Will Justice Department Go After the Real Crooks?

In a scene reminiscent of the glory days of Hoover's G-Men, the FBI rounded up over a hundred numbers runners, thugs, drug dealers, and arms salesmen last week in a big, big story showing the get-toughness on crime by Team Obama. 

The question that remains is whether or not the Justice Department and the FBI will raid the casinos on Wall Street to pick up the real criminals who have walked away with trillions of other people's dollars, while leaving the taxpayers to pay it all back. 

This clip from HuffPo has this story suggesting that there is plenty to indicate that orange jumpsuits and prosecutions are in order, but will Obama and Congress go after their largest political contributors?

The bipartisan panel appointed by Congress to investigate the financial crisis has concluded that several financial industry figures appear to have broken the law and has referred multiple cases to state or federal authorities for potential prosecution, according to two sources directly involved in the deliberations.

The sources, who spoke on condition they not be named, declined to identify the people implicated or the names of their institutions. But they characterized the panel's decision to make referrals to prosecutors as a significant escalation in the government's response to the financial crisis. The panel plans to release its final report in Washington on Thursday morning.

n the three years since major lenders teetered on the brink of collapse, prompting huge taxpayer rescues and amplifying an already painful recession into the most punishing downturn since the Depression, public indignation has swelled while few people who played prominent roles in the crisis have faced legal consequences.


That may be about to change. According to the law that created the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, the panel has a responsibility to refer for prosecution any evidence of lawbreaking. The offices that have received the referrals -- the Justice Department, state attorneys general, and perhaps both -- must now determine whether to prosecute cases and, if so, whether to pursue criminal or civil charges.

Though civil charges appear a more likely outcome should prosecution result, one source familiar with the panel's deliberations said criminal charges should not be ruled out.

The commission's decision to refer conduct for prosecution underscores the severity of the activities it has uncovered and plans to detail in its widely anticipated final report, the sources said.

A spokesman for the commission declined to comment. "I cannot comment on the commission's report or its activities until January 27th," said the spokesman, Tucker Warren.

Joel Klein to Chair Education Reform Now

The New York Daily News is reporting that Joel Klein will serve as chairman of Education Reform Now, the 501c3 branch of Democrats for Education Reform.

Klein was also recently named CEO of the education division of News Corp.

Readers unfamiliar with ERN may be interested in their recent letter to supporters. It summarizes 2010 and looks ahead to possible 2011 plans.

[Also posted at DFERWatch]

Whhhhhhhaaattt? Did'chu Read It?

A research study published last week by Science Magazine is drawing a bit of attention. The Flypaper fellows are talking about it, the NY Times wrote about it (via Pittsburgh Post-Gazette), and the Northwest Evaluation Association tweeted about it:

All three give the impression that taking a test helps with learning. It's fair to say the assumption is that we're talking about standardized variety, or some kind of hybrid multiple choice and extended response format.

Not so. Not even close.

The "test" we're talking about here is simply writing down everything you remembered after reading a for a given amount of time (I believe it was 45 minutes in the study). Free-recall. No multiple choice. No grading of the material. That was a more effective way of studying than putting together a concept map. That's what the study really looked at.

GOOD picked up on this. So did Sherman Dorn.

Why Is Newsweek Protecting the Tea Party from Wake County Schools Connection?

Since Stephen Colbert's skewering of Tedesco and the "choice" crowd that would choose to resegregate and contain poor kids in Wake County's poor neighborhoods, the Tea Partiers appear to have moved further back under their rocks.  Why, Jenny Beth Martin, while no doubt furiously fanning herself, told Newsweek that, my goodness good sir, she has never even heard of any such thing in Wake County (see text below the video clip). 

It's too bad Newsweek prefers to take the tea baggers at their word, rather than doing some research like, uh, googling "john tedesco" and "tea party." If they had bothered, they would have found a whole page of reasons to suspect, heavens to Betsy, mendacity on the part Jenny Beth and her group.

