Corporate Party Continues Propaganda Campaign Against Chicago Teachers

Back in the old days of the Bush Administration, the Bushies paid hacks like Kate Walsh, who were receiving federal discretionary grants from ED,  to seed the op-ed pages of America's newspapers with pro-NCLB propaganda.  After an Inspector General report called out NCTQ and Walsh for their illegal actions, corporate ed deformers shifted their strategy to take advantage of the era of unrestricted spending by PACs and Super PACs.  

Take the work of Rebeca Nieves Huffman, for instance, whose accounts include Chicago Sun-Times, where she spreads the gospel for the Corporate Party's neoliberal wing, the Democrats for Education Reform.  

Who is Rebeca Nieves Huffman?  Well, here is her ad posted at the Friedman Foundation--as in Milton Friedman-- whose philosophy best represents the conservative wing of the Corporate Party that she represents:  

Vice President at the National Association of Charter School Authorizers

Schedule a Speaking Engagement With Rebeca Nieves Huffman

Huffman, a native of Chicago, currently serves as Vice President at the National Association of Charter School Authorizers (NACSA) where she manages the grant making work of the organization through its Fund for Authorizing Excellence.

Before joining NACSA, Huffman served for 5 years as President and CEO of the Hispanic Council for Reform and Educational Options (Hispanic CREO), an organization that is the national voice for the right of Latino parents to access all educational options and is an agent of change and equity in education.

Prior to serving as Hispanic CREO’s President and CEO, Huffman was the Associate Director of Recruitment and Selection for the KIPP Foundation, an organization dedicated to providing historically underserved students with the knowledge, skills, and character needed to succeed in top-quality high schools, colleges, and the competitive world beyond.
Huffman serves on the boards of Education Sector and City Year Chicago. She is also a proud alum of the Aspen Institute’s Entrepreneurial Leadership for Public Education fellowship program which identifies and strengthens the next generation of leaders within the K-12 education sector. 

Huffman resides in the city of Chicago with her husband, Craig, and children Sofia (3) and Solomon (21 months). 

Rebeca's specialty: Parent and Astroturf Grassroots Organizing.

Here is a link to Rebeca's tirade today, with all the trademark fear-mongering and hyperbole that is sure to satisfy her plutocratic bosses of the corporate foundations, who are lined up, waiting to turn Chicago Schools into another corporate revenue stream like Philadelphia, while leaving children behind in testing chain gangs with no public oversight and no alternative to the kind of punishing pedagogy that the corporate non-educators have perfected for the poor.

Pearson Tests Designed to Make the Brightest Child Feel Stupid

From Valerie Strauss at WaPo:

By Valerie Strauss

A New York school principal is urging the state’s education commissioner to review the standardized math assessments recently given to students in grades 3-5 because of a host of serious problems with their design. In a powerful letter, she also told him to take the tests to see the problems for himself.

New York has already had one embarrassing moment during this spring standardized testing season. A public furor arose over questions about a talking pineapple on the reading assessment for eighth gradersthat were so incomprehensible that Education Commissioner John B. King Jr., decided that the problem would not be counted in students’ scores.

Now, Sharon Emick Fougner, principal of Elizabeth Mellick Baker School in Great Neck, N.Y., has alerted King to what she says are major problems with the math assessments, including a “complete disregard for the cognitive and emotional development of elementary children.”

This matters to people beyond New York because it is not likely that the state is the only place such problems exist, given that the big companies that construct these assessments work in many states.

Here is the text of a letter that she just sent to King:

Dear Commissioner King,

I implore you to initiate a thorough review of this year’s NYS Math Assessments in grades three through five. I have been an elementary principal for twelve years, and are quite honestly horrified by the content, format, language and presentation of this year’s exams. In addition, the scoring and reporting procedures and insistence that test items remain permanently undisclosed to the public suggest that the process is both unreliable and artificial.

The poor design of this year’s NY Math Assessments demonstrates complete disregard for the cognitive and emotional development of elementary children. Specifically, third, fourth and fifth grade test booklets have contained:

*Unfamiliar, untaught material

*Deliberately misleading questions & answer choices

*Ambiguous, poorly worded questions & answer choices

*Inconsistent directions

*Misplaced answer lines

*Omitted directional cues

*Multiple answers that could be correct

*Inappropriately sized work spaces

*Extended multiple steps (as many as 5 or 6) in single problems

*Incomplete/missing information

*Reading levels that are above grade

Each of these items has significantly impacted student performance on these tests. They have caused confusion, anxiety, miscalculations, distraction, misuse of time, and fatigue. Compounding these factors is the inordinate length of these exams, which is beyond the stamina and attention span of eight to ten year olds.

