And if haven’t done so already, check out our very own school board challengers, all who are great picks for the school board election this fall, on a Los Angeles based blog talk radio program Momocrats.
Have a great weekend!
Dora
Post Script: If you would like to receive the weekly update in your mailbox, please send a request to seattle.ed2010@gmail.com.
When Wall Street was first occupied I was thrilled to hear the news but hesitant to report it on this blog. People were finally pushing back on those who have taken so much from all of us. The focus of this blog is education and I never want to distract readers with other news but upon reflection and listening to Michael Moore speak on the subject, I determined that it was relevant in terms of our children and their future.
An introduction to the “Occupy Wall Street” movement.
An interview with one of the organizers.
I keep hearing the words “This is what Democracy looks like” when I think about the people who are joining others on Wall Street.
Over 700 hundred Continental and United pilots, joined by additional pilots from other Air Line Pilots Association carriers, demonstrated in front of Wall Street on September 27, 2011 in New York City.
It started 14 days ago when several hundred protesters marched on Wall Street. They were greeted by a cadre of police officers and a barricade that would not allow the protestors to get near the New York Stock Exchange. Instead they were located to a small park nearby that has now become known as Liberty Plaza.
There were buses that left several states this week to join those on Wall Street.
For additional information on this action you can check out the following:
If you want to send an order of pizza’s to the folks occupying Wall Street, check out the list of local restaurants who will deliver to the site. It’s a nice way to show your support.
At least the bull is safe.
Update:
This just in. While protesters are on the ground, the folks up on the balcony drink their champagne.
For all of you who just received the Gates backed League of Education Voters (LEV) invitation to hear Steven Brill talk about his book “Class Warfare” and you are considering attending, watch After Words with Steven Brill and Diane Ravitch as they discuss his book and their opposing views on education first.
It looks like people around the country are becoming aware of our local school board campaign.
Check out the interview with Marty McLaren, Kate Martin, Sharon Peaslee and Michelle Buetow on Momocrats radio based in Los Angeles. It starts at 14 minutes into the program.
By the way, according to a Parents Across America member who attended the school board candidates’ debate last night:
Kate Martin showed a solid knowledge of the issues and strong conviction of how to improve things. She was clearly more prepared than her incumbent, Sherry Carr. All of this resonated with the audience which gave Kate a 63%-38% advantage in the post-debate poll. Go Kate!
One response that the audience loved was when Kate referred to our former superintendent, Dr. Goodloe-Johnson, as coming from the “puppy-mill for superintendents” when referring to the Broad Academy.
Marty McLaren also made a great showing despite the fact that the incumbent, Steve Sundquist, was not there. She got a particularly strong audience response when she brought up the issue of the incumbents taking big money from outside interests.
All the challengers got a big response as well for opposing Teach for America, Inc.
For decades free market advocates such as the Bradley Foundation, the Walton Foundation and the Koch brothers have a waged a multi-front campaign against the public sector and the idea of the common good. Public education has been one of the key battlegrounds. In the coming weeks the Madison Metropolitan School District Board of Education will decide whether to approve a proposal for the Madison Prep Charter School. This proposal and the chief advocate for it – Kaleem Caire of the Urban League of Greater Madison – have their roots in the Bradley/Walton/Koch movement, and like much of that movement they offer false promises of educational progress in order to obscure the damage being done to every child in our public schools.
The campaign to undermine public education, nationally and in Madison, has been very sophisticated politically and simplistic educationally. Caire and other “choice” advocates zero in on the failings of public schools, while dismissing the successes or often even the possibility of success within a public school context. This attention to the failings of public schools, especially for poor and minority students, is welcome. However instead supporting the difficult and uncertain work of finding ways to expand educational opportunities and improve attainment for those being left behind, the self-proclaimed “reformers” offer only unfounded market-based panaceas.
This not only ignores the essential educational work that is needed, it obscures the growing inequalities of wealth and power that are at the core of many of educational struggles.
