More Millions Down the NCLB Tutoring Toilet

Less Public Oversight = More Corruption. The Bloomberg-Klein miracle model continues.

From the Daily News (ht to Monty Neill):

In its drive to improve school reading and math test scores, the city's Department of Education paid a private company more than $21 million in two years to tutor thousands of public school pupils at home.

But most of that money - more than twice the amount the DOE originally budgeted - went for overhead, management and profit for the company, Champion Learning Center.

Champion got $79 an hour to tutor each pupil for up to four hours per week, according to a copy of the contract obtained by the Daily News.

That adds up to almost $320 a week in tutoring costs per child.

Champion paid its part-time tutors, mostly college students with no teaching experience, an average of $17 an hour.

That's right. The company received an astounding $62 in overhead for every hour its employees spent tutoring a child.

Champion is one of dozens of private companies with state approval to provide tutoring services under the No Child Left Behind Act.

"We received very little training in our orientation," said one college student hired by Champion. "They just told us to follow the instructions in the test prep workbooks they gave us." . . . .

Retiring Teachers and Brazen Fools

For those who have embraced the TFA/KIPP teacher "education" model, which promises an endless stream of well-intentioned temps "trained" over a 4-week period in 19th Century teaching techniques, there is a new report out by NCTAF that may present reasons to pause if you have not been entirely convinced by the anti-teacher education deformers. From the NYTimes:

Over the next four years, more than a third of the nation’s 3.2 million teachers could retire, depriving classrooms of experienced instructors and straining taxpayer-financed retirement systems, according to a new report.

The problem is aggravated by high attrition among rookie teachers, with one of every three new teachers leaving the profession within five years, a loss of talent that costs school districts millions in recruiting and training expenses, says the report, by the National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future, a nonprofit research advocacy group.

“The traditional teaching career is collapsing at both ends,” the report says. “Beginners are being driven away” by low pay and frustrating working conditions, and “accomplished veterans who still have much to contribute are being separated from their schools by obsolete retirement systems” that encourage teachers to move from paycheck to pension when they are still in their mid-50s, the report says. . . .

Now with the Dunc's $5 billion ready to hand out to those states willing to embrace the cheap teacher-temp model with its prominent pay-per-score features, you can bet that those teachers who have retirement plans will be eager to get out with their retirements while the getting is good. And those who want to teach, rather than become parrots in testing work camps, will forego the Business Roundtable's opportunity to oversee the stupidification of American children. And the unacknowledged loss of America's best teachers from the testing chain gangs that were formed when Bush came to town will continue, leaving those whose love of the teaching script offers the clearest proof for their lack of fitness to teach. Meanwhile, the poorest children will continue to suffer as the neoliberal reform agenda continues to distract from the problem of poverty that the oligarchs will not address.

But the Dunc has his own preferred solution that you will hear much more of in the coming months as more and more teachers jump ship and more and more benefits and collective bargaining agreements become null and void. It involves the corporate preparation of teachers to teach in the corporate welfare charter schools that the Oligarchy envisions for urban America. At the head of this pack of self-aggrandizing profiteers is, of course, the for-profit, American College of Education, owned by Texas snake oil salesman, Randy Best's Higher Ed Holdings. It will be a teacher preparation devoid of democratic philosophies, history, sociology or developmental issues but, rather, one based on classroom discipline and the gathering and analyzing of test score data.

Resegregation Continues to Outpace Integration

By the end of the Reagan years, the U. S. had begun a disturbing trend toward resegregation of schools that has continued unabated. With the corporate oligarchy now in charge of federal education policy, we may expect this trend to accelerate as the neo-eugenic strategy of isolating and mind-scrubbing the poor in charter schools has replaced efforts to end poverty and to integrate K12 education. In fact, in large urban centers like Boston where democratic governance of schools has given way to autocracy (much to the delight of the Dunc), priority for formation of charter chain gangs is given to those who fashion these isolating institutions for poor and minority populations, thus offering explicit government sanction for apartheid schooling.

The new study is from the Pew Hispanic Center and reported by CNN:

(CNN) -- The nation's suburban schools added 3.4 million students to their rolls over the past 15 years -- and nearly all of them were minorities, according to a study released Tuesday.

Yet the new arrivals resulted in only a modest increase in the individual schools' racial and ethnic diversity, the study said.

