Debunking the Education Deform College Myth

I'm finding that the blogging environment is making me into a much worse writer than when I started out. When I have to do a piece for a print publication I take much more care. Today is the deadline for my column for this Friday's Wave (www.rockawave.com). So I figure I'll do a quickie - just copy and paste a blog item. But when I start reading I find that there's an awful lot of bad writing not fit for print publication - especially since this is a local paper and I will run into people in the gym who might read it and start throwing weights at me. So I start rewriting and one thing leads to another - 3 hours later - I have bits of 3 different posts in an entirely new article. And most verbs actually match the subject.

For publication in the April 1 (already?) edition of The Wave

Debunking the Education Deform College Myth

by Norm Scott

Can we push the idea on kids from the very earliest age that life is a failure if they don't graduate from college?

Shhhhh! Don't tell Sarah Palin that I was palling around with Bill Ayers, the focus of the right wing attacks on Obama for attending some education meetings in the 90's with Ayers, who was a key member of The Weathermen in the 60's. Ayers has become a well-known educator and gave the keynote speech at the NYCORE (NY Collective of Radical Educators) conference last week. Ayers' presentation was both political and pedagogical, focusing on what classrooms and relationships between children and teachers should look like, a far cry from the reality of teaching. But Ayers urged teachers to look for the cracks where they can humanize instruction. Many of the young teachers present say they attempt to practice progressive ed ideas in the cauldron of the testing environment that so dehumanizes schools.

I was involved in a discussion at one of the workshops with a group that included a special ed teacher, two student teachers who are actually doing some teaching, and one community college future teacher. One student teacher talked about her discomfort over being forced to sell kids on going to college as the only way to success considering so many poor kids don't have the means to pay for it or their aptitudes or the interest level seems low. But she didn't want to be accused of the crime of low expectations, where the penalty is death of your career. In the political correct world we live in, educators are afraid to utter the words, "He would be better off working with his hands."

Student loan debt is at $900 billion and it takes a lifetime to pay off that mortgage like loan. Should we be pushing college down people's throats without providing a reasonable path to pay for it? Remember those days when the city university system was free?

Most new jobs being created (73% is a number I've heard) are fairly low paying and will not require a college degree. Walmart and McDonald's are the largest employers in the nation, which means you can hang the name of your college over your cash register as you ask, "Do you want fries with that?" Is that narrow test prep education kids are getting aimed at preparing them to do fairly menial, non-thinking tasks more efficiently? You know longer need to know even basic arithmetic to work a cash register.

Why not open up more vocational opportunities without making it seem like blasphemy? Consider that many white-collar jobs can easily be outsourced while it takes 3 days to get a plumber to come from India.

Paul Krugman, in a March 8, 2011 NY Times piece titled Degrees and Dollars: The hollow promise of good jobs for highly educated workers pointed out that the idea that "modern technology eliminates only menial jobs, that well-educated workers are clear winners [is] actually decades out of date.... since 1990 the U.S. job market has been characterized not by a general rise in the demand for skill, but by 'hollowing out': both high-wage and low-wage employment have grown rapidly, but medium-wage jobs — the kinds of jobs we count on to support a strong middle class — have lagged behind. And the hole in the middle has been getting wider: many of the high-wage occupations that grew rapidly in the 1990s have seen much slower growth recently, even as growth in low-wage employment has accelerated."

The elimination of jobs in the middle goes hand in hand with the assault on public education and the growth of charter schools, which will cull the herd, leaving an underfinanced and under resourced public school system to train kids for the low end jobs.

Krugman makes this case. "Why is this happening? The belief that education is becoming ever more important rests on the plausible-sounding notion that advances in technology increase job opportunities for those who work with information — loosely speaking, that computers help those who work with their minds, while hurting those who work with their hands.... Most of the manual labor still being done in our economy seems to be of the kind that’s hard to automate...."

So are we heading towards Egypt where PhDs are driving cabs? Krugman seems to be pointing us in that direction: "there are things education can’t do. In particular, the notion that putting more kids through college can restore the middle-class society we used to have is wishful thinking. It’s no longer true that having a college degree guarantees that you’ll get a good job, and it’s becoming less true with each passing decade. "

He then offers a solution. "If we want a society of broadly shared prosperity, education isn’t the answer — we’ll have to go about building that society directly. We need to restore the bargaining power that labor has lost over the last 30 years, so that ordinary workers as well as superstars have the power to bargain for good wages. We need to guarantee the essentials, above all health care, to every citizen. What we can’t do is get where we need to go just by giving workers college degrees, which may be no more than tickets to jobs that don’t exist or don’t pay middle-class wages."

Of course it makes sense to have strong unions to counterbalance the overwhelming corporate control of the government. You know those same corporations that cry so hard about high corporate taxes while we see GE pay zero taxes.

