New Physician Group - A Role Model for Teachers

Given the existence of an idealized vision of the community, movements of protest are likely to occur within the political nation when the discrepancy between the image and the reality comes to seem intolerably wide.-- J.H. Elliott

The myths that have been perpetuated over the past several decades about school reform are wearing thin as teachers, parents, students and even some of the most fervent supporters of No Child Left Behind are beginning to see the light. Even Diane Ravitch has taken off her rose colored glasses and is speaking out against NCLB. The title of her article is Obama Gives Bush a Third Term in Education:

The great mystery of education policy today is why the Obama administration is embracing the Bush program. I recently wrote in Education Week (June 10) that it is time to kill the Bush-era No Child Left Behind program. The overwhelming majority of teachers agree with me. Those who educate our kids know that NCLB is a failed program that is not improving our schools but rather turning them into test-prep factories and dumbing down our kids. Bush's main advisor Sandy Kress reacted with outrage on the website of Education Week, and Tom Vander Ark on Huffington Post called me an "edu-curmudgeon" for speaking plain truth.

Anyone who is interested in REAL education reform, not the education reform that has been manufactured by business interests and politicians, should look to a group of doctors mobilized to action who have taken on the American Medical Association and are standing up for their patients by honoring their hippocratic oath. Teachers need to do the same.

The National Physicians Alliance is only a few years old but they have managed to effectively organize and lobby on a variety of issues over the past several years and will continue to be an important voice for physicians. These doctors are sick and tired of having insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies and business interests strip them of their professional integrity and dictate how they should practice medicine. The NPA, along with many other organizations and individuals, will be marching on Washington and meeting with members of Congress this Thursday, June 25th, at a rally for universal, affordable health care.

Teachers must begin to speak out against dangerous and irresponsbile rhetoric like "The Race to the Top." It is disgraceful, immoral and plain wrong to frame education reform in this language. It is especially egregious in the midst of an economic depression.

Wasn't it the race to the top gotten us into this mess? What kind of message is the Obama administration sending to the next generation when his title for education reform implies millions of children who won't make it to the top will be left at the bottom?

I'm afraid the image and the reality is intolerably wide.

"Democrats Are the New Republicans"

As Arne Duncan and Newt Gingrich rev up the bus for the summer "Race Over the Cliff" tour, Bill Maher has struck again, reminding us all that the Republican strategy of moving Rightward into LooneyLand with David Duke and Michael Savage has worked to their advantage: it has made them entirely unnecessary, for the Democrats have openly taken up the agenda of Big Business without all the liberal pretense that is no longer needed to distinguish them from the opposition's remaining nutocracy. Ted Kennedy and George Miller can openly advance the US Chamber of Commerce agenda for corporations running American education without batting an eye, and the Republicans can go on a long, long holiday--that or join the "post-partisan" bus tour to promote the eminent Final Battle against American public education.

The next President will not be from the remaining One-Party system.

On the uses and misuses of Advanced Placement - a personal reflection

I teach 3 sections of Advanced Placement US Government and Politics, mainly to 10th graders. I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, it gives me access to some of the brightest students in our school, students who stretch me as a teacher. On the other hand, I have the responsibility of preparing them for the Advanced Placement test, which determines whether or not they will receive college credit. While this is a semester college-level course spread out over a year, I am more than a little restricted because of the necessity of preparing them to sit for the test.

There are two recent "events" which lead to my writing this posting. The first was serving as a Reader (grader) for the AP exam for the course I teach. The second was the concurrent release of Jay Mathews' Challenge Index, which uses a ratio of number of advanced placement tests taken divided by number of graduating seniors to create a ranking. The combination of these two events has lead to my seriously thinking about the impact of Advanced Placement in our public schools, and thus to the writing of this post.

I invite you to read the results.

At the beginning of this month I spent a week in Florida serving as a Reader. I read several thousand answers to one of the Free Response Questions on this year's examination. Learning more precisely how the test is scored will be of value as I replan the course for next year. But that experience was eye-opening in many ways.

First, let me explain the structure of the examination for the AP course I teach. There are two sections. The first consists of 60 selected response (multiple choice) questions which, like the SAT, has a correction for guessing. Without totally explaining that correction, let it suffice to say that random guessing mathematically would lead on average to no raw points, but elimination of at least one answer per question puts the test taker ahead of the game. The students have I believe 45 minutes to answer the 60 questions, which represent half of the raw score.

The second section consists of 4 "free response questions" (FRQs) which are NOT essays - there is no credit for how well written, nor for topic sentences or conclusion. A rubric is established for each question, anchor papers (sample answers) are culled to guide the Readers who score them, and there are lists of what is and is not acceptable for each point of the rubric. While the questions may have varying number of points in the rubric, in theory from 4 to 10 (the highest this year was 6) the FRQs weight equally as 1/8 of the total value of the test. Students have 100 minutes to answer the 4 FRQs.

Our test had over 170,000 sets of papers. We had around 600 readers. We had in theory over 700,000 individual questions to answer, with each reader reading only one of the four questions. We are trained in multiple stages to ensure consistency, with multiple sets of eyes looking at each paper early on, then as we become more 'reliable' as scorers, a decreasing amount of downstream checking - by table leaders and/or question leaders. By then of the scoring period, because I read very quickly, I had read something over 2,000 sets of papers. Well, that is, I had processed over 2,000, since on more than a few students chose not to answer that question, or in some cases, any question, and/or offered nonsense information. Our question had a rubric of 6 points, and the average rubric score was around a 2.7.

