Money for Nothin'

MONEY, MONEY, MONEY

For the past two decades Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation have been dropping millions of dollars into education schemes the billionaire was sure would transform America's schools. Gates tried small schools, teacher incentives, and the Common Core to try to influence the achievement of public schools – all to no avail. (Further reading: Anthony Cody's, The Educator and the Oligarch: A Teacher Challenges the Gates Foundation)

The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation has invested millions of dollars into training managers to run school systems like businesses. They've put money into large scale teacher merit-pay experiments in school districts. They've supported legislation, including the so-called "Parent Trigger" which would allow a majority of a schools current parents to transfer a community owned public school to a for-profit charter company.

The Walton Family Foundation, run by America's wealthiest family, has invested millions of dollars in the privatization of public education. They have supported the creation and expansion of voucher programs in Indiana and other states.

The attempts to improve America's education by billionaires, none of whom have any training in education, have several things in common.

First, none of the schemes have been successful enough, or been replicable on a large enough scale to improve the country's public education system.

Second, the money used to fund the projects hasn't been sustainable. Some programs have failed when grants ended, because of the inability of the school systems to continue to pay for it.

Third, nearly all attempts to improve schools measure that improvement with standardized test scores which are often inadequate.

Fourth, America's low international test scores are often cited as the reason for the billionaires' interference in education. I have explained in detail why our students' average scores are lower on international tests in The Myth of America's Failing Public Schools.

Finally, none of the attempts by these wealthy families, even if we assume that they are altruistic in their desire to help children succeed, attack the root cause of low achievement in America. Poverty.

POVERTY: THE CRUX OF THE PROBLEM

The late Gerald Bracey wrote,

When people have said “poverty is no excuse,” my response has been, “Yes, you’re right. Poverty is not an excuse. It’s a condition. It’s like gravity. Gravity affects everything you do on the planet. So does poverty.”

David C. Berliner, professor and dean of the Mary Lou Fulton Institute and Graduate School of Education at Arizona State University, presented a brief titled, Poverty and Potential: Out-of-School Factors and School Success. The report explains how improvements of schools are not enough to overcome the out-of-school factors faced by children who live in high poverty areas.

...the negative effects of many [out-of-school factors] are concentrated in the schools that serve poor and minority children and families. This increases the burden on these schools in such a way as to make broad reductions in the achievement gap nearly impossible.

MONEY FOR NOTHIN'

Silicon valley billionaires are dumping their tax write-offs into America's schools in the hopes, they say, of increasing test scores...and, if they can get a few bucks themselves in the process, so much the better.

The New York Times has a long article detailing ways that projects from tech entrepreneurs, like Netflix's Reed Hastings and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, are influencing America's schools. Once again they aren't focusing on the real problem.

The influx of money from rich technology-king benefactors has an influence on what teachers are teaching...and how they teach. After all, when a teacher or school gets a grant for a half million dollars in hardware and software they generally don't turn it down. The students, then, become the "de facto beta testers" for the billionaires' ideas.

But does it actually help?

The Silicon Valley Billionaires Remaking America’s Schools

Tech companies and their founders have been rolling out programs in America’s public schools with relatively few checks and balances, The New York Times found in interviews with more than 100 company executives, government officials, school administrators, researchers, teachers, parents and students.

“They have the power to change policy, but no corresponding check on that power,” said Megan Tompkins-Stange, an assistant professor of public policy at the University of Michigan. “It does subvert the democratic process.”

Furthermore, there is only limited research into whether the tech giants’ programs have actually improved students’ educational results.

Once again we have billionaires dumping money into schools, and often into privatization schemes, without regard to actual research and often without public oversight.

Technology can be a powerful educational tool, when used correctly. Where did Mark Zuckerberg get his teaching credentials? Who is determining how these programs are used? Who is monitoring them to see if they work? Will the money disappear if the programs fail?

ANOTHER WAY: A LESSON FOR THE BILLIONAIRES – FROM SOME MILLIONAIRES

A New Jersey family won a lottery of nearly a half billion dollars...guess where it's going?

Family in New Jersey Wins $429 Million Lottery, Uses Money to Fight Poverty

Last year, the Smith family in Trenton, New Jersey, won the $429 million Powerball lottery, and they planned to use all that money to help fight poverty. Pearlie Mae Smith and her seven children meant what they said at a press conference when they promised to give that money back to their community.

...They used the money to pay off bills and student loans before they put it back into their community with the Smith Family Foundation. “We want to fund programs that directly affect systems of poverty so we can help change the systems or change the dynamics that are causing people to be in poverty,” Harold Smith told NJ.com. “Rather than just helping them find food or give away food, we can make it so they now have the ability to obtain employment, get their proper education in order to be able to go out and get their own food.”

The foundation will work with the city in order to provide both long- and short-term grants for Trenton. [emphasis added]

Imagine if Gates, Broad, The Waltons, and the rest tried to improve education by donating their billions to help fight poverty, like the Smiths, in cooperation with municipalities and states. If we reduce poverty we can reduce the negative effects of out-of-school factors that get in the way of student achievement.

In his Southern Christian Leadership Conference Presidential Address, on August 16, 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. said,

...we are likely to find that the problems of housing and education, instead of preceding the elimination of poverty, will themselves be affected if poverty is first abolished.

🖥⌨️🖨

2014 Medley #14

Gates, Educators Speak Out,
Charters, Money, Public Schools

GATES, "GET OUT OF CORPORATE ED REFORM"

Join with Mark Naison, Leonie Haimson, Anthony Cody, Susan Ohanian and dozens of others. Go to this site and leave your name and information in the comments to sign this petition. It will be delivered on June 26.

We, the undersigned, demand the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation divest from corporate education reform.

