The Corporate Oligarchy's Mis-Education Nation 2010: Review #2 of Microsoft-NBC's Coverage

Conservative pundit, John Merrow weighs in on the all-out corporate blitzkrieg against public education on Microsoft-NBC.  From a post at HuffPo:

. . . Which brings me to Education Nation, the extravaganza hosted by NBC and broadcast on NBC and MSNBC. It had it all: good, bad and ugly.

You probably know the basics: a huge commitment by NBC to cover 'the crisis in public education.' Everyone got into the act: Matt Lauer and the President on the Today Show, David Gregory on Meet the Press on Sunday, and Brian Williams on NBC Nightly News.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan seemingly dropped everything to be on hand. On Monday he participated in a long one-on-one live broadcast about teaching as a career with Tom Brokaw with cutaways to correspondents on four university campuses. He announced a new federal loan forgiveness program (eerily similar to one that existed in the 1970's). On Tuesday he took part in the final wrap up session with governors, US Representatives, Mayors, school principals and teachers and even one student.

All good so far, right? Who can be against public discussion of education's importance?
Usually the devil is in the details, but in this case the devil was right there in the basic skeleton and structure of the event. This wasn't even remotely a search for truth or an exercise in journalism. It was pretty much Johnny One Note, with no room for depth or dissent.

The message was pretty simple: We have an education crisis because we have bad teachers who are protected by evil teacher unions, and the solutions are good charter schools and great teachers. That sounds suspiciously like "Waiting for 'Superman,' " and so you won't be surprised to learn that one of the opening events of Education Nation was a screening of the movie. (I missed that because I was flying home from Texas.)

I kept hoping that someone would be even a tiny bit skeptical about our test-score driven schools. Wouldn't just one person wonder whether we should stop asking 'How intelligent are you?' and ask instead 'How are you intelligent?' (Never happened, not in any session I attended.)

With the awful truth that 6,000 kids drop out every school day staring them in the face, wouldn't someone question the wisdom of extending both the school day and the school year? I mean, what are these dropouts leaving behind? (Never happened, far as I heard.)

People on the stage moaned about the antiquated (agrarian) calendar and the fact that schools still look and act as they did 50 or 75 years ago -- and then suggested that what our kids need are more hours and days of this!

When the details of the event were first announced, the blogosphere lit up with protests about the lack of teachers. NBC responded immediately and recruited perhaps 50 teachers, bringing them to New York all expenses paid (the Waldorf!). Some were asked to present 'mini-lessons' at the beginning of sessions, and the ones I caught were lively and challenging.

When some thoughtless soul at NBC named the session on New Orleans "Does Education Need Another Katrina?" the blogosphere erupted again, and that session was promptly renamed.

Unfortunately, NBC never did respond to calls for diversity of thought, and respected folks like Diane Ravitch were excluded (despite her willingness to participate, from what I heard).

Education Nation was basically a series of panel discussions. I paid particular attention to the moderators because I do a fair amount of that sort of work. Brian Williams gets an A in my grading book. He was beyond good. He was well informed, funny, provocative and fair.

And now to ugly. The one panel that had some real diversity of opinion was ruined by inept moderating by Steven Brill, who brought to the table his own strong views about unions and didn't even attempt to be fair. It's fine for a moderator to be skeptical -- I believe that's part of the job description -- but it's essential to spread that skepticism around evenly. Mr. Brill kissed up to the side he favors (Geoff Canada and Michelle Rhee) and jumped all over Randi Weingarten of the AFT and Dennis Van Roekel of the NEA. What could have been a powerful conversation about contracts, seniority and tenure turned into an embarrassing food fight. Mr. Brill gets an F, but so does whoever at NBC chose him in the first place.

So why wasn't Education Nation set up to be real journalism? Was it the sponsors, The University of Phoenix and the Broad and Gates Foundations? I have had grants from those two foundations and have not found them to be interfering in our journalism, even though both have agendas. Did it on this occasion? I don't know. Why on earth would NBC accept the sponsorship of an education event from a for-profit education organization that is under investigation for some of its practices?

Some critics of Education Nation are finding the silver lining, saying things like, "A national dialogue is a good thing."

Well, I'm looking hard for signs of a dialogue, but what I am finding instead are lines hardening between two camps. Scarily, it reminds me of the abortion/choice battle. Right now it's in the naming stage. Those who were excluded from Education Nation are calling their opponents 'anti-teacher' and 'anti public education,' while the Education Nation crowd is labeling its antagonists 'defenders of bad education' and 'protectors of inept teachers'.. . .