The embedded field test questions on this year’s NYS Assessments have had a particularly negative impact on the performance of our students. As the requirements for next year under the Common Core State Standards are very different from the expectations for this year, I assume that all of the unfamiliar topics are field test questions. These questions (which are very identifiable to adults familiar with the differences between current standards and the CCSS) are based on material to which children have had no exposure, thus rendering them useless as field test items. “Common Core questions” accounted for approximately 12% of the third grade, 8% of the fourth grade, and nearly 17% of the fifth grade questions. It is inconceivable as to why such a large portion of the tests should have been devoted to questions that obviously can provide no helpful information, since the topics are not currently required in NYS curriculum. (If these were not field test questions, then the test design poses an even greater problem, as the developers were not adequately familiar with current NYS Standards.) These questions caused additional anxiety for students who were already functioning under stressful conditions. Children, at all grades and ability levels, spend excessive amounts of time on these questions and became confused and agitated by their inability to answer them. Some of our brightest children reported to teachers after each day of the test that the questions made them feel stupid.

At the other end of the spectrum, the tests have been an emotional and physical assault on our special needs students and English language learners. Many of these children generally experience greater success in mathematics than reading, as they are knowledgeable and confident regarding the content and concepts. The reading levels, vocabulary and language structures made it impossible for them to access the tests and demonstrate their mathematical knowledge. In room after room, children could be seen twenty minutes into the test with their heads on their desks or staring blankly into space. When teachers checked on them, they simply said, “It’s too confusing,” or “I can’t do this,” and hopelessly gave up. Nearly half of my special education students cried at some point during these exams. It is unacceptable for eight, nine and ten year olds to be subjected to this kind of torment.

What is even more detrimental is that neither these children — nor their parents or teachers — will ever have access to their test booklets in order to understand how or why the child arrived at an incorrect answer. No benefit is extended to the child from all of these hours of testing if there is no thoughtful, comprehensive feedback. Likewise, I am unable to provide you and your department with clarification and examples regarding my initial list of concerns, as I am not permitted to speak about the content of the exams, or retain a test booklet for commentary. I find it disingenuous that you want teachers and principals to receive feedback, but want none yourself. It would seem that those of us who have spent our lives doing this work would have much insight to offer you.

I would hope that, as Commissioner of the New York State Education Department, you would aspire to an assessment system of which you can be proud. This is not that system. If you were to sit down and take each of these exams, I think you would be embarrassed that your department subjected children to them. I would expect that you, too, would see the flaws in these tests and want better for the students of New York State. This is not a testing system that should be used to evaluate students’ abilities, and certainly not a system that can determine teacher effectiveness.

I thank you for your careful consideration of my concerns, and would be happy to clarify them for you or answer any questions that you might have. Please do not hesitate to contact me.

Sharon Emick Fougner

Principal

Pc: Members of Board of Regents, NYSED

Diane Ravitch Educates the Nation on ALEC

What You Need To Know About ALEC

By Diane Ravitch, Bridging Differences
Posted on May 3, 2012, Printed on May 3, 2012
http://www.alternet.org/story/155257/what_you_need_to_know_about_alec

Since the 2010 elections, when Republicans took control of many states, there has been an explosion of legislation advancing privatization of public schools and stripping teachers of job protections and collective bargaining rights. Even some Democratic governors, seeing the strong rightward drift of our politics, have jumped on the right-wing bandwagon, seeking to remove any protection for academic freedom from public school teachers.

This outburst of anti-public school, anti-teacher legislation is no accident. It is the work of a shadowy group called the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC. Founded in 1973, ALEC is an organization of nearly 2,000 conservative state legislators. Its hallmark is promotion of privatization and corporate interests in every sphere, not only education, but healthcare, the environment, the economy, voting laws, public safety, etc. It drafts model legislation that conservative legislators take back to their states and introduce as their own "reform" ideas. ALEC is the guiding force behind state-level efforts to privatize public education and to turn teachers into at-will employees who may be fired for any reason. The ALEC agenda is today the "reform" agenda for education.

