Norm's Notes

Parent Call-Out to Attend STATE OF THE UNION CONFERENCE

2012-01-29T08:57:00.000-05:00

This might be a wonderful way to bring yourself up to speed with the many issues
our public schools are currently facing. A way to better understand the complex connections between testing, charter schools and the teacher's union. Learn from experienced and informed teachers, parents and education activists who have been battling these issues for years. Their experience will help shed light on the past and give direction toward the future.
----Janine Sopp, parent, member of GEM

STATE OF THE UNION CONFERENCE

Greetings GEM Membership,
If you are in the NYC area next Saturday, Feb 4, make sure to register and attend the State of the Union Conference. This conference is being organized by rank and file teachers and parents allies. Mayor Bloomberg declared war on our union and on public education in his State of the Union speech last week. Now more than ever is the time to rebuild a fightback inside our unions. Join with teachers, community members, students, parents at this conference to create the union we need!
Register in advance for the discounted rate of $10 which will be used to pay for the space and childcare. Day of event will is $15.
On line registration is at http://stateoftheunionconference.eventbrite.com. Scholarships/Info: stateoftheunionfeb4@gmail.com

We look forward to seeing you next Saturday, Feb 4th at the State of the Union Conference.
GEM

The State of the UNION Conference

Saturday, February 4th, 2012

10:00 am to 4:00 pm

at The Graduate Center for Worker Education

Public education is under attack!

Stand up, fight back!

As educators we are strongest when our voices are united.

That is what a UNION is for.

The UNION makes us strong.

For far too long the leadership of our union, the United Federation of Teachers,

along with the national American Federation of Teachers, have been silent, thrown up minimal defenses too little too late, and have even collaborated in the assault on our profession, our students and their families.

It is time to re-imagine our teachers’ union.

Come meet other UFT members who want a new kind of union

Learn about the history and functioning of the UFT in workshops facilitated by rank and file members, union delegates,

and fellow teachers.

Workshops include:

Workshops include:

UFT 101: Introduction to the UFT

Organizing101:parents and teachers working together--a vision for a community oriented teacher union with Leonie Haimson, Class size Matters

The UFT past and present

Social Movement Unionism? With Lois Weiner, Editor of The Global Assault on Teaching, Teachers andtheir Unions

What happened to Brown vs. Board of Education:

re-segregation of our schoolswith Brian Jones and Sam Anderson

High stakes testing with activists from GrassrootsEducation Movement

Tenure – A Job for Life??

What's the 1% want with our schools? (Privatization 101)

Mayoral Control vs. A People's Board of Education with

Coalition for Public Education

Building your chapter: how do you organize at the school level? With longtime UFT chapter leaders and activists.

Federal, State and local policy and our schools

What does democracy in ourunion look like?

Strategy and Tactics: Lessons fro Occupy Wall Street for our movement

With activist from Occupy theDOE

Register today for the

STATE OF THE UNION CONFERENCE

Saturday, February 4th, 2012

10:00 am to 4:00 pm

at The Graduate Center for Worker Education

25 Broadway, 7th Floor, NYC

Directions: http://workereducation.org/contact-us

Please register online for the State of the Union Conference: http://stateoftheunionconference.eventbrite.com

Find us on Facebook: State of the Union

$10 pre-registration

$15 at the door
Registration Fees will be used to cover expenses

Scholarships available, please email stateoftheunionfeb4@gmail.com

For childcare services at the conference please email Peter Lamphere no later than Jan. 29th at peter.lamphere@gmail.com

STATE OF THE UNION CONFERENCE

The time is NOW

Lois Weiner: Teacher Unionism Reborn

2012-01-28T08:44:00.003-05:00

Published on New Politics (http://newpol.org)
Home > New Politics Vol. XIII No. 4, Whole Number 52 > Teacher Unionism Reborn
Teacher Unionism Reborn

http://newpol.org/print/node/579

by Lois Weiner
In the past five years, we have witnessed a demonization of teachers unions that is close to achieving its goal: destruction of the most stable and potentially powerful defender of mass public education. Teacher unionism’s continued existence is imperiled — if what we define as "existence" is organizations having the legal capacity to bargain over any meaningful economic benefits and defend teachers’ rights to exercise professional judgment about what to teach and how to do it.

      As I explain elsewhere,[1] financial and political elites began this project forty years ago when they imposed school reform on Latin America, Africa, and Asia as a quid pro quo for economic aid. Though specifics of this global social engineering differ from one country to another, reforms have the same footprint: School funding is cut and school systems are broken up to promote privatization under the banner of "choice"; teachers and curriculum are controlled by tying pay to standardized test scores and eliminating tenure; standardized testing measures what is taught to most students, reducing content to basic math, reading, and writing. Teachers unions have been singled out for attack because throughout the world they are the most significant barriers to this project’s implementation.

      Rhetoric about equalizing school outcomes for groups long denied access to adequate, let alone quality education, masks the real aim of the last twenty years of reform, creating a docile workforce that receives no more than the 8th grade education needed to compete with workers elsewhere for jobs that can be moved easily from one city, state, or country. World Bank materials lay out the assumptions seldom articulated in this country: Money educating workers beyond the level most will need wastes scarce public funding; and minimally educated workers require minimally educated teachers, whose performance can be monitored through use of standardized testing. The newest World Bank report, "Making Schools Work" takes the reasoning (and policy) even further, insisting that "contract teachers" who work for one-quarter of what civil service employees receive, have no benefits, no job protection, and no rights produce good enough outcomes.[2]

      The attack has been fueled by right-wing foundations and advanced by Democrats and Republicans alike. The corporate media, including traditionally liberal elements, like Hollywood, The New Yorker and The New York Times, have blanketed TV, radio, and the press with bogus premises about education’s relationship to the economy and the role of teachers unions in blocking much-needed change. The Obama Administration substitutes educational reforms straight out of the playbook of right-wing foundations as the panacea to unemployment and poverty. When Secretary of Education Arne Duncan avers that education is the "one true path out of poverty" he displays the administration’s intention to divert attention away from unemployment, health care, child hunger, and homelessness. School improvement supplants all the economic and social reforms that have, historically, been used to ameliorate poverty. Defenders of public education frequently answer these inflated claims for education with protestations that schools can do nothing to alter the fate of poor children. Unfortunately, their response serves to heighten public perceptions that school people — teachers — refuse to take responsibility for what occurs under their watch. The more accurate and politically effective response is that schools can do more and better if we have well-prepared and well-supported teachers at work in well-resourced schools, and yet, even with these conditions, schools are hostage to powerful forces that depress achievement — factors that are beyond their control. This more nuanced defense of public education and teachers undercuts one of the most difficult problems we face in defending public education, neoliberalism’s exploitation of historic inequalities in education. This is especially true in the United States, where the rhetoric of the civil rights movement has been totally hijacked in defense of charter schools and improving "teacher quality" by eliminating seniority and tenure. Even The Nation has bought the reification of individual teacher performance as the sine qua non of school improvement.[3]

      Teachers unions globally have experienced an astoundingly well-orchestrated, well-financed attack, and resistance elsewhere in the world has been forceful and persistent.[4] In contrast, U.S. teachers unions have been easy targets. Most teachers belong to a local affiliate of the NEA or the AFT. Both the NEA and AFT are national unions with state-level organizations. In general, teachers in the largest cities are in the AFT, which is a member of the AFL-CIO. The NEA functions as a union and collaborates with labor on legislation and in politics but is not in the AFL-CIO. In the NEA, state organizations are the most powerful component. In the AFT, the local affiliate is key. Staff generally control the NEA, officers the AFT. In most school systems, the union apparatus is intact, but the organizations are shells, weakened by their embrace of the "business union" or "service model" that characterizes most U.S. unions. The synergy of business unionism’s hierarchical ethos and the legal framework giving unions the right to bargain on behalf of teachers, namely exclusive representation as bargaining agent, the right to collect "agency fee" (payment to the union of what is generally the equivalent of dues, to cover expenses the union expends in negotiating and enforcing the contract), and dues check-off (automatic deduction of dues from the member’s paycheck) has encouraged a totally bureaucratic approach to contract enforcement, member passivity, and erosion of the union’s school-site presence. Local union officers and activists have often been clueless about how to respond to the blitzkrieg of vitriol, and the national unions have been little help. They have been unwilling to "rock the boat," desiring above all to stay politically moored to Obama, a president who has pressed for a thoroughly anti-teacher, anti-union, anti-public education agenda. Another factor is, of course, the personal power and privilege national officers and staff enjoy as a result of their cozy relationship with powerful elites.

      From the start of mass public education, teachers unions, like most of organized labor, turned a blind eye to racism and anti-immigrant sentiment.[5] Teachers unions’ failure to acknowledge this history has facilitated their being cast — incredibly, by billionaires who have plundered the nation’s resources — as a special interest group, more interested in protecting teachers’ jobs than in helping poor children succeed in school. Many parents and citizens, even some teachers, have been persuaded that tenure and seniority protect "dead wood," not realizing that when tenure and seniority are lost, so is democratic space in classrooms. The unions’ unwillingness to acknowledge schooling’s past and current role in reproducing social inequality, their reluctance to work as partners with activists to take on racism, sexism, militarization, and anti-immigrant prejudice, have weakened their credibility with groups who should be teacher unionists’ strongest allies.

      This problem is exemplified by Diane Ravitch’s defense of teacher unions. Unlike Chester Finn, a former ally who brags about his desire to destroy public education, Ravitch understands that once public education is destroyed, like Humpty Dumpty, it won’t be put back together again — and when public education goes, so will a powerful force for democracy. Another explanation for Ravitch’s about-face on the neoliberal reforms she advocated as part of the Bush Administration is that she is an intellectual and unlike her former neo-conservative allies is genuinely interested in education. She is, rightly, horrified by the anti-intellectualism that is writ large in neoliberalism’s successful efforts to vocationalize education. Most of what she writes is eloquent, passionate, and accurate. Unlike the disoriented bureaucrats who run the unions, Ravitch understands that a fight needs to be made and she is willing to wage it. Ravitch criticized mayoral control of the New York City schools as undemocratic when the president of the union representing New York City teachers supported the measure. Ravitch has come out against linking teacher pay to test scores while the national unions have caved. Ravitch has shown the union bureaucrats how they could, if they wished, defend the union and public education more effectively. She is Albert Shanker’s doppelganger, that is, while he still acted like union president rather than a labor statesman.

      However, as was the case with Shanker and is true of NEA and AFT officials today, Ravitch’s defense of teacher unionism and public education is constrained by an ideological commitment to defending U.S. capitalism at any cost. Because she can’t or won’t acknowledge what has been wrong with U.S. society and public education, she can’t devise a compelling alternative to the neoliberal reforms. She embeds, subtly, in her current defense of public education the claim that there was no crisis in U.S. public education before the neoliberal reforms were imposed. But there was. The Left historians she blasted in the 1960s and 70s in her defense of the status quo had it right. The schools did — and do — reproduce social inequality. In her recent essay in the New York Review of Books (September 29, 2011) she reduces current educational inequality between Whites and minorities to yet another in a series of over-blown crises U.S. schools have endured since their creation. She argues that "poverty matters," which it does, of course. So does racism, which she does not mention. So do other forms of discrimination which she ignores. Elsewhere, Ravitch states her desire for public education to be what she experienced in high school, in Houston, Texas.[6] (In the PBS history of U.S. public education, Ravitch fondly recalls her days as a high school cheerleader.) But how many Black and Hispanic parents will fight for a return to the status quo that barred their children from schools that served Whites?

An Emerging Resistance

The nation’s largest cities were home to teacher unionism’s original birth and its rebirth in the 1960s. Today opposition caucuses have emerged once again in cities, where conditions have deteriorated to an extent unimaginable even a decade ago. Charter schools, as their proponents freely admit, are one of the main weapons to make school systems free of union influence. A charter school is essentially its own school district, free of district regulations — and union involvement. In most large cities, teachers unions gave up seniority in transfer when the first wave of school closings began. Now, when schools are closed because of poor test scores and replaced by charter schools, experienced teachers are often thrown into pools of "displaced teachers." They must compete for jobs with new hires who earn one-half the salary. Teacher pay now comes out of a school’s budget, so many principals, especially those with little or no teaching experience themselves, prefer hiring two new teachers for the price of one more-experienced teacher. A fact little publicized by the unions is that older minority teachers face intense racism when they interview for jobs, especially with young, white principals. Readers familiar with labor history will see the dismaying parallels to "shape up" on the docks and fields, before unionization brought hiring halls and protections for older workers.

      Although tenure has been dismissed as irrelevant in K-12 teaching, its importance is greater today than ever before. As principals’ pay is increasingly tied to improving test scores, and the noose between teacher pay and student test scores is tightened, teachers who want to give their students a richer diet than test prep are facing the prospect of losing their jobs if they follow their moral and professional principles. Even more chilling is schools’ use of corporate propaganda, obtained through seemingly trustworthy vendors, as occurred with Scholastic Books promoting a fourth-grade curriculum written by the coal industry with its perspective.[7] Even where it still exists in state law, tenure has been greatly weakened because administrators can easily give teachers spurious unsatisfactory ratings due to weakened enforcement of evaluation procedures. In many city schools, principals can and do function without any check on their power, other than what is exercised by distant officials whose only concern is test scores. Over and over one hears of teachers who have bought the anti-union propaganda that is so prevalent in the media, or are too overworked and demoralized to do anything other than what they are told, or are too afraid of retribution to voice a contrary opinion. The union’s presence has been so eroded and its credibility so damaged that "transforming the union" in many districts probably means building it from scratch.

      At the same time, some teachers have become politicized by the vicious, unfair political attacks on their ability, character, professional authority, and economic well-being. Still, they often cling to the "service model" of unionism and expect "the union" to somehow, magically, intervene. The idea that they ARE the union is slowly percolating through the ranks, and increasingly, a new generation of teacher union activists is emerging. Union renewal is taking many forms, but the most important developments from a strategic perspective are occurring in the nation’s cities. Not all major cities are experiencing the kind of change that’s needed. For example, in Washington D.C., a protracted, ultimately successful court challenge by a former union official who vied for the presidency did little to mobilize teachers and community. On the other hand, in the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), a vibrant leadership, mostly new to union office, has brought their commitment to mobilize the membership, explicitly rejecting business unionism. In Milwaukee, long-time education activist Bob Peterson, a founder of the magazine Rethinking Schools, now heads Milwaukee’s teachers union. Radical teachers who previously shunned the union now understand that they need it to protect teachers’ economic rights, and like Peterson, see the union capable of fighting on a "tripod" of concerns: "bread and butter unionism… professional unionism… and social justice unionism." Peterson points to the need for truly mutual alliances, building strong relations with parents and community groups "not just to ensure adequate support for public education, but so that we as a union are also involved in improving the community." [8]

      Though "Rethinking Schools" and others use the term "social justice" union, I think the idea of a "social movement" union is more useful because it addresses the need for transformation of the unions internally, especially the need for union democracy. Union democracy is a thorny issue for radicals, especially those who assume leadership of moribund organizations. "Social justice" unionism addresses the positions the union takes on various political, social, and economic issues. One temptation for radicals who take office without a mobilized base to support them is that union democracy becomes a hindrance to the union acting on a "social justice" program. On the other hand, "social movement" unionism gets at the need for empowering members, building the union from the bottom-up, making the union itself a social movement. A social movement union not only endorses social justice demands in education and the society, working with social movements to further these aims, it also exists as a social movement itself, pressing as much as it can against the constraints of its being a membership organization — with the responsibility to protect its members.