"The school districts look like they are more diverse, but within your school districts, if the whites are in one school, the blacks in a different school and the Hispanics in yet a different school, it doesn't necessarily mean the suburban whites have more black and Hispanic classmates -- because they don't go to the same school," said Richard Fry, senior research associate at the Pew Hispanic Center in Washington, who wrote the report.

Using federal government data, Fry found that minority students made up 99 percent of the increase in suburban school enrollment between the 1993-94 and 2006-07 school years.

During that time, the student body at the nation's suburban schools went from 72 percent white to 59 percent white; from 12 percent black to 15 percent black; from 11 percent Hispanic to 20 percent Hispanic; and from 5 percent Asian to 6 percent Asian.

The diversity, however, is not reflected at the individual school level. For example, in 2006-07, the typical white suburban student attended a school whose student body was 75 percent white, down from 83 percent white in 1993-94, Fry wrote.

"So at a time when the white share of student enrollment in suburban school districts was falling by 13 percentage points, the exposure of the typical white suburban student to minority students in his or her own school was growing by a little more than half that much -- or 8 percentage points," the report said.

From another point of view, the typical black suburban student attended a school in 2006-07 that was 34 percent white, down from 43 percent white in 1993-94. . . . .

During Test Week the Poor Kids Get Breakfast in Philly

In Philadelphia, the school CEOs (once known as principals), who report the system CEO (once known as superintendent), who report to another CEO who we once knew as mayor, are all in agreement that poor children should be given time to eat breakfast, at least during Test Week. The rest of the year, drill time (once known as school) is too important to give up for feeding the population (as they say in prison), even though a third of poor kids come to school hungry every day.

With the Dunc's pay-per-score plan financed and ready to "roll out," along with the accelerated conversion of poor schools into the "no excuses" charter chain gangs modeled on the KIPP brainwashing camps, we may expect that it will be more and more difficult for poor kids to get something to eat when they get to school--except, of course, during Test Week, when the staff's salaries for next year are being determined by children who are to be well fed for at least a week--unless, of course, the children are too nervous to keep down what they eat.

How many atrocities must be accumulated before the the American people say ENOUGH. From the Philadelphia Inquirer:

By Alfred Lubrano

Inquirer Staff Writer

Students in Pennsylvania schools can eat breakfast in their first class of the day with a teacher present and it will be counted as instructional time, the Department of Education has announced.
The new ruling is important because many principals typically have resisted in-class breakfast service, saying it detracted from instructional time.

Numerous studies show that breakfast is vital to learning and that in-class service has proved the most effective means of getting children to eat the meal, said Leah Harris, a department spokeswoman.

Seizing on the change, Philadelphia advocates for the hungry say the city school district should mandate breakfast service during the first class every day.

"It should be required throughout the system," said Jonathan Stein, a lawyer with Community Legal Services long involved in school-meal programs. "And principals should be evaluated on whether they ensure children eat breakfast."

Referring to a district spokesperson's statement that principals are afforded a good deal of leeway and often resist in-class feeding as "kings of their fiefdoms," Stein added, "The days of laissez-faire should be history. More direction from the top is needed."

The Inquirer reported last week that principals typically push in-class food service during testing periods, when their performance is being judged. But during the rest of the year, they don't seem to make the same effort to ensure that children eat morning meals. . . .

Chicago Charter School Teachers Vote to Join Union

From WGN:

There's another first in Chicago's decade-plus history of charter schools: a teachers' union.

After a year of meetings, teachers at three campuses of Civatas Schools' Chicago International Charter Schools filed notice Friday with state and local officials that they had voted to form a union.

The teachers at three campuses of the Civatas Schools' Chicago International Charter Schools have been meeting for nearly a year to consider forming a union and recently the majority of teachers voted to support the move.

While the charter school has 12 campuses in Chicago, the vote only affects teachers at three locations: Wrightwood, 8130 S. California Ave.; Northtown Academy, 3900 W. Peterson Ave.; and Ralph Ellison, 1817 W. 80th St. The three campuses have about 115 teachers, the majority of whom voted to join, officials said.

Emily Mueller, a high school Spanish teacher at Northtown Academy, said she was one of the first teachers to begin working to form a union in the living room of one of the teachers nearly a year ago.

