trying out and defending an answer, traits that are among those most sought after by companies in their new employees.

---

[1] Competing Models for Public Education: Which Model is Best? by Robert Freeman

[2] http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2009/11/art5full.pdf, p. 88

[3] While it is reported that 147 firms control 40% of transnational entities -- http://thevictorychronicles.com/2011/08/27/study-shows-powerful-corporations-really-do-control-the-worlds-finances/, a recent study done by the Small Business Administration’s Office of Advocacy -- http://www.politifact.com/virginia/statements/2011/dec/30/eric-cantor/cantor-says-small-businesses-create-70-percent-us-/ --said that “60 to 80 percent of all new jobs (in the USA) come from small businesses.” This suggests that those who decide to invest in post-secondary education (and, particularly those intending to go for advanced degrees) would be wise to begin their job searches by getting to know which of the 147 hire in your intended study area and where in the world they operate.

[4] http://deborahmeier.com/2012/12/26/weve-been-there-before/

Broad Disciple with Checkered Past Becomes New MA Ed Chief

Teachers scoring a 2.77 out of 5.0 on the new evaluation schemes proliferating across the U.S.  would face some extra "professional development" to grind out some higher scores next year.  If you are MA superintendent getting that score, however, and if you have been one of Eli Broad's "chosen" rock stars for the past decade, then you could find yourself selected by the governor to become the chief ed official in your state.  Such is the fate of Matt Malone (Broad Class of 2003), who recently escaped the likelihood of being canned by the Brockton School Committee just in time to be appointed Secretary of Education by Governor Patrick. Malone's brief stay in Brockton followed a rocky tenure at Swampscott, where he received a no confidence vote (136-8) by Swampscott teachers.

Known as a "rock star" of the corporate reform school movement since his apprenticeship in San Diego as an assistant in the cram-down corporate ed reform dictatorship of Alan Bersin before the deformers were sent packing.  Bersin, too, was once considered a rock star for playing hard and loud, but the folks of San Diego finally got tired of the same tired tune.

One thing is for sure: as long as the corporate lap dog, Paul Toner, remains in charge of the MA Teachers Association, Mr. Malone will have the blessing of the MTA. 

New Hope for Socio-Economic Integration

Richard Kahlenberg’s “From All Walks of Life, New Hope for School Integration,” updates the evidence in favor of socio-economic integration as the best single way to improve outcomes for poor children.  He also gives reason for measured hope that it can be expanded, perhaps replacing failed test-driven attempts to improve poor schools.  I remain unconvinced, however, that Kahlenberg’s wisdom will be scaled up.

Kahlenberg summarizes research explaining that socio-economic integration works because it involves all three of the essential factors of effective schools.  Low-income students in schools where less than 50% of students are eligible for free and reduced lunch are surrounded by peers that are academically engaged, have larger vocabularies, and who are less likely to disrupt class.  They also benefit from a community of involved parents, and teachers with higher expectations.

Kahlenberg cites research showing that a school’s socio-economic status has as much influence on a student’s performance as his individual status. Another study found that the racial achievement gap is likely to be smaller when black and Latino students are not stuck in high-poverty schools. He also describes the experience in Montgomery County which shows that socio-economic integration is more helpful to poor children than even school reforms that are successful.  This is particularly important given the disappointing outcomes of most instruction-driven efforts to improve high-poverty schools.

Montgomery County invested $2,000 per student in its lowest-performing schools.  It extended learning time, cut class size, and offered intensive professional development.  These schools, known as the “red zone,” produced double-digit gains for poor students.  Socio-economic integration, in schools known as the “green zone, produced even better outcomes, however.  In contrast to most of the more conventional “reforms” since NCLB, Montgomery County not only cut the math achievement gap by half, but it cut the reading gap by 1/3^rd.

Kahlenberg sets a seemingly doable goal – the reduction of economic segregation by 50%.  He persuasively recounts successes by local districts showing that it could be time to move beyond disappointing test-driven “reforms” and to break up concentrations of poverty.  He also notes that the rise of poverty in suburban districts could create venues for magnet schools that provide incentives for affluent families and top teachers to transfer to economically diverse schools.  And, he even recounts a victory on the federal front; Senator Tom Harkin favors magnet schools as an option for turning around schools under School Improvement Grants.