      The CTU is probably the most important testing ground for social movement unionism. The union is now led by activists from CORE ( Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators ).[9] Using new-fangled social media and old-fashioned face-to-face meetings and organizing, CORE defeated the older guard leadership loyal to the national AFT office. With scarcely a second to catch their breath, CTU’s new leaders were confronted with ferocious attacks by the state and city on the contract and teachers’ pensions. In gaining their political footing, the inexperienced leadership made mistakes that were both natural and damaging, for instance, trusting that state union officials would be more expert about policy decisions and allowing the local president to participate in meetings with high-ranking state officials by herself. The CTU leadership faces a stunning phalanx of opponents, ranging from Mayor Rahm Emmanuel, who flaunts the prestige and support he has in the White House and from powerful "friends of labor" in the Democratic Party, to Republican and Democratic state politicians, eager to destroy all public employees unions, mostly especially those representing city teachers. CTU leaders must simultaneously take from the state and national union resources that are needed while simultaneously doing all that is necessary to oust these officials who impede the movement’s objectives. In my opinion, CORE activists are an inspiration, heroic and wise.

      Like teachers in other cities, Los Angeles teachers face a viciously anti-teachers union mayor. But what differentiates LA’s Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa is that he parlayed his position as a staffer for the teachers union, United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA), and his close relationship with two of UTLA’s highest ranking officers — well-known leftists — to become a labor bigwig and then mayor. UTLA was the first teachers union in a major U.S. city in which a reform caucus succeeded in sweeping the old guard out of office. However, only a small fraction of the membership voted in the election (and in the most recent election as well). The reformers have been in the unenviable position of responding to horrific attacks while also managing the union’s bureaucratic operations, without being able to count on much support from the membership. Unfortunately, the reformers, who took office in a coalition that did not permit accountability among the factions, maintained many of the bureaucratic practices of the previous administration. The leadership’s disastrous decision to support mayoral control — because their buddy was the Mayor — was a function of an emphasis on playing power politics rather than addressing the union’s bureaucratic functioning. In the most recent elections, a long-time activist running as an independent but aligning himself with a more conservative caucus won the presidency. At the same time, a progressive caucus, PEAC, took a majority of seats on the union’s board of directors. What needs to be done now — and quickly — is for leaders and activists to focus financial and human resources on reviving the union at the school site. Probably one-third of the schools, campuses as they’re called, lack functioning chapters. This admittedly painstaking work of educating members that they "own" the union, to help them in organizing themselves, is inescapable. One bright spot from the reformers’ victory is that UTLA’s Human Rights Committee has embraced international work with Canadian and Mexican teachers unions, under the umbrella of the Trinational Coalition to Defend Public Education.[10]

      Of all the teachers unions in major cities, it appears at first glance that New York’s union, the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), has done the best job in protecting teachers and public schools. Many of the worst abuses teachers have suffered elsewhere have been forestalled by the union’s political clout in Albany. Charter schools have not mushroomed as fast as they have elsewhere, for instance California. Schools being closed due to low test scores are not being auctioned off to the highest bidder, as is occurring in Los Angeles. But appearances are deceiving because while the UFT has indeed been able to protect many of the vestiges of the old system by calling in its political chips, it has done so at the expense of alienating its natural allies, insulating the bureaucracy and allowing the union to all but disappear at the school, and seriously erode at the district level, where union staff may decline to provide chapter chairs with the most minimal forms of support, like meeting with principals about grievances. One estimate I’ve heard from a loyalist to the current leadership puts the number of schools with no functioning union chapters at far more than one-third, probably closer to three-fifths. Many teachers are too frightened to attend union meetings or even meet privately with union staff at the school site. What they may consent to do, when pressed, is to put union materials in teachers’ mailboxes, but they will do so only in secret. One fine young teacher in a selective Manhattan high school touted to be "progressive" and favored by leftish parents was given "unsatisfactory" ratings by the principal for "harassing" colleagues. He put a notice in their mailboxes informing them of a get-together to discuss the school’s admission policies. The chapter chair refused to help because she wanted to stay in the principal’s good graces, and union staff were unwilling to be involved. Their job as they see it is to file grievances that they are sure will succeed. The UFT clearly lacks the capacity — and will — to defend its members and the schools. Some activists theorize that the union is morphing, perhaps through conscious intent, from a "service model" of unionism into a membership organization that wears the mantle of union but in fact is a provider of consumer services, like low cost auto insurance.

      Still, the UFT bosses have not yet seen a serious challenge. In the last change of rule, the crown was passed to Michael Mulgrew, who actually taught in the city schools, unlike Randi Weingarten, a lawyer who served as UFT President and is currently AFT national President. Mulgrew’s face is new, but the apparatus remains impenetrably bureaucratic and the union’s politics are essentially as they were under Shanker. There is little sense from the way the union leadership presents itself or acts that teacher unionism has experienced an assault that challenges its existence. The union newspaper’s coverage of school struggles — or rather lack of it — shows how little engaged the UFT is in protecting the contract, schools or teachers, as well as how remote it is from community-based groups fighting on social justice. In the October 27, 2001 issue of the union newspaper, Michael Mulgrew’s picture appeared 9 times in the first 11 pages. An article applauded the success of Junior ROTC at one of the city’s many racially segregated city high schools. No mention was made of the anti-militarization campaigns that are occurring elsewhere in the nation, for instance in Los Angeles, with UTLA’s support. Another story informed teachers about their rights — in handling disruptive students. No mention was made of advocacy groups’ work about racial discrimination in school disciplinary policies, of activists working to alter school organization and culture so that "disruptive" students are less so. Stories on charter school organizing painted a glowing picture — another victory! There was one nod to the fact that Occupy Wall Street was a few blocks away from union headquarters, a story (with a picture of Michael Mulgrew) described the union’s participation in a coalition demanding no tax breaks for millionaires. But mostly the newspaper contained sentimental snapshots of teachers doing charity work. In light of the real conditions in the school system, including thousands of teachers who are paid (for now) but jobless, draconian cuts in funding felt in loss of money for supplies and class sizes that often exceed the contractual norms (not enforced), and the absence of union chapters in at least one-third of the schools, the paper’s contents are almost surreal. Clearly, this is a union leadership that doesn’t understand that publicity about teachers walking in support of breast cancer awareness will not suffice to defend their schools, their jobs, or their right to have a real union represent them.

      The UFT’s one victory in recent memory was organizing family day care workers, that is, making them union members. The UFT, in alliance with ACORN, used its political muscle to win the right to have family day care workers have union representation and have their dues deducted from their wages, which are paid by the state. An election for the bargaining agent occurred, a small fraction of the workers in the unit voted, and the UFT won the vote. While this seems to be a win-win, strengthening the union and giving exploited workers union representation, in fact the "top-down" process fails to build the resiliency union members will need to win or defend gains. Often what occurs in this kind of organizing is that shortly after the election for representation, the new members are forgotten. In this familiar scenario not limited to the UFT, union officials use the new members to strengthen their bureaucratic hold on the union apparatus. Union membership gives workers access to some protections, much needed and deserved to be sure; but especially when members are not in the majority constituency (teachers in the case of the UFT), they are trapped in a union that does little to represent them. The case of the family daycare workers is especially poignant because the UFT/ACORN alliance muscled out what had been the authentic community-based organizing of family daycare workers, by a Brooklyn group, Families United for Racial and Economic Equality.[11]

      One bright spot in the New York City teachers union’s political horizon is Teachers Unite, which is trying to bring activists on social justice in schooling together with teachers who want to see the UFT transformed.[12] Teachers Unite is small but growing. One of its most successful activities has been providing workshops on building the union at the school site, taught by teachers who are themselves chapter leaders. Teachers Unite’s activity demonstrates what could be done to build the union if the UFT bureaucracy really wanted to do so. Teachers from other activist groups, including Grassroots Education Movement (GEM), which produced a splendid video countering the misinformation in Waiting for Superman, are collaborating with Teachers Unite on social justice campaigns in the city schools, including helping to organize against school closings.[13] Another hopeful development is that Teachers Unite is part of a still-emerging national network of reform groups.

Occupy the Unions!

If teachers unions are to continue to exist as a meaningful form of workers’ representation, members need to transform them — and fast. The future of the movement depends on activists realizing that they, not staff or officers on the state and national levels, have to be the catalysts for change. Just as there is no escape from building the union at the base, there is no getting around the hard work of developing authentic alliances with parents and community activists, coalitions that acknowledge historic inequalities and support communities in their needs, rather than being paper organizations that are dusted off when the union wants to display community support. Elected officials, from school boards to governors, are violating union contracts with impunity. Lawsuits, by themselves, the favored method of dealing with law-breaking officials, can’t stop this. What can is direct action undertaken with parents and community, as the CTU has done in combating school closings in Chicago.

      In contrast, the AFT and NEA national leadership pursue a strategy of cozying up to their "friends" in the Democratic Party, including President Obama. This undercuts the brave activity of many teachers battling in their schools against the policies Obama and Duncan are pushing. For instance, both national unions have accepted use of standardized tests to judge student performance and teachers’ pay, in order, they say, to stay "credible." But "credible" to whom? Certainly not teachers who risk their livelihoods by speaking out against the harm done by education having been reduced to teaching to/for the test. The president of the AFT chapter in his charter school shared with me his outrage and dismay at what occurred when he called the state union for help in dealing with the principal’s demand for pay increases linked to student test scores. He was told the changes the principal demanded were official AFT policy.

      In July 2011, the NEA officially endorsed Obama for President. The AFT will undoubtedly follow suit, once organized labor decides the time is right to make this commitment. Although the AFT and NEA nationally are in the Democrats’ hip pocket, a different scenario might occur in local school board elections. Teachers unions are beginning to run candidates for school boards. Often local unions support candidates with the same "lesser evil" rationale the national and state unions use in endorsing Democrats. But in some places, this strategy is being challenged. Instead of electing someone, anyone, who is marginally better, teachers unions are thinking of how they might use the races as an opportunity to build support from the ground up. Campaigns for school board elections can be testing grounds for building new electoral alliances, alliances that are wholly independent of both parties, speak truth to corporate power, and advance a vision of public education that supports collaboration among schooling’s constituencies. As Occupy Wall Street has demonstrated, the country is hungry for leaders who will speak out against capitalism’s excesses. Neither the NEA nor AFT can provide that leadership, nor be partners in a movement that challenges Wall Street, as long as its top officials want the unions to be included as collaborators in maintaining U.S. capitalism’s domination of U.S. society and the globe.

      As labor researchers Mayssoun Sukarieh and Stuart Tannock explain, though the AFT supports its far-flung global operations with "high-minded rhetoric of global labor solidarity, philanthropic goodwill, and democracy promotion," the union wants most of all to further U.S. hegemony. The AFT’s international operations are vast, ranging from "Bolivia to Burma and Kenya to Kazakhstan."[14] Ironically, the AFT aims to educate teacher unionists elsewhere in the world to desert the traditions of social movement unionism that we in the United States should be learning — and imitating — here at home. Given claims by some progressives that the AFT changed with the end of the Cold War and Shanker’s death, it’s important to note Sukarieh and Tannock contend that the AFT "continues with its cold war legacy largely uninterrupted. Its current director of international affairs, David Dorn, was also director during the Shanker era. Rather than question, apologize for, or distance itself from any of its past international work, the AFT celebrates and explicitly claims to be continuing with this exact same line of activity…The AFT continues to expand its international programs.. from its 1990s base in Eastern Europe to the current focus on the Middle East." (p. 186).

      AFT and NEA rely on their size, wealth, and connections with the U.S. government to dominate politics of the Education International (EI), the global federation of teachers unions. There used to be significant foreign policy differences between the NEA and AFT, with the NEA being more liberal. However, those distinctions, even ephemeral, seem to have been lost. Both joined in squashing democracy at the EI conference in Capetown this past summer, where they used their control of the EI’s administrative apparatus to push through a palatable (to them) resolution on Palestine and Israel. According to a conference participant with whom I spoke, AFT and NEA shocked Western European delegates with their brazen (and successful) effort to control debate and force an outcome that was more in line with U.S. foreign policy.

      Three different resolutions on Palestine and Israel were presented to the conference. One came from the EI board, another from the UK higher education union, Universities and Colleges Union, and the third from the National Union of Teachers (NUT). Operating much as the AFT leadership does at its own conventions, the AFT and NEA maneuvered to suppress the NUT resolution, which was a forthright condemnation of Israel’s actions towards Palestine. They first tried to persuade the presiding NUT officer to withdraw the resolution. This effort at intimidation failed, so they warned NUT delegates that should they persist in presenting their resolution, the AFT delegation would bolt from the conference. An NEA staffer being groomed for leadership in the EI’s administrative office handled negotiations on behalf of the AFT and NEA, and ultimately, a "compromise" resolution was approved, one that dropped sharp criticism of Israeli policy. Delegates from the Middle East were enraged at the resolution and by their having been silenced in the debate.

      With all of the political struggles going on in the world, with the concerted attacks against teachers unions, why did the AFT and NEA make the NUT’s resolution on Palestine the main focus of their political intervention at the EI? Why would the leadership of NEA and AFT jeopardize their political legitimacy by flaunting their control over the EI’s administrative apparatus? The answer is in the lopsided nature of the AFT and NEA’s political compass, permanently stuck in the direction of the U.S. government’s desires. Nothing counts as much for the NEA and AFT leadership as the prerogatives of U.S. capitalism and the government that protects it. Their political loyalties to U.S. imperialism are seen in almost every political decision. For example, the NEA and AFT ban membership by the Chinese and Cuban unions in the EI because they are not free of government control. Fair enough, but why then permit participation of the Egyptian union — entirely controlled by the Mubarak dictatorship — until the union fell in arrears on its dues, shortly before Mubarak was overthrown? Teacher union leaders from the global south object to the contradiction between EI’s professed support for free trade unions throughout the world and its, that is, the NEA and AFT’s, one-sided application of criteria that coincide with the desires of the U.S. government. Under life-and-death pressure from their own governments and fearful of further attacks by international agencies that answer to Washington, teacher unionists in Asia and Africa are understandably reluctant to challenge the AFT and NEA. Given this imbalance of power between unions in the global south and the AFT and NEA, the Western European unions have a special responsibility to fight for democracy in the EI and for consistent application of the ruler measuring whether unions are indeed "free" of government control.

      When Naomi Klein spoke at Occupy Wall Street she noted that the rest of the world had been waiting for this challenge at capitalism’s heart. The same is true of U.S. teacher unionism’s renaissance. Teachers and students around the globe need teachers in this country to occupy their unions. At this writing, the eyes of the world are on the courageous activists who are facing down the world’s most powerful elite in downtown Manhattan. Our eyes should also be on the heroic activity of teachers moving to occupy their unions. The future of public education globally depends in great measure on them.