I can imagine some of you asking why a student would sit through the 100 minutes of the test section for the FRQs and write nothing at all, or perhaps instead write deliberately totally off topic. Perhaps because the student was required to take the test by her school? Why? That leads to the challenge index.

Jay Mathews invented the Challenge Index, which rates high schools using a calculation of total number of Advanced Placement Examinations taken the previous year in each school divided by the number of graduating seniors. A ratio greater than 1.0 gets one on the list. Our high school has been on the list since Mathews first released it about a decade ago (and you can visit this page at the Washington Post for more information). The intent was to find those high schools which challenged their students. Mathews decided to use this measure as the result of an article by Cliff Adelman which argued that even sitting for an AP exam, whether or not one passes the exam, better prepares the student for college work. Here I note that the passing rate on the exam has no effect on the calculation of the index (and thus on the rating of the school). In the past Mathews has tweaked the calculation, in some cases uses International Baccalaureate (IB) exams as well as AP exams, and in some cases sitting for courses that are cross-registered with local institutions of higher education where a college level examination is required.

Mathews, for those who do not know his work, wrote a book on the achievements of Jaime Escalante at Garfield HS in Los Angeles, challenging his largely inner city Hispanic kids to take AP Calculus - you may well have seen the film that resulted, "Stand and Deliver," starring Edward James Olmos as Escalante. In introducing the index in 1998, Mathews wrote

Nearly every professional educator will tell you that ranking schools is counterproductive, unscientific, hurtful and wrong. But I am going to do it anyway, not because I believe my system is scientifically infallible, but because I think it provides insight into one of the most significant emerging issues in American education: whether our high schools are working hard enough to challenge and elevate students.

From his experience as a reporter and as a parent, he began to question the restrictions some schools and systems used to limit enrollment in AP courses, which he viewed as more challenging than the course students would otherwise take. It is worthwhile to read the essay linked above, because it explains the rationales Mathews offers both for creating the index and for ranking the schools.

Here I should disclose several things. I got to know Jay Mathews about the time of the first index being published, although not for that reason. I had read a book he had written largely about a school attended by one of his children, and it was about my alma mater, which led to contact between us. Although I often find myself in disagreement with Jay, we developed a friendship and I have appeared in his column on several occasions. Thus I find myself conflicted because while I admire the intent behind the index, I find it destructive and misleading.

Let me first note the following - in the 1998 index the school at which I teach Eleanor Roosevelt, was ranked 16th in the DC metro area with an index of 1.173. That also, if memory serves, put us in the top 100 in the nation, excluding schools that got to totally select their student body (we admit about 1/3 of ours by exam to our science and tech program). In 2008, we have fallen to 82nd in the area, even though our index score has risen to 1.289. Having been at the school since 1998, I can assure you that our rigor has not decreased in any way, either on an absolute basis or in comparison to other schools in the region, even though many more now offer many more AP courses than before. It is the explosion of advanced placement that leads to the different results. And I believe that one can argue that explosions results directly from the Challenge Index. And I question whether it is the right course for our schools to follow.

Our school system, Prince George's County (MD), now requires all high schools to offer a base of 8 AP courses. The system pays for exams, which are required, because we give a weighted grade for an AP course - an A is worth 5 versus 4 for any other course, a B is a 4 versus a 3, and so on. At least now the teachers of the AP courses are required to receive appropriate AP training - that was not the case when we began to offer AP Gov in 10th grade. When we moved the course from 9th to 10th so that students would have had all of American History before taking government (previously they had the 2nd half in 11th grade, 2 years after taking government), I argued for allowing students to take AP in lieu of the regular course of Local, State and National Government. Our then superintendent decided all 21 high schools should offer at least one section of AP, but only 4 teachers,2 from our high school, were appropriately trained to do AP.

Many school systems began expanding their AP offerings after the Index first appeared. The College Board, which controls AP, began to question the validity of such courses, in part because of how many of the increasing number of exams scored so badly - here I will note that in 2007-08 academic year, in order to receive a passing score of 3 (out of a possible 5) on the exam, students needed less than 50% of the raw points. A few years back those wishing to use the AP designation on a course had to submit a syllabus to ascertain whether what was being taught was in fact at the college level. My syllabus was immediately accepted. Most of the AP government teachers in our system submitted a common syllabus prepared centrally, which was rejected as not meeting the requirements of the program.

Let me add one additional note: many colleges will limit the number of credits a student can receive via AP or IB, and will for AP courses only give credit for the maximum score of 5 on the zero to 5 scale. Now imagine you are a student who will graduate with ten or more AP courses, and you are required to sit for the AP exam in each. Why bother preparing for the exam, right? That is in part the explanation for some of the blank booklets or totally non-responsive answers we encountered.

What was far more troubling as a reader was seeing the number of answers where the student was attempting to answer the question but was not responsive to the prompt of the question, could not present a coherent series of statements, and/or lacked basic understanding of the material.

As noted, I read several thousand answers to one question. The rubric had six points. The number of papers I read which met all 6 points was in the single digits. And it is not that the rubric required us to be all that finicky in awarding points. Remember also that our average score was around a 2.7 out of those 6 points. And remember also that last year on our exam one needed less than 50% of the raw points to receive a "passing" scaled score of 3 (out of 5). If you find something wrong with this picture, so do I. There are far too many sitting for the AP examination who are not, as demonstrated by their FRQs, capable of working in this subject at a college level.