Your imposition of corporate reform policies, which are measured using a single, narrow, biased yardstick, are successful in one area only: making a profit for you, test companies, publishers, and the privatizing corporate reformers. Your policies continue to use our children as guinea pigs in your corporate reform experiments and risk doing “irreparable harm to our schools and our students”.

EDUCATORS SPEAK OUT

The Q and A: John Kuhn

Thankfully, John Kuhn feels morally obligated to speak up about the damage that "school reform" has done to America's public schools.

There’s so much more to education than a single test score on a single subject, and trying to reduce quality education to something that is quantifiable, you have to leave out a lot of really important information...

Previously, I just kind of accepted whatever rolled down from Washington, D.C., and whatever rolled down from Austin. I kind of thought the role of a teacher and educator was just to live with dumb policies. And I don’t think that anymore. I think now that I have a moral obligation to speak up and say, “Hey, this policy is dumb. It doesn’t work, and this is what we’re seeing on the front lines.”

Like John Kuhn, teachers all over the country are speaking up -- demanding to be heard.


Heidi Nance: I Am Teacher, Hear Me Roar!

I have an amazing administration that allows me to do what is best for my students. The great Sir Ken Robinson gave an interview and in that interview he explained that for the children we teach, we are their educational system. The children know nothing of policy or politics; all they know is what we do in our classrooms. I took great solace in that, and I decided to make sure that I always did right by the children in my class...

The Toxic Culture of Education -- Joshua Katz

...because we have a toxic culture of education the teachers and the schools have accepted this accountability for all students...

We take the blame for a student who can't focus in class because she hasn't eaten since yesterday's lunch.

We take the blame for a student who's always in trouble in school because he doesn't know the difference between right and wrong.

We take the blame for a student who can't stay awake in class because she spends her nights on a different couch depending on which friend takes her in.

And some teachers are still afraid to let their voices be heard...


The Deafening Silence of Teachers

Teachers are terrified of voicing their opinions because many times it not only makes them a target but could possibly make them not get their contract renewed for the following year!

CHARTERS

Five Ways Charter Schools Are Bad for Children and Other Living Things

This is an important article summarizing five ways that charters hurt public schools and students.

1. Failure to Improve Learning – Two consecutive reports from the Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO), 2009 and 2013, have shown that public schools outperform charter schools...

2. Draconian Discipline Policies – Charter schools have notoriously high suspension rates. The driving philosophy behind many charter school discipline policies seems to be “shame the students into submission.”...

3. Draining Money from Public Schools – Charter schools proliferate in already financially strapped urban school districts. The effects can be devastating as it is in Philadelphia right now where the district is struggling to maintain financial viability in the face of the growing charter movement along with huge cuts in state aid...

4. Lax Oversight – Charter schools lack the oversight that is built into public schools. Public schools are run by publicly elected school boards answerable to the parents and community members...Charter schools are run by private boards who are not answerable to the community and hold private meetings...In this atmosphere corruption has been rampant. A recent report by Integrity in Education found $100 million in wasted public dollars through fraud and mismanagement in 14 states with charter schools...

5. Skimming Students – By definition public schools take on all comers. It is part of the responsibility of public schools to accept and educate students of widely varying backgrounds, languages, abilities and disabilities. Since charter schools are funded with public funds, most charter school laws call for charter schools to take on all students, too. Charter schools often accomplish this through a lottery system. But these under-regulated charters have many subtle and not so subtle ways to insure that they can shape their student population to make them look like they are doing better than public schools.

All hell breaks loose when Illinois charters are told to stop discriminating.

If charters couldn't pick and choose their students -- even when the law disallows it -- then they would be "no different than the public school system."

Republican Sen. David Luechtefeld (R-Okawville) spoke up. “One reason charter schools were set up in the first place was to give them that flexibility because a lot of things were not happening that needed to happen in the public school system.”

Flexibility to turn away students with Special Needs and non-English speakers.

Luechtefeld added, that if we take away the right of charters to turn away Special Needs students than charters would be “no different than the public school system and therefore … obsolete.”

Republican Sen. Jim Oberweis (R-North Aurora) used another favorite word of the charter vultures. He opposed HB 4527 because it would give parents “less choice” in their children’s education.

The choice to discriminate against children who speak another language at home. Children with autism. Children with Down Syndrome. Children in wheel chairs.

It would take away the right to make hateful choices.

PUBLIC SCHOOLS TEACH EVERYONE

Dale Hansen: Bad bills hamper teacher effectiveness

Myth: Public schools are failing and teachers are to blame.

Truth: Legislatures have defunded education and are trying to blame public schools for their own failure. Politicians are getting money from school privatizers and then are supporting private schools at the expense of public schools.

This is from Michigan, but I'm sure it will sound familiar.

Using the fallacy that our education system is broken and that public educators are squarely to blame, the Legislature has passed two bills that look to make teachers accountable for their student outcomes.

If the capitalist model is the basis for these changes, it is important to recognize that, in the private sector, when an individual is judged on the performance of others, that individual typically has the authority to remove any underperforming team members and chose a staff that they work well with.

Educators have no such option. They must teach and improve every student that walks through the door. Period.

FOLLOW THE MONEY

Operation Discourage Bright People from Wanting to Teach

The goal of "reformers" seems to be the destruction of public education, the profession of teaching, and the corporatization of all schools. The reason for this is simple...as Rupert Murdoch said, "When it comes to K-12 education, we see a $500 billion sector in the U.S. alone that is waiting desperately to be transformed..."

...whose definition of "quality"? Arne Duncan and Bill Gates have no better grasp of the nuances of how children learn, and what constitutes meaningful evidence of deep understanding, than does your next-door neighbor -- which helps to explain why, when they talk about "quality" (or "achievement"), all they mean is higher standardized test scores. Unlike your neighbor, though, they have the power to compel schools -- whole states, even -- to enact practices that will cement that conflation into place...