1. Neoliberalism, Teacher Unionism, and the Future of Public Education
2. http://siteresources.worldbank.org/EDUCATION/Resources/278200-1298568319076/makingschoolswork.pdf
3. Matt Damon, Diane Ravitch, and scapegoating teachers
4. www.teachersolidarity.com is probably the best source of information about teacher union resistance globally.
5. Rousmaniere, K. (2001), "White silence: A racial biography of Margaret Haley," Equity and excellence in education, 34(2), 7-15.
6. What's right - and wrong - in Diane Ravitch's new take on school reform
7. Tell Scholastic: Stop Selling Kids on Coal
8. It’s Time to Re-imagine and Reinvent the MTEA
9. www.coreteachers.com
10. www.trinational-usa.org
11. http://findarticles.com/p/news-articles/new-york-amsterdam-news/mi_8153/is_20050804/organize-york-family-care-providers/ai_n50545408/
12. www.teachersunite.net
13. Inconvenient Truth screening @NYU Oct 27th
14. Labor Studies Journal, June 2010.

Source URL: http://newpol.org/node/579
Links:
[1] http://newpol.org/taxonomy/term/128
[2] http://newpol.org/taxonomy/term/126

Rye Principal Retires to Fight Ed Deform

2012-01-28T07:22:00.002-05:00

Osborn School Principal Clarita Zeppie announced she will be retiring at the end of 2011-12 school year to fight the "unhealthy" and "wrong" direction of the State's education program for grade-school students.
Photo Credit: Luke Lavoie

Osborn Principal Clarita Zeppie.
Photo Credit: Luke Lavoie
▲▼
RYE, N.Y. - Osborn School Principal Clarita Zeppie announced in a letter to schools Superintendent Ed Shine and the Osborn School staff that she would be retiring as principal at the end of the 2011-12 school year.

For most people, retirement signals an exit from the spotlight, but for Zeppie it's the exact opposite.

"It was a difficult decision because I really do love what I do, and I do love Osborn," Zeppie said. "But the actual reason I'm retiring is because I'm very disappointed in the direction of education, and I want to dedicate myself to fighting education reform."

Zeppie said Gov. Andrew Cuomo's recent implementation of standardized testing reviews is unhealthy and wrong.

"I don’t believe in stressing kids out so that they have no childhood," Zeppie said. "Sooner or later it will trickle down and lead to more suicides in children."

According to Zeppie, the increased emphasis on standardized testing for third, fourth, and fifth graders has forced the Osborn School to cut interesting and valuable programs.

"These children are going from nursery school to a rigorous academic program that allows for no growth," Zeppie said. "It's taking away the main purpose of education, which is learning."

Zeppie has been in touch with several advocacy groups around the country but has a special interest in getting involved with the advocacy campaign for "the Race to Nowhere", a film that attempts to expose the "silent epidemic in our schools."

According to Zeppie, there has been a large outpouring of community support for her decision.

"I have support from parents, from all of the teachers, and many of my colleagues who are administrators," Zeppie said. "Many people agree with me, but unfortunately many do not have the luxury to retire and pursue what they think is right, but ill be carrying the word for them."

Stop Tying Pay to Performance: Harvard Business Review

2012-01-28T07:00:00.000-05:00

All the pts below and more apply to teacher merit pay – doesn’t work, unreliable, causes narrowing and manipulation to achieve numerical goals, & undermines intrinsic motivation

http://hbr.org/2012/01/tackling-business-problems/ar/1#.TvtyhA4E5ps.twitter

Stop Tying Pay to Performance

The evidence is overwhelming: It doesn’t work.
by Bruno S. Frey and Margit Osterloh
Time frame: next week | Degree of difficulty: operationally easy, psychologically hard | Barrier: greed, economic theory
We’ve talked about this since the financial meltdown. Now it’s time to do it: Unlink pay from performance. The evidence keeps growing that pay for performance is ineffective. It also may induce executives to take company-killing risks. There are other ways to motivate employees that yield better results at lower cost.
Thanks mainly to provisions linked to performance, CEO compensation has skyrocketed in recent decades, while its correlation with actual corporate performance has remained as weak as ever. This has been most true in the U.S., where among the S&P 500 the ratio of average CEO pay to average employee salary went from about 40:1 in the 1970s to 325:1 in 2010. The ratio isn’t as extreme in most other countries, but the trend is the same. Below the top level, mismatches between pay and performance aren’t so acute. But all variable-pay-for-performance schemes still suffer from four inescapable flaws:
1. In a modern economy, where new challenges emerge constantly, it’s impossible to determine the tasks that will need to be done in the future precisely enough for variable pay for performance to work well.
2. People subject to variable pay for performance don’t passively accept the criteria. They spend a lot of time and energy trying to manipulate the criteria in their favor, helped by the fact that they often know the specifics of their work better than their superiors do.
3. Variable pay for performance often leads employees to focus exclusively on areas covered by the criteria and neglect other important tasks. This is known as the “multiple tasking” problem.
4. Variable pay for performance tends to crowd out intrinsic motivation and thus the joy of fulfilling work. Such motivation is of great importance to business, because it supports innovation and encourages beyond-the-ordinary contributions.
The idea that people work only for money has been thrown overboard by leading scholars. Research has shown that human beings are not interested solely in material gain. They care for the well-being of other individuals and value recognition from coworkers. Many employees apply themselves because they find their work challenging and worthwhile. These nonmaterial motivations point to better ways to get results from the members of an organization.
One way is to select employees more carefully, hiring people who are truly interested in the work—not people whose primary goal is earning the highest pay. Another approach is to pay fixed compensation but adjust it on the basis of a comprehensive evaluation of employees’ work after some time. This avoids the multiple-tasking problem. At the end of the year companies can also distribute part of their profits to employees according to their contribution to overall performance, rather than preset criteria. Awards and recognition are effective motivators as well. Research suggests that effort increases among both the winners and other employees when awards are given out.
Variable pay for performance, while it may seem attractive in theory, creates more problems than it solves. There’s no proof that it helps achieve its intended purposes, and other approaches not only work better but also strengthen employee loyalty.
Bruno S. Frey is the Distinguished Professor of Behavioural Science at the UK’s Warwick Business School and a professor of economics at the University of Zurich. Margit Osterloh is a professor of management science at Warwick Business School.

Charter Schools and the Corporate Makeover of Public Education: What's at Stake?

2012-01-27T22:59:00.002-05:00

Announcing the release of Michael Fabricant and Michelle Fine's new book!

Charter Schools and the Corporate Makeover of Public Education: What's at Stake?
by Michael Fabricant and Michelle Fine
Foreword by Deborah Meier

[cid:ii_1351b00401857f34]

"A spectacular book—needs to be published yesterday." —Deborah Meier, New York University

“Fabricant and Fine have fearlessly peered behind the Waiting for Superman hype. Everyone interested in the future of American education needs to read this insightful analysis of how our public schools are being dismantled under the banner of reform.” —Juan Gonzalez, New York Daily News columnist and co-host of Democracy Now!

“A compelling analysis of the promise, politics, and problems of charter schools. The authors go well beyond a defense of the status quo in offering a progressive agenda to more fully realize education's democratic ideals." —Gary Rhoades, Professor of Higher Education, University of Arizona

“Fabricant and Fine present an invaluably clear, historically textured, and carefully argued account of the charter school idea and its transformation from progressive, teacher-driven experiment to corporate, neoliberal edge of the wedge against public education and the public sector writ large.” —Adolph Reed, Jr., Professor of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania

“The authors help us see that the emperor has no clothes when one truthfully examines the entire heavily funded charter school movement and the emerging privatization of public education. If you think it does not or will not affect you, please read this revealing book.” —Barbara Fields, Executive Board Member of Black Educator Alliance of Massachusetts and Former Senior Officer, Office of Equity, Boston Public Schools

This book will reset the discourse on charter schooling by systematically exploring the gap between the promise and the performance of charter schools. The authors do not defend the public school system, which for decades has failed primarily poor children of color. Instead, they use empirical evidence to determine whether charter schooling offers an authentic alternative for these children. In concise chapters, they address a series of important questions related to the recent ascent of charter schools and the radical restructuring of public education. This essential introduction includes a detailed history of the charter movement, an analysis of the politics and economics driving the movement, documentation of actual student outcomes, and alternative images of transforming public education to serve all children.

Book Features:
• An overview of the key issues surrounding the charter school movement.
• A reframing of the recent discourse on public school reform • A comprehensive comparison examining the promises of charter schooling against the empirical evidence.
• An examination of how charter schools impact communities of color and larger public school systems in poor urban areas.
• An exploration of the relationships among the rapid ascendance of charter reform, economic decline, and fiscal austerity.

Michael Fabricant is a professor at the Hunter College School of Social Work and executive officer of the Ph.D. Program in Social Welfare.
Michelle Fine is a distinguished professor of Social Psychology, Women’s Studies, and Urban Education at the Graduate Center, CUNY.

January 2012, 168 pages, Paperback: $25.95, ISBN: 978-0-8077-5285-2

To order visit us on the web: www.tcpress.com or call 800-575-6566 Follow us on Twitter @TCPress
For special bulk sales, please contact TC Press at: (212) 678-3919 For exam/desk copy requests go to our website and click on Information Desk

Ed Tweet Links on Obama SOU

2012-01-27T09:21:00.003-05:00

Results for #EdSOTU

23 Jan

Promoted by Mitt Romney

RachelAnneLevy Rachel Levy

Stop teaching to the test? Okay, then stop making policy to the test. #edsotu

24 Jan

nancyflanagan nancyflanagan

Why the #EdSOTU Matters. Smart thinking from @teachersabrina. sabrinastevensshupe.com/2012/01/25/why…

11 minutes ago

KatieOsgood_ Katie Osgood

Did @BarackObama call for more people to be fired in any other profession besides teachers in #SOTU?? Yeah, didn't think so... #EdSOTU

25 Jan

mikeklonsky Mike Klonsky

RT @mfriedman10: @rweingarten contradiction between words and policy reality on "teaching to the test" are glaring and offensive #EdSOTU

25 Jan

xianb8 xian barrett

#edSOTU The best way to keep kids in school is to make school a decent place to be. Mandating it just makes it that much more like prison.

25 Jan

NEPCtweet NEPC

#Teachers matter. But so does poverty- See ow.ly/8FiX2 #EdSOTU #SOTU #edpolicy

24 Jan

TeachMoore Renee Moore

And we should be glad about this? “Obama: My education reform offers more competition, and more control for schools and States. #EdSOTU”

24 Jan

TeacherSabrina Sabrina Stevens

Wait, so they can do their jobs w/o fed agency looking over their shoulders, but TEACHERS CAN'T???? I am trying so hard not to cuss #EdSOTU

24 Jan

DemocracyPrep Democracy Prep

Higher ed can't be a luxury, it's an economic imperative that every family should be able to afford. So k-12 must prepare every kid #edSOTU

24 Jan

KatieOsgood_ Katie Osgood

@jerseyjazzman Agreed. The #edu section was a joke. He will lose the teacher vote & it will cost him. Fool. #SOTU #EdSOTU #DontWantPrezNewt

24 Jan

RachelAnneLevy Rachel Levy

If our edpolicies are making more kids drop out, we'll just mandate that they can't. #edsotu

24 Jan

AnthonyCody Anthony Cody

U say "Stop teaching 2 the test" yet NCLB waivers require states 2 evaluate teachers & principals based on test scores. Why? #WHChat #EdSOTU

24 Jan

NEPCtweet NEPC

Just heard subtle ref to merit pay, which is unsupported by evidence. Here's better info on motivating teachers ow.ly/8Fgl5 #EdSOTU

24 Jan

jerseyjazzman Jersey Jazzman

IS THERE NO NATIONAL CANDIDATE WHO WILL LISTEN TO TEACHERS??? #edSOTU #SOTU jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2012/01/pay-te…

24 Jan

NAESP NAESP

"...In return, grant schools flexibility: To teach with creativity and passion; to stop teaching to the test..." #principalSOTU #edSOTU

24 Jan

AnthonyCody Anthony Cody

How do you intend to IDENTIFY good teachers? Current plans emphasize test scores in spite of yr words. #EDSOTU #WHchat

24 Jan

Joy_Resmovits Joy Resmovits

Also, as a lobbyist suggested to me yesterday, administration will seek to prevent student loan interest rates from doubling. #sotu #edsotu

24 Jan

Joy_Resmovits Joy Resmovits

Obama isn't planning on uttering the words "Race to the Top" tonight. Mentions "education" 8x, "teacher" 12x. #sotu #education #edsotu

24 Jan

Joy_Resmovits Joy Resmovits

Obama will announce "a plan to shift federal aid away from colleges that don't keep tuition down" (via @jbendery) #sotu #edsotu #education

24 Jan

AnthonyCody Anthony Cody

Why would anyone choose to teach in high poverty schools when testing pressure is the status quo? #SOTU #EDSOTU #WHChat

24 Jan

Joy_Resmovits Joy Resmovits

#sotu is about to start. here's my bet on likely #education content. #edsotu huff.to/A0vaDv via @HuffingtonPost

24 Jan

ASCD ASCD

Minutes before #EdSOTU uber guru Bill Gates issues state of the foundation letter. ow.ly/8FeHs

24 Jan

DemocracyPrep Democracy Prep

RT @newleadersorg: "Let's make sure our young people dream big dreams" President Obama #SOTU #EdSOTU

24 Jan

NewLeadersOrg New Leaders

Sneak peek of #SOTU: "The America within our reach: A country that leads the world in educating its people." #EdSOTU ow.ly/8Fehx

24 Jan

ASCD ASCD

Economic prosperity depends on a highly educated workforce. Supporting schools is a smart jobs plan. #EdSOTU #ASCDPolicy

24 Jan

ASCD ASCD

We hope Prez understands that career readiness = learning in all core subjects. #ASCDPolicy #EdSOTU

24 Jan

NEPCtweet NEPC

Have Qs about how tonight's #edpolicy statements or proposals match up with high quality, peer-reviewed research? Ask away. #EdSOTU #SOTU

24 Jan

NEPCtweet NEPC

Hello #EdSOTU! Looking forward to tonight's speech, #education panel & conversation. #SOTU #edchat #edpolicy

24 Jan

NSBAComm NSBA | School Boards

RT @NEAMedia:Who did the first lady invite? Teacher from PA #SOTU wapo.st/xFJoi9 #edSOTU

24 Jan

NSBAComm NSBA | School Boards

Following #SOTU, a panel of senior advisors including @ArneDuncan will be taking questions @ #WHchat & White House’s FB page #edSOTU

24 Jan

NAESP NAESP

Theme to tonight's #SOTU "Blueprint for an America Built to Last". #edSOTU #principalSOTU

24 Jan

TeacherSabrina Sabrina Stevens

Heads up: @arneduncan's doing a panel right after the #SOTU, ~10 Eastern. Not that he really listens, but maybe worth a try? #EdSOTU #p2

24 Jan

connectaschool Connect All Schools

No secret what we want to hear in the #SOTU: set goal to bring #globaled to all US schools bit.ly/vNrP9L #edsotu

24 Jan

TeacherSabrina Sabrina Stevens

Ah! School board friends are on it. Tweet #EdSOTU to track the convo around #education during #SOTU tonight.

24 Jan

Joy_Resmovits Joy Resmovits

State Of The Union Speech Text: Excerpts Released huff.to/yax1Sg via @HuffingtonPost #sotu #edsotu

24 Jan

TeacherSabrina Sabrina Stevens

Hey, #education Tweeps: how can we distinguish our #SOTU tweets from everyone else's? Anyone in favor of #EdSOTU or something like that?

24 Jan

Joy_Resmovits Joy Resmovits

Guys, not only is there #SOTU tonight. There's also #EdSOTU, courtesy of @nsbacomm. Who else will be watching for #education content?