ALEC operated largely in the dark for years, but gained notoriety because of the Trayvon Martin case in Florida. It turns out that ALEC crafted the "Stand Your Ground" legislation that empowered George Zimmerman to kill an unarmed teenager with the defense that he (the shooter) felt threatened. When the bright light of publicity was shone on ALEC, a number of corporate sponsors dropped out, including McDonald's, Kraft, Coca-Cola, Mars, Wendy's, Intuit, Kaplan, and PepsiCo. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation said that it would not halt its current grant to ALEC, but pledged not to provide new funding. ALEC has some 300 corporate sponsors, including Walmart, the Koch Brothers, and AT&T, so there's still quite a lot of corporate support for its free-market policies. ALEC claimed that it is the victim of a campaign of intimidation.

Groups like Common Cause and colorofchange.org have been putting ALEC's model legislation online and printing the names of its sponsors. They have also published sharp criticism of ALEC's ideas. This is hardly intimidation. It's the democratic process at work. A website called alecexposed.org has published ALEC's policy agenda. Common Cause postedthe agenda for the meeting of ALEC on May 11 in Charlotte, N.C. The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards has dropped out of ALEC and also withdrawn from the May 11 conference, where it was originally going to be a presenter.

A recent article in the Newark Star-Ledger showed how closely New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie's "reform" legislation is modeled on ALEC's work in education. Wherever you see states expanding vouchers, charters, and other forms of privatization, wherever you see states lowering standards for entry into the teaching profession, wherever you see states opening up new opportunities for profit-making entities, wherever you see the expansion of for-profit online charter schools, you are likely to find legislation that echoes the ALEC model.

ALEC has been leading the privatization movement for nearly 40 years, but the only thing new is the attention it is getting, and the fact that many of its ideas are now being enacted. Just last week, the Michigan House of Representatives expanded the number of cyber charters that may operate in the state, even though the academic results for such online schools are dismal.

Who is on the education task force of ALEC? The members of the task force as of July 2011 are here. Several members represent for-profit online companies, including the co-chair from Connections Academy; many members come from for-profit higher education corporations. There is someone from Jeb Bush's foundation, as well as right-wing think tank people. There are charter school representatives, as well as Scantron. And the task force includes a long list of state legislators, from Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming.

Quite a lineup. Common Cause has asked why ALEC is considered a "charity" by the Internal Revenue Service and holds tax-exempt status, when it devotes so much time to lobbying for changes in state laws. Common Cause has filed a "whistleblower" complaint with the IRS about ALEC's status.

The campaign to privatize the schools and to dismantle the teaching profession is in full swing. Where is the leadership to oppose it?

This article was originally published on EdWeek.org, May 1, 2012.  Reprinted with permission from the author.

Diane Ravitch is Research Professor of Education at New York University and a historian of education. In addition, she is a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.

© 2012 Bridging Differences All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/155257/

Pearson Boycott News: NY State Tosses 4th Pearson Test Question in 4 Weeks

Obviously, $32,000,000 is not enough to get Pearson to hire test writers who know more than the students they are testing.   


From NYTimes SchooBook: 

May 2, 2012, 12:34 p.m.

By ANNA M. PHILLIPS

For the fourth time within a month, state education officials have tossed out a question on the standardized tests after finding that errors by Pearson, the test maker, made the problem virtually impossible for students to solve.

The question, which appeared on the fifth-grade math exam, was administered in a trial-run last year and vetted by teachers. Yet it was not until after it was included on a real test last month that teachers found and reported a major flaw: the problem asked students to find the perimeter of a trapezoid that could not exist within the bounds of mathematics.

Officials said the item was meant to test students’ knowledge of perimeter and geometric ratios. But because of the way the problem was worded, to arrive at the mathematically correct answer, fifth graders needed to know the Pythagorean theorem and how to find an imperfect square root, concepts they typically do not encounter until middle or high school.

The “right” answer, supplied by Pearson, was actually wrong.

Reveal Solution

Dennis Tompkins, a spokesman for the State Education Department, said on Monday that the question would not be counted in students’ scores.