While there's no official name for the dual strategy of micromanaging teachers and trying to root out the bad ones, it might as well be called 'Operation Discourage Bright People from Wanting to Teach'. After all, who would choose to focus on test preparation rather than helping kids to think and question? Who would agree to forego any real professional autonomy? Who would want to be treated like a pet, rewarded with financial doggie biscuits for toeing the line? And who, if he or she had other opportunities, would pick a career that featured a constant threat of public humiliation?

In fact, it does seem likely that more and more college students who become teachers will be those who lack other opportunities. The impact of this isn't difficult to predict. What's less obvious is the ironic fact that it's due, in large part, to what's known -- and uncritically celebrated in the popular press -- as "school reform.

Toward the Total Paralysis of an Unequal Society

The numbers here speak for themselves...

A Broken System of Compensation: The Combined Salaries of 350,000 Pre-School Teachers is Less Than That of Five Hedge Fund Managers

Pre-school teaching may be our nation's most important job. Numerous studies show that with pre-school, all children achieve more and earn more through adulthood, with the most disadvantaged benefiting the most.

Hedge fund managers, at the other extreme, are likely to bet on mortgages to fail or on food prices to rise.

It's a frightening commentary on our value system that the total income of over a third of a million pre-school teachers is less than the combined income of just five big-money speculators.

REFORMSTERS AND RESISTANCE: COMPARE AND CONTRAST

Quarter Million Served

The motivation to privatize our nation's public education system is not to benefit children, it's to make money.

I am always struck by the huge contrast between the Reformsters and the Resistance. On the Reformster side we find almost exclusively people who are making a buck from all this mess. We find glossy sites and paid consultant work and huge efforts (and expense) to push the carefully spun and crafted message out there. On the Resistance side, we find...well, we find a herd of cats. A big unpaid volunteer DIY widespread pay-your-own-expenses herd of cats. If Reformsters were working on the Resistance's collective budget, with the Resistance's expectation of monetary reward in their future, the battle would be over today, because they would have about three people left fighting for their cause.

SUPPRESSING THE TRUTH

On the Death of Childhood and the Destruction of Public Schools, by Gerald Bracey, 2003

The first Bush administration buried the information that our schools were not failing and our public school system was not broken. Click the link below to read about the suppressed Sandia Report.

www.edutopia.org/landmark-education-report-nation-risk

When a large, federally funded report concluded that there was no crisis in American Education, the [George H. W.] Bush administration suppressed it.

WHO YOU ARE

Teachers: Children will remember who you are and how you made them feel, not how you drilled them to fill in bubbles on a test.

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Sign An Education Declaration to Rebuild America