24 Jan

NSBAComm NSBA | School Boards

Join @NSBAComm in an #education discussion during the #SOTU tonight @ 9pm EST @ #EdSOTU bit.ly/zUzzHY #k12 Please RT

24 Jan

LearningFirst LFA

Watching the State of the Union tomorrow? Share thoughts on the president’s plans for #education w/ #EDSOTU ow.ly/1gSTYs @NSBAComm

23 Jan

AACTE AACTE

On 1/24, join State of the Union Twitter chat using #EdSOTU. Share thoughts on President’s comments & PK-12 edu plans. Thanks, @NSBAComm!

23 Jan

jsackmin Joetta Sack-Min

Twitter chat at #EdSOTU on education issues during the State of the Union ow.ly/1gSTxt

23 Jan

NSBAComm NSBA | School Boards

#education #k12 Twitter chat at #EdSOTU on education issues during the State of the Union ow.ly/1gSTYs

23 Jan

NSBA_TLN NSBA's TLN

#edtech Twitter chat at #EdSOTU on education issues during the State of the Union ow.ly/1gSVAz

23 Jan

NASSP NASSP

@NSBA is hosting a chat during the State of the Union #sotu Tues night. Use #edSOTU

23 Jan

officialhoomah hoomah

Twitter chat at #EdSOTU on education issues during the State of the Union: The National School Boards Associatio... bit.ly/xwcP52

23 Jan

Anthony Cody on Obama SOU

2012-01-27T07:18:00.001-05:00

Teachers Offer the Wealthy an Escape from Poverty

By Anthony Cody on January 25

Follow me on Twitter at @AnthonyCody

Last night in President Obama's State of the Union address, he repeated a familiar refrain about the importance of teachers.

A great teacher can offer an escape from poverty to the child who dreams beyond his circumstance.

But it seems that it is those in power who are actually using teachers to escape from the realities of poverty these days.

President Obama offered as evidence a citation from a recent Harvard report:

We know a good teacher can increase the lifetime income of a classroom by over $250,000.

He went on to say,

Teachers matter. So instead of bashing them, or defending the status quo, let's offer schools a deal. Give them the resources to keep good teachers on the job, and reward the best ones. In return, grant schools flexibility: To teach with creativity and passion; to stop teaching to the test; and to replace teachers who just aren't helping kids learn.

There are several problems with this. As others have pointed out, if you take a classroom of 25 students, and spread $250,000 over their 40 years of earnings, this amount comes to a grand total of $250 a year per student. This is unlikely to represent an escape from poverty. (see more thorough responses to the Chetty report here, and here.)

The second problem is a glaring contradiction, a logical flaw so huge it has been overlooked by almost every journalist apparently too polite to challenge the administration on it. If you do not wish teachers to teach to the test, if you want them to be passionate and creative, then how can you insist that their performance be measured by the use of test scores?

Let us be crystal clear. The Obama administration has made the use of test scores to evaluate principals and teachers a pre-condition for federal aid. Both Race to the Top and the NCLB waivers require that states develop evaluation processes that incorporate this data. Furthermore, the administration proposes to continue to identify and target for closure or "turnaround" the bottom 5% of schools, once again based on these same test scores we are told should not be taught to.

You cannot have it both ways. You cannot tell teachers to be creative, you cannot pretend you are "flexible," when you mandate the use of test scores for teacher and principal evaluations, and continue to use them as the basis by which schools are condemned as failures.

But the biggest burn is this. Everyone now knows that many of the wealthy have abandoned any pretense of caring about the poor in this country. They use every device to cling not only to their privilege, but to obscene levels of enrichment. The answer to poverty ought to be clear to us, as it was to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. more than fifty years ago. Poor people need a living wage. People need opportunities to work. We need a tax structure that rewards people for working and producing, not investing billions in tax havens overseas.

Of course teachers make a difference. But the idea that teachers will somehow elevate the one in four children in this country from poverty is not only wrong, it is a distraction from the real sources of poverty and inequality. In short, it lets the billionaires off the hook.

To his credit, President Obama discussed a number of measures that could result in a fairer tax structure, and encourage investment in our infrastructure and manufacturing base. These things could create jobs and opportunities.

Teachers have already chosen to put our shoulders to the wheel of inequality. Those of us who work with children in poverty are making tremendous sacrifices to meet their needs. The reason child poverty has expanded over the past two decades has nothing to do with "bad teachers," and everything to do with the huge concentration of wealth, and the devastation of America's manufacturing base, as millions of jobs have been shipped overseas in pursuit of higher profits.

The drive to get rid of bad teachers for the benefit of the poor is a phony crusade. The use of test scores for this purpose ensures that students in high poverty schools will continue to wallow in year-round test preparation, even while Arne Duncan sails around telling everyone he is opposed to teaching to the test..

The only people who are escaping poverty as a result of this charade are the wealthy. By making teachers the source of salvation, the rest of society is off the hook. By claiming that "bad teachers" are the reason our students lag, we can, as a society, ignore the enormous opportunity and resource gap that condemns millions of our children to poor futures.

Enough.

What do you think? Do teachers offer students an escape from poverty? Or is it the wealthy who are looking for the easy way out?

http://blogs.edweek.org/teachers/living-in-dialogue/2012/01/teachers_offer_the_wealthy_an.html?cmp=ENL-EU-

Peninsula Prep Parent Speaks Out

2012-01-23T16:00:00.000-05:00

Viewpoint

http://www.nytimes.com/schoolbook/2012/01/20/closing-peninsula-prep-leaves-inferior-options/

Closing Peninsula Prep Leaves Inferior Options

Related Schools

Jan. 20, 2012, 1:33 p.m.

By Josmar Trujillo

Last week’s article on the school that my son, Jadyn, attends, Peninsula Preparatory Academy Charter School, captured the city’s attention for a brief moment. Our story, which we, the parents, had been agonizing over during that week, was at least being read by other parents and education activists who know all too well the recurring theme of school closures.
We live in austere times, and although I write this on Martin Luther King Day, who famously spoke of the need for government investment in programs of “social uplift,” the political narrative seems deadlocked on themes like “accountability.”
The community at Peninsula Prep would agree with that goal. Our school’s mission statement includes a passage that speaks to the school’s commitment to a “no-excuses” culture.
However, a disconnect between accountability and proper stewardship of our children’s education seems to be developing here. James Merriman, an important charter lobbyist, wrote a post last week rationalizing and justifying Peninsula Prep’s closure, despite its consistent strides academically.
Readers of last week’s initial story on Peninsula Prep might not understand that despite the C grade on our last four progress reports, the gains that the children made were offset by a change in how grades are assessed (changes, I might add, that were not included in the conditions of the last renewal).
A group of Peninsula Prep parents and I have banded together and begun to organize and mobilize ourselves to ask this question. Many are motivated by one fact alone: 95 percent of Peninsula Prep’s students find themselves being directed by the city Department of Education to zoned public schools that Peninsula Prep outperformed.
So therefore you have a situation wherein the same authorities that rationalize the closing of our school for lackluster performance are also telling the parents that their only options are those that are inferior to what they already have.
Most parents tell me that they enrolled their children in Peninsula specifically to avoid these same schools in Rockaway, many of which are notorious for violence. Parents said Peninsula was one of the few choices in their memory that had been afforded to our community by the City of New York.
The fact of its closing has left both parents and community leaders utterly confused.
Policy-making without attention to details never makes for good policy. One cannot hope to positively affect the lives of people in our community without regard to the local conditions within which our community finds itself.
Folks like Mr. Merriman, who incorrectly identified our school as a Far Rockaway school instead of a Rockaway Park school, cannot possibly see the view from the ground that has led me to defend our school so adamantly.
He cannot see the benefits that the new building we are now in have given us, allowing such enhancements as flag football and basketball programs run by the parents in the gym and grass field the children now call their own.
He cannot see the parental attendance of our P.T.O. meetings (among the very best in the city). But perhaps most importantly, he cannot comprehend what stuffing 346 students into local schools, many which are in a progressive state of decline — and one of which is in the process of being phased out, causing even more perplexity about the wisdom of sending Peninsula students there — will mean for education in our community.
The Rockaways unfortunately do not present enough opportunities for children who are eager to grow. We as parents therefore have an obligation to our children and a democratic responsibility to speak out when policy overlooks the people it is intended to serve.
So we have come to the conclusion that apart from the politics and passions that charters evoke, we must speak for our children, not from the left or from the right, but from the ground up, to hold the system accountable to us, the parents of 346 children out here on the outskirts of the city: Rockaway, Queens.

Josmar Trujillo is co-president of the Peninsula Preparatory Charter School in Rockaway, Queens, where his son, Jadyn, is in second grade.

United Opt Out: Why I'm Leaving Public Education

2012-01-23T08:54:00.000-05:00

http://unitedoptout.com/

A Teacher Story: Why I’m Leaving Public Education

Posted on January 23, 2012

As promised, we are going to begin sharing stories – these stories need to be heard – and many are being silenced through the use of fear tactics and the ever so silent mainstream media. So, with your help, we can make these stories be heard. Please read, please share, and welcome our first guest post by a teacher who wishes to remain anonymous.
I’ve had a radical change of heart recently. Those who worked with me in my previous position as an Instructional Coach (helping teachers to improve instruction and overcome difficulties with high-needs students) must be shocked by the links I am posting online. They might say that now that I’m back in the classroom, I don’t want to practice what I preached. They’d be at least partly right.
Wasn’t I the one reassuring other teachers that Colorado’s new teacher evaluations, based 50% on student test scores, was exactly what was needed to bring credibility and respect back into the teaching profession? Wasn’t I the one who said, “Merit pay? Bring it on! I’ll be makin’ the big bucks!” Yep, that was me. It was frustrating to work with some teachers who didn’t seem to care about their huge responsibility for educating our youth. Reforming tenure and paying teachers based on their efforts made sense to me, at least in theory.
I tried to reassure the teachers I worked with that they were great teachers who had nothing to worry about, and ignored the nagging voice in the back of my head that said it wasn’t so simple –like what about Special Education teachers? I’d worked with one who had a huge case-load of kids, including Jose, a boy with autism who struggled socially and academically but was a gifted artist. I had offered to help Jose’s teacher administer the CSAP (Colorado’s standardized test) because she had so many students that required special accommodations.
I was asked to read the questions aloud to Jose, and stop if he became agitated. The previous year, Jose had felt so bad about not knowing the answers that he had gouged his fingernails into his arm. This year, they felt he had made great academic progress, and his improved scores would make the school look good. After a few minutes, I could see that Jose was getting upset. I suggested we take a break. He vehemently shook his head, determined to “be good”. When his tears began to flow, I insisted that we stop. Why were we torturing this young man, when, as a student with an Individualized Education Plan, we knew exactly what his levels of proficiency were? Still, I reasoned that it was necessary to assess all students, because we wanted No Child Left Behind.
The following year, we relocated for my husband’s career and I was headed back to the classroom. I was a little nervous; more is expected of teachers now than ever: instruction must be data-driven, lessons tailored to specific “research-based” methods, assessment both formative and summative. Still, I was excited to have my own students again, and felt I still had a lot of “teach” left in me.
My trepidation started in the summer, when my new school district sent me to be trained on a new writing curriculum. “This curriculum will raise your CSAP scores!” the instructor boasted like a circus ringleader (pun intended). The curriculum was completely scripted, requiring students to write using a specific format consisting of at least one simple, one compound and one complex sentence, one instance of multiple modifiers separated by a comma, one simile or metaphor, etc. The idea is to make evaluating writing, a very subjective task, more objective (read: easy for under-trained, low-paid standardized test scorers to evaluate). Apparently it doesn’t matter if everyone’s paragraph reads exactly the same.
I tried to swallow back my disgust and focus on the way this curriculum made it easy for teachers to differentiate instruction. I was determined, as teachers almost always are, to remain positive, improve my instruction, to soldier on. I chatted with the teacher next to me, who said she worked in a district I had heard a lot about – one that piloted merit-pay. When I asked her about it, she shook her head in disdain. “It’s impossible to get the big pay raises unless you are in the principal’s inner circle,” she said. “I’m looking for work in another district.” I was shocked. Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea after all.
On our first day back, the superintendent gleefully announced that our district goal would be to attain the state designation of Accredited with Distinction. I thought: who doesn’t want to work in a school that’s not just accredited, but with distinction? I wasn’t sure exactly what this meant, but it sounded great! Imagine my crestfallen look when we were told that this designation was based solely on growth on the CSAP. I wondered how this would really improve the students’ learning.
School started, and so did the principal’s walk-through evaluations. At least once per week, the principal would sit in the back of the room, writing urgently and mysteriously. A checklist of Marzano’s elements of effective lessons would appear on my desk the same day, noting elements that were present and those that were not. Evaluations were often on Fridays before big home games, vacations, etc., and teachers began to grumble to each other that it felt as if the principal were trying to “catch” us not using every minute of instructional time efficiently.
After my formal evaluation, my principal noted that, while my pedagogy (he pronounced it “pegoggy”) was perfect, I had serious classroom management issues. Hadn’t I noticed that while the two students were debating in one group, the other group had already finished and were drawing a fish on the giant sticky note I’d provided for their brainstorming session? (Actually, I thought to myself, it was a dolphin, the subject of the short story they’d read.) “Chris would never do that in another class,” the principal told me. “He doesn’t respect you.”
“Wouldn’t do what?” I asked, “Draw a fish?” I was instructed, for the first time in more than a decade of teaching, to write a performance improvement plan, and observe another teacher. I resisted the urge to remind this man that I had taught successfully for four years in inner-city Pittsburgh while he was still in high school. Instead, I tried to see his point of view – shouldn’t all teachers strive for continual improvement? Still, I felt threatened. Teachers all over the country are being systematically intimidated by top-down, authoritarian rule designed to ensure compliance.
In spite of myself, I began to worry about my students’ test scores. I have always believed that teaching to the test is unnecessary; good instruction leads to good scores. I hadn’t done the greatest job of implementing the writing curriculum; not only did I not like it, but the students didn’t either. Plus, some students were threatening not to take the test seriously – they were fed-up with this annual rite of spring that had no relevance whatsoever to their lives. I could hardly blame them. In fact, one of my students opted not to take the test: Ann, a tough-as-nails ranch girl. Though Ann was no whiner, she ended up in my classroom, sobbing, telling me that the other teachers had berated her for not taking the test. I was flabbergasted. This was nothing short of emotional abuse – over one stupid test! Her mother later called to thank me for being the only teacher who supported her, and I shared with her my disdain for the test. Whoops.
The principal informed me I was not to disparage the test out loud – certainly not to parents. I vowed to behave better, though I didn’t really want to keep quiet. Being silenced has the curious effect of making one want to speak even louder.
This year, I did start speaking up. No one else wanted to confront the administration about our school’s focus on one test. Sure as the sun, I was called in to speak with the principal again, the week before Christmas break. He had a list of things I’d said at faculty meetings. “It sounds like you’re not happy here,” he said. I tried to explain that I was having a great year with my students (a project we’d done was featured on the front page of the paper a couple of months earlier), but I couldn’t help noticing the fall-out that was resulting from our school’s focus on test scores. I gave him some examples: Greg, who told me that another teacher asked him what he liked, so that she could use it to bribe him to do better on the test. He’d dropped out a week later. Carrie, who earns straight A’s and plays in orchestra and jazz band, came to me crying because the guidance counselor had tried to shame her for not taking an “optional” ACT-prep class in the morning before school.
I asked my principal what gains we would achieve by demoralizing students and making them feel like nothing but a test score. We debated. He suggested that perhaps, over the break, I needed to think about whether or not I really wanted to be there. Wow. Under the guise of wanting to make sure I was happy in my job, he had once again made it clear that I needed to shut up or leave.
I did think about it. I thought about the new teacher and principal evaluations, based on test scores, coming in 2014, along with a new Social Studies CSAP. I thought about my own daughter, an avid reader, being given a practice reading test every Friday, and wondered how long she would continue to love reading. I thought what would happen to me if I decided to opt her out of the test this year and whether I could truly advocate for my own children in my current position. And I decided it was time for me to go.
This week I let my principal know that I am looking for work outside public education. I am heartbroken and will miss my students dearly, but I realize that I can neither teach them properly nor fight for their education while trapped in silent submission.