Madison Prep is a classic case. The proposals (there have been multiple versions) and the extensive media campaign have centered on a narrative based on selected statistics illustrating gaps in achievement between African American (and to a lesser extent Hispanic) males and other students. No attempt is made to locate the sources of those gaps, no attention is given to student-related factors such as poverty (Madison Prep advocates prefer to talk about race, not poverty) or mobility (in 2009 173 of the 435 African American 10th graders were in their first year at the school they attended); or to school-based factors such as curriculum, pedagogy, grouping practices, class-size, resource allocations….Instead the one and only “solution” offered is the ill-conceived Madison Prep Charter School.
A big part of this campaign has been directed at unionized public school teachers who are blamed for all the ills of schools. Charters like Madison Prep promise to address these ills by stripping teachers of their rights and job security, forcing them to work longer hours for less pay and fewer benefits, while expanding administrative supervision via a top heavy structure peopled by multiple well compensated administrators, a “President” and a “Head of School” and a “Development Director.” The transfer of wealth and power of the market based economy is mirrored in the structure of the school.
Since the early 1970s, the rich, corporate power brokers and right-wing cultural warriors realized that education was central to creating a viable populist movement that served their interests. Over the last 40 years, the financial elites and their wealthy accomplices have not only mobilized an educational anti-reform movement in the name of “reform” to dismantle public education and turn it over to hedge-fund managers and billionaires; they have also taken a lesson from the muckrakers, critical public intellectuals, left-wing journals, progressive newspapers and educational institutions of the mid-20th century and developed their own cultural apparatuses, talk shows, anti-public intellectuals, think tanks and grassroots organizations. As the left slid into organizing around mostly single-issue movements since the 1980s, the right moved in a different direction, mobilizing a range of educational forces and wider cultural apparatus as a way of addressing broader ideas that appealed to a wider public and issues that resonated with their everyday lives. Tax reform, the role of government, the crisis of education, family values and the economy, to name a few issues, were wrenched out of their progressive legacy and inserted into a context defined by the values of the free market, an unbridled notion of freedom and individualism and a growing hatred for the social contract.
At the heart of this movement was a culture of cruelty and vulgarity that used education to produce a new form of political illiteracy in which there was no difference between opinions and arguments, reason and emotion and evidence and false statements. In this culture of illiteracy, science became a liability, thinking became an act of stupidity, anti-intellectualism became a virtue, social protections were described as a pathology and the social contract was dismissed as socialism. While social critic Michael Kazin does not mention the notions of education or public pedagogy in a recent New York Times article, he is right in stressing the centrality of education to the current right-wing-Christian-extremists takeover of almost every aspect of political and economic life in America – extending from the Supreme Court to the federal government to the dominant media-cultural educational apparatus. He writes: “Like the left in the early 20th century, conservatives built an impressive set of institutions to develop and disseminate their ideas. Their think tanks, legal societies, lobbyists, talk radio and best selling manifestos have trained, educated and financed two generations of writers and organizers. Conservative Christian colleges both Protestant and Catholic, provide students with a more coherent worldview than do the more prestigious schools led by liberals. More recently, conservatives marshaled media outlets like Fox News and the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal to their cause.”(1)
Education has become the political weapon of choice for conservatives, and they have had astounding success in using the mainstream and new media to drown out the voices of more progressive critics. The evidence is everywhere. For instance, The New York Times is currently advertising its Watch Education Take Center Stage initiative and the keynote address is being given by the politically and morally discredited champion of neoliberal education, Lawrence Summers. Given his failed presidency at Harvard, his utterly shameful role in contributing to the financial crisis of 2008 and the failure of Obama’s economic policies and his crude instrumental view of education, why would The New York Times select him as an educational leader and beacon of hope for any kind of educational vision designed to address future generations? Other speakers include the likes of Chester Finn, whose views on public education are as politically reactionary as they are theoretically bogus. Another example can be found in the ongoing Education Nation series sponsored on a number of platforms by NBC. It’s endorsement of market-driven anti-public education policies are evident in its parading of the likes of Bill and Melinda Gates and their utterly anti-public, charter school, privatized and technocratic vision of education. Also included are the usual list of charter school, corporate funded anti-union, public school cheerleaders for defunding and privatizing American education. Of course, missing from these dog-and-pony shows are progressive public school reformers such as David Berliner, Stanley Aronowitz, Jonathan Kozol, Marian Wright Edelman, Donaldo Macedo, and others who have been fighting for real educational reform for the last few decades. Nor is there any mention of the many local struggling social movements fighting for public education and the ever-dissolving protections of social contract inherited from the legacy of the New Deal and the Great Society programs. Education at all levels is firmly in the hands of the rich, reactionary and the powerful. Is it any wonder given how invisible progressive forces are in this country that young people are not in the streets as they were in the sixties, refusing the future being offered to them by Wall Street and the moralizing Christian fundamentalists?