Mueller said that among the main reasons teachers wanted union representation was for job security. Currently, teachers at most charter schools are given yearly contracts that must be renewed spring. Similarly, pay raises for the following year are often determined on a case by case basis at the school, Mueller said.

She said that teachers wanted more of a say in the number of classes they teach as well as better benefits.

"We have felt that we needed more of a voice with decisions being made at our school, some teachers felt they wanted more job security," Mueller said. "The administration has an obligation to sit down with us and bargain collectively."

Officials said that three-quarters of the teaching staff signed documents to be the first unit represented by the Chicago Alliance of Charter Teachers and Staff, an affiliate of the Illinois Federation of Teachers and the American Federation of Teachers. . . .

No Oversight, More Child Abuse: The Labrew Case Two Years Later

In May of 2007, the AP was writing about unconscionable practices at one of Milwaukee's "choice" schools, where children were being served bread and water for discipline infringements.

Someone in Milwaukee should be asking why it took almost a two years to shut this voucher hellhole down. You can bet that this kind of government-sponsored child abuse would never be condoned in the public schools. One can only hope that some "accountability" is handed out to the political cowards who allowed this to continue, despite a mountain of complaints from the community.

The latest from Folkbum:

I got forwarded the following letter, by Glenda Haynes, about LaBrew Troopers Military University School. There was an email attached to the letter (Haynes emailed later to offer an edited-for-typos version):

I was the K5 teacher at Labrew the school that I have worked to close down after seeing daily abuse of the children; sponsored by our tax dollars. I wrote President Obama, Gwen Moore, Feingold, the Mayor, Governor and DPI. I had the building inspector notified, the health department and called child protection and gave the names of almost 17 children; but there are hundreds more that have been abused. I have contacted an attorney for a class-action law suite for the children. Child protection went to the police on last 3/27/09 and the police came to talk to me that same day. I have provided recordings of the meetings concerning the abuse and video. Myself as well as two other teachers have come forth on the kids behalf. And with all this the police tells me that because none of the children have been injured where they have gone to the hospital they may not pursue it, and this was said to me before they had even talked to children, teachers, or listened to my tapes. They say they may just go after him for money fraud concerning the use of the voucher and food monies. I am angry.

As the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported this morning, the school is indeed closed, and has been since March 9, apparently because the withholding of nearly $400,000 in voucher funding has left the school without funds to continue. This is different from what Haynes says here--and what she told me on the phone--which is that investigations begun by Milwaukee's Child Protective Services and the Milwaukee Police Department her contacting the city (corrected) halted operations. I mean, not that either one of those is a good thing for the school, not at all. But I should note the discrepancy. . . .

Stealth Bill in Oklahoma Set to Blow Up Public Schools

The conservatives are at it again. You have to wonder which wunderkind from the right-wing sludgetanks came up this newest strategy to dismantle public schools by destroying the state statutory system that maintains standards and practices for public schools--everything from state curriculum frameworks to rules for class size, teacher credentialing, to school libraries, to the qualifications of school nurses and bus drivers. The legislation, Senate Bill 834, just sailed through the Oklahoma Senate on a party line vote, and has passed the first committee hurdle in the House. Unless Oklahoma parents and teachers act quickly, this coming fall will bring the beginning of the end of the state system of public education in Oklahoma.

What the legislation does is give local boards all the jurisdiction and discretion that now resides at the state department of education. It would give local boards the same discretion as charter schools, except that local boards would have to accept all students, which, of course, charters do not:

A school district identified by the State Board of Education for participation in the School District Empowerment Program shall be exempt from all statutory requirements and State Board of Education rules from which charter schools are exempt as provided for in the Oklahoma Charter Schools Act, except that the district shall continue to be required to enroll all students who are residents of the school district.

So how is a school district "identified by the State Board of Education for participation" in this dismantling? Beginning in the Fall of 2010, all school systems with any schools on the NCLB hit list of "needs improvement" will be eligible for deconstruction. Then from 2011 to 2014, 20 percent of districts each year that meet a particular enrollment criteria will be randomly selected by the State Board for meltdown. At the end of 2014, there will be no state level governance of public schools in Oklahoma.

With changes coming to NCLB that threaten the scheduled dismantling of public schools that NCLB required, the conservatives have come up this new strategy to hasten the end, thus erasing the gains in public education and taking us to the middle of the 19th century in terms of standards and governance of public schools. If you think that fascists like Grover Norquist have taken a holiday, think again. Here, in Oklahoma, is their agenda about to burst into bloom.