All who envision a more just, progressive and fair society cannot ignore the battle for our nation’s educational future. Principals fighting for better schools, teachers fighting for better classrooms, students fighting for greater opportunities, parents fighting for a future worthy of their child’s promise: their fight is our fight. We must all join in.

~~~

Stop the Testing Insanity!

Sign the National Resolution on High Stakes Testing!

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2013 in Quotes

This is the 151st and last post of 2013 for this blog. Here are some of my favorite quotes from it's pages during the past year. The quotes are my words, unless otherwise (and often) noted. Go to the links provided for the original context of the quotes.

JANUARY

2013 Medley #2

"I'll say it until the day I die: I am proud to be an American public school teacher. I am proud of the great kids of this country. I am proud to be a part of a system that produces such fine young men and women." -- Jersey Jazzman

FEBRUARY

A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words - Feb.2013

If we privatize public schools now, then the public oversight will be lost and our descendents will have a hard time recovering it. Public schools don't belong to the parents of children attending them today. They belong to us all...everyone who has ever attended...everyone who has ever paid taxes...everyone who has ever been a part of the community.

Teachers' Low Job Satisfaction - Let the Bashing Continue

"The American teacher stands on the front lines of poverty and inequity that our fellow Americans refuse to acknowledge, on the front lines of the real social condition of our nation–not the advertised one–and we stand together. When we look over our shoulders, there’s no one there backing us up. The rest of the army is off pretending there is no fight to be had here, no excuses to be made, no hardships to decry, no supply lines to worry about, that things in American society are just hunky-dory outside of the fact that the teachers just don’t care enough..." -- John Kuhn, Superintendent of superintendent of Perrin-Whitt Consolidated Independent School District, Perrin, Texas

MARCH

A Superintendent's Voice

"...History will recognize that the epithets they applied to your schools said more about leaders who refused to confront child poverty than the teachers who tried valiantly to overcome it. History will recognize that teachers in these bleak years stood in desperate need of public policy help that never came. Advocacy for hurting children was ripped from our lips with a shush of "no excuses." These hateful labels should be hung around the necks of those who have allowed inequitable school funding to persist for decades, those who refuse to tend to the basic needs of our poorest children so that they may come to school ready to learn." -- John Kuhn

APRIL

Can You Buy Your Way to a Better Education?

"People agree with everything I say," Kozol continued. "They say, 'Yes, it is unfair they don't get as much per pupil as our children.' Then they say, 'Tell me one thing. Can you really solve this kind of problem by throwing money at it?' And I say, 'You mean, can you really buy your way to a better education? It seems to work for your children.'" -- Jonathan Kozol

MAY

Myths Taken as Reality

When something is repeated often enough it becomes "common knowledge" even if it's not completely true. "Reformers" and others who have the destruction of America's public education system as part of their agenda, repeat the myth that "American schools are failing" over and over again. They have done that so often that it's accepted as truth. Unfortunately, it's wrong.

Thank a Teacher

"Bail out the bankers and bankrupt the school teachers -- we will still teach...I will never follow the lead of those who exclude the kids who need education the most so that my precious scores will rise. I will never line up with those whose idea of reform is the subtle segregation of the poor and desperate. I want no part of the American caste system." -- John Kuhn

JUNE

This Just In: New Data Confirms Old Data

"When people have said 'poverty is no excuse,' my response has been, 'Yes, you're right. Poverty is not an excuse. It's a condition. It's like gravity. Gravity affects everything you do on the planet. So does poverty.'" -- Gerald Bracey

An Open Reply to President Obama

...even though you, Mr. President, have said that we have too much testing, your Race to the Top program requires teachers to be evaluated using student test scores. Standardized tests used to evaluate student achievement were not made to evaluated teaching and learning. I don't know if you learned anything about tests and measurements when you were in law school, but if you did you would know that tests should only be used for that for which they were developed. If you develop a test for use as a measure of student achievement, then that's what it should be used for...and only that.

JULY

Reading Aloud: Still the Most Important Part of Reading Instruction

"The single most important activity for building the knowledge required for eventual success in reading is reading aloud to children...It is a practice that should continue throughout the grades." -- from Becoming a Nation of Readers, quoted in The Read Aloud Handbook, by Jim Trelease

The Schools America's Children Deserve

Money doesn't solve all the problems by itself. It must be spent wisely. One of the things about the "increase" in school funding in a lot of places, or the "huge amount of the state budget directed at public education" in some states is that the money is being spent on testing and test prep materials. The students don't get the full benefits of increased revenues...but the testing industry does.

Talking Education: Educate Yourself

Our teachers are drowning in a sea of standards and testing, scripted curricula and increasing class sizes, accusations and blame. Is it any wonder that many of them have neither the time nor the energy to fight back against the billions of dollars worth of insults and abuse hurled against them as a profession?

AUGUST

Make a Positive Impact on Students

Teachers touch the future by relating to their students. Our students will learn from us and remember us for the kind of people we are, not for the homework we assign, the lectures we give, or the standardized tests we administer. Content knowledge, pedagogy and assessment are important, of course, but in order to make a positive impact on students' lives, which is after all the main reason we are in this profession, teachers must build positive relationships with them.

Fighting Myths with Facts

Myth #4) Poverty is just an excuse.

False: Poverty matters.

"Thousands of studies have linked poverty to academic achievement. The relationship is every bit as strong as the connection between cigarettes and cancer." —- David Berliner, Our Impoverished View of Ed. Reform, Aug. 2005

Test Scores: Punishing Teachers

The myth of the bad teacher resonates with the general public in part because nearly everyone has been to school and has seen teachers teach. Everyone remembers a "bad" teacher -- often defined as "a teacher my parents or I didn't like" (This is not to deny that "bad" teachers exist, but many, if not most, are weeded out in the first 5 years of their career where nearly 50% quit or are "counseled" out). The memories of their childhood and/or young adulthood in school leads people to believe that teaching is simply providing information and being nice to children. The problem with this is that the memories are distorted by the fact that they are childhood memories complete with the lack of judgment and experience that comes with childhood.

SEPTEMBER

Share the Responsibility

You can't make children learn just by raising or changing "standards," increasing test cut scores, belittling and de-professionalizing teachers, while at the same time ignoring out-of-school factors. Spending millions on test-prep, test administration, and test result analysis is not investing in education. No amount of testing, and union bashing is going to help students who come to school hungry, sick, cold, terrified, and/or homeless.

Retention: Punishing Children

The fact is that as a nation, we don't really care about student achievement. We care about test scores. If we really cared about student achievement we wouldn't be closing schools whose students are struggling. We wouldn't be evaluating teachers using test scores and punishing those teachers who work with the most difficult to educate students. We wouldn't be rewarding "successful" schools with more funding, and we wouldn't be replacing experienced educators with trainees.

OCTOBER

Duncan Shows His Ignorance - Again

Arne Duncan, remember, has no experience in educating children. His stint as CEO of Chicago Public Schools was focused on closing public schools and opening privately operated charters. Duncan's college degree is in Sociology, the study of human social behavior, not education. His college and previous professional experience is in basketball. His closest brush with actual teaching was watching his mother tutor students. He never taught in a public school. He never even attended a public school.

It's therefore understandable that he knows nothing -- absolutely nothing -- about the process of teaching and about what goes on in the classrooms of America's public schools. He apparently doesn't know that teachers are constantly evaluating their students. Standardized tests are, of course, not the only way that student evaluation occurs (and by this statement I am making an unfounded assumption that standardized tests do, indeed, evaluate student learning). Teachers give tests, quizzes and homework, lead discussions and observe student behavior and work...and in doing so, gain an understanding of a student's progress.

Growing Poverty Affects Schools

"Every dollar that fattens the educational industrial complex–not only the testing industry and the inexperienced, ill-trained Teach for America but the corporations now collecting hundreds of millions of dollars to tell schools what to do–is a dollar diverted from what should be done now to address directly the pressing needs of our nation’s most vulnerable children, whose numbers continue to escalate, demonstrating the utter futility and self-serving nature of what is currently and deceptively called 'reform.'” -- Diane Ravitch

NOVEMBER

2013 Medley #23

"The United States is one of few advanced nations where schools serving better-off children usually have more educational resources than those serving poor students, according to research by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Among the 34 O.E.C.D. nations, only in the United States, Israel and Turkey do disadvantaged schools have lower teacher/student ratios than in those serving more privileged students." -- Eduardo Porter, New York Times

Ken Robinson Nails it!

"Education doesn't go on in the committee rooms of our legislative buildings. It happens in classrooms and schools. And the people who do it are the teachers and the students and if you remove their discretion it stops working..." -- Sir Ken Robinson

Yet Another National Shame

"I ask you, where is the label for the lawmaker whose policies fail to clean up the poorest neighborhoods? Why do we not demand that our leaders make 'Adequate Yearly Progress'? We have data about poverty, health care, crime, and drug abuse in every legislative district. We know that those factors directly impact our ability to teach kids. Why have we not established annual targets for our legislators to meet? Why do they not join us beneath these vinyl banners that read 'exemplary' in the suburbs and 'unacceptable' in the slums?" -- John Kuhn

DECEMBER

2013 Medley #27

Politicians, policy makers and pundits claim that it's the schools and teachers who are to blame for low achievement. They do this in order to redirect the blame away from themselves and the inadequate safety nets provided for people living in poverty, the loss of jobs, and the inability of our leaders to deal with the effects of poverty.

The facts that nearly 25% of the nation's children live in poverty and that approximately 50% of all school children are poor, are ignored when talking about academic achievement even though the correlation is clear.

President Bush II referred to the "soft bigotry of low expectations" when he was pushing for passage of No Child Left Behind. What we have now is the "hard bigotry of neglect and denial" towards our children who live in poverty.

2013 Medley #28

The failure of policy makers to deal with the side-effects of poverty (low birthweight of infants, drug and alcohol abuse, toxicity in cities, lack of health care, food insecurity, violence, lack of mental health services, mobility and absenteeism of children in school, lack of high quality preschools, lack of summer programs for children) is the number one problem affecting education in America.