Of course, this is not merely a debate about education; it is really about the emergence of an anti-reform movement that wants to create armies of low-skilled workers and consumers for the privatized, deregulated and commodified world of the 21st century where a survival of the fittest ethic has been elevated to the status of commonsense. This is a world in which the culture of cruelty is now so commonplace that audiences clap when right-wing politicians insist that people who are terminally ill should die rather than receive government support; it is a world in which the legacies and injustice of slavery and the Jim Crow era now shape a criminal justice system in which capital punishment is largely used to kill black men while, at the same time, used by crass politicians to provoke political support and cheers from audiences who could have once sat in the seats of Roman coliseums watching people eaten by wild animals; the culture of cruelty is now matched by the culture of vulgarity – reality TV shows mimic the worst values of American life; celebrity culture is now so crude that it is worse than illiterate, and celebrities such as Kim Kardashian become role models for legitimating a lethal combination of vulgarity and stupidity. The combination of vulgarity and illiteracy permeates American culture, particularly its political class. What is one to make of the current crop of Republic presidential candidates who claim, without irony, that climate change is not the result of human behavior; evolution is bad science; and in the case of the queen of idiocy, Michele Bachmann, ignore the most obvious scientific evidence about the HPV vaccine in order to make false claims about the value of this particular drug in saving the lives of young girls. In all of these examples, education becomes another way of making the larger public and young people either stupid or mindless consumers – even worse, both.
The American public needs access to a new political and educational vocabulary in order to fashion democratically vibrant educational institutions; social movements; community educational centers; bookstores; and a lively, independent press. Young people, educators, activists, artists, parents, and others need alternative media such as Truthout, AlterNet and CounterPunch as popular civic outlets to make education central to building the formative culture that would create new generations of real public intellectuals, youth activists, social movements and a vibrant range of public spheres. I have taken up this issue in my newest book, “Education and the Crisis of Public Values.” The book points to how educators and others can meet the current attack on education, young people and democracy itself. It offers a new vocabulary for better understanding the crisis of education as a crisis of democracy and public life, and provides a number of suggestions for what new beginnings are necessary, all of which is outlined in more detail throughout the book. Below is an excerpt from the preface that forecasts both the swindle of education offered by conservatives, the billionaires and corporate power brokers and why it needs to be resisted with as much urgency and collective power as possible.
With all due respect to Charles Dickens, it appears to be the worst of times for public and higher education in America; public schools are increasingly viewed as a business and are prized above all for “customer satisfaction,” and efficiency while largely judged through the narrow lens of empirical accountability measures. When not functioning as a business or a potentially lucrative for-profit investment, public schools are reduced to containment centers, holding institutions designed to largely punish young people marginalized by race and class. No longer merely tracked into low-achieving classes, poor white, brown and black youth are now tracked out of school into what is often called the school-to-prison pipeline. Schools have now become stress centers for the privileged and zones of abandonment for the poor…
The American Jobs Act would invest $30 billion in modernizing and upgrading school and community college infrastructure. And $35 billion would go to prevent up to 280,000 layoffs of teachers, who are—along with cops and firefighters—particularly vulnerable to local government budget shortfalls.
43rd District (Belltown, Cap Hill, Eastlake, Greenlake, Mad Pk, Montlake, Ravenna, U District, Wallingford)
And this from Sue Peters:
“After too many years of mismanagement, churn and scandal, clearly it’s time for new leadership and better judgment in Seattle’s Public Schools. We need engaged school board members who will respond to the community and manage our limited resources responsibly. Sharon Peaslee brings an intelligent and clear commitment to getting our district back on track. Sharon Peaslee has my confidence and my vote.”