One can certainly argue for students being challenged. I do not believe an Advanced Placement course is the only way to accomplish that. In fact, I have found teaching AP to 10th graders has in some ways restricted my ability to challenge my students as much as I did when I taught the course to 9th graders, and did not have to worry about "coverage" - the amount of material my students had to learn to be prepared for what might appear on the AP exam. To give just one example, there is no defined universe of Supreme Court cases that could appear. I cover in some form or other almost 100. Yet this is not a course in legal history or in the Supreme Court.

Mathews does not currently include cross-registered courses in the calculation of his index. We have students who run out of the math, including Calculus B/C, sometimes by their sophomore year, often by the junior year. This is one case where we offer courses through cross registration with local universities. We have a man from Catholic U who teaches Calculus III and Differential equations. These course do not get a weighted GPA, nor do they count as part of the Challenge Index. Thus even though we are definitely challenging these students, the Index gives us no credit for doing so.

The students in our Science and Technology program can, if they are well prepared, do a Research Practicum in lieu of 3 of their courses as senior. They receive a grade, equal to 3 courses, but it is not weighted. They are working in laboratories with real-word scientists, often doing original work. They might be at the USDA lab in Beltsville MD, or working with someone in a university science department. They are doing work that is beyond the freshman level of college in its demands and challenges. Were they not involved in this program, most would be taking at least two and in some cases 3 more AP courses. The Index gives our school no credit for our challenging our students in this fashion.

I could go further. One of the most demanding courses in our school is Genetics, taught by a man with a Ph.D. It is the equivalent of a college level genetics course. The students do not receive a weighted grade. Nor is participation in the course included in the calculation of the index.

We have active parents at Eleanor Roosevelt. Some have argued with Mathews on both the calculation of the index and the concomitant ranking of schools by their scores. Mathews argues that any school with an index of >1.0 is already in the top 3% of schools in the nation, so that the rankings are not all that important. Then why publish rankings? I can remember when I was exploring teaching at a school in another system. The day I met with the Assistant Principal was the day the index was published, and the school in question was listed in the top 20 in the nation. As I was coming in to his office he was arranging to have the list reproduced and distributed.

We are obsessed with rankings in this nation. And that can lead to distortions. One of the more egregious examples of this has been in the rankings of Colleges and Universities, especially that done by US News and World Reports. As it happens, there is an op ed in today's Boston Globe entitled Our obsession with college rankings which came about in part because of how Clemson University successfully improved its ranking - they limited classes that would otherwise have 24-25 students to 19 in order to have a higher percentage of class with less than 20 students, which meant that the remaining classes often expanded to more than 50.

If you know how an index is calculated, you can do things to manipulate the score you receive. We have seen this outside of education, for example, in ratings of cities as places to live. All of these are yet again example's of Donald T. Campbell's 1976 postulate that

The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decisionmaking, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.

One statement from the Globe piece, while written with respect to universities, is I believe quite applicable to this discussion:

It is the public’s obsession with the numerical rank, and not the actions of US News or schools like Clemson, that misleads us into believing that some schools are innately better than others and pressures students into dreaming of schools that are not right for them.

We have an obsession with reducing complex situations to single numbers so that we can do comparisons that provide much less meaningful information than the weight we give the results of those comparisons.

I am not opposed to Advanced Placement. I would not continue to teach my three sections, which next year may contain over 100 students, if I did not find value in the program. I know that some students sign up for the course for the weighted grade. Others do hope to receive the college credit. And a few sign up because they want me as a teacher, particular those who are younger siblings of students I have previously taught - although in a few cases that decision is made by the parent rather than the student. I always have some students who really are not prepared to do the work required. Still, I believe that I am able to stretch the vast majority of my students, and I always especially enjoy those who stretch me as a teacher - that helps keep me fresh. Insofar as I am challenging my students, Mathews is right about his emphasis on AP, although I believe I could challenge them even absent the AP designation.

And I do not disagree that one measure of a school is how much it is willing to challenge its students. I do not limit who can take my class. We do require a recommendation from the current social studies teacher, and check English grades and overall academic performance. Even in the few cases where a student is not recommended for AP, or recommended with reservations, the parent can override that recommendation and insist on the student taking the class. AP can provide a framework within which good teachers can find ways to challenge themselves and their students.

Still, I remember the large number of answers I read and rated during that week in Florida, and wonder if we may be overdoing it? I have had brilliant students, some of whom graduate with 14, 15 or more AP courses, with 5s on all their exams. So long as they have time to still be teenagers, to participate in activities like music, theater, sports, or simply hanging with friends, I don't object. I worry that we may push some into academic endeavors at the expense of developing the students in other ways.

If the reason is to improve how the school "ranks" on an artificial index, such a use of AP is truly a misuse, and may represent an abuse - not only of the academics, but of the students. If you think the word "abuse" too harsh, then perhaps substitute "academic malpractice."

I will continue to teach AP because it enables me to challenge some very bright students, and to experience how their minds and insights can challenge me, stretch me even further as teacher and as person. I will also continue to teach ordinary kids, those who might not be considered as academically able, because I know that they can surprise me if I can find the way of connecting them with the subject matter. Every year I get a couple of students who took regular government with me in a non-honors class as a sophomore who decide to come back and take AP as a senior or even as a junior.

I read over 2,000 answers. Less than a dozen got all 6 points on the rubric. Some of the papers I most enjoyed reading did not get all 6 points, but showed a depth of insight that blew me away. Reading so many papers could be mind-numbing, except so often I encountered students who were willing to stretch themselves. That is a proper purpose of Advanced Placement. AP is not the only way to accomplish that, but it can well serve that purpose, properly applied.

I do hope we do not continue down the path of our current obsession, believing that more AP is inevitably better. The quality of the instruction is not necessarily better nor more challenging merely because the course has an AP designation - after all, one can have the most wonderful syllabus and still not be able to communicate its contents to the students, nor to engage the students in the process of learning.

