U. S. Chamber of Horrors Bringing Its Brand of Destruction to MA Schools

If you thought that states with gubernatorial stooges controlled by the Koch-Heads were the only ones set on destroying their public education systems and other public institutions, think again.  Here in the Commonwealth where there is darker hue to Blue, the Business Roundtable, the Broadies, the Boston Foundation, and other lower forms of corporate hangers-on are staging an all-out push to destroy the public teaching profession with the same kind of anti-scientific and test score based teacher evaluations that we see being pushed in red state Indiana, Tennessee, or Utah.

Despite the warnings by leading scholars and the National Research Council, no less, the U. S. Chamber of Horrors and their billions directed by their Business Roundtable have bought their way to the front of the line (hell, they've bought the line) in public policy-making even in home state of Horace Mann, where public education began and where it has flourished, except for the poor, of course.

Despite the fact that Massachusetts NAEP scores are at the highest levels in the nation, and despite the fact that Massachusetts students' international test scores are among the best in the world, the fools, charlatans, and control freak Harvard toadies hired by Death Chamber are pushing hard to make test scores even more central to what schools do, thus pushing critical thinking about pressing social and ecological issues further into the background than they are now.  This is all part of the same coordinated national effort to distract effort away from issues that, if addressed, could affect the bottom lines of the dirty energy giants and the sludge funders of Wall Street who are driving the Chamber of Horrors' agenda, which is, in fact, a social agenda.

The price to pay if the death-worshipping sociopaths of the Chamber go unchecked?  If the Spirit of Cairo and Madison do not run these scoundrels into a Caribbean or Swiss exile (or better yet, lock them up like the Mubarak boys)?  The price to pay will be the final generations of a human civilization that was miseducated to embrace their own demise, to think positive about the end of the world as we know it, to keep order as the ecological apocalypse closed in, to support the corporate state and the final wars to corner the remaining resources as the oceans die.

In Massachusetts, as elsewhere, civil disobedience must take hold on a large scale, with demonstrations, boycotts, and mass strikes by teachers and students and parents and grandparents.  Boycotting the corporate rag and official organ of the Death Chamber, the Boston Globe, would be a great first step.  There is no worse example of public irresponsibility in the media--well, maybe Fox--but that's not media, just sordid entertainment.

Any newspaper that would label the NCTQ as a non-partisan research outfit, as the Globe has done in cheerleading for the new evaluation scheme, is too owned by the corporations to even make a distinction between partisan and non-partisan.  When both sides of the aisle of the same corporate jet are drinking the same champagne, what does partisan really mean, anyway?  About the same thing that it means in China.  Too bad there is not a Pulitzer for the most consistent editorializing within news stories--James Vaznis would be a shoo-in.

There is much educational work and organizing to be done if the world is to avoid catastrophe.  Much resistance to be swept aside, pushed into the ditch, left behind.  We have less than two decades to turn this rusting, smelly, smoking multi-national corporate ship.  We cannot be complicit in our demise or that of our children.  Action now or never.  Stop the Corporate Takeover of Massachusetts Schools!  That's a step that must be taken.

Disclosures, Anyone??

The NY Daily News ran a pro-NCLB piece written by Sandy Kress, but they neglected a good deal of relevant information. Nowhere does the DN mention that Kress is a lobbyist for Pearson (a beneficiary of NCLB), Teach for America, or Wireless Generation (among others). See the clip below (via OpenSecrets.org), or this list of companies Kress lobbies for in TX:

Likewise, today's Eduwonk post links to an article about the recent reforms in IL, but forgets to mention that his consulting firm, Bellwether Education Partners, lists Stand for Children and Advance Illinois as clients. SFC is specifically mentioned in the piece he links to; AI is not, but they clearly played an important role.

[Side note: Kress' lobbying partner, Beth Ann Bryan, might be a familiar name if you followed the "Reading First" debacle.]

Inner Oklahoma City Teacher Considers Neighboring KIPP

Part of John Thompson's post at HuffPo:

. . . .I notice that Oklahoma City's KIPP was one of the 22 schools studied [in recent Mathematica working paper], but its attrition data was excluded due to the way the numbers were kept. Our KIPP does a great job, but you simply can not compare a charter which had a decade to build up to serving 285 students, with 8.5 percent being on special education IEPs, with its neighboring school. KIPP replaced Moon Middle School which had served 792 students, with 26 percent on IEPs. Last year, KIPP recommended 21 percent of students for retention, while the old Moon had recommended 3 precent of students for retention. The old Moon was cited in Harpers Index for a lunch room riot. KIPP's neighboring school had a one year middle school dropout rate of 11.5 percent. At Moon, latecomers sometimes arrived in a deputy's car, in handcuffs, as they reentered a school with no transition services. One of their forms of attrition was 30 expulsions; the old school had 808 total suspensions.