~~~

Sign An Education Declaration to Rebuild America

All who envision a more just, progressive and fair society cannot ignore the battle for our nation’s educational future. Principals fighting for better schools, teachers fighting for better classrooms, students fighting for greater opportunities, parents fighting for a future worthy of their child’s promise: their fight is our fight. We must all join in.

~~~

Stop the Testing Insanity!

Sign the National Resolution on High Stakes Testing!

~~~

2013 Medley #14

Testing, Politics, Public Education
Books, Common Core

TESTING

High-stakes tests: bad for students, teachers, and education in general.

The great advantage of public education is also it's great disadvantage...the public is (or should be) in control. Like democracy itself, public education should be run by the people. This means that it is subject to the errors and foibles of ordinary citizens and their choices. People deserve the government they choose -- assuming they have the right to choose -- and sometimes that government doesn't work for their best interests.

School boards, elected by the people, can institute unpopular changes. In the long run, however, public schools can reflect the will of the people who reelect board members or throw them out of office.

Mayoral appointed school boards or school boards installed in some other manner are not answerable to the public. Private and corporate run pubic schools are often not answerable to the people either. Students, parents and teachers, and the school program in general, is often determined by the whims of those in charge...whether it's "the Mayor" or the corporate CEO.

Current "reformers" want to privatize schools and take the control out of the hands of the voters. The voters are sometimes misinformed or easily swayed, but public education needs to remain public.

The following article from teacherbiz focuses on standardized testing and shows how the lack of public oversight can ultimately harm public education -- in this case, for the entire nation.

It’s unfortunate that reformers and profiteering corporations have such damaging influence in public schools.

POLITICS

Senate Education Bill Fails To Reverse "No Child Left Behind" Damage, Ignores Constituents

No Child Left Behind was a disaster from day one. Gerald Bracey published his first anti-no-child-left-behind article on January 28, 2001, before the law was signed by President Bush. Even then he could see that "NCLB would funnel large sums of public funds into the private sector..." He was right.

The bill, finally, is up for review. Fairtest has some fears about what's going to happen.

• This bill maintains NCLB’s testing requirements, which have failed to fulfill the law’s fundamental promises of higher overall achievement and smaller gaps between racial groups.
• Even more testing will be required because states seeking Title II funds will have to include student test scores in teacher evaluation.
• Focusing sanctions on the lowest-scoring schools will lift the worst punishments from most suburban communities while leaving low-income, minority neighborhoods at continued risk.

...[Monty] Neill concluded, “Instead of pursuing ‘more of the same’ failed policies, policy-makers need to listen to their constituents. It is time to replace high-stakes testing schemes with assessment systems that help improve educational quality and equity.”

PUBLIC EDUCATION

Nine Myths About Public Schools

Speaking of Gerald Bracey...here's an article he wrote in 2009. Not much has changed, has it?

Money doesn't matter. Tell this to wealthy districts. Money clearly affects changes in achievement although levels of achievement are more influenced by the variables just mentioned. Most studies are short term and look only at test scores, a very foolish mistake. Economists David Card and Alan Krueger also found investments in school show a payoff in terms of long-term earnings of graduates.

The Public Purpose of Public Education

...from earlier this year, Jan Resseger, Minister for Public Education and Witness of the United Church of Christ, makes a strong case for supporting public education.

The politics of public education have turned so ugly that one wakes in the night with anxious questions. In a year when the platform of one Texas political party would ban the teaching of “higher order thinking skills” and “critical thinking,” have we turned against education itself? A decade after the death of Fred Rogers, have we stopped treasuring our children and wanting them to enjoy childhood while they grow? Have our political leaders, many of them one-percenters, so little experience with the public schools that are the quintessential institution of the 99 percent—both the children and their teachers—that our leaders fail to understand the schools’ complex needs?

BOOKS: WHAT I'M READING NOW

Fire in the Ashes: Twenty-Five Years Among the Poorest Children in America

Critics claim that Kozol is inflammatory...that he's too emotional, but I have yet to see any of them spend their lives working among the children and families of the poor like he's done for nearly 50 years. Fire in the Ashes is a series of short stories about real people who live in unhealthy and horrible circumstances in one of the world's wealthiest nations.

I've asked before...how can we allow nearly 25% of our children to live in poverty? Kozol tries to be the conscience of the nation...if anyone will listen.

From the publisher's blurb...

...tells the stories of young men and women who have come of age in one of the most destitute communities of the United States. Some of them never do recover from the battering they undergo in their early years, but many more battle back with fierce and, often, jubilant determination to overcome the formidable obstacles they face. As we watch these glorious children grow into the fullness of a healthy and contributive maturity, they ignite a flame of hope, not only for themselves, but for our society.

From the book...