A solution or pipe dream? Restore the bargaining power of labor? In this tea party climate we live in? My advice? When you get your PhD, better get your hack license along with it.

Norm blogs at: http://ednotesonline.blogspot.com/
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Check out Norms Notes for a variety of articles of interest: http://normsnotes2.blogspot.com/. And make sure to check out the side panel on right for news bits. Here are some crucial pieces for you to catch up on at Norms Notes:

• Got Dough? How Billionaires Rule Our Schools- Joan...
• Marc Epstein on Deform End Game
• In Fight for Space, Educator Takes On Charter Chai...
• When test scores soared in D.C., were the gains re...
• Another Teacher E4E Would Want Fired

Can You Have Dialogue With Ed Deformers?

At our film (The Inconvenient Truth Behind Waiting for Superman) preview at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn last Saturday, during the discussion afterwards someone said there was an attitude in the film demonizing charter school backers. "There are some good charters," he said. Sam Anderson, who is in the film, was on the panel and said something along the lines of (I'm paraphrasing):

The charter school movement at the macro level will result in the destruction of the public school system, the draining of enormous resources out of the hands of public control and into private hands, and enormous harm to the majority of children over the long run. They should be demonized.

My response (to myself) was: fuck 'em.

Now, Michael Fiorillo, made a similar, but more eloquent than my expletive (as expected) statement in response to a thoughtful essay by Mark Anderson at the Gotham Schools Community board. Anderson talks about Labor and Management. Though Anderson comes from a business background and understands the points of view:

I often find the debates that are ongoing in the education policy world suffer from a lack of explicit acknowledgement of underlying values, even as those debates are really just a fundamental clash of values. As I read articles heralding the decline in union power and calling for budgetary bloodletting in public services, I might posit that some values that the authors would hold are that of efficiency, expediency, and force as an agent of change. As someone who has been in positions of management, I can understand the perspectives that channel from such values. We seek immediate and replicable solutions to problems, to make systems run more smoothly and efficiently, and to increase performance and productivity.

As Diane Ravitch explains in “The Death and Life of the Great American School System,” education leaders such as Joel Klein and Alan Bersin seemed to turn a deaf ears to their employee base as they rammed through reforms, as if this were effective leadership. Michelle Rhee has also most famously exemplified this style of leadership. Problem is, this is not effective leadership. Not in the business world, and most certainly not in the realm of education. At least, not in any sort of sustainable way. It might seemingly work for a few years — in that people conform because they have to —until the results start trickling in. Turnover will be high. Motivation will be low. And increasingly hostile rhetoric and a culture of mistrust will develop between labor and management.

Anderson seems to be scratching his head as to why these so-called business leaders would be using a tactic that will fail in motivating teachers and is calling for a dialogue. between the two sides. What he is missing in that the intentions of the ed deformers is NOT to improve the schools but to take them over, turn over the massive amount of money into private hands while running the rudimentary school system left over on the cheap. THEY HAVE NO GOOD INTENTIONS AND YOU CANNOT ENGAGE IN DIALOGUE WITH PEOPLE WITH NO GOOD INTENTIONS. EVIL MOSKOWITZ INDEED!!!

Phew! I feel better.

Now, on to Michael's much more reasoned response:

When the balance of forces so overwhelmingly favors management and capital, as it currently does in this country, and when those unregulated forces are literally sociopathic, as is the case with the DOE and all urban education systems under mayoral control, then to speak about "building relationships" is naive and preposterous. It's hard to build relationships with people who are trying to kill you. I suggest you ask teachers in Wisconsin about how "dialogue" works in the middle of a class war.


Management's reflex to control labor as a cost and a factor of production, and to make it as fungible as possible, is axiomatic. Rather than reading the fairy tales contained in management how-to manuals found in airport bookracks, I suggest you carefully observe management behavior. In the social darwinist swamp that is the neoliberal economy (and Michael Bloomberg's New York City), behavior is the most honest form of communication. That behavior includes de-skilling labor, eliminating whatever vestiges of autonomy it has, and using that as leverage to reduce its wages, its benefits and maintain unilateral control over the terms of employment. Labor's status in this "partnership" is akin to that of school principal and student council president. They may listen to each other, respect and like each other, but the dynamics of power make it impossible to call it a true partnership. Sure you'll get your meeting, and maybe they'll even agree to serve chocolate milk in the lunchroom, but the parameters of power are set.


Additionally, your analogy about the woman on the subway is false, since as a civilized human being you responded appropriately to her established position by the door. Had you been the DOE (as a proxy for all corporate ed deformers), however, you (and your cronies, contractors, consultants, subsidized researchers, politically-connected vendors, advocacy satellites and astroturf shills) would have grabbed her handbag and pushed her and the people around her out of the way. In fact, you would have grabbed as much of that public space as you could, used it as your own, and proclaimed your munificence to the people you had just evicted.