As I have explained, Arne Duncan came to Oklahoma City and gave our KIPP the praise it deserved, but he was factually incorrect in claiming that the charter served the "same kids in the same building." Ironically, I had been bloodied that day breaking up a vicious assault which badly injured a student. The assailant had previously sent a teacher to the hospital. I had former KIPP students in my honors class, and they said that KIPP would never have tolerated the routine physical assaults that our neighborhood school allowed to be committed on students and teachers.

. . . .

I will never begrudge KIPP the praise that it deserves for the good it does for some students. Neither do I begrudge the extra resources that KIPP gets from private donors.

The problem is the claim that neighborhood schools could replicate those successes if we had higher expectations. Every day in my last two years in the classroom, I had a student transfer in or transfer out. I doubt anyone would claim that families chose my school in order to improve their life's prospects. If a student transferred to my school, obviously, it was because his or her family was not able to take advantage of the wide array of educational choices in our metropolitan area. At best, their only transition services were a handshake while being greeted or being told "good bye." Too many times, teachers were too overwhelmed to even offer those basic courtesies.

By pretending that KIPP serves our most vulnerable students, society is given an excuse for starving alternative services for our most traumatized kids. For the life of me, I can not understand why people of good will can not agree on the obvious. KIPP is the answer for some students. But our toughest secondary schools need far more investments for our most damaged children if we hope to provide educational futures for them and their classmates. Why not give our neighborhood schools the same chances to help poor kids that we give to KIPP?

The case for libraries

The Case for Libraries

Sent to the San Diego Union Tribune

"When I read about the way in which library funds are being cut and cut, I can only think that American society has found one more way to destroy itself." (Isaac Asimov)

The mayor's budget experts who want to cut public library funding should consider the extraordinary amount of research on the impact of libraries on children.

Of the many items in the San Diego Union over the last few days about libraries (“Sanders to propose deep cuts to parks, libraries,” April 15; "Community life thrives at endangered public libraries," April 16; Letters, April 16), only Pam Munoz Ryan ("Improving literacy through school libraries," April 16) mentioned these studies: They show that when children have access to good public and/or school libraries with plenty of good books and with adequate staffing, they read more, and thus do better on reading tests. For children of poverty, public and school libraries are typically the only possible source of reading material.

We complain that children don’t read well enough, but we make it impossible for them to improve.

Stephen Krashen

Bill McKibben Goes After the Everest of Dirty Money: U. S. Chamber of Commerce

"A Taxing Tale" for Imagine Schools

From Karen Francisco at the Journal Gazette:

A taxing tale

County scrutinizes charter school property tax exemption

The news about charter schools, their owners, and the money they make goes back to December to the state Supreme Court. In reversing a decision by the Indiana Tax Court, the justices ruled that a property owner doesn’t automatically qualify for a tax exemption even if property is used for a charitable or exempt purpose.

From that one decision, some charter school books are being opened in Fort Wayne. Taxpayers can learn where some of their tax dollars are going, and a lot of them leave the state and end up at a company boasting of attractive profits from a “reliable cash flow.”

A company is summoned. Based on that Supreme Court decision and a January memorandum from the Indiana Department of Local Government Finance, Allen County officials summoned JERIT CS Fund LLC, the real estate investment trust listed as owner of the Wells Street campus of the Imagine schools, to defend its property tax exemption.

Continue reading here.

Big Three Edu-Spending

The folks at EdSector received a $2.22 million, 3-year grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation "to explore and highlight policies at the state level that prevent greater use of innovation, technology, and competency-based education". CMOs, a main component of the second wave of B&MGF reforms (the first being their botched small schools movement), were clearly not sustainable even before the financial calamity, and they're facing even more challenges now that state budgets are being slashed. "Hybrid learning" both appeals to the new philanthropists (many with a background in tech), and can save money by limiting labor costs.

In case you haven't followed some of the controversy around the NJ/Newark reforms, it recently came to light that the Broad Foundation is paying for a consultant to help Cerf with whatever Cerf is doing these days:

A major foundation is paying a national expert on analyzing schools $60,000 to advise acting Education Commissioner Christopher Cerf as he tries to restructure the Department of Education.