...I had never seen destitution like this in America before. Twenty years earlier, I had taught young children in the black community of Boston and had organized slum tenants there and lived within their neighborhood and had been in many homes where rats cohabited with children in their bedrooms. But sickness, squalor, and immiseration on the scale I was observing now were virtually unknown to me.

Almost every child that I came to know that winter in the Martinique was hungry. On repeated evenings when I went to interview a family I gave up asking questions when a boy or girl would eye the denim shoulder bag I used to carry, in which I often had an apple or some cookies or a box of raisins, and would give them what I had.

The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America

And, as long as we're on the sujbect of Kozol, this is his best book, in my opinion. It blows the cover off the argument that "you can't throw money" at education and get results. It covers our lack of commitment to Brown vs. Board of Education, as well as the obvious fact that America doesn't really care about its children. The low priority given to the nation's future, especially poor children of color, is a travesty.

From the publisher's blurb...

...pays tribute to those undefeated educators who persist against the odds, but directly challenges the chilling practices now being forced upon our urban systems. In their place, Kozol offers a humane, dramatic challenge to our nation to fulfill at last the promise made some fifty years ago to all our youngest citizens.

From the book...

By the end of the 1980s, the high hopes that I had briefly sensed a decade earlier were hard to find. Many of the schools I visited during this period seemed every bit as grim as those I'd seen in Boston in the 1960s, sometimes a good deal worse. I visited a high school in East St. Louis, Illinois, where the lab stations in the science rooms had empty holes where pipes were attached. A history teacher who befriended me told me of rooms that were so cold in winter that the students had to wear their coats to class while kids in other classes sweltered in a suffocating heat that could not be turned down. A foul odor filled much of the building because of an overflow of sewage that had forced the city to shut down the school the year before.

COMMON CORE

Van Roekel asks "What do you want instead (of the common core)?" My response.

Stephen Krashen responds to Dennis van Roekal, current president of the nation's largest teachers union, and the latter's collaborations with the corporate enemies.

PREDICTION: You read it here first. When van Roekel finishes his term as NEA President and retires he will go to work for someone like Arne Duncan. The NEA needs to dump him ASAP, before he drags us all down into the mire of corporate education.

Instead of the CCSS, Krashen says,

The question assumes that something is seriously wrong with American schools and that schools need to be fixed. We are always working to improve teaching, but there is no crisis in teaching. The real crisis is poverty.

What I want instead is: (1) dump the CC$$ (for a quick summary of arguments, please see: http://skrashen.blogspot.com/2013/06/common-cores-claims-are-false.html (2) protect children from the impact of poverty by investing more in food programs, health care, and libraries. (3) pay for (2) by reducing testing. A lot.

~~~

Sign An Education Declaration to Rebuild America

All who envision a more just, progressive and fair society cannot ignore the battle for our nation’s educational future. Principals fighting for better schools, teachers fighting for better classrooms, students fighting for greater opportunities, parents fighting for a future worthy of their child’s promise: their fight is our fight. We must all join in.

~~~

Stop the Testing Insanity!