Stan Karp: Challenging Corporate School Reform and 10 Hopeful Signs of Resistance

2012-01-21T20:02:00.000-05:00

Published on Tuesday, October 25, 2011 by Rethinking Schools

Video too at: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/10/25-1

Challenging Corporate School Reform and 10 Hopeful Signs of Resistance

by Stan Karp

About a year ago I was invited to Portland to give a talk about who was bashing teachers and public schools in the wake of the release of the pro-charter propaganda film Waiting for Stupidman. Since then, it's been a year from hell for many teachers; at times it seems the people making education policy have completely lost their minds, and the attacks on public schools and those who work in them or rely on them have morphed in ugly and sometimes dangerous ways.

But it's also been a year of pushback, heroic resistance, and movement building. There are cracks in the corporate reform movement, recently reflected in the collapse of the coalition that supported NCLB, and there are signs of resistance everywhere (e.g. recent Tacoma strike).

So today I want to take a closer look at the corporate school reform movement because I think it can help expose where that movement is vulnerable to the most hopeful development of the past year, and that's the steady growth of a deep, broad and at times quite militant pushback against corporate reform.

There's been some discussion about whether the phrase "corporate school reform" is the right label for a set of proposals coming from private foundations like Gates, Broad, and Walton and their well-funded partners in elite corporate, media, and political circles. Some call it "market reform" or "neo-liberal reform." Some call it "de-form" instead of "re-form." Some call it "Rhee-form" with an R-h-e-e for Michelle Rhee, one of its most high profile representatives. I think my own favorite term is "reforminess," a label borrowed from comedian Stephen Colbert's rightwing TV persona whose beliefs and ideas are strongly held but have only a tenuous connection to reality, a quality he calls "truthiness." [BTW, even though I'm a big Colbert fan, you may have noticed his show has a steady stream of "reformy" heroes as guests: Kopp/Canada/Rhee/Guggenheim. It's because one of Colbert's chief producers is the wife of the self-appointed education pundit and corporate reform cheerleader Jonathan Alter.]

The corporate reformers like to call themselves just the "reformers" and counterpose themselves to the "status quo." And there's no doubt that the corporate/foundation crowd has successfully captured the media label as "education reformers." If you support testing, charters, merit pay, the elimination of tenure and seniority, and control of school policy by corporate managers you're a "reformer." If you support increased school funding, collective bargaining, and control of school policy by educators, you're a "defender of the status quo."

This bears no resemblance to reality or to the substance of the issues under debate. As Seattle's own parent activist Sue Peters put it so well in a blog post a few months ago, "The current crowd of education reformers like to dismiss any of us who disagree with their agenda as 'defenders of the status quo.' Nothing could be further from the truth. I am not a defender of the status quo in public education because the status quo is currently a beleaguered, underfunded system [that] has been ravaged by damaging policies...pushed by those who want to privatize our public schools."

Now I've also spent a large part of my adult life criticizing the flawed institutions and policies of public education—as a teacher, an education activist, and a policy advocate. Rethinking Schools has been pressing for radical reform of public education since it was started 25 years ago. But with debate about education policy now sharply politicized and polarized, it's important to be specific about the policies we oppose and why, and the alternatives we need to address the very real problems our schools face.

So I'm going to use "corporate reform" to describe a specific set of specific policy proposals and political forces driving current education policy at the state and federal level. This corporate reform movement advocates the following:

Increased test-based evaluation of students, teachers, and schools of education.
Elimination or weakening of tenure and seniority rights.
An end to pay for experience or advanced degrees.
Closing schools deemed low performing and their replacement by publicly funded, but privately run charters.
Replacing governance by local school boards with various forms of mayoral and state takeover or private management.
Vouchers and tax credit subsidies for private school tuition.
Increases in class size, sometimes tied to the firing of 5-10% of the teaching staff.
Implementation of common core standards and something called "college and career readiness" as a standard for high school graduation.

These proposals are currently being promoted by reams of foundation reports, well-funded think tanks, a proliferation of Astroturf political groups and canned legislation from the rightwing American Legislative Exchange Counsel (ALEC).

Together these strategies use the testing regime that is the main engine of corporate reform to extend the narrow standardization of curricula and scripted classroom practice that we've seen under NCLB, and to drill down even further into the fabric of schooling to transform the teaching profession and create a less experienced, less secure, less stable, and less expensive professional staff. Where NCLB used test scores to impose sanctions on schools and sometimes students (e.g., grade retention, diploma denial), increasingly test-based sanctions are targeted at teachers.

Alongside these efforts to change the way schools and classrooms function, a larger social/political goal is reflected in the attacks on collective bargaining rights, union rights, and the permanent crisis of school funding across the country. These policies undermine public education and seek to replace it with a market-based system that will do for schooling what the market has done for health care, housing, and the labor market, produce fabulous profits and give opportunities for a few and unequal outcomes and access for the many.

It's been stunning to see this play out in my home state of New Jersey where I was a high school teacher for 30 years before going to work for New Jersey's Education Law Center, one of the nation's most successful legal advocacy projects for funding equity. Since I left the classroom five years ago, I've worked at ELC on reform issues growing out of a landmark funding equity case called Abbott.

For those not familiar with Abbott, it's worth noting briefly that for ten years, roughly between 1998 and 2008, New Jersey's Abbott decisions produced the highest funding levels in the country for poor urban districts. Some 30 districts with about 350,000 schoolchildren received per-pupil parity with the richest districts in a state that ranked at or near the top in school spending. They also received extra funding for supplemental programs including full-day, high-quality pre-school for 3 and 4-year olds, reduced class size, extended school days and years, concentrated early literacy programs, a multi-billion program of school construction, and an unprecedented set of health and social service supports. The Abbott districts were the only place I know where the kind of wraparound supports now universally praised in Geoffrey Canada's Harlem Children Zone, which gets two-thirds of its funding from private sources, were mandated for all high-needs students and sustained, at least for a while, with public dollars.

This funding helped lay the basis for progress that was described by Linda Darling Hammond in a chapter in her most recent book, The Flat World and Education. She described New Jersey's public education system as one that:

Ranked in the top 5 states in every grade and subject tested by the National Asessment of Educational Progress.
Was one of the few states that had significantly reduced achievement gaps as measured by test score terms.
Saw its African-American and Hispanic students outscore the average student in California.
Had the highest overall graduation rate in the country.
Had the #1 high school graduation rate for Hispanic students and the #2 rate for African-American students
Accomplished all this in a strong teacher union state where 45% of the public school population is comprised of students of color.

Yet almost none of this was any defense against a fierce corporate reform attack on teachers and public education over the past two years. Fueled by NCLB's test and punish accountability system, the mainstream conversation has been all about public school failure and the need to reduce the power of educators over school policy while increasing the power of corporate managers and political bureaucracies. The attack has been led by Governor Chris Christie, a Republican protégé of Karl Rove—who is to education reform what MTV's Jersey Shore is to culture—and more recently by Chris Cerf—former CEO of the private education management firm Edison Schools and deputy chancellor under Joel Klein in NYC—who is now Christie's Education Commissioner.
Alongside these efforts to change the way schools and classrooms function, a larger social/political goal is reflected in the attacks on collective bargaining rights, union rights, and the permanent crisis of school funding across the country.

The corporate reform campaign in New Jersey at times has reached bizarre media circus levels. It has involved everyone from Oprah to Mark Zuckerberg to Newark Mayor Cory Booker and the entire cast of WfS. The campaign covers the whole range of bad ideas from privatized charters to vouchers to test-based merit pay to attacks on union bargaining rights to massive intervention by unaccountable private foundations in the design and implementation of public education policy.

Two things have been painfully clear throughout this sustained attack on public education in New Jersey:

Deep racial and class inequality remains the Achilles heel of public education. New Jersey has a better equity record than most states, but the race and class divisions remain stark and appalling; fourth most segregated, the best black/Latino high school graduation rates in the country are still 20-30 points below rates for whites. One decade of Abbott progress was not enough to erase huge gaps in achievement and opportunity created by decades of separate and unequal schooling and, for young people of color, the school-to-prison pipeline is still a far greater reality in their lives than the mostly hollow college for all rhetoric. This inequality is the entry point that allows the corporate reform virus to enter and attack the entire system.
This attack on New Jersey's public education system has been immeasurably strengthened and legitimized by the Obama/Duncan Administration. Last April, Secretary of Education Duncan came to New Jersey. [It was about two years after some of us dreamed that Linda Darling-Hammond might be named Secretary of Education after an election many of us were desperately hoping we had won]. Duncan came on the same day that the New Jersey Supreme Court heard ELC's challenge to Governor Christie's $1.6 billion in school aid cuts. He came to Newark to talk about education reform. But he failed to say a single word about the Governor's cuts, which were so drastic the New Jersey State Supreme Court ultimately ordered $500 million restored for urban schools. Instead, Duncan staged a photo op with Christie and embraced him as a "partner" in his education reform efforts. In response, Christie said, "Secretary Duncan and I have a lot of common views and interests on the school reform agenda. What he and the president are doing is making possible the kind of reforms that are happening in New Jersey, that are happening in other states."We've seen this again and again (Central Falls/Raleigh...Obama's broken picket promise...Ohio, Ill., Indiana, Colorado).

Like a lot of us here today, I suspect, I supported Obama in 2008 out of a desperate desire to see an end to the era of war, hate, lies, and greed that flourished under George Bush and Republican rule. And the fact that Obama's administration has a bigger achievement gap between its policies and its rhetoric than any public school you've ever seen has no doubt been a contributing factor to the political funk progressive forces have been in for the past few years. The only thing more demoralizing than losing is thinking you've won only to find out you haven't.

But anyone who has followed the development of NCLB and corporate education reform knows it has always been a bipartisan project. And the support that the Obama Administration has given to corporate reform has been a major factor in its ascendency. It has also greatly facilitated the attempt of the hedgehogs, private foundations and billionaires who are driving the corporate education reform movement to attach their agenda of union busting, privatization, and test-based accountability to the needs of poor communities who have been poorly served by the current system.

This fall, instead of WfS, we have Steven Brill's book Class Warfare, which pretty much is to reporting on education policy what WfS was to documentary film making: a well-crafted but deeply ideological and completely inaccurate framing of the problems facing public education. Like Guggenheim's film, Brill's book is more valuable for what it tells us about the aims and mythology of the corporate reform movement than what it has to say about our schools or our teachers. But it's a good barometer of where that movement currently is and where it may be headed.

The book includes a starry-eyed look at how a tight circle of wealthy, well-connected, self-styled education reformers, most of whom never attended a public school or taught in a classroom, staged a virtual coup, seized control of federal education policy and drove it off the rails.

Brill makes it clear that Barack Obama was in partnership with this effort early on. One of the key vehicles for advancing the corporate reform agenda has been the Democrats for Education Reform, or DFER, a political lobby initiated and funded by hedge fund superstar Whitney Tilson. According to Brill, then-Senator Obama was present at the founding meeting of DFER in 2005, which was sponsored by a group of financial and charter school entrepreneurs, some of whom would later become key figures in the coming financial meltdown. DFER was formed explicitly to drive a wedge between Democrats and the two large teacher unions, the NEA and AFT, and to cultivate political support and develop strategies to bring market reform to public education. The fact that Obama won the Democratic nomination by defeating Hillary Clinton, who initially had the backing of both national teachers unions, only strengthened Obama's ties to the hedge fund/DFER crowd. After Obama won, DFER produced a strategy paper memorably entitled "Bursting the Dam," in which it described Obama's election as creating "unprecedented political conditions" for "fundamental reform of public education."

Brill describes how former Clinton staffers who helped construct the test and punish regime that eventually produced NCLB, were hired to lead DFER and how they used insider beltway politicking and lobbying to advance what had previously been a mostly Republican agenda of school choice, charters, testing and union attacks inside the new administration. Some of you will remember the campaign to replace Linda Darling Hammond as Obama's spokesperson on education issues and potentially his Secretary of Education with his Chicago crony and schools CEO Arne Duncan. This was not only one of DFER's first major successes; it was also just a small part of a strategy to staff every key education position in the Department of Education and the White House with people from the corporate, foundation, and think tank worlds committed to the corporate reform agenda.

One of the more ironic quotes in Brill's book comes from hedge fund billionaire Whitney Tilson who wrote "The whole idea behind Democrats for Education Reform [is] it has to be an inside job."

Now, the irony isn't only in dressing up a straight up anti-union, pro-privatization Republican agenda as a Democratic plan for education reform. But some of you will no doubt recognize the the phrase "inside job" as the title of the documentary film about the fiscal crisis which mercifully beat out WfS as best documentary last year. Even if you haven't seen either film, it's worth considering the parallels they suggest between corporate prescriptions for school reform and the economy.

One of the common themes used by corporate reformers is their persistent calls for "accountability." Brill complains that teaching has become "an occupation where performance just doesn't count... There really isn't any other workplace in the United States where how well you do, how energetic you are, how much you care, how professional you are doesn't count."

Now this is a fantasy that discounts the 24/7 pressure most teachers I know feel every day to prepare for their students while coping with the bureaucratic screws tightening from above. But it's a good indication of the bubble these self-proclaimed education policy experts live in.

According to Brill and the corporate reformers, the key to imposing the kind of accountability schools need is test-based evaluation of teachers. Brill goes so far as to describe what he calls "the discovery" that "good teaching matters" and that it can be measured by standardized test scores as "the beginning of a flood of scholarly work," much of it "financed by a data-obsessed wonk named Bill Gates" that would "reframe the education debate" and provide "ammunition" for a "growing network of reformers."

Now the corporate reformers misrepresent almost every aspect of this topic from the reliability of test-based evaluation formulas, to the research on merit pay, to the comparative academic performance of US students, to the impact of poverty, to straw man arguments about supposed reluctance of teachers to consider student progress in evaluating schools and teachers. But before looking at some of these specifics, it's worth reminding ourselves that this is a society that generally does not do accountability well.

For example, the movie Inside Job—again not to be confused with Whitney Tilson's Trojan horse education reform lobby—reminded us that "the financial crisis of 2008 costs tens of millions of people their savings, their jobs, and their homes." Yet "the men who destroyed their own companies and plunged the world into crisis walked away from the wreckage with their fortunes intact." Architects of the crisis like Summers and Geitner remained in high policy-making positions. Nobody from Goldman Sachs went to jail. Corporate profits and executive bonuses are at the highest levels in the history of the country. Where's the accountability?