STATE OF OKLAHOMA

1st Session of the 52nd Legislature (2009)

SENATE BILL 834 By: Ford

AS INTRODUCED

An Act relating to schools; establishing the School District Empowerment Program; stating purpose; exempting certain districts from certain statutory requirements and rules; specifying certain requirement; identifying districts for participation and implementation of program; specifying method of selection of remaining districts and timeline for implementation; providing for codification; and providing an effective date.


BE IT ENACTED BY THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE OF OKLAHOMA:
SECTION 1. NEW LAW A new section of law to be codified in the Oklahoma Statutes as Section 3-129 of Title 70, unless there is created a duplication in numbering, reads as follows:

A. There is hereby established the School District Empowerment Program which shall be administered by the State Board of Education. The purpose of the program is to empower locally elected school board members to govern school districts and make decisions based on the needs of their students and circumstances.

B. A school district identified by the State Board of Education for participation in the School District Empowerment Program shall be exempt from all statutory requirements and State Board of Education rules from which charter schools are exempt as provided for in the Oklahoma Charter Schools Act, except that the district shall continue to be required to enroll all students who are residents of the school district.

C. School districts which include a school that has been identified for school improvement for the 2009-2010 school year by the State Board of Education pursuant to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, as amended, 20 U.S.C. 6301 et seq., shall be identified for participation in the School District Empowerment Program and shall implement the program beginning in the 2010-2011 school year.

D. 1. By September 30, 2010, the State Board of Education shall randomly select twenty percent (20%) of districts from each of the following categories for implementation during the 2011-2012 school year:

a. districts with an Average Daily Membership (ADM) of less than two hundred fifty (250),
b. districts with an ADM of less than five hundred (500) and greater than or equal to two hundred fifty (250),
c. districts with an ADM of less than two thousand (2,000) and greater than or equal to five hundred (500), and
d. districts with an ADM of two thousand (2,000) or more.
2. The selection of districts as directed by this subsection shall:
a. occur during open meetings of the Board,
b. occur each year thereafter, for implementation by the districts selected during the following school year, until all districts have been selected to implement the program, and
c. be applicable to the number of districts in each category as of September 30, 2010, to allow for all districts to be selected by September 30, 2014.

SECTION 2. This act shall become effective September 1, 2009.

52-1-11 KM 1/14/2009 4:54:26 PM

Bracey Offers the Answer Sheet on NAEP

Posted at ARN:

If I or Jim Popham, or Bob Linn or anyone who has worked in the field of psychometrics constructed a test of "assessment literacy," most of the Fourth Estate would fail. Today's low grade goes to Sam Dillon of the NYT (who recently received a compliment from me for noting that comparing a huge, diverse nation like the US with tiny city-states like Hong Kong and Singapore doesn't make any sense). A low mark to anyone else who reported the following from a conference call with Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan: "student math and reading scores on local tests, as well as on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a federal test that is more difficult."

No. They will not be reporting SCORES since SCORES on state tests and NAEP would not be comparable (but, to cut Sam some slack, it is possible that it is Mr. Cliche Man, Duncan, said that; Duncan managed to conduct a 38 minute interview with Ed. Week editors and reporters and another with the Washington Post's Lois Romano without saying ANYTHING).

What the states will be reporting are the percent of students reaching the various NAEP achievement levels and the equivalent proficiency rates, passing rates, meets standards, etc., on state tests. These are not SCORES. As I have shown over and over, the NAEP achievement levels are ridiculous (see for example, "Oh, those NAEP achievement levels" in the September 2005 Principal Leadership or "A test everyone will fail" in the May, 3, 2007 Washington Post, also at www.huffingtonpost.com/gerald-bracey).

This is not the paranoid position of a lone crank. I am in the company of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Education, the Government Accounting Office and the Center for Research in Evaluation, Standards and Student Testing as well as individual psychometricians. Before the Bush administration declared war on science, the NAEP reports themselves carried disclaimers including quotes from the National Academy of Sciences like this: "NAEP's current achievment setting procedures remain fundamentally flawed. The judgment tasks are difficult and confusing; raters' judgments of different item types are internally inconsistent, appropriate validity for the cut scores is lacking; and the process has produced unreasonable results."

