Quote of the Day or the Decade?

In order to stimulate the teachers to greater expectations, the percents were posted up in the offices of the superintendents, . . . carried about in triumph by principals, paraded in the daily papers,and published in school reports. But it was found that attaching undue importance to percents leads to the driving and cramming process, to teaching in narrow ruts . . . [and] to drive poor pupils out of school." --John B. Peaslee, 1899 (quoted in David Tyack's Seeking Common Ground: Public Schools in a Diverse Society, 2003)

Nader on Corporate Socialism

Every time I think that I have come up something original, I start to look around and try to figure out where it came from. Apparently I did not look hard enough when I started using "corporate socialism" to describe the faux capitalism that is based on taxpayer handouts to, otherwise, private enterprises. The current coinage is owed to major muckracker and good guy, Ralph Nader--at least a good guy before he decided to carve out a place for himself in political obscurity by making the 2000 election close enough for the neo-cons to steal. Here is a link to the Nader article that originally appeared in a 2002 Washington Post piece that my colleague, David McCurry, brought to my attention yesterday.

In the meantime, there is a growing understanding of and outrage against corporate socialism and its implications for democracy. The corporate welfare school concept offers a perfect lab to study this corruption at work. Here's part of a commentary from Ohio's cantonrep.com:

LET’S TAR AND FEATHER CHARTER SCHOOL SYSTEM
Sunday, December 4, 2005 MUSTARD SEEDS RICK SENFTEN

You know, if word leaked that the county engineer had sent out a few guys with a couple of truckloads of asphalt to lay a new driveway for a generous campaign contributor, people would scream. They’d want to know why their taxes were spent on a private job and who in the world OK’d this — well, let’s call it what it is — theft. They’d want the boss’s head.

Spending tax dollars on charter schools is pretty much the same scam, or would be considered so had it not been legitimized back in the ’90s by handsomely bankrolled and grandly schmoozed legislators who, by their votes, created a 297-school, $445 million industry — one that drains public schools of the dollars needed to reach education goals that charters, so far, haven’t been made to meet.

OOPS!

When his charters were launched here a few years back, David L. Brennan, chairman of White Hat Management and mega-Republican contributor, urged reporters to check the scores of students in his schools after their first year; he assured they’d do better than public school kids.

We checked. They were struggling, and things haven’t changed much since.

The charters are flopping so badly, in fact, that our lethargic governor recently worked up the energy to warn them to shape up or scram. Of course, with the backing of the Legislature, the charters are free to answer, “Yeah, right.”

Highly Qualified Teachers and Alternate Universes

One of the core lies undergirding NCLB is the claim that the Law will provide “highly-qualified” teachers in every classroom in America. But just as the “Clear Skies” initiative offers more latitude to the polluters and the “Healthy Forests” initiative gives great swaths of virgin timber to the logging companies, the “highly-qualified teacher” initiative inside NCLB disguises a policy designed to accomplish the exact opposite of its claim.

What the neo-cons at ED have done in terms of teacher quality since the signing of NCLB in 2002 is to, in fact, denigrate teacher education programs (or threaten to blow them up) and undercut professional accreditation efforts by NBPTS to offer a rigorous licensing procedure for teachers that has national legitimacy. ED prefers, instead, to offer to schools non-teachers with subject area degrees whose only exposure to the art and science of teaching (pedagogy) will have been through brief self-induced tutorials to conditioning techniques that are central to Ed’s preferred straight- jacketed model of teaching, Direct Instruction.

The evidence for ED’s preference for teachers who know nothing about teaching can be found in policy decisions that began in 2001 to support test-taking certification routes ($5 million to create the American Board Certification for Teacher Excellence) to meet the shortage of teachers that NCLB has since guaranteed through its requirement that all teachers have new competencies in all the subjects they teach. Crunch time is near.

Teachers must now have a degree in all the subjects they teach or demonstrate competence in those subjects by an ever-evolving set of proofs, including coursework, tests in the subjects, and logged hours in professional development. While we don’t know how many experienced, competent, and caring teachers have simply quit or retired as a result of these increased demands and new definitions of “highly-qualified,” we do know that increasing numbers are fed up with the denigration of their commitment after years of service to their communities.

Here is a link to a story on the situation in Charlotte, where at least one NBPTS-certified teacher is not happy:

A Kannapolis elementary school teacher who's been in the classroom for 29 years is considering quitting the profession because she wouldn't be considered "highly qualified" under the federal No Child Left Behind Act.

She has a master's degree and National Board certification, and she has led staff development at her school.