This piece from the News-Observer early last year clearly shows the influence and money trail from the NC Republican Tea Party to the Wake County school board elections.  If that were not convincing enough for any Newsweek reporter too lazy to ask, have a look at the video made just after Little John's ascension to the position of Board mouthpiece for the Tea Party agenda of reverse engineering:

And here is a clip from Newsweek's give-the-Tea-Party-a-break piece, which aims to discredit the WaPo piece by McCrummen that blew the top off the Wake County story:

The explanation in the Post, which is found about two thirds of the way through the article, is that Americans for Prosperity (AFP)—which the Post identifies as “the nation's largest tea party organizers”—is supporting the board’s efforts. Americans for Prosperity is not actually a Tea Party organization. It is a staunchly conservative advocacy group, funded by large donors such as the shadowy Koch brothers. Critics characterize it as an “Astroturf” organization, to distinguish it from genuine grassroots like the Tea Party movement. Like similar organizations such as FreedomWorks it has partnered with grassroots Tea Party activists for events including the 2009 Tax Day Tea Party Protests and on local political campaigns. But when I called JennyBeth Martin, national coordinator for the Tea Party Patriots, which is a network of hundreds of state and local Tea Party groups, she had heard nothing of the brouhaha in Wake County. 

Local school-board supporters will tell you that the disillusionment was not motivated by opposition to integration as such, but rather the logistical problems and inequities caused by the busing program. They complain that students in outlying areas could not attend schools with rich academic programs unless they traveled far afield, that overcrowding in growing suburban school districts was causing them to switch to a year-round school schedule, and that sending kids to far-away schools stifles parental involvement. Any segregation that results of returning to geographic alignment of schools, they say, is incidental. “The idea that we are re-segregating the schools is ludicrous,” says Woodhouse. “Segregation was done at the point of a gun.”

Yes, how things have changed.  Today containment, segregation, and anti-culturalism is called education for the poor, the "civil rights issue of our generation."  No guns are needed when you have federal policy mandating it and when you mass media celebrating and when have philanthrocapitalists getting fatter on it.  And yet it's still segregation, and it's still as morally bankrupt as it was during Jim Crow.

The State of the Union's Schools

 While everyone knows that Barack Obama's State of the Union speech is likely to continue to push for the agenda that we've been facing in Race to the Top — privatization, more testing and test based "accountability," Arne Duncan's meanderings, more charter schools, and the other policies that have taken the nation's public schools further towards ruin than anything imagined when George W. Bush was President — we can at least try an imaginary alternative. Hence, the following wording from a State of the Union speech that we won't hear (at least not from the current President of the United States). --George Schmidt, Editor, Substance News

The State of the Union’s Schools: That Part of Mr. Obama’s Speech We Would Like to Hear But Won’t

Jim Horn

. . . . And now I would like to turn to a subject that all of us, including myself, love to talk about, even when we sometimes don’t understand exactly what we are saying—or at least don’t fully understand the implications of what we’re saying.  The subject is education, and the state of the Union’s educational system is, well, not so great, if you live in one of the thousands of poor communities across our great land.  In the leafier, middle class communities of America, things are pretty good.  In fact, the most recent international test comparisons show that our middle class children are performing at or above the levels of children in other Western countries.  That is why I want to spend a few minutes talking about how we can do better, particularly for that 20 percent, or that bottom quintile, of American children who now live in poverty, the same ones who are struggling against great odds with hopes of some day claiming a share of the American dream.

For the past decade, at least, our national education policies have had mostly negative consequences for the children they were intended to help.  No Child Left Behind with its unachievable test performance demands for both poor and non-poor  students has resulted in the urban public school systems being blown apart, you might say, by sanctions that punish the children and the teachers and shut down their schools while doing little or nothing to bring resources to bear to change the awful poverty that is largely responsible for the weak academic performance in these schools.  Now I am not saying this in order that we once again blame the poor for the effects of their poverty, but, rather, to point out the need now to take what we know about who is struggling and who is failing, to finally deliver on our promise to bring educational hope and change to those who haven’t had much of it in the recent, or distant, past.

I am, therefore, ordering the Education Department to draft regulatory language that will freeze NCLB performance targets at their 2010 levels until a thorough evaluation of the current policy on testing and accountability can be undertaken.  Toward that end, I am requesting the formation of a blue ribbon taskforce to be comprised of educators and educational leaders from K-12 and higher ed, education policy experts, representatives from both political parties, union representatives, and parent groups to come together, deliberate, and to make recommendations toward actionable legislation for the long overdue reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act that, henceforth, will be known as the Education Debt Repayment Act (EDRA).