There's also this nugget from the consultant about how the Broad Foundation helps graduates of the Academy:

"Frequently what the Broad Center does when one of its graduates or fellows takes on a new assignment or moves into a new role, they reach out to a network of individuals that have experience with the Broad Center and seek ways folks can help out,” Cox said.
Cox said he aimed to help “align the department to be of maximum support to school districts in their efforts to improve education outcomes for all kids, especially those at risk.”

And, just to make sure I cover the "Big Three" of the Billionaire Boys Club, did you know that the Walton Family Foundation is funding some of Stand for Children's work in Colorado?

Jay Mathews Condemns Miron KIPP Study for Its Fairness, Part II

Mathematica, which is under contract to KIPP, Inc. for some ongoing research, issued a working paper in time for AERA this year and in time to try to neutralize the findings of the Miron study.  It is this "better data" to which Jay refers in the quote below.  "Better data for Jay is, of course, data that supports the KIPP party line.  It matters not that the Mathematica paper bases its numbers on self-reported info from KIPP schools and does not include some schools that did not bother to report or that had incomplete data, whereas the Miron study pulls from the Fed's Common Core of Data, which some might view as "better data" in the sense that is is less likely to be cooked by KIPP.

Miron and his team raise good questions about KIPP. They come up with some interesting answers that both support and criticize the KIPP model, although their conclusions lean toward the negative and they make some mistakes. In one section they say KIPP is losing 40 percent of black males, but better data from Mathematica show the loss is considerably less than that, and below the average attrition of black males in neighboring regular public schools. The Miron report then contradicts its own point by saying that the attrition rate for low-income students at KIPP schools (about 85 percent of their total student bodies) is the same as that for low-income kids at regular schools in the districts in which they are located.

Below is a chart from the Miron study that breaks out the attrition rates by sub-groups (click to enlarge).  Apparently it never occurred to Jay that one sub-group, black males, might have much higher attrition rates, while other more docile sub-groups such as Hispanic females could have a much lower attrition rate, thus creating an average that matches neighboring schools, which is just what the Miron report shows.  Duh.

Jay is also upset that the Miron report points out that any replacement for urban public schools, corporate or otherwise, will have to be ready to convert existing schools.  KIPP's test scores and KIPP's success at cultural sterilization of minorities has depended upon starting new schools from scratch.  Where KIPP has tried conversions, such as in Denver and Buffalo, KIPP headquarters cut and ran before big problems could become PR nightmares and data damagers.  Jay's preference?  Well, of course, the world should operate to suit the organizational needs of KIPP.  Simple.

You create new schools within schools by growing a grade at a time, as KIPP does. That gives teachers a chance to establish a new culture that supports learning.

Note Jay's backstroke here in the KIPP sea of arrogance: only KIPP teachers can grow a culture of learning. Why do I think pandemic when Mathews talk about growing cultures?

Finally, Jay if miffed that Miron and his colleagues find that KIPP does not take children during the school year as public schools must.  (We know that KIPP has the luxury of requiring that 3 weeks of brainwashing during the previous summer to KIPP-notize new recruits, where would-be KIPPsters learn to walk and go the bathroom the KIPP way).  So once again, for Jay this simply points out the need for the rest of the world to change in order to comply with the KIPP organizational needs.  We, therefore, should create something like student rubber rooms or holding pens for students who transfer in so that they do not break the spell of the  treatment for KIPPsters who have been readied for their yearlong treatment in how to pass tests and how to resiliently absorb abuse and say thank you for it:

Admitting students at midyear in urban neighborhoods also holds back classes in regular schools, the report notes. If that is the case, then why do it in that unpromising way? Why not have special classes for students who arrive at midyear that focus on their special problems and ready them for a fresh start in the new school year?

If Jay Mathews truly believes this ridiculous babble, he is, indeed, dumber than I thought, which is to say, life continues to be full of surprises.

Jay Mathews Condemns Miron KIPP Study for Its Fairness, Part I

As the spokesman for the testing industry in general and for Kaplan in partiular (thank you, Kaplan, for paying Jay's salary), Jay Mathews lost credibility as a reporter a long time ago.

When Jay signed on as KIPP's man in the print media, a previous lack of credibility earned from disfiguring the facts turned to public dismissal as dissembling degenerated to all-out bullshit, as defined by Frankfurt in his book, On Bullshit:

He [the bullshitter] does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.