And I wish, almost certainly futilely, that we would stop distorting the meaning of AP by using it as a means of 'ranking' schools.

My school year is now officially over. This summer I will be working with students at the other end of academic performance, students needing extra help to meet state requirements in government to graduate from high school. I wanted to complete this reflection before I mentally transition next month.

All of my students deserve the best teaching I can give them. All students are capable of learning, of being stretched. I expect that this summer will stretch me as a teacher and person, albeit in a different fashion.

As a teacher, I find that I must take time to look back, to reflect, to learn. This essay is a part of that process. I hope it is of value to at least one person who encounters it.

Peace.

Yet Another DFER Brief

     The DFER propaganda machine marches on, this time with support of TFA's Associate Director for Teacher Quality Robin Chait, and Michelle McGlaughlin of the Center For American Progres.  In "Enhancing Entry Points To The Teaching Profession," released today, DFER proposes expanding alternative route programs like Teach For America and The New Teacher Project to attract more teachers to the field.  "Moreover, by increasing the supply of teacher applications for hard-to-staff positions, these programs also allow districts to be more selective in choosing teacher candidates, thus increasing the caliber of their teaching workforce."  These alternative route programs, far from increasing the caliber of the teaching workforce, actually provide a steady stream of ill-prepared, temporary laborers to work in the charter school chains spread by the philanthrocapitalists and neoliberals looking to improve education through a cruel brand of economic efficiency.  Notice their rationale: letting the market guide the way through increasing competition will improve the quality of teaching.

     The Mathematica study cited in the DFER document, which alleges that alternative route teachers are just as good or better than traditional route teachers, draws broad conclusions based on very little evidence (as outlined here by EPIC and here by Linda Darling-Hammond).  In particular, the EPIC researchers suggest the study is "relevant only to a very limited population of teachers in schools that hire many alternatively certified teachers, and is not generalized to most states, districts and schools that do not allow such programs and are more selective in their hiring."  Of the other studies cited by DFER, one pertains only to high school students (although DFER implies alternative track teachers would be as effective in every grade, or at the very least neglects to mention the narrowness of some of their research) while another study they cite shows minimal impact of TFA members on math scores and zero impact on reading scores (as well as reporting TFAers reported having more difficulty with classroom management).  But once again, this kind of research narrows and equates the definition of "good teaching" to "test scores," a sad indication of how many reformers view the role of the teacher.  In the business model, CEOs drive profits; in the business model of education reform, the teacher (and principal) is the CEO driving test scores, children be damned.

     DFER's supplemental information isn't any better.  The only "additional resources" cited in the DFER brief is a document by Chait and McLaughlin from earlier this year, "Realizing the Promise: How State Policy Can Support Alternative Certification Programs."  The real "promise" to be realized in DFER's corporate movement is the gradual privatization of public education and more anti-union politics.  In "Realizing the Promise," the authors cite Frederick Hess and Chester Finn (the same Hoover Institution publication suggests TFA and KIPP are models of 21st century education, complains that Chicago's Renaissance 2010 plan doesn't privatize enough schools, and features articles from Michelle Rhee and former NewSchools Venture Fund CEO Kim Smith):

Serving as field marshals for large-scale policy change is the proper role of advocates, whose interests do not always coincide with those of entrepreneurs. Indeed, advocacy groups are typically tone-deaf to some challenges facing entrepreneurs—such as the need for human capital, better R&D, increased access to venture capital, back-office services, and incubation—and are thus unhelpful at cultivating the full set of reforms that might help entrepreneurial ventures to prosper. If advocacy organizations wish to pave the way for more entrepreneurial activity, they need to attend to such issues.

The above statement gives us a pretty accurate summary of the role of DFER in the charter school movement: DFER is the media blitz designed to lay the framework for education entrepreneurs (funded by philanthrocapitalists and school privatizers) to expand competition and further erode the democratic purposes and functions of education.  DFER certainly isn't "tone-deaf" to the needs of these corporate charter chains - they're quickly becoming the lead trumpet in New Democratic education reform.  "Enhancing Entry Points" is DFER's call for reforms of the "human capital" in education.

     The authors conclude with this suggestion: Charter schools, nonprofits, and school districts should be allowed to operate as teacher preparation programs.  This, DFER argues, would increase "innovation and growth" in teacher education programs.  DFER would also like to break the "teacher student data firewall" to track teacher performance - defined as student standardized test scores - and connect teachers to their preparation programs (DFER expresses these viewpoints on their Twitter page).  Better yet, allowing charter schools to act as teacher preparation programs would allow high-turnover chains like KIPP to ensure a steady flow of temporary laborers for their unsustainable teaching model.  Training their own worker bees (the "human capital") would also help charter chains "expand to scale" as Duncan tries to close 5,000 schools during the next four years.  DFER, of course, loves Duncan.  From the DFER website, just after Duncan's appointment:

Under Duncan’s leadership, Chicago has been at the forefront of school restructuring and improving teacher quality.

The school restructuring miracle was a glitzy PR campaign waged by Chicago's corporate elite, as described by George Schmidt and Substance News.  The "teacher quality" improvement resulted in the recent lawsuit filed by African American teachers in Chicago.  DFER will eagerly play the role of pushing market mechanisms for the neoliberal school reform movement based on efficiency, charter schools, high-stakes testing, and common standards.  We'll innovate our way out of this, open up more entrepreneurship opportunities, and have more competition; high-stakes testing and No Child Left Behind are here to stay; and Washington will continue to ignore poverty and social injustice.  In this day and age, this is the "progressive" agenda.