But under the federal act, she's not considered highly qualified because she has not taken the Praxis test, Kannapolis school officials say.

With an ongoing teacher shortage, that is one of the biggest concerns about No Child Left Behind, said Kannapolis Schools spokesperson Ellen Boyd.

If these new requirements were actually intended to improve teacher quality, perhaps we could overlook some of the collateral negative effects of the law, yes? I think so. What we know, however, is that these requirements were intended to exacerbate the shortage of qualified teachers in order to introduce alternative certifications outside the normal channels of normal teacher education programs. This will, in effect, lead to the de-skilling of teaching to the point that ignorance of teaching strategies will make DI an even easier sell to a "profession" that will have been effectively Walmart-ized.

ED’s new conception of “highly-qualified” became clear early in 2003, when Sec. Paige and ED endorsed an alternative certification plan known as ABCTE. A warm endorsement was offered to ABCTE in March 2003, even though the company had not even begun to develop the test that it would eventually offer as the sole determinant for judging a candidate’s ability to teach. As noted in earlier posts here and here, Paige, the former Secretary of ED, was at the National Press Club pumping the virtues of ABCTE’s “passport to teaching” a full three months before ABCTE had even contracted with a company to create the test:

March 18, 2003. Paige promotes ABCTE at the National Press Club (3 months before they announce the development of their first credentialing tool), where he says of ABCTE, “It focuses on what teachers need to know and be able to do in order to be effective, instead of the number of credits or courses they’ve taken . . . . It demands excellence rather than exercises in filling bureaucratic requirements.”

June 4, 2003. ABCTE announces it will partner with Promissor to develop the first series of rigorous exams for its Passport to Teaching certification.

June 15, 2003. The Secretary of Education endorses ABCTE (two weeks after the announcement of work starting on the first series of tests) as an approved path to the Federal requirement for "highly-qualified" teachers. Some quotes from the US DOE document available here:

The American Board “bases its certification not on whether an applicant has come up through the traditional route, such as a college of education, but on whether that teacher knows his or her academic content and classroom management skills,” says American Board president Kathleen Madigan (2003). “That’s teacher excellence—and that’s ‘highly qualified’” (p. 26). . . . Some people will argue that this change is too radical, that it’s too risky, that we should maintain the status quo,” Secretary Paige added. “Well, I agree that it’s radical. It’s radically better than the system we have now, a system that drives thousands of talented people away from our classrooms” (p. 27).

September 25, 2003. ABCTE announces the awarding of a 35 million dollar grant from US DOE.

This $40 million dollar giveaway to insider cronies for an unproven, undeveloped, and unitiated effort to certify teachers through an Internet test would be made even more galling by the White House working overtime to eliminate all federal support to the NBPTS, the one best hope for a national licensure for teachers, one already respected by every state department of education in the country.

Now it seems that the GAO investigation of how that $40 million was spent may have lit a fire under the scammers, leading to the expulsion or resignation of several members on its Board of Directors, including the esteemed Chester Finn. (One must wonder if this distancing is an effort to swim clear of the bloody waters in Washington). There is evidence, too, of a renewed effort to push this scam in local newspapers gullible enough to publish these propaganda pieces that are likely to be popping up again like Armstrong Williams editorials just after payday. Here is one that shows the propaganda in action, this one recycled from September. Recruiting good progagandists must be getting to be hard work.

As the deadline for “highly qualified” nears, one that many states will have trouble meeting, ABCTE will be waiting to certify as many replacements as they can for the the most needy schools who will get new teachers knowing nothing more about teaching strategies than using the chain gang methods that are central to the “success” of the Direct Instruction model.

Corporate Scammers Come to Oakland

If you thought the Whittle nitemare was somewhere down the road, think again. Here is an op-ed from the Oakland Tribune:

Oakland schools in need of real reform

Inside Bay Area

THIS month's $24 million question: When should you reject a gift? Answer: When that "gift" is a poison pill. When the state picked Randolph Ward, from the pro-charter school Broad Foundation, to take over Oakland schools in 2003, some smelled a corporate coup. If the onslaught of school closings and charter openings under Ward has left any doubt, he's finally made his goal clear: to privatize Oakland schools. In a nakedly aggressive public gesture, representatives of some of the world's richest men and corporations — including Bill Gates, Eli Broad, Clorox, Kaiser, Dell and Dreyer's/Nestle — joined Ward on Nov. 14 to unveil their "investment" in district "redesign." Executives congratulated themselves for throwing crumbs to a project allegedly for education. But, as the Tribune reported, the $24 million "will not bring in any new pencils, books, teachers or school buses." Instead, it buys technology and training solely to transform the district into a private business network. The investors say the district's new central office will become a "business service," and new small schools will "act as customers" who "invest in services." Donors revealed that corporate executives will now call the shots in the district. The head of the East Bay Community Foundation said his private organization will disburse funds and "communicate the bottom line" to educators. The CEO of Dreyer's celebrated the "great opportunity" provided by the district's bankruptcy and state takeover, because "we needed someone ... with Randy's authority and Randy's power. ... Now we have true ownership, and we're expecting success, Randy." Such rhetoric shouldn't be confused with newfound "corporate responsibility." Rather, it typifies the "new philanthropy" reported by Frederick Hess of the conservative American Enterprise Institute. "Hands-on corporate leaders from the new economy, like Bill Gates ... and Eli Broad," Hess says, "have exhibited little patience for educational bureaucracies or traditional giving ... while importing along with their funds a private-sector mindset regarding results, accountability, and rapid execution." The Oakland Education Association proposes a different educational vision: 15 students per class; the best facilities, materials and technology for teaching and learning; enough support staff for students' academic and extracurricular needs; and much more. OEA's vision focuses on what students need each day and is based on extensive research, experience and commitment. The district's corporate investors disregard this vision, because authentic reform costs many times more than what they currently pay in taxes or token "gifts." Each year Clorox gives its CEO 32 times more than what it will give to 41,000 students. Kaiser called its million-dollar donation "a big deal," but its 18 to 24 percent planned rate increase over two years will cost the district several times that amount. OEA has demanded that Kaiser and Health Net freeze rates to the district as a first step to support fiscal recovery. But Ward would rather pass increases on to workers who have already taken a pay cut. It's time to say no to phony reform, no to handing our children over to big business; but yes to real change and excellent schools for all. A movement of educators, students and parents can achieve this goal by demanding that Oakland's major corporations: (1) pay off the district's debt to restore democratic control to Oakland citizens and (2) commit to substantial, mandatory and ongoing contributions for genuine reforms that will dramatically improve learning conditions for all students. Craig Gordon has taught in Oakland public schools for 15 years. He is taking a leave this year to write about educational issues.

Pigs Without Lipstick

Some political analysts find significant parallels between Iraq and Vietnam, from lies told to get the wars started, to lies told to keep the wars going, to lies told to justify the declarations of victory in the face of defeat. Those of us in education who have been following the parallel wars and planned wars on Iraq and on American public schools since 2001 have our own dots to connect. The Iraq lies to get the war stoked and started are now well documented (see presidential poll data for evidence that the jig is up). Less talked about by the media and the public are the big lies behind the war on public education that began in earnest with the passage of NCLB.

The biggest lies, of course, are the one about not leaving any children behind and about closing the achievement gap. Even though the Law does carry the impossible requirement that all children will be at grade level in reading and math by 2014, this demand is as likely to be realized as the Bush team successfully imposing democracy in Iraq. If Iraq ends up with a democracy, it will not be because Richard Perle and Dick Cheney thought it was a good idea to impose one in a place that has a 50-year oil supply—but because the Iraqi people paid the price to grow the institutions and political infrastructure to make it happen. Similarly, if the achievement gap between the rich and poor is to be closed in America, it will not be because Rod Paige or Maggie Spellings declared that educators would make it happen in a civic space that is worth $450 billion a year in potential profit for the education industry, but rather, because the American people are willing to pay the price to begin to close the gaps in opportunity, housing, income, health care, and school funding. Blaming the schools for not achieving what we as a people have decided is not important is the logical equivalent of blaming the Iraqi people for not appreciating our rock-headed notion that democracy can be imposed by the U. S. military.

Victory, victory, victory. Just as the White House now lies about how Iraqi-azation is working, with 14 Iraqi brigades taking the lead in recent battles against insurgents (despite eyewitness reports to the contrary), Spellings claims that test scores show that the achievement gaps are closing. More lies. Just as the White House allows signals from Condi to bring some relief to the majority of American who support withdrawal of troops, Bush insists that staying the course is the way to victory. And while recent announcements about accepting growth models brings some psychic relief to those willing to believe that the assured failure of the public schools has been taken off the table, Spellings insists that the impossible demand of 100% proficiency has not changed.