Some of these same members of the financial wrecking crew are now righteous education reformers. NYC union activist Leo Casey recently noted that of the 10 names on Forbes' list of the richest Americans, only one "is not engaged in active political warfare against public school teachers and teacher unions." The rest are investing their fabulous wealth in campaigns for vouchers, charter expansion, Astroturf political groups like Michelle Rhee's self-promoting Students First, and efforts to end seniority and tenure rights for teachers.

And much as Inside Job documented how the academic economists who designed and promoted the theories that deregulated the financial markets and allowed the looting of the private and public wealth to proceed profited directly from these policies, today virtually the entire official world of education research and policy analysis is on the payroll of the Gates Foundation.

My own favorite example of this crowd is David Tepper, who lives in New Jersey, a few towns over from me. Tepper manages something called the Appaloosa Hedge fund. In 2009, partly because of the massive taxpayer bailout of the financial sector, Tepper made $4 billion dollars as a hedge fund manager. This was equal to the salaries of 60% of the state's teachers who educate 850,000 students. But for two years in a row, Governor Christie vetoed a millionaire's tax and cut $1 billion out of the state school budget, so people like David Tepper would have lower taxes. So this past year, flush with more money than God, Tepper followed the example of your own local billionaire Bill Gates, and created an education reform group called Better Education for Kids. He hired the states' chief lobbyist for school vouchers to be his executive director and began pouring millions of dollars which should be going to the public treasury into slick campaigns to promote vouchers, expanded charters, eliminate tenure and seniority and attack the state teacher's union. This is how the creation of public policy is being privatized in state after state.
And the economy is far from the only area of social policy where accountability is virtually non-existent. George Bush systematically lied a nation into a war that killed hundreds of thousands of U.S. and foreign citizens. No accountability. Former VP Dick Cheney, who should be facing a war crimes tribunal for authorizing torture and other violations of the US Constitution, is instead on the book tour circuit. Where's BP's accountability for the Gulf oil spill? Who's being held responsible for the march to global climate change disaster?
This absence of accountability for major social crimes teaches some very different lessons about how our society deals with responsibility for various social outcomes. And frankly, it makes a mockery of most discussions of accountability in education.
The same people and politicians who accept no accountability for having created the most unequal distribution of wealth in the history of the planet, an economy that threatens the health and well being of hundreds of millions, want to hold you accountable for your students' test scores. And they even want to use similar instruments to do it.
Standardized tests have been disguising class and race privilege as merit for decades. Today they've become the credit default swaps of the education world. Few people understand how either really works. Both encourage a focus on short-term gains over long-term goals. And both drive bad behavior on the part of those in charge. Yet these deeply flawed standardized tests have become the primary policy instruments used to shrink public space, impose sanctions on teachers, and close or punish schools. And if the corporate reformers have their way, their schemes to evaluate teachers and the schools of education they came from on the basis of yet another new generation of standardized tests, it will make the testing plague unleashed by NCLB pale by comparison. Right now, New Jersey is getting ready to implement a so-called "growth model" developed in Colorado, where they are now giving first graders multiple choice questions about Picasso paintings and using the results to decide the compensation level and job security of teachers.
Or take the issue of poverty. Again, I have no doubt that the majority of us agree that poverty is no excuse for school failure or year after year of lousy school outcomes; and much of the work of the people in this room is about proving that the potential of our students and communities can be fulfilled when their needs are met and the reality of their lives is reflected in our schools and classrooms.
But the contradictions of trying to promote positive change amidst intolerable conditions are becoming sharper. And in the current education reform debates, saying poverty isn't an excuse has become an excuse for ignoring poverty.
The corporate reform plans now being put forward do nothing to reduce or disperse the concentrations of 70/80/90% poverty that remain the central problem in urban education. Instead what we're getting is disruptive reform that is increasing instability, especially in our more vulnerable communities, and creating new forms of collateral damage for students, teachers, schools, and families.
Let's look for a minute at what the corporate reform has actually accomplished:
First the corporate reformers over-reached and chose the wrong target. They didn't go after funding inequity or poverty, they didn't go after reform faddism or consultant profiteering or massive teacher turnover or politicized bureaucratic management or the overuse and misuse of testing.
Instead, they went after collective bargaining, teacher tenure, and seniority. And they went after the universal public and democratic character of public education.
Look again at the issues the corporate reformers have made prominent features of school reform efforts in every state: rapid expansion of charters, closing low performing schools, more testing, elimination of tenure and seniority for teachers, and test-based teacher evaluation. If every one of these policies was fully implemented in every state tomorrow, it would do absolutely nothing to close academic achievement gaps, increase high school graduation rates, or expand access to college. There is no evidence tying any of these proposals to better outcomes for large numbers of kids over time. The greatest gains in reducing gaps in achievement and opportunity have been made during those periods where concentrated poverty has been dispersed through efforts at integration or economic growth for the black middle class and other communities, or where significant new investments in school funding have been made.
Yet the recent financial meltdown reduced the median household wealth of Hispanics by two-thirds and by 50% for African Americans and Asians. Today, over 46 million people live in poverty, the highest total since they started keeping figures in 1959. Child poverty rate is a shameful 22%, twice that in many poor communities, by far the highest rate in the developed world. In the past three years, 300,000 teachers have been laid off. In New York City, supposedly one of the national models of corporate reform under Mayor Bloomberg and former Chancellor Joel Klein, (who's now a digital educational entrepreneur for Rupert Murdoch), class sizes are the largest they have been in a decade. Over 7000 classes are larger than contractual limits. Nationally, two-thirds of the districts who responded to one survey said they are raising class sizes this year. And both Secretary. Duncan and his friend Bill Gates are traveling the country recommending that districts save money by increasing class sizes and expanding virtual classrooms while they're shutting down real ones.
The corporate reformers have successfully used deeply rooted inequalities in our society to construct a misleading narrative of failure and introduce market reform into public education
The only thing corporate education reform policies are doing successfully is bringing the anti-labor politics of class warfare to the public sector and to public schools in particular. In fact, by over-reaching, demonizing teachers and unions, and sharply polarizing the education debate, corporate reform is undermining serious efforts to improve schools. They've narrowed the common ground by eroding the broad public support a universal system of public education needs to survive.
For example, there's actually a lot of common ground on the need to improve teacher support and evaluation. There's widespread agreement among educators, parents, and even administrators on the following:

better preparation and evaluation before new teachers get tenure (or leave the profession, as 50% do within 5 years).
reasonable, timely procedures for resolving tenure hearings when they are initiated.
a credible intervention process to remediate and if necessary remove ineffective teachers, both tenured and non-tenured.

But the over-reaching by corporate reformers has actually undermined efforts to promote teacher quality. They have detached the issue of teacher quality from the conditions that shape it. Their proposals are staffing our most challenging schools with novices or Teach for America temps on their way to other careers after a couple of years of resume-building. They are pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into data systems and tests designed to replace collaborative professional culture and experienced instructional leadership with a kind of psychometric astrology. These data-driven formulas lack both statistical credibility and a basic understanding of the human motivations and relationships that make good schooling possible. These attacks on the profession are driving experienced teachers into despair, retirement, or rage. Corporate reform isn't elevating the profession, it's dismantling it.
One of the most dishonest framings, that has become a favorite of the corporate crowd, is to counter-pose the interests of "adults" vs. the "children." Their rhetoric righteously pits the interests of teachers and their unions against those of children, and there are certainly times when those interests diverge and when our unions have not adequately defended the interests of the families and communities we serve. But this same rhetoric never questions the adult motives of the hedge fund privateers, consultants, the private foundations, pundits, or politicians who are suddenly the champions of the poor. Only in the US could a campaign of billionaires to privatize and dismantle what's probably the most inclusive democratic institution we have left be dressed up as a selfless campaign for civil rights.
The "disruptive reform," that corporate reformers claim is necessary to shake up the status quo is increasing pressure on 5000 schools serving the poorest communities at a time of unprecedented economic crisis and budget cutting. The latest waiver bailout for NCLB, announced last week by Secretary Duncan, may actually ratchet up that pressure. While it rolls back NCLB's absurd adequate yearly progress system just as it was about to self-destruct, the new guidelines require states that apply for waivers to identify up to 15% of their schools with the lowest scores for unproven "turnaround" interventions, "charterization" or closing. These policies are already wreaking havoc in areas with high concentrations of poverty, high-need student populations, and clusters of struggling schools.
Teachers and schools, who in many cases are day to day the strongest advocates and most stable support system struggling youth have, are instead being scapegoated for a society that is failing our children. As Linda Darling-Hammond put it at the SOS march last summer, "Our leaders seek to solve the problems of the poor by blaming the teachers and schools that seek to serve them." At the same time, they are giving parents triggers to blow up the schools they have, but no say and no guarantees about what will replace them.
So where's the hope; where's the way forward? If corporate reform is leading us in a Race Over the Cliff, how do we turn back and go a different way? Let me try to give you some possibilities.
First, it's important to remember that corporate reform rests on fundamentally false premises. The corporate reformers do not represent the interests of poor communities of color, or for that matter, working or middle class communities. And test-based reform, which is now the status quo in public education and has been for sometime, has been a colossal failure on its own test-score terms.
And because reality still counts—despite the bizarre Wizard of Oz-like character of our media and political systems—corporate reform rests on a very weak foundation of false claims and failed policies. For all its deep pockets and political influence, it's a movement that has absolutely no way to deliver on its promises of better education for all, and particularly for our poorest and most vulnerable schools and communities.
Even though the people making policy are drawing the wrong conclusions, the collapse of the NCLB coalition is still a victory for ten years of grassroots opposition and organizing that exposed its test-and-punish approach as a predictable failure. Recent reports have fully exposed the myth of "reformy" progress in key cities like Duncan's Chicago and Bloomberg/Klein's New York City. Twenty years of corporate reform have failed to narrow achievement gaps or succeed even on its own narrow test score terms. In the past few months, merit pay has met the cheating scandals, an intersection of bureaucratic pressure, corruption, and bad policy that is likely to be a growing obstacle to claims of future miracles while producing more scandals and lawsuits.
The corporate reformers have successfully used deeply rooted inequalities in our society to construct a misleading narrative of failure and introduce market reform into public education. But because they've overreached and promised results and choices they cannot deliver, we need to turn their accountability rhetoric back upon them. We need to demand evidence that their market reform policies produce better outcomes for the majority of kids, and when they can't, we need to use the absence of that evidence to press for the limitation or reversal of the "disruptive reforms" they seek. And when their policies fail in one place, we need to share those results in their next target.
There was a good example of that last spring when Newark was searching for a new Superintendent and Seattle's former Superintendent Goodloe-Johnson surfaced as a candidate. The great work Parents Across America had done exposing the role of the Broad Foundation in spreading the corporate reform agenda laid a foundation of connections that allowed activists in Seattle and New Jersey to share history and information that helped quickly derail her candidacy. I know she's probably surfaced somewhere else already. Fighting Broad and Gates is like whack-a-mole. Their network is stronger than ours at this point, but our own efforts are building and resonating.
Some of that work includes defending the very idea of public education as a common good against free market, everyone-for-themselves mythology. One of the hopeful developments of the past year has been the emergence of a strong counter-narrative to the dominant corporate line on reform. Led by Diane Ravitch's emergence as a prominent critic of the corporate reform agenda, there's been an explosion of progressive policy blogs, analysis, and social media pushback to the corporate crowd. Well-read teacher bloggers like Anthony Cody, Nancy Flanagan, and teacherken Bernstein produce a steady stream of accessible refutations of "reformy" nonsense, rooted in the experience of real teachers and schools. A recent listing of the most influential education tweeters was headed by Ravitch and included progressives like Alfie Kohn, Mike Klonsky, and Leonie Haimson in the top 12.
It's especially satisfying to see how effectively the social media activists can be in disrupting the official line. Last May, when Secretary Duncan wrote a condescending letter of support for US teachers, he was inundated with responses and counter-commentaries highlighting the contradictions between his lofty sentiments and his destructive policies.
A few months ago, in a moment of clueless arrogance, director Davis Guggenheim posted an invitation on the Huffington Post to "Teachers, to tell me what you think" (along with a discount offer to see his teacher-bashing film during Teacher Appreciation Week). In return, he received pages upon pages of scathing comments from educators and parents. Perhaps the best response came from a veteran early childhood teacher who said: "I felt personally offended by your film. Its oversimplified and antagonistic message has stirred me into becoming a whole education activist."
And of course, that's the key. Because democratic ideas are only as strong as the ability of people to organize movements to implement them. So let me end by offering a quick survey of some of the hopeful, tangible signs of organizing resistance and alternatives to the corporate reform agenda and then open it up for discussion about how corporate reform is affecting your schools and classrooms and how we might build the movement against it over the coming year.
In no particular order, let me mention 10 hopeful signs that the tide is turning against corporate reform:

I've already mentioned Parents Across America (PAA) which has linked experienced parent activists from Seattle to Chicago to New Orleans to New York, Florida, and elsewhere into a growing parent voice for better policies. The landscape is different in every city, but there is no more crucial work than building an alliance between parents and teachers to defend and improve public education. Even a small group of activists representing teachers, parents, and progressive academics can have a big influence on local reform debates if they work together. If you haven't connected to PAA already, do it.
The outpouring of critical response to Waiting for Superman last fall was when a lot of teachers discovered they were not alone. Rethinking Schools' "NOT Waiting for Superman" campaign drew tens of thousands of supportive responses and has created an archive of information and resources for countering corporate reform that's still growing. In New York City, the GEM produced a documentary response to the film entitled The Inconvenient Truths Behind Waiting for Superman that's served as a rallying point for organizing and discussion across the country.
The two large teacher unions, the AFT & the NEA, have had mostly weak and defensive responses to the policy attacks of the past few years. But they are being pressed by both their members and by reality to develop more effective responses. This includes on-the-ground efforts at reform and the election of activist teacher leaders like Karen Lewis in Chicago and Bob Peterson in Milwaukee. Years of failing to effectively mobilize their membership or develop effective responses to school failure in poor communities have taken a big toll on the ability of our unions to lead the charge in defending public education. But their role remains crucial and activists have begun to rebuild that power on the basis of new politics and new coalitions with the communities schools serve.
The heroic Wisconsin rebellion. More than a month of sustained large scale protests and organizing that's still targeting a recall effort for Gov. Scott Walker. Check out OneWisconsinNow.org for the latest.
In Ohio, outrage over another anti-labor bill, SB#5 helped over generate 1.3 million signatures to put a referendum on the ballot and the measure may be repealed this November by popular vote.
There's a growing national movement of parents and students to opt out of standardized testing. This effort has the potential to mobilize large numbers of parents and students in the fight against the testing plague. Check out Unitedoptout.com or Testing is Not Teaching.
The growth of locally-based teacher activist groups. There are now active Teachers for Social Justice groups with various names in Chicago, San Francisco, Milwaukee, Portland, New York City (where there are multiple groups), St. Louis, Atlanta, and New Jersey to name just the ones I can remember. If there's one in your town, join it. If not, start one.
Education for Liberation is a national network of educators, youth, and community activists, led by people of color, doing great work on school-to-prison pipeline, youth organizing, and other social justice issues. Their conference in Providence this summer was probably the biggest and most dynamic yet.
The Save Our Schools march and conference last July reflected both the growth and the as yet unfulfilled potential of a national teachers' voice in defense of public education and the teaching profession. Interestingly, the SOS project did not begin with radical political activists, but with impeccably well-credentialed national board certified teachers, who attempted to engage the Obama administration to discuss it's education policies and who were stunned by the arrogance and ignorance of the response. A project that began with Anthony Cody's Teachers Letters to Obama found itself pushed by the aggressive acceleration of corporate reform into a more political and activist response. The media offensive of last fall around Waiting for Superman and the state-by-state battles last winter and spring convinced many that a national mobilization was sorely needed. The well-credentialed, experienced teachers at the center of the project were able to attract a significant number of well-known, respected advocates for public education who threw their support behind the effort, including Diane Ravitch, Jonathan Kozol, Linda Darling-Hammond, Pedro Noguera, Angela Valenzuela, Nancy-Carlsson Paige and others. Actor Matt Damon added media visibility and celebrity star power and Parents Across America broadened the project's base and outreach, as did savvy use of social media. The event had an impact far beyond the 8000 people who turned out for the rally, and while it remains to be seen whether SOS will be able to harvest what it started and sustain a national network, local and state groups are building on the grassroots energy that SOS helped set in motion.
And finally there's my own home base, Rethinking Schools, which has somewhat miraculously survived to this year celebrate its 25^th anniversary as a voice for activist educators. Rethinking Schools has always tried to connect efforts to create classrooms that are places of hope and humanity with larger struggles for racial and social justice. It made me a better teacher in the classroom and a better activist outside it. I don't think it's ever been more important to fight on both fronts and I thank you for letting me be part of that effort today.