Sue Peters
Seattle Public School Parent
Founding co-editor of Seattle Education
And upcoming school board candidate events:
Tuesday, September 27 4:30-6:30pm
Meet the School Board Challengers
Ballard High School Library
1418 NW 65th St, Seattle WA
Jim once again hits the nail on the head with his great prose and phrases worth remembering. I particularly like the “federal ATM machine at the U. S. Department of Ed” and the “corporate welfare charters” which indeed they are.
In anticipation of the new NCLB initiative rolled out yesterday (my response in the making), Arne Duncan announced recently a new corporate ed reform money maker called “Digital Promise,” which promises to fill the pockets of some of Duncan’s favorite techie sidekicks who are already lining up at Duncan’s “innovation-inspiring” federal ATM machine at the U. S. Department of Ed. Take Reed Hastings, for instance (please), whose rattle-trap outfit, NetFlix, is beginning to flicker toward extinction just as Hastings moves into the edu-biz in a big way.
As the Godfather of the corporate welfare charter movement in California and initial backer of the corrupt Green Dot, Inc., Hastings, who sits on Microsoft’s Board of Directors, became quick friends with Arne Duncan when Duncan became Secretary of ED. In 2009, Hastings was picked by Duncan to head up turnaround planning for the thousands of urban schools that poverty and NCLB testing have blown up in recent years. Most of the planned replacement schools for the bottom 5% per year (four to five thousand schools nationwide) of low test score schools are planned as corporate welfare charters, and edupreneurs are looking for ways to further cut personnel costs and increase the bottom line beyond the typical charter school cuts to teacher salaries and benefit packages. Enter the techno-twits with a plan to essentially cut the urban teacher corps in half by hooking children up to “dream machines” for half the school day.
Duncan (Gates and the BRT) are keen to develop digital tutors that use technology that analyze student response patterns in order to customize their “dream box” drill and kill sessions. They are also interested, as Arne’s press release indicates, in getting these systems into classrooms before their effectiveness can ever be ascertained:
It’s interesting how President Obama in his speech yesterday referred to No Child Left Behind (NCLB) as a failed program with no mention of Race to the Top (RTTT) which was the same but worse. Some of us refer to RTTT as NCLB on steroids and it seems that at this time most people have recognized that RTTT is also a failed policy. It was a policy of forcing school districts to align to a specific set of standards and if the standards were not met, the school was “turned around”, meaning either the school was closed permanently, half the staff fired or the principal removed. The other option was for the school to be turned into a charter school and staffed with uncertified and inexperienced teachers including Teach for America, Inc. recruits. It was an ill-conceived idea developed by a few wealthy venture (vulture) capitalists who knew nothing about education and everything about how to make a buck. Unfortunately school districts wanting some of that RTTT money complied with disastrous results.
Neither NCLB nor RTTT addressed the basis of low achievement, mainly poverty. 21% of our children live in poverty and that number is increasing every day with unemployment increasing and no end in sight.
Maybe now the Washington State PTA will seriously consider removing merit pay for teachers out of their platform. It looks like it’s no longer the darling of those in power.
Is this truly going to be the beginning of the end to the Federal demand for merit pay, school turnarounds, exhaustive testing and charter schools? We’ll see.
Either way, the next thing that President Obama needs to do is fire Arne Duncan. With him as an albatross around the president’s neck, it would make it even more difficult for President Obama to be re-elected.
I have reviewed what is a rather sketchy outline of this new “flexibility” that Obama is allowing each state and find the following phrases interesting. The first one is:
A State will no longer have to set targets that require all students to be proficient by 2014. Instead, a State will have flexibility to establish ambitious but achievable goals in reading/language arts and mathematics to support improvement efforts for all schools and all students.
The stated goal initially by the Obama administration was that all students in all states would reach a specific level of achievement by 2014. I guess they got a reality check on that after a few years.
For a State’s lowest–performing schools — Priority schools, generally, those in the bottom 5 percent — a district will implement rigorous interventions to turn the schools around. In an additional 10 percent of the State’s schools — Focus Schools, identified due to low graduation rates, large achievement gaps, or low student subgroup performance — the district will target strategies designed to focus on students with the greatest needs.