Take a look around the world we live in, and especially the regime too many teachers in New York work under: can you say with a straight face that those in positions of policy-making and power are "building relationships" and "listening?"


The reality is that management and labor have intrinsically opposing interests, and that only in those rare periods when labor is able to counterbalance management and capital's inherent advantage (which does not exist at the moment) can we achieve the best we can hope for, which is a wary accommodation. Without that, the situation is the one we currently find ourselves in, that of one-sided aggression, deception (and self-deception) and contempt for the public good.

Afterburn
Here are some related blog posts for you to check out if you have time:

Filmmaker Michael Galinsky, a public school parent who I have run into at various events, is going to do a film on education. Here are some of his thoughts.

NYC Educator has 2 must reads over the last few days:

I'm Not Against Tenure, But...

So says faux-Democrat Cory Booker in his love letter to the reformers who put him where he is today. Sure, let's not abolish tenure. Let's simply make it meaningless. The Wal-Mart family did not finance Booker so as to help working people. Wal-Mart money subverts public schools because union is a scourge that must be stopped, so that people can do as they're told, shut the hell up, and work until they die. MORE

The Value of a Teacher

There is no question in my mind that the path we're embarking upon is littered with, reeking of, completely composed of sheer nonsense. We're moving into an evaluation system that relies on "value-added" information, information that can make an exemplary teacher look like an utter incompetent. And we're also playing right into the hands of "reformers," yet again. MORE

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Check out Norms Notes for a variety of articles of interest: http://normsnotes2.blogspot.com/. And make sure to check out the side panel on right for news bits.

The Resistance Strikes Back: Major Hits Undermine Ed Deform Platform

...there are things education can’t do. In particular, the notion that putting more kids through college can restore the middle-class society we used to have is wishful thinking. It’s no longer true that having a college degree guarantees that you’ll get a good job, and it’s becoming less true with each passing decade. 

So if we want a society of broadly shared prosperity, education isn’t the answer — we’ll have to go about building that society directly. We need to restore the bargaining power that labor has lost over the last 30 years, so that ordinary workers as well as superstars have the power to bargain for good wages. We need to guarantee the essentials, above all health care, to every citizen.  
 

- Paul Krugman, NY Times, March 8, 2011

Despite their billionaire supporters and massive control of the media, the ed deformers are starting to take a number of hits. Last week with Ravitch on Jon Stewart and Cavanagh debating ME$ME on NY1 and principals standing up to Tweed and Matt Damon speaking out against high-stakes testing was a good week. Leonie Haimson catalogued some of the victories at the NYC Parent blog: This week, the real reformers finally broke through!

This week is also starting out well. First, let's review some of the major planks of ed deform, all of which will be debunked in this post (and I won't even touch on the testing/charter/choice crap- for now).

• Going to college is necessary to get a good job (the centerpiece of ed deform)
• Merit pay will improve results
• Experience and class size don't matter  
• All we need is harder working teachers to overcome poverty and turn failing schools into wildly successful ones 
• Teacher effectiveness can be determined by value-added formulas

Where shall we start? At the beginning


Going to college is necessary to get a good job

Whenever I hear people yapping about how we have to remain competetive in the tech age - yada, yada, yada - my response is "Tell 'em to become a plumber - if you try to outsource plumbing it takes days for the guy to get to your house from India." John Lawhead 8 years ago was pointing out that less than 30% of the new jobs expected to be created would require a college degree - the bulk of jobs would be McDonald's and Walmart.

Paul Krugman is finally delving into the ed deform bullshit. His Monday's (March 8) NY Times piece Degrees and Dollars: The hollow promise of good jobs for highly educated workers, Krugman corroborates my "be a plumber" line and lays waste to the central tenet being pushed by Obama and translated into charter schools calling their kids "scholars" and having teachers post the name of the college they graduated from (don't look for CUNY colleges) on their classroom doors. Here are a few excerpts in addition to the quotes above- but read it all.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that education is the key to economic success. Everyone knows that the jobs of the future will require ever higher levels of skill. That’s why, in an appearance Friday with former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, President Obama declared that “If we want more good news on the jobs front then we’ve got to make more investments in education.” But what everyone knows is wrong. ....that modern technology eliminates only menial jobs, that well-educated workers are clear winners, may dominate popular discussion, but it’s actually decades out of date.

The fact is that since 1990 or so the U.S. job market has been characterized not by a general rise in the demand for skill, but by “hollowing out”: both high-wage and low-wage employment have grown rapidly, but medium-wage jobs — the kinds of jobs we count on to support a strong middle class — have lagged behind. And the hole in the middle has been getting wider: many of the high-wage occupations that grew rapidly in the 1990s have seen much slower growth recently, even as growth in low-wage employment has accelerated.