There is one truth that undercuts all these lies. Both Iraq and NCLB are now being seen as debacles of the first order, created and implemented by arrogant, pigheaded ideologues who convinced themselves they could bully their way to undermining the true democratic values that once made this country the envy of the world. The lipstick is off both of these pigs, and there is nothing that more lying can do to make either of these trough feeders any more attractive to anyone--who is not a pig.

Kozol on Ending Apartheid Schooling in America

This article can be found on the web at http://www.thenation.com/doc/20051219/kozol

Overcoming Apartheid
by JONATHAN KOZOL
[from the December 19, 2005 issue]
Apartheid education, rarely mentioned in the press or openly confronted even among once-progressive educators, is alive and well and rapidly increasing now in the United States. Hypersegregated inner-city schools--in which one finds no more than five or ten white children, at the very most, within a student population of as many as 3,000--are the norm, not the exception, in most northern urban areas today.

"At the beginning of the twenty-first century," according to Gary Orfield and his colleagues at the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University, "American public schools are now 12 years into the process of continuous resegregation. The desegregation of black students, which increased continuously from the 1950s to the late 1980s, has receded to levels not seen in three decades." The proportion of black students in majority-white schools stands at "a level lower than in any year since 1968." The four most segregated states for black students, according to a recent study by the Civil Rights Project, are New York, Michigan, Illinois and California. In New York, only one black student in seven goes to a predominantly white school.

Click here to return to the browser-optimized version of this page.

New Scores-Same Story

The new NAEP urban district assessment test scores were released this week.

Guess what? Poor children score lower than their richer counterparts outside the poverty belts. Imagine that.

And even though the scores show much the same minimal pattern of improvement (flat in reading and small gains in math) that the October NAEP scores showed, several urban systems such as Charlotte, Austin, and New York are clamoring to occupy the peak on this mole hill. One of the best news summaries on the subject I have found was in the Kansas City Star.

Taking NCLB to the Stage in Hartford

Those within driving distance will want to check out this piece of theatre:

Through the combined styles of Hip-Hop Theater and Musical Theater, New To Me focuses on a group of young people who are given the chance to create their own TV news program. Once they decide to report on disparities in the No Child Left Behind Act, the youth face a governing group of adults who would like to “white wash” what is broadcast over the airwaves.

National Council of Churches on NCLB

Here is one to place in every mailbox.

Click here for a pdf copy of the NCC's ten “moral concerns” about NCLB:

Ten Moral Concerns in the Implementation of the No Child Left Behind Act A Statement of the National Council of Churches Committee on Public Education and Literacy

Christian faith speaks to public morality and the ways our nation should bring justice and compassion into its civic life. This call to justice is central to needed reform in public education, America’s largest civic institution, where enormous achievement gaps alert us that some children have access to excellent education while other children are left behind. The No Child Left Behind Act is a federal law passed in 2001 that purports to address educational inequity. Now several years into No Child Left Behind’s implementation, as its hundreds of sequential regulations have begun to be triggered, it is becoming clear that the law is leaving behind more children than it is saving. The children being abandoned are our nation’s most vulnerable children—children of color and poor children in America’s big cities and remote rural areas—the very children the law claims it will rescue. We examine ten moral concerns in the law’s implementation.

1. While it is a civic responsibility to insist that schools do a better job of educating every child, we must also recognize that undermining support for public schooling threatens our democracy. The No Child Left Behind Act sets an impossibly high bar—that every single student will be proficient in reading and math by 2014. We fear that this law will discredit public education when it becomes clear that schools cannot possibly realize such an ideal.

2. The No Child Left Behind Act has neither acknowledged where children start the school year nor celebrated their individual accomplishments. A school where the mean eighth grade math score for any one subgroup grows from a third to a sixth grade level has been labeled a “in need of improvement” (a label of failure) even though the students have made significant progress. The law has not acknowledged that every child is unique and that thresholds are merely benchmarks set by human beings. Now, four years into implementation, the Department of Education has stated it will begin experimenting with permitting 10 states to measure student growth. Too many children will continue to be labeled failures even though they are making strides.

3. Because the No Child Left Behind Act ranks schools according to test score thresholds of children in every demographic subgroup, a “failing group of children” will know when they are the ones who made their school a “failing” school. They risk being shamed among their peers, by their teachers and by their community. The No Child Left Behind Act has renamed this group of children the school’s “problem group.” In some schools educators have felt pressured to counsel students who lag far behind into alternative programs so they won’t be tested. This has increased the dropout rate.

4. The No Child Left Behind Act requires children in special education to pass tests designed for children without disabilities.

5. The No Child Left Behind Act requires English language learners to take tests in English before they learn English. It calls their school a failure because they have not yet mastered academic English.