VALIDITY lacking? UNREASONABLE results? Fundamentally flawed? Sounds worse to me than credit default swaps. Why didn't IES at USDOE ban them as not being derived from "scientifically based research?" (It actually might be a good thing to make Reid Lyon head of the National Assessment Governing Board, the agency produced these monstrosities). The achievement levels were supposed to be used only until something better could be produced. That was almost 20 years ago. But, of course, no one is working on anything better. Why? Because the results from the current procedures build such wonderful cudgels to bash schools with.

Among the "unreasonable results" are that American students scored high on some international tests of reading, math, and science, but only a small percentage ever reaches the "proficient" level on NAEP In the most recent NAEP reading assessment, only 33% of 4th graders were deemed proficient or better. Richard Rothstein and colleagues, in a perfectly straightforward procedure estimated that the highest scoring nation in one reading assessment, Sweden, would have about 33% of its kids proficient in reading if Swedish kids had to sit for NAEP (at the time of Rothstein's study, 31% of American kids reached this level).

So states will or will not become eligible for stimulus money based on invalid criteria. This is not change we can believe in. But don't look for them to change soon. In his speech to the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, President Obama said "just a third of our 13- and 14-year-olds can read as well as they should." For extra credit, guess where that statistic came from.

Jerry Bracey
Port Townsend, Washington

Fenty Shoves Out Rhee Opposition and Hires Former Spellings Lieutenant

From WaPo:

Mayor Adrian M. Fenty named a former Bush administration official yesterday as his state superintendent of education, replacing Deborah A. Gist, who has resigned to become Rhode Island education commissioner.

Kerri L. Briggs, former assistant secretary for elementary and secondary education under Margaret Spellings, will manage the $380 million agency. The agency's responsibilities include special education, distributing federal grants and setting academic standards.

. . . .

Last year, Gist asserted that she had authority over Rhee's plans to restructure schools deemed to be failing under the No Child Left Behind law. But she was overruled by D.C. lawyers. Her name has surfaced in several recent national searches for superintendents, including in St. Louis. . . . .

And so another voice is eliminated from the opposition to the corporate takeover of public education in America. And if you doubted the role of Broad and Gates and the other oligarchs, here is an infomercial, On Leadership: Eli Broad, from the oligarchs' favorite media charity case, the once-great Washington Post

KIPP Reform Schools Come to Pre-K: The Classes of the 2020s

The reform schoolers and child fixers of the early 21st Century, the ones inspired rather than repulsed by the morally-challenged machismo of the Feinberg-Levin KIPP model, could be easily confused with the reform schoolers and eugenics enthusiasts of the early 20th Century, when the new science of efficiency determined that poor children, immmigrant children, and other social burdens needed a special educational treatment to make the white middle class adult world safe from the effects of the growing epidemic of poverty and from those with defective germ plasm.

Now with an Adminstratation that has ceded the U. S. Department of Education to the corporate oligarchs and the dystopian dopes like Marc Tucker who draw up plans whose breadth is a measurement of the empty spaces between their ears, the stage is set for the imposition of a cradle to workplace or cradle to prison education system of contract schools that will be capable of absorbing the growing throngs of the poor, as our country becomes third-worlded by the rapacious raptors of greed who are devouring the world's wealth and who are now in charge of the social control system that is the American School.

Our new version of apartheid schooling that is being rolled out and scaled up (you have to love the irony of this assembly line metaphor, yes?) is, of course, based the sado-masochistic cage schooling of KIPP, the test-til-you-puke direct instruction approach, and topped off with the "positive" psychology character building of former CIA consultant and abnormal psychology expert, Dr. Martin Seligman. With billions in federal dough available for new KIPP stores and their chains of imitators, the plan is coming together to convert poor children to future-focused corpuscular automatons. Perhaps one day they will not even notice the crack vials that crush under their tiny feet or the bullet whizzing by them on their way home from their "extended" work days. And yes, this new part of the miracle starts in Houston, too:

At KIPP Shine, the original primary campus that Brenner founded, students use the extended day to learn Spanish, reading and math. They play soccer, participate in the arts, and undergo character development.

Children are also taught the importance of preparing for college.

“It’s never too early to start climbing the mountain to college,” said Frank Cush, leader of the new East End campus. “We don’t call them kindergartners. We call them the Class of 2022.”