Why is this happening? The belief that education is becoming ever more important rests on the plausible-sounding notion that advances in technology increase job opportunities for those who work with information — loosely speaking, that computers help those who work with their minds, while hurting those who work with their hands.... Most of the manual labor still being done in our economy seems to be of the kind that’s hard to automate.

...there are things education can’t do. In particular, the notion that putting more kids through college can restore the middle-class society we used to have is wishful thinking. It’s no longer true that having a college degree guarantees that you’ll get a good job, and it’s becoming less true with each passing decade. 

 CHECK

Merit pay will improve results

Roland Fryer at http://www.nber.org/papers/w16850.    If anything, teacher incentives may decrease student achievement, especially in larger schools. Third paper showing no gains in NYC; at least fifth or sixth study overall. And yet the US Govt. under Duncan seems intent on throwing away millions in our tax payer funds on this nonsense.  

Financial incentives for teachers to increase student performance is an increasingly popular education policy around the world. This paper describes a school-based randomized trial in over two-hundred New York City public schools designed to better understand the impact of teacher incentives on student achievement.

I find no evidence that teacher incentives increase student performance, attendance, or graduation, nor do I find any evidence that the incentives change student or teacher behavior. If anything, teacher incentives may decrease student achievement, especially in larger schools. The paper concludes with a speculative discussion of theories that may explain these stark results.

 CHECK

Experience doesn't matter

Even as New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg,  Michelle Rhee and others around the nation are arguing for experienced teachers to be laid off regardless of seniority, every single study shows teaching experience matters.

In fact, the only two observable factors that have been found consistently to lead to higher student achievement are class size and teacher experience, so that it’s ironic that these same individuals are trying to undermine both.

Generally speaking the corporate reformers argue that only the first few years of experience matter, though you can see from these charts from a study by Thomas J. Kane, now at the Gates foundation, Jonah E. Rockoff and Douglas O. Staiger  that at year five, effectiveness is still going up for all categories other than uncertified teachers.

MORE at How Teaching Experience Makes a Difference

CHECK

Class size doesn't matter 

NY Times: Class Size Rising 

Leonie Haimson debating class size on MSNBC

All we need is harder working teachers to overcome poverty and turn failing schools into wildly successful ones 

Same Kids, Same Building, Same Lies

One of the highlights of the TFA 20th anniversary summit was certainly when Secretary of Education Arne Duncan made a rousing speech at the closing ceremony. The most impressive part of his speech was when he described the transformation of Englewood High School in Chicago while he was heading that school district. He said that they shut it down because 60% of the students were not graduating. They replaced it with three charter schools. One of those charters, the all boys Urban Prep, just graduated their first class and 107 out of 107 graduated and got accepted to college. He says then “Same children, same community, same poverty, same violence, same building, different adults, different expectations, different sense of what’s possible and that made all the difference”

it was not the ‘same children’ attending Urban Prep as would have attended Englewood High School.  They had the typical lottery which excludes certain families.  It also had a mandatory three week program for students who got accepted, which eliminated even more students.  And then, they did the typical ‘weeding out’ of kids who weren’t performing.

CHECK

Teacher effectiveness can be determined by value-added formulas


Michael Winerip has a powerful story about Ms. Isaacson, who looks to be a good teacher by all counts but will probably be denied tenure. Ms. Eyre writes about it at NYC Educator: A Note to Ms. Isaacson
Here are some excerpts from Winerip, who has always been a champion of true reform - if he keeps this up look for him to once again be move from the ed beat to something like covering real estate.

Evaluating New York Teachers, Perhaps the Numbers Do Lie- NYTimes

You would think the Department of Education would want to replicate Ms. Isaacson — who has degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia — and sprinkle Ms. Isaacsons all over town. Instead, the department’s accountability experts have developed a complex formula to calculate how much academic progress a teacher’s students make in a year — the teacher’s value-added score — and that formula indicates that Ms. Isaacson is one of the city’s worst teachers.
According to the formula, Ms. Isaacson ranks in the 7th percentile among her teaching peers — meaning 93 per cent are better.
This may seem disconnected from reality, but it has real ramifications. Because of her 7th percentile, Ms. Isaacson was told in February that it was virtually certain that she would not be getting tenure this year. “My principal said that given the opportunity, she would advocate for me,” Ms. Isaacson said. “But she said don’t get your hopes up, with a 7th percentile, there wasn’t much she could do.”
That’s not the only problem Ms. Isaacson’s 7th percentile has caused. If the mayor and governor have their way, and layoffs are no longer based on seniority but instead are based on the city’s formulas that scientifically identify good teachers, Ms. Isaacson is pretty sure she’d be cooked.
She may leave anyway. She is 33 and had a successful career in advertising and finance before taking the teaching job, at half the pay.
“I love teaching,” she said. “I love my principal, I feel so lucky to work for her. But the people at the Department of Education — you feel demoralized.”
How could this happen to Ms. Isaacson? It took a lot of hard work by the accountability experts.