U. S. News Blog Scrubs Negative Comments About CER

Even though U. S. News has been the only weekly news outfit to print anything about the CREDO study that undermines the entire rationale for Duncan's Race Over the Cliff charterizing strategy, this morning I could not help but posting a comment below the U.S. News blog piece reminding them that getting an unbiased and fact-based reaction on charter schools from the Jeanne Allen's Center for Education Reform is like getting a straight answer from the Washington Times about the shortcomings of the Moonies.

Anyway, the post was posted, but this afternoon is long gone. For the record, I kept a copy:

Thanks for carrying the news of this important peer-reviewed national study of over 2,400 charter schools. The criticism of the study that comes from Jeanne Allen's Center for Education Reform is typical of the fact-bashing that this charter/choice advocacy group produces regularly. With the following admission from their website, how could anyone consider them an unbiased source of information:

"The Center for Education Reform drives the creation of better educational opportunities for all children by leading parents, policymakers and the media in boldly advocating for school choice, advancing the charter school movement, and challenging the education establishment."

More New Democrats and DFER

Link To Video Here

     According to Rahm Emanuel, Democratic policymakers are working on a "quiet revolution" in education reform.  If yesterday's DLC gathering and two briefs from DFER are indicators of what's to come, we're in for some big changes.  Here is a summary of the hour-plus DLC discussion on education reform and the DFER policy briefs.

DLC Policy Forum on Health and Education Reform:

     The DLC gathering began with speeches by Emanuel and DLC President Bruce Reed (education viewpoints explored here).  Emanuel, when not pressuring freshmen Democrats from voting against another $100+ billion for the War on Terror, is pushing support for Duncan's brand of education reform.  This includes common standards, removing the caps from charter schools, pay for performance, and the incentives built into the "Race to the Top" fund.  "We know what's necessary as it relates to quality teachers," says Emanuel.  "We know what's necessary as it relates to competition in the public school system, i.e. charters," he continues.  "And we know what's necessary to adopt the common standards so you're raising the capacity of our children, our schools, and our teachers."  Reed suggested education reform was the "sleeper issue" of the Obama administration, which is dealing with healthcare reform and the ongoing economic crisis.  But the Democrats are "just getting warmed up" in education reform and in the next few weeks, President Obama will be making announcements about expanding both community college and early childhood education.  

     The action really gets interesting during the panel following the speeches of Emanuel and Reed.  Andrew Rotherham moderated a discussion between DFER's Joe Williams, DLC's Harold Ford, Jr., Alabama Congressman Artur Davis, and Florida Democrat Lorraine Ausley. 

     There was agreement on expanding charter schools and shutting failing schools ("Bring in the proven operators," says Williams), reforming teacher preparation programs (or eliminate them entirely: "proficiency in subject matter" is all that matters to Davis), and support for more testing.

     The support for charter schools is not surprising given the presence of Rotherham and Williams, two vocal supporters of charter schools.  DFER and Education Sector are certainly New Democratic organizations looking for competition and choice in public education (echoing their funders' desire for market-based reforms).  

     Williams even comes out with a strong anti-union stance and suggests that higher wages are a way to "buy out" potential union employees.  This, of course, is needed for the charter chain that simply need a disposable source of laborers that can be fired for a variety of reasons.  Rotherham suggested that we could be entering a "moneyball era" in evaluating teachers, a reference to the various statistical models used by the Oakland A's GM Billy Beane.  There was a general hostility towards teacher preparation programs, particularly from Davis.  Proficiency in subject matter, in Davis's opinion, is all that matters for good teaching.  Davis also thinks we should establish a fast-track principal program for high-achieving college graduates who don't want to go to Wall Street and don't want to teach, which would look something like a Teach For America/New Leaders for New Schools combination.  

     At one point, the discussion turns to student evaluations.  The idea of using a portfolio assessment method, which would certainly allow for a much more dynamic form of demonstrating learning, was brushed aside because it could not be applied evenly across the board.  The crisis in standardized testing, according to DFER's Williams, is "a lack of confidence in the tests we're using."  Student performance, Davis agues, is the best indicator: "performance is pretty objective - how do they do on tests?"  Sharpen your pencils (or fire up your computers), American children: more testing is coming down the pipeline.

     The charter school movement, it was noted, needs to do a better job of educating the public about their role in education.  Most of America, the panelists argued, did not understand the concept of charter schools.  Many people erroneously believe they're private schools; keep this in mind the next time you see the New Democrats refer to "public charter schools" instead of just "charter schools."  This is a very intentional part of their marketing campaign.  

     The presentation - dubbed the "DLC Policy Forum on Health and Education Reform" - gives a pretty comprehensive view of the New Democrat's platform for education: charter schools, altering the "human capital" in education, and embracing common standards.  

DFER Briefs:  

     One document, "Public Charter Schools and High Quality Pre-K," suggests the charter school movement could increase the availability of Pre-K for 3- and 4-year olds.  I'm supportive of expanding educational opportunities, but we should also be very careful about making preschool too academic (education researchers down at the University of Oregon must be salivating over the prospect of more DIBELS testing).  Sadly, I doubt this crowd of reformers understands this concept, but they also have little to no understanding of teaching and what is developmentally appropriate for children.