How does the role of bullshitter fit Jay?  Try this paragraph from his attack yesterday on the Miron report:

The Miron report leaves the impression that the researchers are not here to help raise student achievement, but to act like racetrack monitors and make sure every competing model is obeying rules designed to make sure nobody gets an unfair advantage. They are not looking for ways to help horses run faster and more safely. Instead, they want to make sure everyone has the proper weights and other equalizers to make it a fair race, when the idea should be not to decide who gets the blue ribbon, but how to improve all schools.

A worthy goal for social advocacy, Jay, but not one for credible researchers whose job it is to ascertain the facts, i. e., the truth.  But since KIPP is in the business of advocacy, it would be a worthy goal for them and you to heed your own advice for other educational advocates.  But your advocacy, Jay, and that of KIPP is only for the KIPP brand, rather than for all schools.  They came to bury public schools, not to help them win a blue ribbon.

To use your horse-racing metaphor (in which case it may be appropriate to revert to horseshit rather than bullshit), you and KIPP, Inc. insist on keeping only the strongest horses, while turning out the rest to your competitors while insisting that they be run against your stable without a handicap.  Not only that, but KIPP Farms would demand needed resources from their competitors who must then carry more weight in the saddle, while KIPP Farms hoards a stash of hundreds of millions of dollars that it may use as it sees fit to perfect its corporate branding and training program.  And who is to make sure that KIPP horses are not being doped or abused?  Why, KIPP insists on self-policing and no outside regulations, while demanding every form of oversight and accounting for their competitors.  Any wonder how KIPP Farms could be winning this test race?

Here is another example from Mathews, whose bullshitting is exemplary here:

I wish the Miron report would more directly confront the fact that some of the recommendations it makes for KIPP, particularly its call to recruit more disabled and English-language-deficient students, violate charter school laws. KIPP cannot promise that students it recruits will be admitted if there are more applications than there are places at the school. In such circumstances, selection has to be by random lottery.

More bullshit.  Notice that Mathews does not deny the fact that KIPP's test scores receive a big bump because they serve far fewer ELLs and SPED students.  (See Miron chart below--click to enlarge):

Jay is unconcerned with the truth of this matter, even as he makes excuses by hiding behind sloppy corporation-serving charter laws that do not require charters to hire teachers who are certified in special education or who have ESL certification. Most require no certification at all.  What parent with a special needs child is going to send that child to a school with a one-size-must-fit total compliance lockdown system.  Mathews remains unconcerned with this truth as he promotes his corporate cause.  The truth does not matter.  Here is what the Miron report said in the Policy Implications section:

If KIPP wishes to maintain its status as an exemplar of private management of public schools, rather than a new effort to privatize public schools, it will need to convince policymakers and the public that it intends to recruit and serve a wider range of students and that it will be able to do so with sustainable levels of funding comparable to what other traditional public schools receive.

Before KIPP can be considered a model to be widely replicated, it has to be committed to serving all the students it admits and to serving a portion of the students who are mobile,  including those who require a place in the middle of the school year, after the cut-off time for public funding to follow the student. Furthermore, to be considered a viable contributor to a system of public schools, KIPP also needs to recruit and serve a reasonable share of students who are more costly to educate, especially students with disabilities and students who are not native English speakers. The limited range of students that KIPP serves, its inability to serve all students who enter, and its dependence on local traditional public schools to receive and serve the droves of students who leave, all speak loudly to the limitations of this model. Furthermore the funding KIPP receives from public and private sources—more than $6,500 more per pupil in addition to what local school districts receive—is not likely to be sustainable in the longer run . . . .

The Intersection of Literacy and Education "Reform"

In my opinion, the meat of the issue when talking education policy is how changes to our public schools impact the lives of those people in the classroom. If you take it a step further and focus on a very specific topic - say, for instance, early elementary literacy - you're bound to find some very interesting reflections from thoughtful, trained, caring educators.

In the blog post I've linked to below, a teacher with training in literacy studies reflects on her experience in a corporate charter school. Here's a brief introduction (via Mary Ann Reilly's blog):

Guest Blog: This blog post was written by Miss C a former graduate student of mine who spent a year working as a first grade teacher at a charter school in the South Bronx (NYC). Miss C completed a Masters of Professional Studies in Literacy, a graduate program that ironically privileged the arts and situated the study of "literacies" within a sociocultural framework. The charter world that Miss C describes represents a fundamentally different understanding of teaching, learning, children, and developmentally appropriate practices than what she knew and learned at college.

I warn you, I cried reading this narrative--not for Miss C, a talented artist and teacher now working in a public school, but for her 22 first graders still at the charter school.

Do continue reading here. It is well worth your time.