Now look at this idiot response from the DOE

In an e-mail, Matthew Mittenthal, a department spokesman said: “We are saying that a teacher’s tenure decision should simply be delayed (not denied) until that teacher has demonstrated effective practice for consecutive years in all three categories. The alternative is what we’ve had in the past — 90-plus percent of teachers who are up for tenure receive it. Do you think journalists deserve lifetime jobs after their third year in the business?”

Hey Matt, guess what?  Stacey Isaacson is OUTAHERE! and much better off for it. The second the economy improves she will be joined by a mass exodus. See: REPORT CARD: “Who Wants to be a Teacher Now?” from the Brooklyn Rail. Also see Stephen Lazar at Gotham: Turnover ideas from a teacher whose colleagues keep leaving.

DOUBLE CHECK

There's even a piece from the venerable Sol Stern: Bloomy's bubble bursts:
Nothing illuminates the vacancy of Bloomberg’s mayoralty more than the false narrative that depicted him as America’s “education mayor.”

TRIPLE CHECK
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Check out Norms Notes for a variety of articles of interest: http://normsnotes2.blogspot.com/. And make sure to check out the side panel on right for news bits.

Ed Deform and Neoliberalism

People are comparing Egypt and Wisconsin. The link? Neoliberalism. Tattoo the word on your arm. Look at the entire ed deform program in the context of neoliberalism. Naomi Klein's "The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism" is the bible ed deform resisters. Paul Krugman on Friday referenced Klein's groundbreaking work. Now if only Krugman would tie the  string to the ed deforms and tell people that charter schools are the battering ram of neoliberal assault on the public school system. Leonie Haimson's husband, Michael Oppenheimer, teaches at Princeton with Krugman. Michael should whisper sweet anti ed deformer words in his ear.

Confused about the Democratic Party support for ed deform? The Clintons are classic neoliberals and the rest of the party is in step.

Confused about why the UFT/AFT/MulGarten crew won't put up a defense? They too are neoliberals, who are close relatives of neocons. That was why Vera Pavone and I titled our review of Richard Kahlenberg's "Albert Shanker: Tough Liberal" Albert Shanker: Ruthless Neocon. We could easily have called it "Ruthless Neoliberal" but didn't want to confuse people who think neolineral is a modernized version of classic American liberalism when it is exactly the opposite.

Union leaders like Weingarten differ from the anti-union neoliberals in that they feel unions should exist - naturally - but in limited format - in support of the government/corporate state more than the membership. But of course they support the concept of unions - look how well they have done as leaders who misdirect the energies of the members. That is why Weingarten is helping find ways to get rid of teachers. See NYC Educator: A Fine Day for a Sellout

With the myriad of anti-teacher crap pervading the headlines, AFT President Randi Weingarten thinks it's a good time to discuss faster ways to fire us

If things ever get sticky just watch where they stand.

What is neoliberalism?

Yves Smith at http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/02/al-jazeera-on-egypts-revolt-against-neoliberalism.html  has the links:

In his Brief History of Neoliberalism, the eminent social geographer David Harvey outlined “a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterised by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade.”

Neoliberal states guarantee, by force if necessary, the “proper functioning” of markets; where markets do not exist (for example, in the use of land, water, education, health care, social security, or environmental pollution), then the state should create them.

Guaranteeing the sanctity of markets is supposed to be the limit of legitimate state functions, and state interventions should always be subordinate to markets. All human behavior, and not just the production of goods and services, can be reduced to market transactions.

And the application of utopian neoliberalism in the real world leads to deformed societies as surely as the application of utopian communism did…..

KRUGMAN ARTICLE BELOW THE FOLD

Shock Doctrine, U.S.A.

By PAUL KRUGMAN



Published: February 24, 2011

Here’s a thought: maybe Madison, Wis., isn’t Cairo after all. Maybe it’s Baghdad — specifically, Baghdad in 2003, when the Bush administration put Iraq under the rule of officials chosen for loyalty and political reliability rather than experience and competence.