“The item was developed by Pearson to assess fifth graders’ conceptual understanding of perimeter, not the application of the Pythagorean theorem,” Mr. Tompkins said.

This year’s standardized math and reading exams were already causing anxiety in classrooms around the state. They were longer than in years past, and a new evaluation system made the results more critical to teachers’ jobs. But a series of gaffes, including a confusing reading passage about a pineapple, has given new fodder to opponents of standardized testing and even led the chancellor of the Board of Regents to complain.

The English language arts and math exams, which were administered on six days between April 17 and April 27, were the first produced by the Pearson testing company under a five-year, $32 million contract.

State education officials specifically asked the company to make the exams, given to third through eighth graders, less tricky, with fewer questions designed to trip up students. Answer choices like “none of the above” or “all of the above” were banned.

But some teachers and parents have argued that this year’s exams were unusually confusing. First, eighth graders reacted to a parable about a talking hare and a pineapple by mocking the passage on Facebook and other social media sites.

Later, state education officials warned principals that the fourth-grade math test had a question for which there were accidentally two correct answers.

And an eighth-grade math question had no right answer because of a typo.

In a telephone conversation this week, Merryl H. Tisch, the chancellor of the Board of Regents, which oversees the State Education Department, said that Pearson would have to do better.

“My answer to Pearson is, ‘No, no, no,’” she said.

“I take full responsibility for all of these errors, I do, I do, do,” she added. “And I would hope that Pearson as a producer of these exams would join me in this responsibility.”

Pearson rarely responds publicly to questions about its tests, and did not do so this week.

At a Regents meeting on Monday, John B. King Jr., the commissioner of the State Education Department, suggested that the public outcry had less to do with the content of the exam and more with students’ access to social media and teachers’ concern about the new evaluation system, in which at least 20 percent of their rating will be based on their students’ test performance.

“In every administration of a test we’ve had, there’s always the occasion of a typo,” he said. “There is the occasional question that we have to adjust.”

He announced last week that the confusing questions about the pineapple and the hare would not count toward students’ scores. The math question with no right answer also was tossed.

Opponents of standardized testing have seized on the gaffes as the latest example of its failures.

“There is much more scrutiny now because of the state’s having ratcheted up the stakes for kids, schools and teachers, as well as increasing their length and cost to schools, as well as the fact that the state is determined to keep them secret,” Leonie Haimson, the executive director of Class Size Matters, wrote in an e-mail.

Ms. Tisch said that despite the errors, the tests were still a valid measurement of students’ academic abilities.

“Does it invalidate the test? Definitely not,” she said. “And anyone who says that is really just trying to push back, not only against the test, but against testing in general and against teacher evaluations in specific.”

Compounding the confusion over the faulty fourth-grade math question were the state’s instructions on how schools should deal with it. They were told to inform any stumped fourth grader who asked about the question that there were two correct answers, but students who did not inquire might be left scratching their heads.

Many teachers brushed aside the state’s advice and warned students.

“She made it really big on a big piece of paper so everyone could see it,” Martine Arranz, 9, a fourth grader at Public School 261 Philip Livingston in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, said of her teacher. “She said it would be two answers.”

This is not the first year the state has had to send out last-minute notices warning about errors on the exams. In fact, the state’s Web site lists examples of Spanish translations gone wrong and mislabeled answer choices. In 2004, the Braille edition of the fourth-grade science test listed the answers for one question in the wrong order. The list is incomplete.

Pineapplegate also has a predecessor: Browniegate. In 2006, parents called on the state to throw out the results of the fourth-grade reading exam, claiming that a listening passage had been so confusing that no child should be penalized for getting it wrong.

The story was about an arrogant rooster who was tricked by Brownie, a cow, into getting up early each morning and crowing. The test asked children to write an essay about how and why the cow’s behavior changed over the course of the story.

Parents objected on the grounds that 9-year-olds were being asked to perform psychoanalysis. The state disagreed, saying, “The question was not confusing to children.”

Anna M. Phillips is a member of the SchoolBook staff. Follow her on Twitter @annamphillips.

Princeton Review Nailed for NCLB Tutoring Fraud

If there are any educational historians around in a hundred years to examine the records from this generation of corporate reform efforts to privateer public schools into corporate revenue streams, No Child Left Behind will stand out, no doubt, as one of the most useful tools in their arsenal.  To those less disposed to celebrate the demise of democratic institutions, NCLB has, thus far anyway, proved itself as the most expensive, toxic, and damaging federal education policy in the nation’s history. 