Sign the National Resolution on High Stakes Testing!

~~~

10 Years of NCLB -- Part 1

The late Gerald Bracey wrote this a year after No Child Left Behind was passed. Thanks to Schools Matter for reprinting this. Go to the Schools Matter web site to read it in its entirety...

Nine Years Before Ten Years After

THE NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND ACT, A PLAN FOR THE DESTRUCTION OF PUBLIC EDUCATION: JUST SAY NO

by Gerald W. Bracey

There are any number of impossible-to-meet provisions in the NCLB, but let's take just two of the most prominent: those for testing and for teacher qualifications. The federal government cannot force NCLB on states, but any state that wants NCLB money must agree to test all children in grades three through eight every year in reading and math and, two years later, science as well. The tests must be based on "challenging" standards and schools must show "Adequate Yearly Progress" (AYP) until, after 12 years, all of the schools' students attain the "proficient" level. The school must demonstrate AYP overall and separately for all major ethnic and socio-economic groups, special education students and English Language Learners. And pigs will fly...The testing requirements alone are enough to consign the schools to failure. The requirements for "highly qualified" teachers simply hit the schools while they're down. All current teachers in schools receiving NCLB funds must be "highly qualified" by 2005-2006, as must anyone who was hired after the 2002-2003 school year began. By "highly qualified," NCLB means those who hold at least a bachelor's degree, have full state certification (or have passed the state's licensing exam), and who have not had any certification requirements waived on "an emergency, provisional, or temporary basis."

(Click here for 10 years of NCLB -- Part 2)
(Click here for 10 years of NCLB -- Part 3)

Excuses, excuses!

Our schools have been labeled as failing by people who have never stepped foot in them. The favorite weapon of these 'reformers' is test scores.

Michelle Newsum, Teacher at Coos Bay (Oregon) School District, continued,

* American kids in schools with less than 10% poverty far outscore all
other nations
* Kids in schools with up to 50% of students living in poverty score
well in comparison to the international average
* Only American students in schools with more than 75% poverty score
below the international average

This trend holds true for virtually all major standardized tests. On the TIMSS, PISA, SAT and NAEP low poverty schools do well and high poverty schools do not.

Stephen Krashen has made this point repeatedly, but as teachers know, it takes as many as twenty repetitions for students to learn something and some may need more. It takes even more repetitions to overcome misinformation such as these comments from Secretary of Education Arne Duncan from 2009 in Atlanta...

...[Education Secretary] Duncan noted while striding through Atlanta’s Grady High School...“You can have all the money in the world, but it won’t make a difference if teachers don’t believe their students can learn.”

...[Duncan] has no patience for teachers and schools that tick off all the reasons that their poor or minority students can’t achieve.

He doesn’t accept the excuses that their parents don’t care, their homes lack books and no one takes them to museums or plays.

Secretary Duncan, in misinforming the American people, doesn't seem to know the difference between understanding that all children can, indeed learn at their own rate, and the fact that the condition of poverty interrupts the education process.

In The Year They Began Calling Poverty and Homelessness an 'Excuse' Mike Klonsky wrote

Duncan has chosen to ignore poverty's downward effect on test scores and focus entirely on what he calls "bad teachers" and "failing schools." Recently confronted by educators teaching in some of the nation's highest-poverty areas about the need to do something about the living conditions of their students, Duncan cynically responded, "poverty is not destiny."

Yes, Secretary Duncan is correct, poverty is not destiny, but as Gerald Bracey said,

[Poverty is] like gravity. Gravity affects everything you do on the planet. So does poverty.

Duncan's assertion that poverty is not destiny, while true, minimizes the role the government has played in increasing poverty over the last 10 years, and the lack of progress in reducing it. He has essentially said that "bad teachers" and "bad schools" are at fault for not reducing poverty in the United States.

The last two years, especially, have see a surge in family poverty.

The poverty rate increased from 13.2% to 14.3% between 2008 and 2009, representing an additional 3.7 million people living in poverty for a total of 43.6 million in poverty in 2009. The poverty rate for children was 20.7% in 2009, representing 15.5 million kids living in poverty. In 2009, over one-third (35.5%) of all people living in poverty were children.

Unlike Secretary Duncan, most people understand that poverty has a deleterious effect on people, especially children.

In 2009, over one-third of black children (35.7%) and nearly one-third Hispanic children (33.1%) were living in poverty. Families (with children) headed by single mothers hit 38.5% in 2009. Of the 6.6 million families living in poverty, 3.8 million of them were headed by a single mom.

Schools can't provide everything needed to heal children from the effects of poverty. Families are the most important part of a child's life. If the family is not functioning properly due to a lack of food, heat, medical and dental care, or emotional support then schools will have difficulty doing their job...especially as money for education decreases and class sizes increase.

In Waiting for a School Miracle, Diane Ravitch wrote

Families are children's most important educators. Our society must invest in parental education, prenatal care and preschool. Of course, schools must improve; every one should have a stable, experienced staff, adequate resources and a balanced curriculum including the arts, foreign languages, history and science.

If every child arrived in school well-nourished, healthy and ready to learn, from a family with a stable home and a steady income, many of our educational problems would be solved.

The so-called "reformers" are trying to tell us that if we improved the education of children then poverty would disappear. However, it's the opposite which is, in fact, true. The education of the majority of poor children in the United States will improve once their poverty is reduced.

Blaming schools and teachers is the excuse used to cover up the failure of our society to deal with the growing poverty rate in our nation. When the billionaires (Gates, Broad, Walton), their foundations, their mouthpieces (Duncan, Obama, Klein, Bloomberg, et al), along with their state government lackeys (Walker, Scott, Kasich, Snyder, Daniels et al) direct the course of public education in the nation then something's wrong. None of them have ever taught in a public school...indeed, many of them, like Secretary Duncan, never even attended a public school. Their lack of experience in and knowledge of teaching and schools should disqualify them from affecting the direction of education in the United States.

What have any of these people done to reduce our nation's poverty? Susan Ohanian put it best:

When Congress passes No Child Left Unfed, No Child Without Health Care and No Child Left Homeless, then we can talk seriously about No Child Left Behind.

Is Anyone Listening?

We keep shouting but no one seems to be listening. The corporate/federal school "reformers" seem to have access to all the media...the Washington Post and the New York Times, NBC News, Oprah, even movie theaters. Does the average American know that there are people who object to the Gates/Broad/Duncan/Superman view of American schools? I hope so...but I don't see it.

As Marion Brady writes in the article referenced below,

...the failure of those now setting policy to respond to my arguments says they’re not listening, or not understanding, or are so sure they know what they’re doing they don’t need to pay attention to someone who was wrestling with issues about which they consider themselves expert before many of them were born.

Are the reformers listening? Does Bill Gates know that people disagree with him and his corporate money? Does Arne Duncan know that his policies go directly against what research has shown to be best for the schools in the country? Does President Obama know that poverty is, indeed, the major factor in student achievement and that our middle class and upper class students lead the world in their achievement?

Perhaps not. Perhaps they really believe that charter schools, which, on the whole are no better than public schools, are the answer to our "failing schools." Perhaps they really believe that teachers don't try hard enough and we're somehow hiding our real teaching skills until they pay us for test scores.

So...they need to listen. They need to listen to Stephen Krashen when he reminds them that Gerald Bracey showed that poverty was the major problem with student achievement.

The entire basis for the national standards/testing movement is our low scores on international tests when compared to other countries. Our scores, however, are only low because we have such a high percentage of children in poverty, compared to other countries that participate in international tests. When we consider only middle-class children who attend well-funded schools, our math scores are near the top of the world (Payne and Biddle, 1999).

They need to listen to Marion Brady when he decries

...Congress as America’s school board, and members of the Business Roundtable and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce cutting the checks that help elect and keep the members of that board in office...

Is anyone reading the Gesell Institute's report on their 18 month study which shows that even though we're pushing academics in Kindergarten children still develop at their own rate...proving once again that One Size Does Not Fit All!

In many districts, worries about benchmarks and test scores have made kindergarten less play-centered and developmental gaps more pronounced. When some children couldn’t handle expectations and were disrupting class, the William H. Frazier Elementary School in Fallbrook, Calif. began “Preppie Kindergarten” to separate those children who are ready for today’s kindergarten from those who are not. These children spend two years in kindergarten rather than one.

“All these kids were struggling and we wanted to give them a better start,” says Preppie Kindergarten teacher Kim Kinsman, who requires children to sit 15 minutes—not 30—at a stretch. “You cannot make a baby walk before they are ready to walk,” she says. “You cannot push a child. If they are not ready, they’re not ready.”

There's clear evidence that poverty is the real problem and that children learn at their own rate no matter how much we test them. The best teacher in the world can't change a child's rate of development. The best teacher in the world can't overcome the enormous negative influence of malnutrition and hunger, lack of health care, environmental toxins, and lack of access to books. American students from well-funded schools who come from high-income families outscore nearly all other countries on international tests. Our overall national scores are lower because the US has a very high percentage of children in poverty (over 20%, compared to Denmark's 3%).

Who's listening?