     The second document, "Unleashing Innovation in American Schools," describes the Race to the Top fund as the "icing on the cake" of the stimulus plan.  Practically drooling over the $5 billion to be used for leveraging reform, the document goes on to describe some up-and-coming school reformers who have been able to "break through bureaucratic inertia and move beyond outmoded ways of thinking about what schools can and should do."  These reformers?  Green Dot, NewSchools Venture Fund, MATCH Charter School, and Uncommon Schools.  These school management organizations "are linking their high-achieving networks of schools with new approaches to teacher education."  Uncommon Schools, KIPP, and Aspire have launched a partnership with Hunter College to train 1,000 teachers every year.  These new teachers, and hopefully teachers everywhere, will use more "data-driven instructional practices," a creative euphemism for dumbing down the teaching profession and injecting more computer-based learning (which is deceptively called "student-based learning" by many business-minded education reformers).  

     The $650 million Innovation Fund should be used to expand charter school chains, expanding data-driven instruction, and the funds should be "administered through nonprofit intermediaries that have proven track records of successfully baking and launching innovations in education."  DFER is referring to venture philanthropy organizations like the NewSchools Venture Fund (who has two former partners running the Race to the Top fund and Innovation fund, Joanne Weiss and Jim Shelton) and the Charter School Growth Fund.

     A final word: Green Dot is described as a "disruptive innovator" in the field of education.  This concept of "disruptive innovation" is laid out by Clayton Christensen, Michael Horn, and Curtis Johnson in their new book, Disrupting Class.  Christensen and his pals run the Innosight Institute; their website, which tilts strongly towards applying market fundamentalism to public education, is certainly worth exploring.  There's also an interview with Jeb Bush, who evidently has read the book on his Kindle and really likes their ideas (gulp).  I'll elaborate on their book in the coming days.  

Washington Post Readers: Here Are Your Charter School Results

Since it is more than obvious that WaPo's ed industry stooges are not going to print the results of the first national peer-reviewed report on charter schools, here are the results for Fenty/Rhee/Obama/Duncan corporate charter solution to fixing the schools. From the DC section of the Report (pdf):

The results suggest that new charter school students have an initial loss of learning in reading from charter school attendance compared to their counterparts in traditional public schools, and receive no impact in math. In subsequent years, charter school students have no significant impact in reading from charter school attendance compared to their counterparts in traditional public schools and an initial gain in math (p. 4).

The results show that in the District, Blacks enrolled in charter schools do about the same in reading and math compared to their counterparts in traditional public schools (p. 5).

Hispanics enrolled in charter schools also do about the same in reading and math compared to their counterparts in traditional public schools (p. 5).

As shown in the figure above, students in poverty enrolled in charter schools receive no significant benefit in reading or math compared to their counterparts in traditional public schools (p. 6).

Special Education students in charter schools in the District receive no significant benefit from charter school attendance compared to their counterparts in traditional public schools in either reading or math (p. 7).

English Language Learner students in charter schools in the District receive no significant benefit from charter school attendance compared to their counterparts in traditional public schools in reading or math (p. 8).

Retained students in charter schools in the District receive no significant benefit from charter school attendance compared to their counterparts in traditional public schools in reading or math (p. 9).

For students in the District, figures 8.a and 8.b show that charter schools are not creating significantly different results for students compared to their virtual peers from traditional public schools in either math or reading (p. 11).

Black Agenda Report: Obama Administration Sued By Chicago Teachers

From Black Agenda Report:

by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon

Public-private partnerships between Chicago's City Hall, where two men named Richard Daley have ruled more than 40 of the last 55 years, and a gaggle of corporate bagmen from the Gates, Bradley, Walton and other foundations have honed a disastrous “education reform” agenda that is now national policy. In Chicago, where dozens of neighborhood public schools have been shuttered and hundreds of experienced, predominantly black teachers fired in mid-career and replaced by underqualified, underpaid, uncertified and ovewhelmingly white newbie instructors, resistance is brewing and spreading.

Chicago Teachers File Racial Discrimination Suit Against Obama Administration's School “Turnaround” Plan

by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon

"The fired teachers are disproportionately African American, and the newly hired teachers are not.”

In May, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan declared the Obama administration's intent to close and “turn around” 5,000 "underperforming” public schools in poorer neighborhoods across the country. Duncan's last job was CEO of Chicago's public schools where he shut down dozens of neighborhood schools, practically all in lower income areas, and dismissed thousands of committed and experienced teachers, the vast majority of them African American women.

When the Chicago Teachers Union made no effort to reach out to parents, students or their communities, refused to organize teachers to oppose the wave of school shutdowns and privatizations, teachers organized what they call CORE, the Coalition of Rank & File Educators. CORE has now filed suit against the Chicago Board of Education, charging that the mass dismissal of hundreds of mostly black veteran teachers and their replacement with uncertified and generally underqualified white teachers is racially discriminatory.

“We looked at the number of teachers who lost their jobs in these 'school turnarounds,'” CORE research director Carol Caref told BAR, “and we looked at the number of African American teachers who were employed in those same schools or in the charter schools which replaced them and there was a huge discrepancy which couldn't be accounted for by chance. The fired teachers are disproportionately African American, and the newly hired teachers are not.”

“Even if it's inadvertently discriminatory, it's still discriminatory because the majority of the teachers wiped out in these turnarounds are African American,” offered Chicago teacher Wanda Evans. The fired veteran teachers, CORE also maintains, are being replaced by a much younger, much whiter and much less experienced corps of instructors graduated from a handful of accelerated programs funded by Boeing, the Bill and Melinda Gates, Bradley, Walton Family, Rockerfeller and other foundations, and favored by City Hall and the Commercial Club. “The new teachers are paid half or less what experienced teachers with advanced degrees were making."