An education suitable for a hopeful future for all American children cannot be sustained by practices from a past that is better left behind.  The practices of segregation and apartheid in America should hold no attraction for us, and yet our federal policies have urged us back in that direction, particularly with the encouragement of widespread charter schools.  With zero tolerance charter schools as the only choice to weak public schools for poor parents, most middle class parents would not and will not send their children to these schools because they are so severe.  On the other hand, we have the high-flying charter schools in white suburbs that do not provide public transportation or lunches for that poor children would need if they could be enrolled in them.  In either case, the result is increased segregation.

Too, these segregating charters often drain tax dollars away from public schools that could use those funds for renewal, restoration, and renovation during these hard economic times, when the best research tells us that less than 20 percent of charter schools are doing better than the struggling regular public schools they are replacing.  Therefore, I am declaring a moratorium on federal funding for all new charter schools until the Institute of Educational Science and the Government Accounting Office can complete a thorough review of charter school benefits, costs, and overall effects on America’s public schools.

 At the same time, I am directing the Secretary of Education to devise clear guidelines for generous grant funding for any school, school system, or consortium to put in place programs to challenge the re-segregation trends in America’s schools today and in the future by creating new magnet school initiatives or by initiating or improving programs based on socioeconomic diversity with public school choice. 

Finally, I want to announce a new initiative regarding teacher quality.  Just as we cannot afford, either morally or economically, to return to an America that had segregated schools, we cannot turn our backs on our commitment to the most important and, of late, the most vilified of professions.  I am speaking, of course, of teachers, who are daily in charge of that precious 20 percent of our population that constitute 100 percent of our future.  Since the days of Horace Mann and the Common School Crusade, school reformers have pushed for more qualified and better-educated teachers.  But in recent years, those standards for entering the profession, which were often weak already, have been weakened further by lowering requirements or by encouraging a Peace Corps approach to teacher recruitment in poor areas.

While we applaud those enthusiastic new graduates who sign up to teach two years in the hardest to staff schools, this is not enough for a country that believes that hope for a professionally-trained teacher and a quality public school should not be limited by one’s zip code.  In order to make sure that every child in America’s public education system has a professionally prepared and highly-qualified teacher, I am announcing a new program to attract, recruit, and train this generation’s best and brightest college graduates who have the desire, character, intellect, and disposition to become teachers in America’s most challenging learning environments. 

Under this new initiative, college graduates with liberal arts and science majors may apply for Teach America Grants (TAG).  These grants will pay for post-graduate training at the level of Masters in Education and Teaching (MET), while paying a stipend for living expenses until TAG graduates find suitable employment in schools with America’s lowest-achieving children.  I am requesting that Congress authorize $1.6 billion per year for the next five years to educate the first 100,000 TAG teachers.

Now with such an investment in making available the best and brightest teachers in poor schools, we cannot afford to leave these communities in disrepair from generations of malignant neglect.  We cannot afford for the conditions of poverty to burn out and burn up our investments in educational hope and change.   Because we know that when poverty and the effects of poverty are reduced, so will the schools in those communities improve if programs and teachers are put in place to coincide with those community changes, my Administration is announcing the creation of a new paradigm for educational policy.  We are transitioning, then, from policies aimed at creating magnet schools, even though they can be helpful in the short term, to a new policy of creating magnet communities.  These new magnet communities will attract diverse job opportunities and diverse populations to work, to live, to rebuild, and to restore the poorest areas of our cities.

That is why I am directing the Secretaries for Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, Labor, and Transportation, to appoint representatives at the Assistant Secretary level to participate fully in the EDRA Taskforce deliberations, with authorization to bring to bear the full resources of their departments in crafting an education policy that treats the learning problem of the poor as not only a school problem, but as a jobs problem, a housing problem, a transportation problem, and a health problem.  Until these problems are addressed with the appropriate resources required to do so effectively, the education debt that we owe to every parent with a child in a poor school cannot be paid. 

And until that debt is paid, it is the President and Congress that must be held accountable by the American people.  The old saying of “No Excuses” will no longer serve as an excuse for doing nothing to improve the desperate lives of the working poor and their children, who deserve an education that can sustain the hope that we as adults urge upon them.