In fact, Kahlenberg says that Michelle Rhee, the archetypical “reformer” who has ridiculed anti-poverty efforts, has acknowledged “research shows that socioeconomic integration clearly benefits low-income kids.” So, it should be possible to persuade Education Secretary Arne Duncan to reconsider his one-legged stool – his “move-the-adults” SIG turnarounds that ignore the role of students and the community in schooling. Kahlenberg thus addresses educators’ most maddening dilemma, the difficulty of convincing many liberals and the Obama administration to look at social science evidence.

I won’t hold my breath, but what if Duncan deemphasized the punitive models that his SIG encourages and encouraged districts to devise a new model based socio-economic integration?  In districts such as my 88% low-income Oklahoma City School System, we already have a surplus of magnet schools and selective charters.  We simply don’t have enough non-poor students.  We have plenty of inner city students who surreptitiously attend low-poverty suburban schools, however. So, for systems like ours, why not help students openly cross district boundaries and attend the schools of their choice? Now that major concentrations of poverty have spilled out of central urban areas and into the suburbs, why not sponsor collaborative efforts where districts work together to improve educational opportunities for poor kids?  In fact, a similar turnaround effort could foster more equity in gentrifying urban schools.

I will admit to being predisposed to agree with Kahlenberg’s educational analysis when I read his latest update on the research.  I was still surprised, however, by the strength of his new evidence. I was equally impressed by his case that socio-economic integration has become more plausible politically.

It is sad enough that many liberals have long joined with conservatives in rejecting the best single method of overcoming the legacies of racial and economic injustice.  But, if we cannot convince Arne Duncan and President Obama to face the facts of school improvement, that would be doubly tragic.  So, I finished Kahlenberg’s article torn between the conclusion that his argument should convince the administration and other liberals reformers and the suspicion that the time has still not come for the reform that makes the most sense.

     

SCAM ALERT: Coleman as Perpetual Huckster

There's an allegory that is popular among lawyers called the allegory of the river. [1]

In this allegory, people find themselves near a river and confronted with a stream of babies floating helplessly by in the current. Many begin frantically to wade into the rushing water, saving as many babies as possible.

Then one walks away. The others are stunned and ask why this one person is abandoning the mission to rescue the babies floating down the river.

The one walking away says, "I am going upstream to find who is throwing the babies in and stop them."

•

If David Coleman found himself among these people, he would be the one crafting (and selling) a strategy to retrieve the babies from the water, and his work would keep everyone so frantic on how to save the babies (Common Core Standards for Saving Babies in the River, anyone?) that no one would pause to look at the bigger problem: Someone was tossing the babies in the river upstream.

Coleman is a perpetual huckster, skilled at his selling without having to have any expertise behind his showmanship. Since he has successfully sold the U.S. on the CCSS, a magnificent scam, he now is poised to revamp the College Board, making headlines by speaking about problems with the SAT.

Coleman seems concerned the writing section and vocabulary on the SAT are problematic. To that I say, "Welcome to my world, about 30 years too late."

If I were willing to take Coleman's bait (like the endless list of states, departments of education, professional organizations, and unions who are scrambling to trump each other with their plans to implement CCSS), I could provide a detailed examination of all that is wrong with the writing portion of the SAT (students spend more time bubbling than drafting, one-draft sample, prompted writing, etc.).

BUT that is exactly what Coleman is seeking—not a better SAT, but a flurry of how to revise the SAT!

The SAT and the standards movement have one fact in common: A perpetual state of revision insures that some people make a great deal of money and the "new" and "better" paradigm allow them to capitalize on reform.

If we wrangle over how to reform the SAT, we are distracted from asking the essential question: What is the SAT good for? (absolutely nothing)

Arguments over how to implement CCSS or whether or not the CCSS marginalizes fiction for the new frontier of non-fiction, arguments over how to revise the writing section of the SAT or whether or not the SAT should test practical or esoteric vocabulary—these are acts of futility, these are wading into the river to retrieve the babies while ignoring the need to walk up stream and stop the real horror to begin with.

Let's pause for a history lesson.

The state university system in California took a swipe at the SAT some years ago, remember? The SAT was revised!

The ACT surpasses the SAT, and bingo! Coleman makes controversial (media grabbing) comments about revising the SAT.

See a pattern?

U.S. public education does not need new standards, new high-stakes tests, or a new SAT.

But we do need to walk upstream and stop the corporate hucksters throwing babies in the river.

[1] Apologies to David Coleman for starting with fiction.