"The fired veteran teachers are being replaced by a much younger, much whiter and much less experienced corps of instructors."

They are forced to work longer hours. They are reluctant to stand up for themselves or their students and tend to be fearful of participating in union and other activities. A high percentage of them burn out or are not asked to stick around after their first year,” according to Jackson Potter, another CORE teacher.

“The young, mostly white replacement teachers are de-skilled temp workers, teaching test-preparation skills. They are neither connected nor committed to the communities their students come from,” added Evans.

The prospect that Chicago's disastrous educational policies are about to go national is frightening, say the teachers BAR talked to. “We all hoped that Obama would not fall for this okie-doke of high-stakes testing, No Child Left Behind, of demonizing teachers and dismantling public education,” Ms. Evans continued. “But he (Arne Duncan) was the president's basketball buddy. It was a slap in the face locally to even have a CEO rather than an educator in charge of our schools here, and a slap in the face for us all nationally to have such a terribly unqualified person as Secretary of Education. Mr. Duncan has not taught in any classroom a single hour, and is in fact not qualified to teach anyplace.”

The Chicago-style “school turnaround” model does indeed owe more to the culture of corporate asset stripping and raiding than it does to any known strategy for educational improvement. In school “turnaround” operations, every teacher, food service worker, building engineer and custodial staff person is fired and the slate wiped clean. Experienced teachers who have invested their careers in urban education and are not rehired are, in the board's terminology “honorably terminated”, with no specific reason given for their dismissal. “Show me a hospital, no matter how bad it's doing,” asked one CORE teacher, “where you walk in and fire every doctor, every nurse, every administrator and tech without bothering to professionally evaluate them? It just sounds foolish. Why does anybody imagine this would help improve a school?”

Wanda Evans, a veteran former teacher at Chicago's Orr High School saw “a solid four restructuring processes in ten years. In ten of the eleven years I taught at Orr there were six principals. In the last year there were three principals.” The next to last, she relates was a 27 year old accountant who graduated from some principals training program favored by City Hall. Like Chicago Public Schools CEO Arne Duncan, he had no classroom teaching experience. But in corporate-raider fashion he didn't need it. “He was their cleanup man. He came in to downsize departments, fire people, to cut programs, and clean the books,” Lewis explained. Later that school year City Hall replaced him with still another closeout principal who would spend the remaining money on showy projects, frequent field trips, T-shirts, special events and other nonsense that had little or nothing to do with instruction in the classroom but were heralded in the corporate media as good faith efforts to correct the situation at the troubled high school.

"In school 'turnaround' operations, every teacher, food service worker, building engineer and custodial staff person is fired and the slate wiped clean."

During the ten years of corporate school-busting reform, Orr was broken up into four smaller schools, only one of which remains today. That was a military academy, whose director took his institution off campus so as to escape the stigma of the parent high school's corporate-engineered “failure.” And as it happens, turning public high schools and even middle schools over to the military was another hallmark of the Duncan regime in Chicago.

Ruled for more than 40 of the last 55 years by two men named Richard Daley, Chicago has given the nation dubious education reforms before this. The New Orleans model, in which the entire public school workforce was fired at one stroke immediately after Katrina, and nearly all the city's public schools replaced with charter schools was implemented by Arne Duncan's predecessor at the Chicago Board of Education, Paul Vallas. Like Duncan, whose longest period of employment before the Chicago Public Schools was as a professional basketball player, Vallas was no educator either. Vallas was an accountant. And as in New Orleans, the closing of neighborhood public schools in Chicago and their wholesale replacement with charter and other special schools has destabilized vast residential areas of the city and greatly contributed to gentrification.

CORE teachers pointed out that Chicago still has laws on the books enabling elected councils of parents to veto the contracts of principals and certain portions of individual school budgets. The turnaround policies allow authorities to strip these last vestiges of democratic control over educational outcomes from those who ought to be among the primary stakeholders -- parents.

The widening craters of collateral damage caused by these misguided policies extend well beyond the affected students, families and their immediate neighborhoods, into the broader communities that teachers live in. These experienced black teachers were part of the bedrock of stable African American communities. Up till now, they could buy homes, raise their families, send their own children to college and play active roles in their churches, sororities and a wide variety of local and civic affairs. Dispersing and dispossessing hundreds of such teachers in Chicago, and tens of thousands nationally of their livelihoods and agency in mid-career will be a severe blow to African American communities across the country. For the nation's first black president - a former community organizer at that - to embrace such a socially destructive policy is puzzling indeed.

"These experienced black teachers were part of the bedrock of stable African American communities."

But just as bad policies and bad examples come from Chicago, so do good ones. “CORE has only been in existence a year. In 2008 we were only able to get a single neighborhood pubic school off the 'turnaround' list,” Potter told us. “This year we have stopped the turnarounds at six schools. We've done what the Chicago Teachers Union never did, reaching out and building partnerships between teachers and community organizations and parents and students.” In 2010 CORE may field a slate of candidates in the union elections in an effort to reclaim the union for its members.

“If I could get a few minutes of the president's time,” Carol Caref told us, “I'd tell him that public education and quality neighborhood public schools are the foundations of stable, livable communities. Turning schools into test-prep centers doesn't improve the quality of education. Neither does repeating the corporate propaganda about our schools being 'dropout factories,' as Arne Duncan does. What works are resources, stability, parent and community involvement and smaller class sizes. Schools in wealthier neighborhoods have all these things. Children and families everywhere deserve them.”

Effective teaching, as one CORE teacher put it, is a performance art. You need commitment, connection and experience to pull it off, not hysteria, insecurity, mass firings and more tests. Somebody, they say, needs to tell President Obama.