As many readers may recall, the results were spectacular — in a bad way. Instead of focusing on the urgent problems of a shattered economy and society, which would soon descend into a murderous civil war, those Bush appointees were obsessed with imposing a conservative ideological vision. Indeed, with looters still prowling the streets of Baghdad, L. Paul Bremer, the American viceroy, told a Washington Post reporter that one of his top priorities was to “corporatize and privatize state-owned enterprises” — Mr. Bremer’s words, not the reporter’s — and to “wean people from the idea the state supports everything.”
The story of the privatization-obsessed Coalition Provisional Authority was the centerpiece of Naomi Klein’s best-selling book “The Shock Doctrine,” which argued that it was part of a broader pattern. From Chile in the 1970s onward, she suggested, right-wing ideologues have exploited crises to push through an agenda that has nothing to do with resolving those crises, and everything to do with imposing their vision of a harsher, more unequal, less democratic society.
Which brings us to Wisconsin 2011, where the shock doctrine is on full display.
In recent weeks, Madison has been the scene of large demonstrations against the governor’s budget bill, which would deny collective-bargaining rights to public-sector workers. Gov. Scott Walker claims that he needs to pass his bill to deal with the state’s fiscal problems. But his attack on unions has nothing to do with the budget. In fact, those unions have already indicated their willingness to make substantial financial concessions — an offer the governor has rejected.
What’s happening in Wisconsin is, instead, a power grab — an attempt to exploit the fiscal crisis to destroy the last major counterweight to the political power of corporations and the wealthy. And the power grab goes beyond union-busting. The bill in question is 144 pages long, and there are some extraordinary things hidden deep inside.
For example, the bill includes language that would allow officials appointed by the governor to make sweeping cuts in health coverage for low-income families without having to go through the normal legislative process.
And then there’s this: “Notwithstanding ss. 13.48 (14) (am) and 16.705 (1), the department may sell any state-owned heating, cooling, and power plant or may contract with a private entity for the operation of any such plant, with or without solicitation of bids, for any amount that the department determines to be in the best interest of the state. Notwithstanding ss. 196.49 and 196.80, no approval or certification of the public service commission is necessary for a public utility to purchase, or contract for the operation of, such a plant, and any such purchase is considered to be in the public interest and to comply with the criteria for certification of a project under s. 196.49 (3) (b).”
What’s that about? The state of Wisconsin owns a number of plants supplying heating, cooling, and electricity to state-run facilities (like the University of Wisconsin). The language in the budget bill would, in effect, let the governor privatize any or all of these facilities at whim. Not only that, he could sell them, without taking bids, to anyone he chooses. And note that any such sale would, by definition, be “considered to be in the public interest.”
If this sounds to you like a perfect setup for cronyism and profiteering — remember those missing billions in Iraq? — you’re not alone. Indeed, there are enough suspicious minds out there that Koch Industries, owned by the billionaire brothers who are playing such a large role in Mr. Walker’s anti-union push, felt compelled to issue a denial that it’s interested in purchasing any of those power plants. Are you reassured?
The good news from Wisconsin is that the upsurge of public outrage — aided by the maneuvering of Democrats in the State Senate, who absented themselves to deny Republicans a quorum — has slowed the bum’s rush. If Mr. Walker’s plan was to push his bill through before anyone had a chance to realize his true goals, that plan has been foiled. And events in Wisconsin may have given pause to other Republican governors, who seem to be backing off similar moves.
But don’t expect either Mr. Walker or the rest of his party to change those goals. Union-busting and privatization remain G.O.P. priorities, and the party will continue its efforts to smuggle those priorities through in the name of balanced budgets.

She's Coming For The Ed Deformers - and MulGarten Too

UPDATED: Sept. 14, 2am:

The ed deform press promotes Evan Stone and Sydney Morris and their bogus "alternative to the UFT" - see the Wall St. Journal headliner today

Teachers Break Union Ranks

They claim to have 700 supporters but they will prove to have zero presence in the long run.

The Journal's Barbara Martinez writes hopefully:

"While that's a pittance compared with the nearly 80,000 teachers under the UFT, her nascent movement may represent the seeds of a growing population of teachers who are breaking ranks with the traditional tenets of unionism."

Sure, Barbara, keep praying. Already Evan and Sydney have left teaching:


"This school year, Ms. Morris and Mr. Stone took a break from teaching and are instead working on building up their organization, including identifying "school captains" at the city's schools—much like the UFT has a "chapter leader" at every public school."

That should enhance their creds with real teachers as they see Evan and Sydney getting hedge hog type funding. I can't wait to see these "school captains."

[UPDATE: See Ms Eyre's brilliant piece on Evan and Sydney now running at NYC Educator. Educators 4 Actually Being Educators].

The Real Reformers stand up
The press ignores a fairly recent current within the UFT that represents the same generation of teachers as Evan and Sydney as represented by groups like NYCORE (2000 members on the listserve) and Teachers Unite which also has lots of people signed up. And GEM has managed to attract some real young activists who make Evan and Sydney look like the joke they are.

Now these people are virulently pro-union and anti Ed Deform while they call for a more progressive system of education reform. They don't buy the pablum that if you just work 24 hours a day you will accomplish Michelle Rhee like miracles. They call for real reforms like reduction in class size and increased resources. And they are totally opposed to charter school co-locations. They are the people working on a response to "Waiting for Superman" and other exciting projects.