These efforts to rethink and renew our commitments to quality public schools for all children follow a tradition that began over 200 years ago with Noah Webster and Thomas Jefferson.  The future of our democratic and economic aspirations as a free people rests upon a well-educated citizenry, and that that can only happen as a result of equal opportunity being extended to all children, rather than the best opportunities for some with the worst for others.  These educational changes that I am announcing tonight represent a new beginning for the restoration of a national commitment to educational equity and excellence for all.  A free people demand nothing less, for as Jefferson still reminds us, "if a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."

Help Ballou Senior High School Library Build a Book Collection

WaPo ran this story today:

By Bill Turque
Friday, January 21, 2011; 3:52 PM


The literature section of Melissa Jackson's library at Ballou Senior High School had 63 books one morning last week, not enough to fill five small shelves. In the area marked "pure science," there were 77 volumes.

This is not because the students at the Southeast Washington school had scoured the stacks and checked almost everything out. Ballou's entire collection consists of 1,185 books, about one per kid. "What you see is what we have," said Jackson. "Keep in mind, this is a high school. We should be flooded with books."

This might be an odd way to begin a success story, but success it is. The central figures are Jackson, a genial but deeply persistent educator, and principal Rahman Branch, who is determined to bring academic rigor to a school that has seen multiple waves of federally mandated restructuring because of poor performance.

The generally accepted standard for school libraries is 11 books for each of the Ballou's 1,104 students. Yet until recently, it had no functioning library, much less a librarian. Students say the room was a dimly lit dead zone with moldy carpeting and sadly outdated books (the encylopedia collection was from 1974). More of a place to hide out, they said, than to read or research.

It was consistent with the generally dismal condition of the 50-year-old Ward 8 building, a tired, red-brick structure touched only at the margins by the $1 billion wave of modernization and reconstruction that transformed many schools under former Mayor Adrian M. Fenty. The city's second largest high school is not scheduled for a full makeover until 2014. ("Can you help me kick and scream about that travesty?" asked Branch).

The library turnaround began in the spring of 2009 when Branch recruited Jackson, 40, a 1986 Ballou graduate who'd won raves for her work as a librarian at nearby Martin Luther King Elementary. Branch also hired a "resource development" director, Ruth Jones, to marshal private contributions to the school. Donations have included a $600,000 anonymous gift, most of which was earmarked for college scholarships. But some went to new library furniture. The school system's building modernization office upgraded the lighting and other systems.

The result is a small, but radiant sanctuary. Branch and Jackson wanted to give the room a college campus ambience, so in addition to the standard furniture they added a "chill zone" with overstuffed couches and chairs, where students can read, work on a laptop or even stretch out and close their eyes for a few minutes.

The room has become a locus of school community life, drawing a lunchtime contingent of students who prefer it the often-chaotic cafeteria and gym. To lure them in and get them reading, Jackson has amped up the magazine collection, adding "ESPN" and "O," as well as more traditional offerings such as "Newsweek" and "National Geographic." She keeps the room open until 6:30 p.m. each day, and it is the now the location for a book club, chess club, poetry club and monthly classic black cinema club, which has screened films ranging from "Birth of a Nation" to "Shaft." Students with toddlers in the school's day care center get a weekly story time period.

"This library used to be a hot mess," said senior Tiesha Hines. "No books, no computers, no tables."

Sophomore Tiffany Adams said most students were scarcely aware that there was a library at Ballou until this year. Now, she said, "we come here and get our work done."

The mission is a personal one for Jackson, who is saddened at how Ballou has declined since her student days She grew up in Southeast, the daughter of a "pieman" who delivered fresh pies for Mrs. Smith's. Her mother managed a dress shop. There were books in the house - her favorite as a child was the Judy Blume's "Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret."

Her father insisted that the family watch "60 Minutes" every week. "It was his way of getting us to know there was a wider world out there," she said. After Ballou and the University of the District of Columbia (and a masters degree at the University of Maryland) she spent 17 years as an early childhood teacher at Meyer Elementary.

But Jackson always nursed a desire to be a librarian. When Branch called, she knew what she needed to do.
"Ballou is where I should be," she said.

Jackson is a compulsive hugger who mills constantly among teachers and their classes, consulting on research projects. One morning last week it was a Power Point presentation exploring "The Chemistry of Making Ice Cream Without an Ice Cream Maker." She helped another girl spellcheck her scholarship application, including "procrastinate."