. . . .

NBC says it's going to do this again next year. Let's hope so. There's certainly room for improvement.

CMO Update

ICEF, a Los Angeles-based CMO, announced this week that they are in debt in the short- and long-term, and unlikely to meet payroll deadlines.  Philanthropists, including the Broad Foundation, had to raise $3 million to keep the organization afloat.  Mike Piscal, the fiery CEO, will become the academic leader while Caprice Young steps in to right the ship.  Young is a former LAUSD board member, former CEO of the California Charter Schools Association, a current partner (with Tom Vander Ark) at Revolution Learning, and a former DFER board member.  She's done other things, too - that's just a partial list (she's on the Board of Trustees at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, for instance).

Yesterday, Duncan announced $50,000,000 for charter school expansion, including grants to Achievement First, Aspire, KIPP, Eva Moskowitz's Success Network, and a handful of other organizations.  

Not to be outdone, the Charter School Growth Fund announced a new $160,000,000 fundraising campaign.

The Corporate Oligarchy's Mis-Education Nation 2010: Review #1

It's by Valerie Strauss, and it's a good one.  Valerie does not mention that the sponsors for Microsoft-NBC's corporate ed love fest are the University of Phoenix, now under federal investigation, and the Gates and Broad Foundations, which should be under criminal investigation:

NBC News president Steve Capus said that his network’s Education Nation summit this week -- a multi-day affair that included interviews with President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan -- would be a fair, serious look at public education today.

It wasn’t even close.

The events, panels and discussions were sharply tilted toward Obama's school reform agenda -- focused in part on closing failing schools, expanding charter schools and using standardized test scores to evaluate teachers. It gave short shrift to the enormous backlash against the plan from educators and parents around the country who say that Obama's education priorities won't improve schools but will narrow curriculum and drive good teachers out of the profession.

NBC seemed to take for granted that Obama’s education policies are sound and will be effective. Seasoned journalists failed to ask hard questions and fell all over their subjects to be sympathetic. It was a forum for people to repeatedly misstate the positions of their opponents.

The one school district that was the subject of a panel was New Orleans, which was remade after Hurricane Katrina with public charter schools. (Never mind that charter schools educate less than five percent of the schoolchildren in the country and can never be a systemic solution to the troubles that ail urban districts.)

A panel on innovation was packed with charter school folks, sending a message that only charter schools are innovative, which they, by and large, are not.

Before Education Nation's televised panels, some participants in New York were treated to a screening of the movie "Waiting for Superman," a documentary that significantly skews the reality of public education. It, for example, blames teachers unions for failing schools, without noting that the problems remain the same in non-unionized states. On a panel that followed, the only person defending teachers was American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, who could have used some help.

Matt Lauer interviewed Obama; Tom Brokaw interviewed Duncan; Andrea Mitchell interviewed D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee. (“Michelle, you’ve been through so much, and you’ve been so plainspoken,” Mitchell said sympathetically, ignoring the fact that Rhee has, in fact, not been as plainspoken as all that.)

Other journalists interviewed other school reformers with little journalistic pushback. Sometimes credit was given where credit wasn't due. David Gregory said to Duncan:

“President Bush isn’t often given credit for driving accountability because No Child Left Behind became unpopular, and yet, indeed, that accountability is what the Obama administration has built on.”
 
Actually, No Child Left Behind became unpopular because it didn’t create real accountability and subverted teachers by putting standardized tests at the center of the learning experience.

The Obama administration is taking that obsession with standardized tests to a new level, funding programs that pay teachers by the test scores of their students. It doesn't seem to matter that such merit pay plans have been used off and on since the 1920s with less than stellar results, as education historian Diane Ravitch explained in this piece.
NBC is not the only media outlet to seemingly take for granted that Obama’s education initiative is the answer to fixing failing schools.

The recent project by the Los Angeles Times, in which some 6,000 teachers were evaluated solely on the basis of student test scores, was another example of a news organization promoting a highly controversial way to assess teachers as effective. The largest study to date on the “value-added” method of teacher evaluation, released earlier this month [from Vanderbilt University], found that linking test scores to teachers’ pay was not effective. That didn’t stop the Obama administration from handing out hundreds of millions of dollars to states to develop such programs. The study and earlier ones like it were not a big topic at Education Nation.