But there's another wrinkle. While Evan and Sydney are presenting themselves as not anti union but as offering an alternative to the UFT, the real reformers are also showing a willingness to be critical of the MulGarten type of Unity Caucus leadership. Evan and Sydney want to destroy the UFT. The Real Reformers not only want to reform the schools, but the union too. They seek to build a democratic union that would support a democratically run public education system.

Oh yeah. They are uniformly superb teachers at the top of their game, amongst the most respected in their schools. 

If you didn't read the Michael Mulgrew "Welcome Back" letter I posted yesterday that was reworked to express what is really going on, go forth immediately and read it:

Welcome to the new school year … Remix

To me the most important thing about the Remix is that it was written by one of the new Real Reformers, a still young teacher who not very long ago had a different view of the UFT. The teacher began teaching in NYC right out of college 10 years ago (thus spending the bulk of the career under BloomKlein).  Just a short time ago this teacher would argue that addressing UFT related issues in terms of the actions of the leadership was not worth putting time and effort into.

I wrote in the into to the Remix that the Mulgrew letter had stirred a hornets next and the Remix is the result. If more teachers of this generation become hornets and start nesting together, a serious opposition within the UFT might yet emerge.

If you are a fan of the Stieg Larsson novels with its unique heroine, I can't help thinking that the Remix author may be representative of what I will call the Lisbeth Salander generation of teachers. Smart and tough, taking no crap from anyone. And capable of reaching out to parents and community and to other teachers. I've seen some of them with long careers ahead stand up and openly challenge BloomKlein time and again. If they get organized and turn their sights on BloomKlein and MulGarten - and Sydney and Evan's phony movement  - there will be more than a few hornet stings to go around.

KIPP is the way the white and powerful want the poor of color to be educated — A Question for Obama: Why Does KIPP Not Look Like Sidwell?

The achievement gap has left the stadium, ladies and gentlemen, while growth models have taken the stage.  Now that the urban school systems have been blown up, thus clearing the way for the corporate charterites,  the canyon between test scores of the rich and poor is no longer of interest.  Indeed, the achievement gap has become a "mindless measure," to use the words of Jay Mathews.
....Jim Horn 

KIPP is the way the white and powerful want the poor of color to be educated... Ira Socol

This stuff is so good, I've delayed leaving for the beach to get it out there. Jim Horn put up a scathing piece the other day, including videos, at Schools Matter and followed up today. He delves into the shifting vocabulary from closing the achievement gap to the current quality teaching/value added craze and explains it this way:

this new value-added universe is not even interested in those troublesome group comparisons any longer that are based on the poverty chasm. Unless, of course, the reformers need to shut down your neighborhood school and turn it into a corporate-styled testing madrasah, i. e., charter school. Then your percentile ranking becomes a crucial tool in deciding who is in that bottom five percent that just keeps replenishing itself as the last group is scraped off to become charterized.

Jim nails exactly what the Tweed yokels are trying to pull off with their road show explaining the test score gap. Oh my God. This stuff is getting me hot. Screw the beach. Here is a section from Jim's Sept. 1 post:

Below is an open online letter from Ira Socol to the President.  I have ventured to add a few comments and a couple of video clips.

Dear President Obama,

I wanted to discuss the things you believe are "innovative in education," just so I might assure you that in this field - in the field of America's future - your administration is doing irreparable harm.

 "Students at both KIPP and Achievement First schools follow a system for classroom behavior invented by Levin and Feinberg called Slant, which instructs them to sit up, listen, ask questions, nod and track the speaker with their eyes." Yes, the first thing KIPP teaches is Calvinist church behaviour. "They all called out at once, “Nodding!"' Yes. Stare at your master. Sit still. Nod to demonstrate your compliance. Speak in unison according to the script.

Mr. President, this is not innovation. We know this formula. It drove the colonialist education systems of Wales and Ireland in the 18th and 19th centuries. It was the hallmark of British Colonial Schools from Lagos to Cape Town to Delhi. It was the path followed by the U.S. government's Indian Schools.

Read the entire piece at Schools Matter: Why Does KIPP Not Look Like Sidwell?

In today's excellent follow-up responding to Jay Mathews, including this:

Jay and the the new generation of reformers doing the same thing as the last generation (when will they become the status quo?) would rather look at test score growth over time, especially when big achievement gap closing claims by your favorite politicians do not materialize. Focusing on individual gains makes the disparity between the haves and the have-nots much easier to ignore, since this new value-added universe is not even interested in those troublesome group comparisons any longer that are based on the poverty chasm. Unless, of course, the reformers need to shut down your neighborhood school and turn it into a corporate-styled testing madrasah, i. e., charter school. Then your percentile ranking becomes a crucial tool in deciding who is in that bottom five percent that just keeps replenishing itself as the last group is scraped off to become charterized.