"You OK?" she asks. It's her default greeting for students coming through her door. It's more than small talk at Ballou, where 85 percent of the students come from families that meet income guidelines for federally subsidized lunches. Issues at home or on the streets often play out in the classroom.

"I haven't seen you for two days," she said to one ninth grader who walked in with an enormous red binder. He replied that his mother had kept him home because he'd been beaten up on the way to school.

Jackson's biggest challenge is the extraordinary shortage of books. Small, outdated collections plague virtually all D.C. public high school libraries, which are chronically underfunded. Only three of the city's 16 regular and specialized high schools have library media centers that meet the the 11-to-1 ratio, according Pat Brown, director of library media services for D.C. schools, a position that was also empty for three years prior to her arrival in 2009.

Jackson did her own research when she took the Ballou job. Banneker, a selective, application-only high school with one-third of Ballou's enrollment, has three times the number of library books. Spingarn High School, with half the number of students as Ballou, has double the book collection, according to Jackson.

In a looseleaf binder she keeps a running list of book requests from teachers. The needs are vast - everything from Shakespeare to Octavia Butler to Richard Wright. She estimates that it would take about $250,000 to bring the Ballou library up to the 11-to-1 standard. She's constantly fundraising, but not always successfully. A recent event at a Barnes and Noble "did not go as well as I projected," she said in a recent appeal. Next on the calendar is a Jan. 29 "Bowl-a-thon" at Lucky Strike lanes on 7thSt NW. The goal is $10,000.

Branch said she's become an enormous asset. "She's a gem, more than that."

How about a 21-hour school day?

Sent to the Washington Post, Jan 21

It is inspiring to read that so many educators, inspired by the hard-driving KIPP schools, are pushing for a longer school day and school year ("Efforts to extend school day, year reignite debate" Jan. 20). Proposals to extend the school day by 30 minutes, however, fall far short of what is needed.

Let's push ahead and consider an even longer day.

A study published in the Journal of Irreproducible Results in 1991 concluded that a 21-hour school day is optimal, with continuous classes and no breaks, except for two breaks for meals and one lavatory visit. Among the many advantages would be fewer discipline problems and quieter classrooms because of sleep deprivation, which "lessened the students' rebellious impulses."

The researchers also intend to do studies to determine whether food is really necessary for school children.

Stephen Krashen

Original article at:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/19/AR2011011907120.html

Will a Koch Brothers Handout Save John Tedesco's House?

It's been quite a week for Little John.  On MLK Day, the same day Raleigh's mayor and North Carolina's governor were attending a Martin Luther King Prayer breakfast and calling out Tedesco and the Gang of Five as "way off track," Tedesco was appearing on Fox Business Network, where he defended the re-segregation school policy as good business. 

. . . Tedesco told Gerri Willis of the Willis Report that the decision is primarily a "money-saving issue."

"We spend $72 million a year on a fleet of 925 buses for transportation... We spend a lot of time getting 5 and 6-year-old kids on bus stops at 5:30, 6:30 in the morning on one side of the county to commute an hour to the other side of the county with 10 kids on a bus here and 10 kids on a bus there, so it's somewhat inefficient," Tedesco told the Willis Report.

Tedesco did not tell Gerri, nor did she ask, how many Wake County children were bused more than five miles from their homes during the days of socioeconomic integration.  Or who was bused.  From the NYTimes in 2005:

Of the county's 139 elementary, middle and high schools, all but 22 are within the 40 percent guideline, according to the district's data. Some are onlya few percentage points above the guideline, while others are significantly higher.

The overwhelming majority of the 120,000 children in the district go either to a local school or a school of their choice, officials said. Slightly more than 85 percent of students attend a school within five miles of home and another 12 percent or so voluntarily attend magnet or year-round schools.  

Although the figures can be calculated many ways, Mr. McNeal says about 2.5 percent - or about 3,000 children - are assigned to schools for economic balance or to accommodate the district's growth by filling new schools or easing overcrowding in existing ones.

Most of those bused for economic diversity tend to be low-income, he said. 