The New York Times' film critic reviewed “Waiting for Superman” and seemed to take as gospel the tendentious narrative in the film. Meanwhile, CBS anchor Katie Couric wrote about her Waiting for Superman impressions on her Couric & Co. blog:

“I was so inspired by how this documentary shines a light on so many issues -- the heartbreak of kids who don’t get into charter schools, the controversy over teachers’ unions and the failure factories that churn out kids who are unprepared or drop out in terrifying numbers. I admire the revolutionaries who are out there shaking up a broken system. So I became obsessed with covering with this story from multiple angles, and we’ve decided to spend a great deal of time this fall and throughout the school year looking at education.”

Capus and Lisa Gersh, NBC's president of strategic initiatives, told journalists at the National Press Club in Washington D.C. last week that the televised Education Nation Summit was not designed to support Obama's agenda and was intended to be the start of the network's focused look at education. Couric announced that CBS, like NBC, was launching a series of reports on education.

Education, the subject that people have long said was super-important but that never got much coverage, is suddenly huge news. The question is why it is not being examined with the same skeptical view that, say, Obama’s health care proposal was.

Obama-style school reform also became the focus of not one but two episodes of the Oprah Winfrey Show last week, though one would not expect a journalistic objectivity from an entertainment show.

On one episode, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg used the occasion to announce to the world that he was donating $100 million to the ailing Newark, N.J., public school system for Obama-style business-driven reforms.

The money comes with strings, the most important that he, a man with no background in education reform, gets to decide what schools are working, according to this story in New Jersey's Star-Ledger.

Billionaires picking out school districts they want to help: What a great way to fund public education.
All this cheerleading for the administration can’t take away from this: There are excellent reasons, as well as evidence, to show that many of its education policies won’t work, and some may be counterproductive.

The biggest study of charter schools yet shows that only 17 percent of them are more effective than their neighborhood traditional public schools, and that more than double are worse. The tough prescription that Obama and Duncan have written for failing schools has proved to be more punitive than helpful, and has not worked in improving a majority of the schools that have undergone the process.

There will come a time when this current wave of “reform” proves as unsuccessful as past fads -- and journalists may look back on their fawning coverage and be very, very sorry that they gave their objectivity on this subject.

The problem is that the schools will likely be in worse shape then than they are today.

The Rewards of Leafleting

I joined some folks from Citizens for Public Education and FairTest who have been out leafleting in West Newton and Brookline, where previews are being held this week in advance of the nationwide release tomorrow, I think, of Waiting for Superman.  Many of the attendees are the well-heeled, but there are many teachers attending, too.  And many are grateful for an summary of the main facts to go along with the misleading melodrama in abundance in the film. 

Please do use the materials below to craft your own "free facts," which I smile and offer moviegoers.  Make the paper colorful, and make your group colorful, too.

The Real Facts About Waiting for Superman, prepared by Mass. Citizens for Public Schools and FairTest - available as a flyer in pdf and in text below so you can adapt it for your own use.
 

The Facts About Waiting for Superman

Waiting for Superman may be good melodrama, but the movie fails the test of accuracy, and its purported solutions will not improve education.

We agree: Too many young people, mostly low-income, do not graduate from high school or get a strong education. The questions are why, and what can be done about it. Waiting for Superman and its unprecedented hype risk leading us dangerously astray from real solutions to real problems by making a number of misleading or factually incorrect claims in a number of important areas:

Public school quality: The most recent Phi Delta Kappan/Gallup poll found that 77% of Americans would give the public school their oldest child attends an A or a B. Does this suggest our public schools are failing across the board, as WFS says? In international comparisons, most of our middle class schools do well. Under resourced schools that serve low-income kids who are disproportionately African American, Latino, or recent immigrants, do far less well. However, they face challenges that schools, alone, can never address adequately.  Improving schools is part of the solution - but the changes must help all children obtain a high-quality education.

Poverty: Poverty matters a lot – and the movie shows that it does, even while trying to tell us it does not. The Harlem Children’s Zone spends heavily to provide services to needy children and their families, services the government does not provide. Two-thirds of HCZ funding is private, not public – making it like a well-funded private school. Who will pay for these services for all the children who need them?

Unions: States with the most unionized teachers do better than states with weaker or fewer unions, and countries with strong educational systems mostly have strong teacher unions. WSF’s demonization of unions ignores the real evidence.

Tenure: Tenure says you cannot be fired without due process and a good reason: you can’t be fired because the boss wants to hire his cousin, or because you are gay (or black or…), or because you take an unpopular position on a public issue outside of school. A recent survey found that most principals agreed they could fire if they needed to. While WSF may have its own opinions on the value of tenure, it may not have its own facts.