Based on the ideologically-driven faux science of the National Reading Panel, NCLB created Reading First, which poured $7,000,000,000 into phonics-based direct instruction (parrot learning) reading efforts that set a course for ineffective, unbalanced literacy programs for years to come in the early grades.  The U.S. Dept. of Education’s own study in 2008 tersely concluded that "Reading First did not produce a statistically significant impact on student reading comprehension test scores in grades one, two, or three" (p. xv).  Why? Could it have something to do with the fact that reading instruction was aimed as much at behavioral control as it was reading, and children spent an inordinate amount of time being tested on how many nonsense syllables they could recognize in 60 seconds—something called decoding and DIBELS testing? 

What did children get out that kind of reading-in-a-straightjacket experience? Again from the Federal study: “Reading First produced a positive and statistically significant impact on decoding among first grade students in one school year (spring 2007).  The impact was equivalent to an effect of 0.17 standard deviations” (p. xv).  Not bad for $7 billion.

In another study from ED, the only literacy method that got positive results in all four domains of reading literacy was Reading Recovery, a balanced program that had been demonized as “whole language” and essentially eliminated from consideration by the Reading First officials who were deciding who would get the Reading First grants. 

Another example of waste and fraud occurred when more public billions were allocated for NCLB tutoring, or supplemental services (see here, here, here, and here) with the greatest beneficiaries being the privateer tutoring companies that operated for over five years without any federal oversight or evaluation studies to determine the effect of their overpriced tutoring on student achievement.  When school vouchers were finally stripped out of the NCLB bill prior to passage, advocates of privatization settled for charters and tutoring as the road to more privatization, while hoping for vouchers to be passed in future reauthorizations of NCLB.  Quoting from Elizabeth Debray’s book:

        . . . Senator Gregg saw another advantage to supplemental services.  As one aide who preferred anonymity recalled about the meeting with Republican Senate committee members right before the committee voted: “Gregg was explaining why they should vote for the bill . . . and he said: ‘Well, the supplemental services are a foot under the door for vouchers.  They’re going to show that these schools aren’t working properly, and we’ll finally be able to show that the schools aren’t doing well. The assessments are going to prove the same thing.’”

Supplemental services operated for 5 years without any oversight whatsoever. When they finally got around to it, ED’s own research found that

     —Private providers accounted for 88 percent of all state-approved providers in May 2008, an increase from 60 percent in May 2003.

     —Expenditures for Title I supplemental educational services varied, $192 million to $375 million per year.

     —By 2007, only eight states had databases containing student achievement and participation information that would permit rigorous evaluations of achievement effects of providers on a statewide basis.

So today’s story in the New York Daily News comes as no surprise.  It simply provides another bit of evidence that historians will collect into their massive database that will contain the voluminous records of corruption, deception, thievery, and dehumanization of public education that occurred in our era, all under the bogus banner of accountability and high standards.

Test-prep firm Princeton Review swindled the federal government out of millions by falsely claiming it tutored needy city kids, the Manhattan U.S. attorney charges. 

From 2006 to 2010, Princeton Review was reimbursed for tutoring services that were either faked or inflated, said Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, whose office filed a civil fraud suit Tuesday. 

“The Princeton Review and its employees were supposed to tutor needy students, not cheat a federal program,” said Bharara, who didn’t specify how much money is involved. 

During those years, city education officials paid Princeton Review $38 million for tutoring funded by the federal government under No Child Left Behind, the suit says. 

During that time, Princeton Review staffers submitted phony attendance forms and invoices for thousands of hours of instruction, the suit claims. 

Bharara said staffers changed hundreds of kids’ absent marks to present — in one case falsely signing in a student named Dontae as “Donate.” 

The company billed for sessions with kids who were on vacation and gave some site managers bonuses of up to $9,600 for reporting high daily attendance, the suit says. . . .  
 

K-12 Teaching: A Service Industry

At The New Republic, "Making the Grade" poses this about the difference between college professors (notice that term "professor," as in "one who professes") and K-12 teachers:

"The vast majority of states have long granted public school teachers tenure. The way it works is simple: After a certain number of years, teachers qualify—'virtually automatically' in most states, according to the National Council on Teacher Quality—for a form of job protection that makes it extremely difficult to fire them for the rest of their careers. 