6. The No Child Left Behind Act blames schools and teachers for many challenges that are neither of their making nor within their capacity to change. The test score focus obscures the importance of the quality of the relationship between the child and teacher. Sincere, often heroic efforts of teachers are made invisible. While the goals of the law are important—to proclaim that every child can learn, to challenge every child to dream of a bright future, and to prepare all children to contribute to society—educators also need financial and community support to accomplish these goals.


7. The relentless focus on testing basic skills in the No Child Left Behind Act obscures the role of the humanities, the arts, and child and adolescent development. While education should cover basic skills in reading and math, the educational process should aspire to far more. We believe education should help all children develop their gifts and realize their promise—intellectually physically, socially, and ethically. The No Child Left Behind Act treats children as products to be tested, measured and made more uniform.

8. Because the No Child Left Behind Act operates through sanctions, it takes federal Title I funding away from educational programming in already overstressed schools and uses these funds to bus students to other schools or to pay for private tutoring firms. A “failing” school district may not be permitted to create its own public tutoring program, but it is expected to create the capacity to regulate private firms that provide tutoring for its students. One of the sanctions provided is to close or reconstitute the “failing” school or to make it into a charter school, but in many places charter schools are unregulated.

9. The No Child Left Behind Act exacerbates racial and economic segregation in metropolitan areas by rating homogeneous, wealthier school districts as excellent, while labeling urban districts with far more subgroups and more complex demands made by the law as “in need of improvement.” Such labeling of schools and districts encourages families with means to move to wealthy, homogeneous school districts.

10. The late Senator Paul Wellstone wrote, “It is simply negligent to force children to pass a test and expect that the poorest children, who face every disadvantage, will be able to do as well as those who have every advantage. When we do this, we hold children responsible for our own inaction and unwillingness to live up to our own promises and our own obligations.” The No Child Left Behind Act makes demands on states and school districts without fully funding reforms that would build capacity to close achievement gaps. To enable schools to comply with the law’s regulations and to create conditions that will raise achievement, society will need to increase federal funding for the schools that serve our nation’s most vulnerable children and to keep Title I funds focused on instruction rather than on transportation and school choice. Christian faith demands, as a matter of justice and compassion, that we be concerned about public schools. The No Child Left Behind Act approaches the education of America’s children through an inside-the-school management strategy of increased productivity rather than providing resources and support for the individuals who will shape children’s lives. As people of faith we do not view our children as products to be tested and managed but instead as unique human beings to be nurtured and educated. We call on our political leaders to invest in developing the capacity of all schools. Our nation should be judged by the way we care for our children.

Spellings Funds Right-Wing Rock in High Schools

It is rare for an education issue, any education issue, to make the political blogs, so one eyebrow lifted over my coffee cup this morning when I saw this at HuffingtonPost. It seems that ED is funding a rock band to tour high schools spreading approved propaganda on drug awareness and abstinence, while selling other favorite political messages of the folks at ED. Here is a clip of the story:

In the group’s numerous school assembly appearances, frontman Bradlee Dean has covered most of the right-wing topics du jour. At one stop, for instance, Dean strongly defended the Second Amendment and said that “blaming Columbine on guns is like blaming spoons for Rosie O’Donnell being fat.”

Invoking another favorite target of conservatives – the “liberal” media and entertainment industry – Dean has repeatedly criticized them for supporting and promoting adultery, homosexuality, and abortion.

On religion, Dean has praised Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ,” and members of his entourage distributed religious literature at several stops. He has also told students that “there is nothing in our Constitution or founding documents about separation of church and state” and criticized the theory of evolution.

Speaking of science, in another appearance, Dean attacked Alcoholics Anonymous, stating that alcoholism is not a disease. He also comes armed with statistics: apparently pornography increased by a staggering 97 percent when Bill Clinton was President, according to Dean.

And perhaps most bizarrely, in at least one assembly, the boys and girls were divided into two groups for part of the performance. In the girls’ session a female staffer from the band told the girls that they “would get black spots” on their wedding dresses if they held hands with a boy and would be serving “leftovers" to their husbands if they lost their virginity before marrying a “God-fearing man.”

The Des Moines Register reported that after one 2004 performance, Junkyard Prophet handed out CDs to a few random students that bore this message: “the death sentence [is] on you due to your sins! The very evidence of your sin will be your death! It is appointed to you to die and after that you will be judged according to your ways! His judgment is so thorough every thought will be brought to the light. When all your sin against God is exposed, how will you escape the damnation of hell?"