They are still targeting the “lowest performing” 5% of schools to intervene and “turn the schools around” but I am assuming they are not referring to the specific requirements of “school turnarounds” which was the dictum of RTTT.
In the paragraph below, it seems that they want to shift the power of decision-making to the state which could still lead to disastrous effects. Imagine our state legislators trying to dictate how each school district is to address school policy. On the other hand, if Randy Dorn with the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI) and his staff were to make the decisions regarding education in our state, as was the purpose of the office, that would make sense. Imagine what would have happened if the ed reformers in our state had gotten what they wished for in the last legislative session and had the office of OSPI dissolved and the decision-making power placed in the hands of one person, our governor.
I believe that each district should be able to determine school policy and have the funding to support all schools successfully in the manner that they determine appropriate. Oh course, there is the question of money or lack thereof which gets us back to where all of this started, there is not enough funding to support our schools and hasn’t been for at least a few decades.
States, districts, and schools will receive relief from a system that over-identifies schools as “failing” and prescribes a “one size fits all” approach to interventions. Instead, States will have the flexibility to design a system that targets efforts to the schools and districts that are the lowest-performing and to schools that have the largest achievement gaps, tailoring interventions to the unique needs of those schools and districts and their students. States will also have flexibility to recognize and reward both schools that are the highest-achieving and those whose students are making the most progress.
And then this paragraph:
States, districts, and schools will gain increased flexibility to use several funding streams in ways they determine best meets their needs, and rural districts will have additional flexibility in using their funds. Funds to meet the needs of particular populations of disadvantaged students will be protected.
I love the phrase “several funding streams” when describing where the money is to come from for this idea of closing the “achievement gap”. I suppose this means that Arne Duncan no longer will be getting billions of dollars to throw around conning states to follow his ideas of ed reform with or without proper funding. So what are these “revenue streams”?
And in this paragraph, the document refers to the state having the responsibility of developing plans for dealing with inequity in schools.
To receive flexibility through these waivers of NCLB requirements, a State must develop a rigorous and comprehensive plan addressing the three critical areas that are designed to improve educational outcomes for all students, close achievement gaps and increase equity, and improve the quality of instruction.
This is starting to sound more and more like NCLB all over again, requirements with no funding, only mandates.
And now, regarding teacher evaluations;
Each State that receives the ESEA flexibility will set basic guidelines for teacher and principal evaluation and support systems. The State and its districts will develop these systems with input from teachers and principals and will assess their performance based on multiple valid measures, including student progress over time and multiple measures of professional practice, and will use these systems to provide clear feedback to teachers on how to improve instruction.
No more merit pay based on test scores? No more needless testing? I am skeptically optimistic.
1.Student Growth: “Student growth” is the change in student achievement for an individual student between two or more points in time. For the purpose of this definition, student achievement means—
·For grades and subjects in which assessments are required under ESEA section 1111(b)(3): (1) a student’s score on such assessments and may include (2) other measures of student learning, such as those described in the second bullet, provided they are rigorous and comparable across schools within an LEA.
·For grades and subjects in which assessments are not required under ESEA section 1111(b)(3): alternative measures of student learning and performance such as student results on pre-tests, end-of-course tests, and objective performance-based assessments; student learning objectives; student performance on English language proficiency assessments; and other measures of student achievement that are rigorous and comparable across schools within an LEA.
Sounds like more unnecessary testing and more money required for expensive computer centered exams. Well, at least someone will profit from this edict.
We’ll see how all of this all plays out.
I will end with this video featuring one of our own, Karran Harper Royal, a founding member of Parents Across America who lives in New Orleans and fights the good fight every day.
Dora
Post Script: September 27, 2011
I just received a description of the NCLB waivers written by the National School Board Association.
It goes as follows:
Conditions for Relief
In order for states to qualify for the waivers, they must meet the following three conditions:
Adopt and implement college- and career-ready standards and assessments.
Administration officials said that states don’t have to use common standards or assessments, but these standards and assessments have to be college and career ready and that states must show they are taking steps to implement them in the classroom.
Develop an accountability system that differentiates schools based on their performance.