"The system is analogous to the protections that university professors receive—but with one important conceptual difference. Universities are not just educational institutions; they are our country’s idea factories. And so it makes a certain amount of sense that we would want university professors—the people our society relies on to explore ideas, including unpopular ones—to enjoy protections from ideological or intellectual retribution.

"But this rationale doesn’t apply at the K–12 level. So what is the case for K–12 teacher tenure? The truth is, there isn’t a good one."

Diane Ravitch has confronted this argument as "bizarre," but otherwise, I have heard little challenging of this sentiment, leading me to wonder how powerful this claim is.

Some of us in education, scholarship, and research have argued that the corporate-driven "no excuses" reform movement aims to make teaching a service industry, but I now wonder: Is K-12 teaching already considered just a service industry?

And if so, who is to blame for this?

Every professional organization, every administrator, and every teacher who have grabbed chairs at the table serving the Common Core State Standards—well, that's a start for the blame.

A Cog in the Wheel of Charters in Connecticut

Finally, a modicum of sanity in the insane asylum of education deform has emerged in Connecticut  over turnaround schools. It appears  Senate Democrats did their homework and stopped drinking the ALEC Kool-Aid. Instead, they are proposing charter schools should not be a solution for any school turnaround plan because they only lead to further privatization and are no better than public schools.

Charter school advocates in Connecticut are "stunned and angry." They can barely hold back their rage over the Democrats refusal to provide an "excellent" education for these poor, underprivileged children who could benefit from a for-profit charter or KIPP chain gang school. Instead, the Democrats argue charters are not the solution and have suggested people read Kenneth Saltman's upcoming book on the failure of corporate school reform.
Could these Democrats be onto something?  Let's hope this book is the one that finally breaks the camel's back and ignites the fire on the dry grass of corporate education reform  so that this wasteland of test prep and chain gang schooling might blossom into something beautiful.

Just imagine if the discussion over school reform in statehouses all across the country actually turned to reality-based solutions like equal funding, respect and professional autonomy for teachers, well-rounded curriculums,  strong health and social services in the school, field trips, libraries, music and art.  These Democrats in Connecticut are onto something - others need to pay attention.

 Kathleen Megan at Currant.com:

Charter schools advocates were stunned, at first, to learn that the latest proposal for education reform does not include charter schools as an acceptable model to turn around low-performing schools, but now they are angry.

Michael Sharpe, chief executive officer of Jumoke Academy in Hartford and president of the Connecticut Charter School Network, said: "We all, as a community representing kids of color and poor kids, should be enraged by this… Why would you tie your hands legislatively from any possible solution to the achievement gap and to the failures of urban schools in Connecticut? It doesn't make any sense."

Sharpe said he has written a letter to legislators who are members of the Black and Puerto Rican Caucus to alert them to the situation. "I would think the members would be enraged by a provision that denies the families they represent, the opportunity to have options in terms of an excellent education."

However, a staff member for the Senate Democrats suggested contacting Kenneth Saltman, a professor in education policy and research at DePaul University in Chicago, who is writing a book to be published in June called "The Failure of Corporate School Reform."

In an interview Tuesday, Saltman had many criticisms of charter schools, whether profit or non-profit, saying they are not as accountable as public schools; have high teacher turnover; can be used as a tool to get rid of teachers unions; and that nationally, they are about the same as or worse than traditional public schools.

He also said there are concerns that charter schools are one step along the path to far more widespread privatization of public schools.

Lisa Delpit on Teach for America

From Ed Week.  Really, that Ed Week:

Our next Teacher Book Club, featuring Lisa Delpit's "Multiplication Is for White People": Raising Expectations for Other People's Children, is just three weeks away. Get familiar with the issues Delpit raises.