Bruce A. Dixon is managing editor at Black Agenda Report and based in Atlanta. He can be reached at bruce.dixon(at)blackagendareport.com.

Day 3: NYTimes and WaPo Continue to Ignore National Charter Study

Do you want to guess how many seconds it would take the NY Times, WaPo, or the Boston Globe to report that a national peer-reviewed study showed that there was a 2-1 margin of good charters to bad charters? Now that the CREDO study shows that there is a 2-1 margin of bad charters to good charters, these big city reporters are nowhere to be found after 3 days. At least there is the LA Times and good ole U. S. News and World Report:

June 17, 2009 12:58 PM ET | Zach Miners | Permanent Link | Print

On average, charter schools are not performing as well as their traditional public-school peers, according to a new study that is being called the first national assessment of these school-choice options. The study, conducted by the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University, compared the reading and math state achievement test scores of students in charter schools in 15 states and the District of Columbia—amounting to 70 percent of U.S. charter school students—to those of their virtual "twins" in regular schools who shared with them certain characteristics. The research found that 37 percent of charter schools posted math gains that were significantly below what students would have seen if they had enrolled in local traditional public schools. And 46 percent of charter schools posted math gains that were statistically indistinguishable from the average growth among their traditional public-school companions. That means that only 17 percent of charter schools have growth in math scores that exceeds that of their traditional public-school equivalents by a significant amount.

In reading, charter students on average realized a growth that was less than their public-school counterparts but was not as statistically significant as differences in math achievement, researchers said.

"We are worried by these results," Margaret Raymond, director of CREDO and lead author of the report, Multiple Choice: Charter School Performance in 16 States, said at a news conference. "This study shows that we've got a 2-to-1 margin of bad charters to good charters." . . . .

Open Letter to Arne Duncan from Herb Kohl

Posted at ARN, thanks to Monty Neill:
Herb Kohl: An Open Letter to Arne Duncan

Summer 2009

From Herbert Kohl

Dear Arne Duncan,

In a recent interview with NEA Today you said of my book *36 Children,* "I read [it] in high school … [and] … wrote about his book in one of my college essays, and I talked about the tremendous hope that I feel [and] the challenges that teachers in tough communities face. The book had a big impact on me."

When I wrote *36 Children* in 1965 it was commonly believed that African American students, with a few exceptions, simply could not function on a high academic level. The book was motivated by my desire to provide a counter-example, one I had created in my classroom, to this cynical and racist view, and to let the students' creativity and intelligence speak for itself. It was also intended to show how important it was to provide interesting and complex curriculum that integrated the arts and sciences, and utilized the students' own culture and experiences to inspire learning. I discovered then, in my early teaching career, that learning is best driven by ideas, challenges, experiences, and activities that engage students. My experience over the past 45 years has confirmed this.

We have come far from that time in the '60s. Now the mantra is high expectations and high standards. Yet, with all that zeal to produce measurable learning outcomes we have lost sight of the essential motivations to learn that moved my students. Recently I asked a number of elementary school students what they were learning about and the reactions were consistently, "We are learning how to do good on the tests." They did not say they were learning to read.

It is hard for me to understand how educators can claim that they are creating high standards when the substance and content o f learning is reduced to the mechanical task of getting a correct answer on a manufactured test. In the panic over teaching students to perform well on reading tests, educators seem to have lost sight of the fact that reading is a tool, an instrument that is used for pleasure and for the acquisition of knowledge and information about the way the world works. The mastery of complex reading skills develops as students grapple with ideas, learn to understand plot and character, and develop and articulate opinions on literature. They also develop through learning history, science, and technology.

Reading is not a series of isolated skills acquired in a sanitized rote-learning environment utilizing "teacher-proof" materials. It develops through interaction with a knowledgeable, active teacher—through dialogue, and critical analysis. It also develops through imaginative writing and research.

It is no wonder that the struggle to coerce all students into mastering high-stakes testing is hardest at the upper grades. The impoverishment of learning taking place in the early grades naturally leads to boredom and alienation from school-based learning. This disengagement is often stigmatized as "attention deficit disorder." The very capacities that No Child Left Behind is trying to achieve are undermined by th e way in which the law is implemented.

This impoverishment of learning is reinforced by cutting programs in the arts. The free play of the imagination, which is so crucial for problem-solving and even for entrepreneurship, is discouraged in a basics curriculum lacking in substantial artistic and human content.

Add to this the elimination of physical education in order to clear more time to torture students with mechanical drilling and shallow questioning and it is no wonder that many American students are lethargic when it comes to ideas and actions. I'm sure that NCLB has, in many cases, a direct hand in the development of childhood obesity.

It is possible to maintain high standards for all children, to help students learn how to speak thoughtfully, think through problems, and create imaginative representations of the world as it is and as it could be, without forcing them through a regime of high-stakes testing. Attention has to be paid to the richness of the curriculum itself and time has to be allocated to thoughtful exploration and experimentation. It is easy to ignore content when the sole focus is on test scores.

Your administration has the opportunity, when NCLB comes up for reauthorization, to set the tone, aspirations, and philosophical and moral grounds for reform that develops the intelligence, creativity, and social and personal sensitivity of students. I still hold to the hope you mentioned you took away from *36 Children* but I sometimes despair about how we are wasting the current opportunity to create truly effective schools where students welcome the wonderful learning that we as adults should feel privileged to provide them.

I would welcome any opportunity to discuss these and other educational issues with you.

Sincerely, Herbert Kohl
— Herb Kohl
*Open Letter*
2009-06-16