Recent Report on Charter School Managers Offers Insights on What Works -- but Downplays Disappointing Results

2012-01-19T14:55:00.001-05:00

For Immediate Release January 19, 2012

Contact: Jamie Horwitz, 202-549-4921, jhdcpr@starpower.net

Bruce Fuller, 510-642-9163, b_fuller@berkeley.edu

RecentReport on Charter School Managers Offers Insights on What Works -- butDownplays Disappointing Results

Study’s findings cannotbe applied charter schools overall, according to independent review

BOULDER, CO – A recentstudy by Mathematica Policy Research Inc. and the Center on Reinventing PublicEducation on the benefits stemming from private, nonprofit charter schoolmanagement operators highlighted interesting trends in the U.S. chartermovement, but overreached wheninterpreting key findings, according to a review published by the NationalEducation Policy Center’s Think Twice review project.

Charter management organizations (CMOs) are nonprofitfirms that operate multiple charter schools either directly or throughmanagement contracts. CMO-operated schools account for about one-fifth of thenation's more than 5,000 public charter schools.

NEPC’s review praised the report foroffering an objective assessment of the comparative benefits for middle-schoolteachers and students. But the review also noted that the report’s analytic approachrelied on a highly select slice of all CMOs operating nationwide, moving fromabout 130 firms to just 22 that qualified for the study sample. The reviewquestioned the generalizability of the findings arising from these select CMOs,and it criticized the report’s “tortured” attempts to find achievementadvantages in the CMO-run schools.

Professor Bruce Fuller of the Universityof California-Berkeley reviewed the Mathematica/CRPE report, Charter-School Management Organizations:Diverse Strategies and Diverse Student Impacts, for NEPC. Fuller hasstudied the role of decentralization and market forces on education over thepast 25 years and is the author of the books Inside Charter Schools and StandardizedChildhood.

The growth of CMOs is an especiallytimely topic, Fuller notes, in light of recent pushes by the ObamaAdministration. The administration sees a prominent role for CMOs in schoolturnaround efforts. It also has required, in order to qualify for federal aid,that states lift caps on the number of charter schools.

Most CMOs, the report’s authors found,serve urban students from low-income families. Survey data and site visits showthat CMO-operated schools are typically smaller; offer longer school days,school years, or both; and recruit teachers who are loyal to their respectiveschool’s mission. The principals of CMO-run schools reported in surveys more frequentcoaching and mentoring of teachers and more intensive use of student testresults and other achievement data to evaluate teachers than did nearbytraditional public schools. The Fuller review found the report to be solid anduseful regarding these findings.

At the heart of the report is an impactanalysis focusing on middle school grades. The analysis began with the morethan 130 CMOs operating nationwide and then engaged in the successive narrowingof the CMOs included in the study down to just 22 that met several inclusioncriteria.

From those 22, the report found that asmall number of CMOs boosted middle-school student achievement growth atdiscernible levels. “Once thus narrowed, the study presents impressive resultsfor between 4 (reading outcome) and 7 (math outcome) of the 22 CMOs,” Fullerobserves. “So, to whom or what can we generalize these results?” Moreover, the overalleffects of CMOs on student achievement were largely flat when compared withboth traditional public schools and with a comparison sample of independentcharter schools not affiliated with a CMO.

“What’s disappointing for charter-schooladherents is the bottom line that the average effects of attending a CMO-runcharter school are not significantly different from those of attending aregular public school,” Fuller notes. He criticizes the report for what hecalls its “unrelenting search for achievement effects in a small, selectivesubset of sampled CMOs,” which he states “erodes its credibility.”

Fuller concludes that the report doesoffer illuminating insights into features of successful CMOs that appear tohave a modest association with student achievement growth in middle school. “Thisreport gets us a bit closer toward pinpointing highly effective CMOs and thepractices or resources that may help to explain their efficacy,” he writes.“What is not known is whether these practices or resources can be exported withintegrity to other charter companies or to the wider public school system.These questions should be squarely addressed in future research.”

Find Bruce Fuller’s review on the NEPCwebsite at:

http://nepc.colorado.edu/thinktank/review-charter-school-management

Find Charter-SchoolManagement Organizations: Diverse Strategies and Diverse Student Impacts onthe web at:

http://www.mathematica-mpr.com/publications/pdfs/education/cmo_final_updated.pdf

The Think Twice think tank review project(http://thinktankreview.og) of the National Education Policy Center (NEPC)provides the public, policy makers, and the press with timely, academicallysound reviews of selected publications. NEPC is housed at the University ofColorado Boulder School of Education. The Think Twice think tank review projectis made possible in part by support provided by the Great Lakes Center forEducation Research and Practice.

The mission ofthe National Education Policy Center is to produce and disseminatehigh-quality, peer-reviewed research to inform education policy discussions. Weare guided by the belief that the democratic governance of public education isstrengthened when policies are based on sound evidence. For more information on NEPC, please visithttp://nepc.colorado.edu/.

This review isalso found on the GLC website at http://www.greatlakescenter.org/

The Skeleton In Arne Duncan's Closet

2012-01-16T10:47:00.002-05:00

Going through old email, I got this from Peter 3 months ago.

Hi Norm,

Re: http://ednotesonline.blogspot.com/2009/10/why-was-arne-duncan-hyping-now.html andhttp://www.openleft.com/diary/16461/gerald-braceys-last-column-the-skeleton-in-arne-duncans-closet

I'm writing a book that includes the rise & fall of the Save-A-Life Foundation (SALF), which is now under investigation by federal and state agencies. Yesterday I posted this update article on my blog:
http://www.the-sidebar.com/2011/10/still-haunted-by-his-ties-to-tainted.html

I've attached a file with the HTML if you wish to cross-post.

Thanks for taking a look.

Sincerely,

Peter

Peter M. Heimlich
Atlanta
ph: (208)474-7283
website: Medfraud
blog: The Sidebar

Gerald Bracey's Last Column: The Skeleton in Arne Duncan's Closet

by: Paul Rosenberg

Sun Dec 13, 2009 at 14:00

During the years (2001 - 2008) that Arne Duncan was CEO of Chicago's public schools, he implemented programs that resulted in the firing of hundreds of veteran teachers and the privatization of more than 70 public schools, mostly through controversial charter school programs. Duncan's years saw the most massive privatization of public school assets in the 175-year history of public education in Chicago. One of the smaller examples of that, was Duncan's decision to out source the work of trained physical education and health education teachers to the "Save-A-Life Foundation." Subsequent investigations showed that Save-A-Life was fraudulent, but Duncan made no effort, following the revelations regarding the foundation, to retrieve the public money he had authorized be paid to Save-A-Life. Substance photo by George N. Schmidt.

Jerry Bracey--America's lead progressive expert/voice on education--had just finished this column when he died on Oct. 20. (Open Left memorial diary here.) He had planned to release it at his Huffington Post blog on Halloween. Hence the rattling skeletons theme. It has published previously by Susan Ohanian and Substance News, and is republished here with permission.

Halloween season is an appropriate time to talk about rattling skeletons in the closet. US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan appears to have a noisy one dating from his years running the Chicago Public Schools. Her name is Carol J. Spizzirri.
A little background. Spizzirri is a convicted shoplifter. According to a sworn affidavit by her ex-husband, a court ordered psychological evaluation diagnosed her as a paranoid schizophrenic and pathological liar. Spizzirri claimed to be a registered nurse and a renal specialist. Her alma mater, now defunct, denied giving her an RN and reportedly she has never been a registered nurse in either Wisconsin or Illinois, as she had claimed. One of her daughters filed a protective order against her because of alleged abuse.

This same daughter died in a car crash in 1992 after which Spizzirri started the nonprofit Save-a-Life Foundation (SALF) whose charter was to teach first aid skills like CPR and the Heimlich maneuver to school children using EMTs and firemen as in-class trainers. According to Spizzirri, her daughter was the victim of a hit-and-run driver and bled to death because the ambulance took a half hour to reach the scene and no one at the scene knew how to stanch the flow of blood. Spizzirri claimed her mother's grief motivated her to start the foundation which attracted political and financial support, including about $9 million in IL state and federal dollars. Famed doctors Peter Safar (who developed CPR) and Henry J. Heimlich (known for the maneuver) served on SALF's medical advisory board.
But official records indicate that the daughter's alcohol level was twice the legal limit, that she flipped the car, and died a half hour after reaching a hospital. Confronted with these facts by Chicago TV investigative reporter Chuck Goudie in 2006, Spizzirri terminated the interview and stomped off the set. Over the next year, Goudie did another three reports raising more questions about SALF.
Those stories appear to have been the first time a Chicago reporter did any fact checking about the foundation. For instance, in an uncritical 2002 Sun-Times article, Spizzirri claimed that her foundation trained 400,000 Illinois school children in 2001 alone. Do the math. In a 180-day school year, that's 2,222 children per day.

Paul Rosenberg :: Gerald Bracey's Last Column: The Skeleton in Arne Duncan's Closet

Save-A-Life Foundation's Carol Spizziri (center) poses with Chicago Schools Chief Executive Officer Arne Duncan (right) and Ronald McDonald (left) in a photograph used by the Save-A-Life Foundation for publicity. Duncan, as a cartoon character, also appeared in a Save-A-Life promotional before the foundation was exposed as a fraud. After the expose on Spizziri and Save-A-Life, Duncan took no action to retrieve Chicago public education funds that he had authorized to the foundation, and CPS records show no activity by Duncan to investigate how CPS spent tens of thousands of dollars on the Save-A-Life programs.

During his years as CPS big dog, Arne Duncan was apparently close to Spizzirri. He was a featured speaker at a 2003 SALF conference and a 2006 press statement has him receiving a SALF "Sponsorship Award" from Spizzirri, his second such prize. Duncan is quoted saying, "Carol is one of my heroes. I really appreciate the partnership." Duncan even appeared as an animated pitchman on SALF's website, cheerily hyping kids on the program: "Hi, friend, I'm Arne Duncan ... Ask your school teacher today if the 'SALF-Town' heroes can visit you!" Before she huffed out of the interview with Chuck Goudie, Spizzirri said SALF trained 67,000 Chicago Public School (CPS) children in first aid the year before and that the training was free to the children. In fact, records show that CPS paid the foundation a considerable amount.

After Goudie's reports, Spizzirri filed a defamation suit against three people who criticized SALF (including Dr. Heimlich's son), claiming the criticisms cost it 11 contracts, including CPS. But the lawsuit resulted in only more scrutiny. For example, in response to a subpoena from the defendants' lawyer for all their SALF records, CPS produced a grand total of 19 invoices from 2000-2007 totaling $12,855.
Three more invoices from 2004/2005 -- which CPS failed to provide to the defendants' attorney -- have since turned up via a public records request. The first 19 invoices produced by the subpoena appear to have gone through regular CPS payroll. But the three later invoices, totaling $49,000, were processed and signed off by CEO Arne Duncan's office. One includes this handwritten notation: "per AD per Ann Whalen 9-14-05." Whalen was Duncan's personal assistant. She now works for him in Washington.
The $49,000 was for "training elementary school students in life supporting first aid skills which will take place in approximately 15 schools with approximately 2,400 students." But the subpoena to CPS didn't produce any records showing the training ever happened.
What about all those CPS students allegedly trained by SALF? If you train 67,000 children in a single year and there are, let's say, 25 children per session, that's 2,680 sessions, 15 per day if evenly distributed across a 180-day school year. As any overworked administrator can testify, that's likely to produce a mountain of paper work -- work orders, reports, employment records, evaluations, etc. Twenty-two invoices over a seven year period do not a mountain make.
On July 9, a federal judge in Chicago granted SALF's request for voluntary dismissal and the lawsuit was dropped. A few months later, SALF filed dissolution papers with the Illinois Secretary of State's Office. But questions remain about the organization's 16-year history, their funding, and their relationships with powerful public officials -- including Arne Duncan.
Why did CPS pay SALF over $60,000 for a "free" program? What happened to the more than $1,000,000 SALF received from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for one year (there were other CDC contracts)? What about the millions SALF received from Illinois taxpayers? In the case of the Illinois State Board of Education, it's a guessing game. ISBE's complete records consist of a form showing a disbursement of $600,000 to SALF -- no application, no review, no evaluation, no nothin'.
According to an Oct. 11 Chicago Tribune article, "(Spizzirri) estimates 2 million children took the classes, many of them from the Chicago Public Schools ... City school officials did not respond to inquiries about how many students received emergency training"
Looks like this tale is so spooky that CPS won't even talk about it to a Trib reporter. But the public may feel entitled to know whether their money went for tricks or treats. For example, the $60,000+ CPS gave SALF was apparently spent on first aid training for hundreds of thousands of ghosts. I'd say it's time to knock on the door of someone who can get to the bottom of this money mystery. He lives in that big house down at the end of the street, the one marked, "Secretary of Education."
Copyright 2009, Gerald W. Bracey, All rights reserved

BESE to name new LA state superintendent: John White

2012-01-11T23:21:00.000-05:00

one board member said:

"We have the responsibility as BESE members to find the most qualified person to be superintendent," she said. "I know very little about John White," except for what she's read about his experience as CEO of Teach for America and an assistant superintendent in New York, "where his primary goal was to close schools. The residents of New York were only too happy to see him leave.

you got that right!

http://www.thenewsstar.com/article/20120111/NEWS01/201110330

in the Monroe “News Star:”

BESE to name superintendent

11:23 PM, Jan. 10, 2012

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Walter Lee, DeSoto Parish schools superintendent. / News-Star File

Written by

Mike Hasten

· Filed Under

· News

· Local News

· Bobby Jindal

January 11, 2012

BESE to name superintendent

By Mike Hasten
mhasten@gannett.com

BATON ROUGE — Board of Elementary and Secondary Education President Penny Dastugue wasted little time calling the new board into session to vote on appointing John White, Gov. Bobby Jindal's choice, as the next state superintendent of education.