In discussing systemic problems in disadvantaged schools, Delpit comes down hard on alternative-certification programs such as Teach for America that recruit bright, young leaders for two-year stints teaching in low-income schools. In a Q&A on Education Week’s BookMarks blog, Delpit delves more deeply into her criticisms of TFA and other recent reform efforts. Here's an excerpt from that conversation:Bookmarks blogger, Catherine Cardno: In your opinion, where does the TFA failure lie and is there a way the program can be adjusted so that it better meets the needs of students at inner-city schools? Delpit: I strongly believe that it is important to have a diverse teaching population. However, I do not believe that the most vulnerable, the most school-dependent of our students should be taught by a revolving door of young teachers who have no commitments to or understanding of the local communities, who have limited teacher training, and who plan to leave teaching before they have had the chance to become good at it. It is no wonder that well-to-do schools refuse to have TFA teachers in their schools. As to how the TFA program could improve, I believe that we should increase the commitment time to teaching, and have TFA teachers practice under the mentorship of experienced, competent teachers with long-term experience in urban schools. I would also like to see such mentors play a much larger part in the training of the TFA teachers.

"Rupert Murdoch is not a fit person to exercise the stewardship of a major international company"

Wonder if sympathy cards have gone out yet from Joel Klein, Peter Gorman, and the rest of Murdoch edu-whores.  From the Report by the House of Commons (their bold):

"On the basis of the facts and evidence before the Committee, we conclude that, if at all relevant times Rupert Murdoch did not take steps to become fully informed about phone-hacking, he turned a blind eye and exhibited wilful blindness to what was going on in his companies and publications. This culture, we consider, permeated from the top throughout the organization and speaks volumes about the lack of effective corporate governance at News Corporation and News International. We conclude, therefore, that Rupert Murdoch is not a fit person to exercise the stewardship of a major international company" (p. 70).

Krash Course #8: Putting Together the Poverty/Education Puzzle

The "no excuses" reformers subscribe to the "never let evidence get in the way of your agenda" approach to their bully pulpit of education reform. However, the evidence is powerful and growing in terms of what we know about inequity in U.S. society and in U.S. education. So what do we know?

• Race, class, and gender correlate strongly with inequitable starting points for children entering formal education in the U.S.—including the inequity of quality school access determined by a child's ZIP code (Schott, Brookings), the relative readiness for education among subgroups of children (Brookings), and the powerful impact of out-of-school factors on a child's ability to learn (Berliner). See the growing evidence:

A Rotting Apple: Education Redlining in New York City, a report from the Schott Foundation for Public Education

Housing Costs, Zoning, and Access to High-Scoring Schools, a report from Brookings

Starting School at a Disadvantage: The School Readiness of Poor Children, a report from Brookings

Poverty and potential: Out-of-school factors and school success, David Berliner

The Role of aspirations, attitudes and behaviour in closing the educational attainment gap, a report from JRF

• Race, class, first language, special needs, and gender correlate strongly with inequitable learning experiences for children once they enter schools—including disproportionate assignments of quality teachers and the predisposition to funnel students with lives of disadvantage into classes that offer barren content and pedagogy. See the evidence:

Teaching inequality: How poor and minority students are shortchanged on teacher quality, a report from The Education Trust

Poor Teaching for Poor Children in the Name of Reform, Alfie Kohn

The pedagogy of poverty versus good teaching, Martin Haberman

• Race and gender correlate strongly with disproportionate discipline for children in U.S. schools*. See the evidence:

Colorado Disciplinary Practices, 2008-2010: Disciplinary Actions, Student Behaviors, Race, and Gender, a report from NEPC

New Study Finds Big Racial Gap in Suspensions of Middle School Students, a report from Southern Poverty Law Center

Prekindergarteners Left Behind: Expulsion Rates in State Prekindergarten Systems, Walter S. Gilliam

• "Miracle" schools do not exist, teacher and school quality matters (but remains dwarfed by out-of-school factors), Teacher for America increases teacher quality inequity, and charter schools are re-segregating schools and perpetuating classist/racist ideologies. See the evidence:

miracleschools wiki

Experiences of poverty and educational disadvantage, a report from JRF

How to fix our schools, Richard Rothstein

Teach for America: A Review of the Evidence, a report from NEPC

Choice without equity: Charter school segregation, a report from EPAA

Schools without Diversity: Education management organizations, charter schools and the demographic stratification of the American school system, a report from NEPC

What makes KIPP work?: A study of student characteristics, attrition, and school finance, a report from NCSPE

* Which correlates strongly with the disproportionate demographics of the U.S. prison system:

Incarceration is not an equal opportunity punishment