Then Tuesday, Tedesco and the Gang of 5 (or is it now 4?) were mock-rified by Stephen Colbert's withering satire during "The Word" segment.  Tedesco responded with the following statement, which sounds like something from the Koch-funded John Locke Foundation think tank (think John Birch Society without hoods):

"While it was skewed and certainly out of context I thought it was hilarious and ultimately I think we need to laugh sometimes. In this heated climate we've recently heard calls to move beyond the rhetoric and I think when we laugh together we can begin to talk together," said Tedesco.

Too bad Tedesco doesn't think we can go to school together. 

But then, Tedesco's world is quite integrated enough without the noisy and nasty poor causing trouble for white children trying to get an education.  No doubt Tedesco's new superintendent (and Fox News commentator), General Tata, would agree.

And then on Wednesday, the Progressive Pulse reported that Tedesco's home in Garner, NC is about to foreclosed:

In court filings, Tedesco’s Garner home on Rock Fish Lane had foreclosure proceedings started against it on Jan. 4, according to public court documents found in the Wake County Courthouse. A May 4^th hearing is scheduled at the Wake County Clerk of Courts office, with a foreclosure sale date on the courthouse steps taking place later in the month, on May 25.

Apparently, when Tedesco stepped forward to become a full-time mouthpiece of the Koch Brothers' resegregation initiative, he expected something more than the $11,000 he collects from being a school board member.  And so he gave up his day job with Big Brothers and Big Sisters, hoping perhaps that his media attention would bring cash as well as stardom.

And then yesterday, Wake County Republican Chair, Susan Bryant, went on the record blaming liberals for Tedesco losing his job and his subsequent financial meltdown:

RALIEGH (WTVD) -- The Wake County chapter of the Republican Party is asking for financial help for school board member John Tedesco. 

In an email sent out Thursday, Wake County Republican chair Susan Bryat says Tedesco had to leave his job at Big Brothers and Big Sisters after he was elected because "liberals threatened to cut off funding for the organization unless he was fired."

"As a result, he fell behind in his mortgage payments and now faces foreclosure," said Bryat.

She also calls out WRAL-TV for "compound[ing] the tragedy by accusing him of fiscal mismanagement."

Tedesco is one of the members of the school board majority that voted to do away with Wake County's socioeconomic diversity policy in favor of sending students to schools closer to their homes.

Tedesco's school board job only pays about $11,000 a year.

"He lost his job because he was doing what we elected him to do. Why not show him your support by sending him a birthday card and gift to let him know how much we appreciate his sacrifice, and help him when he needs it the most," said Bryat.

Here is what happened last April when he quit his job:

Tedesco worked as chief development officer for Big Brothers Big Sisters for a little more than three years. Although he earlier acknowledged that opponents of his school-board policies had contacted his employer and threatened to withhold donations, Tedesco said Friday that those threats were politically motivated and those who made them had not donated to Big Brothers Big Sisters in the past.

Since the election and his ascension in the public eye, Tedesco said, no one had pulled donations from the organization.

And now, today, Little John emerges magnanimous, urging those millions of donations to be given to Big Brothers Big Sisters:

It looks like Wake County school board member John Tedesco will be avoiding any potential ethics concerns by turning down gifts being solicited in his name by the Wake County Republican Party.

As noted in today's article, Tedesco said he didn't know in advance that Wake GOP Chairwoman Susan Bryant would send out the request Thursday. Tedesco said people should instead send gifts and donations to his former employer, Big Brothers Big Sisters of the Triangle.

“While I appreciate their generous offer, I can’t accept it,” Tedesco said. “I know there are many other people having difficulties right now.”

But Tedesco said he'll definitely like to hear about any potential job offers he can explore.

Legally, there would have been nothing stopping him from taking any gifts.

Any potential jobs out there??  Could there be a future John at News Corp. after the next school board election?  How about the guy who gets coffee for Joel Klein?  Until then, stay tuned.

Policy: protect children from poverty before we discuss pedagogy

The NCTE (National Council of Teachers of English) invited suggestions for its policy platform for 2011.

Suggestion for NCTE Policy Platform

Submitted by Stephen Krashen and Susan Ohanian

January 18, 2011

Single sentence summary: The NCTE platform should focus on removing the overwhelming barriers to student learning: food insecurity, lack of health care, toxins, and of special interest to us, access to books.

NCTE's Educational Policy Platform this year deals with removing the serious obstacles many children face that make real learning impossible. All of these obstacles are the result of poverty. The problem of poverty is so serious that it is useless to discuss details of language arts pedagogy unless we protect students from the powerful negative effects of poverty.