BESE members took office Monday, a week earlier than normal, and Dastugue on Tuesday issued a call for a noon Wednesday special meeting for "consideration of appointment of the state superintendent of education."

The board's regularly scheduled meeting, in which members would normally take the oath of office, is scheduled for next week.

Dastugue said there's no reason to wait. "I expect that there will be an appointment" at this meeting, Dastugue said. "I think the members of the board want to recognize John's credentials and what he brings as superintendent. I think they're ready to make a decision."

At least one member of the 11-member body says she will object to taking a vote and if pressed, will vote against White, who is superintendent of the Recovery School District in New Orleans.

Lottie Beebe, 3rd BESE District member from Breaux Bridge, says White lacks the credentials as spelled out in state law, and she believes that instead of trying to improve public schools, White would try to privatize as many as possible.

Beebe said she expects "the vote will be 10 to 1. I'll be the 1."

"I've heard a lot about choice," said Beebe, personnel director of St. Martin Parish Schools. "I want a choice in the selection of superintendent." She said that not opening the superintendent's job to other applicants, including Louisiana school superintendents, "is a slap in the face to them."

BESE member Walter Lee of Shreveport said he's not surprised that Dastugue wanted to move up the appointment of White, and "I think that decision is made." He said he would join the majority of members in voting for White.

Until the new board was seated, Jindal did not have the two-thirds vote on BESE needed to select White. The governor actively campaigned for and made contributions to candidates who would support his idea of reform, which includes appointing White superintendent.

Lee said he committed earlier that "if they had seven votes, I would be the eighth" in favor of White.

Holly Boffy, 3rd BESE District member from Youngsville, said she supports the governor's choice and believes the superintendent should be seated as soon as possible because "there's so much going on" in education.

The legislative session is approaching, she said, as is a deadline for the state to possibly file an application for a waiver that would allow the state to use its own accountability program instead of No Child Left Behind.

Also, the state needs a leader to properly implement the common core curriculum, Boffy said.

"We need to get our team in place to deal with the so many things that are happening," she said. "It doesn't surprise me" that Dastugue moved the decision up a week.

Former Superintendent Paul Pastorek resigned in May. Jindal expressed his support for White at that time and, with Pastorek, brought him in to head the RSD while he pushed for votes on BESE.

Acting Superintendent Ollie Tyler's resignation will become effective at the end of January. Dastugue said "when the appointment is made tomorrow, Miss Tyler will decide with Superintendent White what she would do. I expect she would step back into her assistant superintendent role until her retirement is effective. That would allow for some transition."

Joyce Haynes, president of the Louisiana Association of Educators, said she is "disappointed they won't follow the process" of allowing other superintendent candidates to apply "so we could be sure we get the best.

"They're ignoring the process and a law passed by the Legislature" setting minimum requirements for serving as superintendent, she said. "Unfortunately, they can waive the requirements."

Educators "shouldn't have to watch them run over us and appoint someone who just came to town," Haynes said. "He's come down to privatize schools and change them to charters. Next, it's vouchers."

Jindal has repeatedly said one of his goals for this session is to offer parents more choices so their children don't have to attend failing schools.

Outsourcing Public Ed to Charter Schools

2012-01-09T08:29:00.002-05:00

Why Is Public Education Being Outsourced to Online Charter Schools?

Virtual charter schools are educating kids on computer screens, instead of in classrooms.

January 8, 2012 |

Photo Credit: Eunix via Flickr

Why Is Public Education Being Outsourced to Online Charter Schools?

By Rania Khalek
Posted on January 8, 2012, Printed on January 9, 2012
http://www.alternet.org/story/153680/why_is_public_education_being_outsourced_to_online_charter_schools

Virtual charter schools, which offer classes online instead of in a classroom, have become the fastest-growing segment of the charter school industry. And while data on their effectiveness is scarce, state legislators across the country are passing laws to expand cyber schools at the behest of privatization advocates and online education companies at an alarming rate, with little regulation.
The Associated Press reports that more than 200,000 kindergarten to 12th grade students are enrolled in full-time “virtual charter schools” in at least 40 states. That number soars to two million schoolchildren nationwide when one takes into account students who are enrolled in at least one course.
The last year alone has seen virtual schools dramatically expand across the country. According to the AP, “Ohio lifted a moratorium on new ‘e-schools,’ and Utah passed a ‘virtual voucher’ law,” which lets high school kids determine which classes they prefer to take online and at school. Another roundup by the Wall Street Journal includes similar moves in Virginia, which signed off on 13 new cyberschools. Florida now mandates that high school students enroll in one online course at a minimum and Idaho has moved to implement a requirement for at least two online courses. Georgia offers an app that lets high-schoolers take classes on their smartphones, reports the Journal.
Follow the Money Trail
Five for-profit companies control the cyberschool market: K12 Inc., Connections Academy, Educational Options, Apex Learning, and Plato. These virtual charter school providers supply course material, keep track of student achievement and hire educators.
K12 Inc., based in Herndon, Virginia, is the country’s largest cyberschool provider. In just four years, K12’s full-time enrollment has more than doubled to 94,000 school kids.
In an investigation of virtual charter school companies published in the Nation, Lee Fang discovered a massive but largely quiet campaign by corporate front-groups to push policies in state legislatures that benefit “education-technology companies.” According to Fang, cyberschool advocates have piggy-backed on the school privatization movement, which has relentlessly lobbied for publicly funded charter schools and school vouchers under the guise of school choice. Fang writes:

"In 2010, K12 Inc. spent lavishly in key races across the country, including a last-minute donation of $25,000 to Idahoans for Choice in Education, a political action committee supporting Tom Luna, a self-styled Tea Party school superintendent running for re-election. Since 2004, K12 Inc. alone has spent nearly $500,000 in state-level direct campaign contributions, according to the National Institute on Money in State Politics. David Brennan, Chairman of White Hat Management, became the second-biggest Ohio GOP donor, with more than $4.2 million in contributions in the past decade."

It doesn’t stop there. The New York Times reports that since 2007, K12 spent another $681,000 on lobbying in Pennsylvania, where the company makes nearly 10 percent of its revenue.
Unsurprisingly, the cyberschool movement is getting help from the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a conservative group that backs many privatization efforts.
ALEC lent its services to cyberschools in 2005, designing the "Virtual Public Schools Act.” Lee Fang reports that an executive named Mickey Revenauge at Connections Learning, America’s second largest virtual school company, co-chairs ALEC’s “education policy-writing department.”
Are Virtual Charters Effective?
While online charter school expansion may benefit the bottom line of education-tech companies, the same cannot be said for students, teachers or taxpayers.
The latest study released January 6 by the National Education Policy Center (NEPC) and conducted by researchers at Western Michigan University found that just 27 percent of cyberschool companies achieved the “adequate yearly progress” or AYP benchmarks required by No Child Left Behind as opposed to 48 percent of traditional “brick-and-mortar” schools.
Just like brick-and-mortar charter schools, online charter schools receive public education funding per each student they enroll. A recent New York Times investigation that focused specifically on K12 Inc.’s online schools revealed that the company “tries to squeeze profits from public school dollars by raising enrollment, increasing teacher workload and lowering standards” among other things:

"Despite lower operating costs, the online companies collect nearly as much taxpayer money in some states as brick-and-mortar charter schools. In Pennsylvania, about 30,000 students are enrolled in online schools at an average cost of about $10,000 per student. The state auditor general, Jack Wagner, said that is double or more what it costs the companies to educate those children online."

One of the more creative schemes the company employs to boost revenue is to set up shop in poverty-stricken school districts that could potentially, depending on the state, collect higher public education subsidies. The Times references a school K12 recently established in Union County, Tennessee, where 25 percent of the population is plagued by poverty.
The Wall Street Journal estimates that school staff makes up 80 percent of education budgets, with an average ratio of 150 students per teacher (all classes combined). In comparison, a virtual teacher is expected to manage more than 250 students, leading to a far higher stack of papers to grade, students to monitor, and parents to coach. The Times investigation found serious grievances by online teachers about grueling workloads and insufficient wages.
Although cyberschool charters are subsidized by local and state education budgets, there is little understanding as to whether or not they actually save money. Yet state lawmakers continue to expand the cyberschool market. There’s no doubt that today’s high-tech tools are capable of enhancing the learning experience. But all this uncertainty mixed with the money-making schemes of the virtual charter industry should cause lawmakers, parents and students to pause, and at the very least, consider the consequences of educating future generations on computer screens, instead of in classrooms.
Rania Khalek is an associate writer for AlterNet. Follow her on Twitter @RaniaKhalek.

Winerip: Yet Another Charter Outrage

2012-01-09T00:55:00.001-05:00

January 8, 2012

NY TIMES

Rejected 3 Times, School May Still Open Soon, and With a Grant, Too

By MICHAEL WINERIP

In the last couple of years, Sharon Akman, a real estate agent, applied to the state of New Jersey three times to open a new charter school in the Highland Park area, to be called Tikun Olam Hebrew Language Charter High School.

Each time, she was rejected.

Then on Oct. 6, one week after the state’s most recent rejection, the United States Education Department announced that it had approved a $600,000 grant to finance Ms. Akman’s proposed charter.

It would have taken federal officials just a few phone calls to determine that there were many good reasons for the state to have rejected Ms. Akman’s applications.

For one thing, they have been full of misrepresentations.

Ms. Akman, who declined to comment for this column, writes that the charter school would be located in St. Mary of Mount Virgin Church in New Brunswick, even though the bishop of the Diocese of Metuchen, Paul G. Bootkoski, has repeatedly said that the building is not available.

Ms. Akman’s documents list community supporters of the school, including Jun Choi, a former mayor of Edison, and the directors of the Zimmerli Art Museum in New Brunswick, who have written in e-mails made public that they are not supporters.

The application says there is a need for a Hebrew charter in the Highland Park-Edison-New Brunswick area, even though there are many Jewish private schools close by and, as Ms. Akman has told state reviewers, no community survey has been done.

The application says that the families served by the New Brunswick schools, which are predominantly black and Hispanic, support the Hebrew charter, even though school leaders and the local N.A.A.C.P. chapter do not.

Since March 2010, community volunteers from Highland Park, Edison and New Brunswick have been battling to stop the school from opening, arguing that it would drain resources from traditional public schools in order to provide a free Jewish education that should be the responsibility of private schools.

For each child who leaves a district to attend a charter, the charter receives 90 percent of the district’s per-pupil spending allotment. In modest-size communities like Highland Park, with a district of 1,500 students, that can take a substantial bite out of a school budget.

What has been so frustrating to opponents is that despite repeated distortions in the Tikun Olam applications, the charter still may open in September.

How could federal oversight be so lax?

Part of the answer is that charter schools are a top priority for the Obama administration, making federal officials predisposed to support them.

And part of the answer, as Justin Hamilton, an Education Department spokesman, explained in an e-mail, is that federal officials see their oversight role as limited. The department hires private consultants to rate the quality of a charter applicant, but those consultants “cannot use information not included in the grant application,” he said.

In other words, if Ms. Akman writes that Assemblyman Peter J. Barnes III supports the charter, the federal consultants are not permitted to interview Mr. Barnes, who would have been happy to tell them that he does not.

This prohibition against using outside information is intended to ensure that no special measures are taken to either favor or hinder an applicant, although what it really invites is fiction writing.

Mr. Hamilton points out that the federal grant does not take effect unless the state approves Ms. Akman’s application. The federal role, he said, is to “operate as a funding source for applicants proposing to open high-quality start-up charter schools,” although it is hard to imagine why an applicant would propose a low-quality charter school.

An applicant with a $600,000 pledge in her pocket may be seen in a new light by state officials. In mid-October, Ms. Akman wrote to the state’s acting education commissioner, Christopher D. Cerf, requesting assistance in winning approval for her fourth application. “We were just granted a substantial federal charter school grant,” she wrote him, and would “love to have a meeting to better strategize and prepare for our reapplication.”

How Mr. Cerf responded is not known. E-mails between Ms. Akman and Mr. Cerf’s office were released after a request under the state’s Open Public Records Act. While Ms. Akman’s string of e-mails was made public, responses from Mr. Cerf’s office were redacted.

What we do know is that in mid-October Ms. Akman made her fourth try, as 1 of 42 applicants statewide.

And in December, the state made its first cuts, leaving 17 applicants — including Tikun Olam.

Next week state officials are to announce which are approved. If Tikun Olam is successful, the school plans to open in September with 100 students.

Ms. Akman has repeatedly refused to talk to reporters. She did not respond to a dozen e-mails and voice mail messages left at the real estate office where she works, Century 21 J. J. Laufer in Highland Park. When I called the personal cellphone number she listed on the state application, a woman answered. “Who’s calling?” she asked, and when I explained that I was a reporter, she said, “I’ll tell them you called, thank you,” and hung up.

While I have independently confirmed the facts in this column, a lot of the distortions were first dug up by Darcie Cimarusti, an opponent of the charter school. She is an interior designer and educator with four children in Highland Park schools who is now a stay-at-home mom, and she has devoted an extraordinary amount of her time to stopping the charter.

“Since May this has become my full-time job,” she said. “Some weeks, far more than 40 hours a week.” She has been joined by several dozen community volunteers.

All over the state, volunteers, mainly women, have been working to keep charter schools out. Mostly they’re from prosperous suburbs with high-quality public schools: Livingston, Millburn-Short Hills, Maplewood, Teaneck, Cherry Hill.

Even so, it is an uphill battle against an education establishment that includes Democrats (President Obama) and Republicans (Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey) with strong financial backing (the Gates, Broad and Walton foundations).

A spokesman for the state’s Education Department, Justin Barra, said in an e-mail that in the next review round for charter applications, representatives of Tikun Olam would be brought in for “an intensive in-person interview.” As for possible misrepresentations, he said: “Several individuals in the public comment process have raised concerns about potential inaccurate statements in the application. We will investigate these concerns.”

In New Jersey, there is no limit to the number of times a group can modify its application and reapply for a charter, and Tikun Olam does not hold the record. “We do have applicants that have submitted more than four times,” Mr. Barra said.

Mr. Hamilton, the federal spokesman, said that if the Education Department “becomes aware of material factual misrepresentations,” it could terminate the grant.

An investigation would not require much digging. The list of public officials who supposedly support the Tikun Olam charter — but in interviews have said they really do not — is in the first paragraph on Page 18 of the federal application.

Right after that, in Paragraph 2, the charter supporters provide some of the translations of the Hebrew words “tikun olam,” including “perfecting the world.”

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by: Paul Rosenberg

Sun Dec 13, 2009 at 14:00

BESE to name new LA state superintendent: John White

Outsourcing Public Ed to Charter Schools

Why Is Public Education Being Outsourced to Online Charter Schools?

Why Is Public Education Being Outsourced to Online Charter Schools?

By Rania Khalek Posted on January 8, 2012, Printed on January 9, 2012 http://www.alternet.org/story/153680/why_is_public_education_being_outsourced_to_online_charter_schools

© 2012 All rights reserved.View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/153680/

Winerip: Yet Another Charter Outrage

Rejected 3 Times, School May Still Open Soon, and With a Grant, Too

By MICHAEL WINERIP

By Rania Khalek
Posted on January 8, 2012, Printed on January 9, 2012
http://www.alternet.org/story/153680/why_is_public_education_being_outsourced_to_online_charter_schools

© 2012 All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/153680/