~~~

The First Five Years

The video below (Thanks Kate) hits the nail on the head. Most of our educational problems stem from child poverty which drags children down academically even before they start school.

1. The United States has the highest child poverty rate in the developed world.
2. Poverty is the most accurate determiner of academic achievement.
3. Since 2000 the number of families living in poverty has increased dramatically. 
4. It's easier to blame schools and teachers than to do something about the poverty in our country.



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbSp88PBe9E

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"Thousands of studies have linked poverty to academic achievement. The relationship is every bit as strong as the connection between cigarettes and cancer." —David Berliner, Our Impoverished View of Ed. Reform, Aug. 2005

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"Arne Duncan and his accomplices aren't advocating the close examination of poverty data: health, tooth decay, presence of iron, family income. No, they declare test data is king. All you have to do is look at the really ineffective, misleading, inappropriate, and just plain stupid test questions on which they are basing all this data collection to know the data emperor has no clothes. Depending on McGraw-Hill, Pearson, et al student standardized test results is the most expensive, least effective, and most damaging way to evaluate teacher performance. Period." —Susan Ohanian, website, July 22, 2009

~~~

"13.6 million of America's children live in poverty." —Every Child Matters

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"High-stakes decisions based on school-mean proficiency are scientifically indefensible. We cannot regard differences in school-mean proficiency as reflecting differences in school effectiveness. . . . To reward schools for high mean achievement is tantamount to rewarding those schools for serving students who were doing well prior to school entry." —Stephen Raudenbush, Schooling, Statistics, & Poverty

~~~

"Studies in Colorado, Florida, Michigan, Washington, Denver and Boston -- along with others in England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales -- all show that poverty is a primary determinant of student achievement. High-stakes test scores are very highly correlated with family income." —Donald C. Orlich, Pacific Northwest Inlander, 3/15/06

~~~

"Poverty is not an excuse. It's a condition, like gravity. Gravity affects everything you do on this planet, and so does poverty." —Gerald Bracey

Close my school? No Way!!

Last Thursday evening I attended a "town-hall" meeting with two members of our local school board to talk about the proposals on the table to reorganize our local school district. No one denies that there is a problem with funding the schools. The teachers' association agreed last year to 0% pay increases, and increased insurance costs among other things. It's no secret that the Wall Street mess, coupled with the lack of competent leadership in the national and state legislatures and departments of education have put our schools, locally and across the country, in financial jeopardy.

Our superintendent, who was hired last year, has come up with five plans, none of which will make people happy. They all involve closing schools.

Nearly everyone agrees that closing schools is going to be necessary. We have too many high schools in our district, and our elementary schools vary from nearly empty to bursting at the seams. Redistricting also seems to be warranted.

We're one of the largest school districts in the state by area. Our children are rural, suburban, small town, and urban. We are a culturally diverse district with a large non-English speaking population (a recent influx of Burmese refugees). Our district faces problems with transiency, poverty, and unemployment. We have schools ranging from "Four Star Schools" (a honor bestowed by the state of Indiana) to schools on probation and facing state takeover and likely privatization (those with the highest poverty levels as you might expect).

The town hall meetings which have been taking place all over our 350 square mile district have revealed something very interesting though not very surprising. Most people agree...it's ok to close a school, as long as it's not our school.

The school board members informed us that this was the same feeling throughout the district. It was ok to close schools, but most people, in all areas of the district, wanted the closings to be elsewhere.

I was reminded of the Phi Delta Kappa/Gallop Poll of the Public's Attitudes Toward the Public Schools, an annual poll tracking how people in the US feel about the schools. As has been the case for many years, people ranked the schools in their community better than the schools nationwide. 51% gave their local schools an A or a B as a grade as opposed to 19% for the nation as a whole. In addition, 74% of parents of public school children, who are the people who deal directly with the schools and know much more about what goes on in their local school than do their legislators, awarded the school their oldest child attended a grade of A or B.

At this point you might begin to recognize a pattern here. The majority of people, and a larger majority of parents, feel like their local schools are doing a good job. It's the "other" schools around the country that are so bad.

In a sidebar included in the poll results the late Gerald Bracey asks why the seeming contradiction seems to exist.

It’s a constant in the PDK/Gallup polls: Respondents say their local schools are OK but the nation’s schools are average to awful.

The reasons for this disconnect are simple: Americans never hear anything positive about the nation’s schools and haven’t since the years just before Sputnik in 1957. Think, A Nation at Risk. People who wax positive about public schools are so rare that the June 1996 School Administrator put pictures of all six of us on its cover as “The Contrarians.” Negative information flows almost daily from media, politicians, and ideologues. During the 2008 presidential campaign, a $50 million project, Ed in 08, inundated Americans with negativity through its web site, TV ads, and YouTube clips.

But what about the test scores? Don't they show that our public schools are "failing?" Again, Gerald Bracey...

In the 'Progress in International Reading Literacy Study,' American kids in low poverty schools stomped the top-ranked Swedes," he said. "Even kids in schools with up to 50 percent of the students in poverty attained an average score that, had they constituted a nation, would have ranked fourth. Only American students attending schools with more than 75 percent poverty rates scored below the international average of the 35 participating countries.

As long as politicians ignore poverty as an issue in the US our schools are going to be "failing." Who is doing the failing, though? The kids? the teachers? or those who continue to promote an economy with the largest percentage of children in poverty in the developed world?