Many studies have documented how poverty impacts school performance: "Food insecurity," lack of health care, exposure to environmental toxins, and lack of access to books all have devastating effects on student's ability to learn.

The latter, lack of access to books, is of special interest to NCTE, as well as to other organizations concerned with literacy development and libraries: Without access to books, wide self-selected reading cannot happen. Wide reading for pleasure is the bedrock of the language arts. It is responsible for development enough competence in reading, writing, vocabulary, grammar, and mechanics that make higher levels of literacy possible.

The US has the highest rate of child poverty of all industrialized countries, which accounts for our less-than-spectacular scores on international tests. American children who live in middle class neighborhoods and who attend well-funded schools score at the top of the world.

The NCTE platform this year is that we are in no position to debate the subtleties of instruction such as the content of the literature standards. Our discussions of what is on the menu must wait until people are no longer starving.

The NCTE Platform: Make sure that no child is left unfed, all children have adequate health care and all children have access to a wide variety of reading material. Only when this is accomplished can we return to the business of what goes on in the classroom.

Oligarchs Pay For Evaluation of Oligarchs' Teacher Evaluation System

When Arne Duncan came out publicly in support of Kaya Henderson as Chancellor of DC Schools, it was a clear sign that the same failed approach that led to Wonderwoman's departure would remain in place as long as Henderson was ostensibly in charge.  From Rhee's sordid history in DC, we know that she was a cartoon super-heroine, with scripts provided by the Broadies and Waltons. 

That arrangement continues, with DCPS announcing that an "independent" evaluation of the pay per score evaluation system called IMPACT will be undertaken by Harvard's most famous tenured panderer to the Oligarchs, Roland Fryer. Ha ha, ha ha ha. Excuse me. 

Will Mayor Gray continue to allow this charade?

From Bill Turque at WaPo:

By Bill Turque

The Harvard think tank that experimented with paying D.C. middle schoolers for good grades and behavior will also study the IMPACT teacher evaluation system.

DCPS confirmed late Wednesday that the Education Innovation Laboratory at Harvard University, aka EdLabs, is the mutual selection of the District and the Washington Teachers' Union to conduct an independent evaluation of the evaluation. EdLabs is headed by Roland G. Fryer Jr., the economics professor who has been studying the effects of cash awards on students in D.C., Chicago, Dallas and New York.

An independent look at IMPACT is provided for in a side letter to the collective bargaining agreement signed last year by DCPS and the union, which has major objections to the system.

I might be missing something, but on the surface at least, Fryer seems like a peculiar choice. He's clearly a rising star--one of the youngest Harvard profs to win tenure--but much of his published work involves the achievement gap and race-based economic and social issues. His papers include "An Empirical Analysis of Acting White" and "The Causes and Consequences of Distinctively Black Names."

The other issue is EdLabs "partners," or financial backers. They include at least two of the private foundations providing some of the tens of millions for the performance pay bonuses that are a central element of IMPACT. They include the Eli and Edy Broad Foundation, and the John and Laura Arnold Family Fund. They might like IMPACT just the way it is.

Fryer's voicemail at Harvard is full and not taking messages, and I'm scheduled to speak with WTU president Nathan Saunders later today. Whatever DCPS's reasons for wanting Fryer, it is keeping them to itself for the moment.

"We won't be saying anything more about Fryer at this time," said spokeswoman Safiya Simmons. That includes any details about exactly how deep Fryer will be diving or how long he'll take. It matters because the issue is heating up politically, given Mayor Vincent C. Gray's recent comments questioning IMPACT's fairness to teacher in high-poverty schools.

The cash-for-grades initiative, called Capital Gains, ran for two school years (2008-09 and 2009-10) and involved about 3,000 middle schoolers, who earned up to $100 a month. Fryer's assessment of the first year found that the money led to higher reading test scores for Hispanics, boys and students with behavior problems. But the overall effect, however, was less significant and Fryer acknowledged that the relatively small sample made it difficult to draw strong conclusions.

Former Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee, who brought Fryer to D.C., said she liked the program but that budget issues made it difficult to continue. Cap Gains is not running in the current school year, although DCPS has never formally announced that it has been discontinued.