The New Status Quo
I love the "when will they become the status quo" line? We have been having fun with this idea here in NY by referring to BloomKlein in just that way. As a matter of fact, we have been forming a group to do street theater called "The Status Quo Players." Even thinking of tee-shirts. How's this? STATUS and QUO shirts with an arrow pointing to the left saying "I'm with QUO"? Here is the intro to Jim's piece today:

"Irrepressible" Bloggers vs. the Borg

Jay Mathews is the insider's insider on corporate education reform issues, serving as the media mouthpiece for the psychological sterilization movement of KIPP and the KIPP knock-offs.  The Elder himself, Bill Gates, carries a supply of Jay's KIPP book to hand out to anyone interested in the Oligarchs' choice of a final solution to educating the poor and the brown of urban America.

At the same time KIPP is becoming the urban model for corporate ed reform, the movement is in the process of pivoting from the the phony campaign under Bush ostensibly to close the black-white achievement gap, with the same high expectations for all, thus avoiding "the soft bigotry of low expectations," blah-blah, to a new phony campaign of assuring that poor children have the same access to high quality teachers and schools because education is now the "civil rights issue of our generation."  Blah, blah, blah.  While the pivot leaves in place the high-stakes standardized testing that declared 30-40 percent of public schools failures and charter targets under the last 9 years of NCLB,  the pivot demands a shift in what is measured by the tests and how it is measured.  The achievement gap has left the stadium, ladies and gentlemen, while growth models have taken the stage.  Now that the urban school systems have been blown up, thus clearing the way for the corporate charterites

The focus now is on "a year's worth of individual student growth" for a year's worth of teaching (much more on this later, with a feature on the Wizard of Oz, Bill Sanders).  In short, the new target of corporate ed reform is to blow up, or disrupt, the teaching profession by measuring effective teaching on how much test score growth a teacher can oversee.  And as the new CEO-led KIPP chain gangs are to replace urban public schools, so then an endless stream of non-union white missionary temps are being prepared to replace the professionals who now staff the urban schools.  Test score gains, or lack thereof, will be used to justify the firing of professionals and the use of temps from TFA and the TFA knock-offs that Arne fondly calls alternative teacher certification programs.

So Jay defends KIPP - of course. Discipline is exaggerated. Ira Socol left comments on Mathews' blog, to which Mathews responded. Here are a few excerpts but head over to the piece when you are through here to read it all.

So yes Jay, I have been in KIPP schools...I have been in KIPP schools (3) and - personally - I have found them terrifying.

But more than that Jay, I have some really extensive experience in the types of communities KIPP seeks to serve. I know these kids, and I know what they could do if they were offered the kind of educational opportunities available at Sidwell (or Cranbrook, or St. Ann's or etc).

And I know one more thing. Barack and Michelle would never send their daughters to a KIPP school, nor tolerate KIPP-style education in any school their daughters attended. As I've said, KIPP is the way the white and powerful want the poor of color to be educated. But they aren't suggesting it because that's a path to equality. They are suggesting it for just the opposite reason - they don't want the competition for their own children. 

What concerned me? An absolute lack of tolerance for mental, learning, and behavioural diversity, in classroom after classroom, corridor after corridor. Of course I come from a Special Education background, so this was far more disturbing than it might be to others. I also found the brutality of teacher-student, and especially in Indianapolis, administrator-student communication fairly shocking. If you would send your grandchildren there, you're a different kind of parent than I am.

In Chicago I saw a young teacher working one-on-one with a series of students who needed reading help. A few things stood out. The students who came to him were all, quite obviously, struggling with different aspects of the reading process. One had essentially no phonological awareness, one was really struggling with the symbols (he could not, as an example, associate the lower case letters with the equivalent upper case letters), a third read fluently but with almost zero comprehension.

The teacher, very clearly untrained in any of this, repeated the same efforts with all the kids. He was clearly operating from a script. And as his efforts inevitably failed, he became angry with the students, repeatedly blaming them for "not trying hard enough." The child with no phonological awareness was called "lazy" repeatedly. KIPP only phenomenon? Of course not, but I saw similar scenes throughout all the buildings.

in KIPP classrooms I have seen teachers encourage children to humiliate others. And this is done with the "pack" using the same words, as if scripted. You may see that as positive, I see it as hazing, and perhaps a significant reason for KIPP's rather stunning attrition rate. http://epicpolicy.org/newsletter/2010/06/new-kipp-study-underestimates-attrition-effects-0 A rate the KIPP Foundation seems to go to great lengths to obscure. 

I could go on but I'm getting giddy. Read more here:

"Irrepressible" Bloggers vs. the Borg