They must target the lowest performing 5 percent schools with rigorous interventions, such as those identified in the School Improvement Grant program; must also focus on additional 10 percent of schools that have low graduation rates, large achievement gaps, or poor subgroup performance. The Department of Education officials emphasized that the remedy for these schools will be “locally designed,” but the expectations will be “unequivocal.”
Set guidelines for teacher and principal evaluation systems to support teaching.
These systems will be developed with input from teachers and principals and will assess performance based on “multiple valid measures”, including student progress over time. They will be used to provide clear feedback to teachers on how to improve teaching. The Administration’s plan is silent on how much of the evaluation should be based on student growth and whether the data will be used for rewarding teachers or tenure decisions.
NCLB Waivers
In return, states can request waivers on the law, including the following three key provisions:
States would not have to meet the 100 percent proficiency requirement for 2013-2014.
States can instead set “ambitious but achievable” goals in reading and math.
States would not have to identify schools as failing under the current law.
Instead they have the flexibility to develop an accountability system that targets the lowest performing schools and school districts and tailors interventions to specific students in need.
States would be able to use the currently required 20 percent set-aside local Title I funds for choice and supplemental tutoring services to instead fund other activities that support learning.
This would free up $1 billion for school districts and schools to use for other school improvement strategies—where the state seeks the waiver.
Timeline
States should notify the Department of Education by Oct 12, 2011 for their intent to apply for the waivers. There are two application windows:
• Submit requests by November 13, 2011 for December peer review.
• Submit requests by mid-February, 2012 for Spring review.
Action At The State Level
The extent to which waivers are granted and what local school districts will need to do to meet the conditions for relief will depend on the content of the state application. Working through their state associations, local school boards can have an avenue to influence the content of those applications.
"American education has a long history of infatuation with fads and ill-considered ideas. The current obsession with making our schools work like a business may be the worst of them, for it threatens to destroy public education. Who will stand up to the tycoons and politicians and tell them so?"
Diane Ravitch
Events and Actions
Parents Across America presents:
Moving Forward in Public Education: Ideas That Work
A Panel Discussion
Thursday, May 31st at 6:30 PM
Rainier Beach High School Auditorium
8815 Seward Park Ave. S.
Seattle, WA 98118
Featuring:
Dr. Margit McGuire, Professor and Director, Seattle Universityʼs Teacher Education Program
Sharon Okamoto, Principal, Seattle Urban Academy
Rita Green, parent and PTA vice-president, Rainier Beach High School
Marquita Prinzing, teacher, Sanislo Elementary School
For more information e-mail seattle.paa@gmail.com or call 206-724-5556.
Chris Hedges
"There is something grotesque about the fact that education reform is being led not by educators but by financiers and speculators and billionaires."
Anti charter school resolutions to date
5th District Democrats
27th District Democrats
32nd District Democrats
34th District Democrats
36th District Democrats
37th District Democrats
45th District Democrats
46th District Democrats
Washington State Democrats
Metropolitan Democratic Club of Seattle
Ballard High School PTSA
Ingraham High School PTSA
Jane Addams Elementary PTSA
Nova High School PTSA
Olympic View Elementary School PTSA
The League of Women Voters
UW Alumni Association Multicultural Alumni Partnership
Please send me your resolutions as they are passed (dora.taylor@gmail.com) and I will post them and add the resolution to the list.
“Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them.”
Contact Us
seattle.ed2010@gmail.com
Danny Weil, 2009
"...charter chains would prefer national standards...
This would allow them to use prepackaged curricula across
their charter outlets no matter the location...for dummied
down standardized curriculum keeps costs down and the
dispensation is formulaic and repetitive. This is the Walmart model of education."
"When the country was debating the economic-stimulus plan, policy makers asked economists for advice, and the press frequently provided a forum for them to express their opinions. Yet when discussing education, the experts, those who work with children every day in classrooms, are rarely consulted. It seems to me that if this is a genuine concern, those who best understand the challenges and problems in our schools, namely teachers, should be asked what they think."
DIANE RAVITCH ON SCHOOL CLOSURES
"It is odd that school leaders feel triumphant when they close schools, as though they were not responsible for them. They enjoy the role of executioner, shirking any responsibility for the schools in their care."