Charter schools: Charter schools get public money but are run by private groups, which means there is less public oversight. The most extensive national study found that 46% of charters did about the same as regular public schools, 37% did worse, and only 17% did better. Meanwhile, charters routinely accept fewer students with disabilities and fewer English language learners. Since charters only serve 4% of the nation’s K-12 students, they represent a distraction and a drain from the focused work needed to renew quality schools for all children. They are not a solution.

Using standardized tests like MCAS to evaluate teachers: The National Research Council and many other researchers say that evaluating teachers based on student test scores is inaccurate and unfair. Several reports found that some 20-25% of teachers in the bottom groups one year are in the top groups the next - and vice versa. This is because many more things affect student learning or teacher's rankings than just the teacher's own efforts.

Using standardized tests to tell us if schools are successful: Most test score differences are not due to what schools do, but to the kids’ ZIP codes. As opportunity, health and family wealth increase, so do test scores. When schools focus on boosting scores on tests like MCAS, they ignore important subject areas and teach to the test, leaving children less prepared for the future. We need a lot more than test scores to know if schools are doing well and to help schools improve.

How students learn: Most people know what science confirmed years ago: learning is an active process. Pouring disconnected information into kids’ heads, as the movie shows, has no lasting value, and it does not educate students for citizenship, college, lifelong learning or employment. Why didn’t the movie show us what excellent teaching looks like?

Competition: There is no evidence for the claim that competition will improve education. Teachers competing against each other will endanger cooperation among teachers and reduce their ability to help children most in need. 

Since No Child Left Behind, the rate of school improvement has declined!  This film pushes for another generation of failed reforms.

Don’t wait for Superman. Take the time to inform yourself, to find out the real stories from teachers, parents and principals.  Get the real facts on which to base your opinion, and consider how you can make a difference by doing what is right and good for children, not what “Superman” tells you to do.
Citizens for Public Schools and FairTest

For more information and genuine ways to improve schools, see http://www.citizensforpublicschools.org and http://www.fairtest.org.

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Yatvin: Turning schools into robot factories

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/elementary-school/-this-post-was-written.html

Turning schools into robot factories
This post was written by Joanne Yatvin, a longtime public school educator, author and past president of the National Council of Teachers of English. She is now teaching part-time at Portland State University.
By Joanne Yatvin
I never miss reading the newspaper comics. Not for entertainment, but because I think their creators are some of the most intelligent and well-informed people on the public scene. As a group, they have mastered the subtleties of language, politics, philosophy, and human behavior.
Right about now I am struck by how many comics are dealing with the beginning of the school year and how uniform their messages are: Children aren’t happy about going back to school.
This is not good-natured humor. It reflects pretty accurately the feelings I hear expressed by my grandchildren and the other children I meet.
Although the excitement of new clothes and school supplies seems to soften the blow, the thought of being confined all day to over-crowded classrooms and hard seats and allowed to speak only after raising one’s hand is not a pretty prospect. Unfortunately, this picture gets uglier every year as demands for more and harder work increase, and the old respites of recess, art, music, and physical education disappear. By law, adults get breaks during their workday, but not children.
As a teacher educator and educational researcher, I have been visiting classrooms for years, and, for the most part, I don’t like what I see. Many of the once excellent teachers I know have been reduced to automatons reciting scripted lessons, focusing on mechanical skills, and rehearsing students for standardized tests. The school curriculum has become something teachers "deliver" like a pizza and students "swallow" whole, whether or not they like mushrooms.
Kindergartens that used to be places for children to learn social behavior, songs, dances, and poetry; how to build cities with blocks, play store, and express feelings with crayons and paint, are now cheerless cells for memorizing letter sounds and numbers. In one kindergarten I visited last year, children recited all the words in their little books without ever recognizing that they were part of a story.
In a first-grade classroom, I watched children march in circles at mid-morning, waving their arms because there was no longer a recess to refresh their bodies and spirits. Still, there was time enough for them to shout out the sounds of letters in chorus everyday and to memorize the words "onomatopoeia" and "metaphor."
In the upper elementary grades I saw both English and math taught by formulas. Students were given a list of the parts of a standard essay, told to use them in order and to begin with a question or a surprising statement. They were also taught the formula for dividing by fractions (as if anyone ever does such a thing) and the Pythagorean theorem (useful whenever you want to know the length of the hypotenuse of a right triangle).
Many school districts have also adopted summer homework policies, usually requiring students to read a prescribed list of books. This past summer my grandnephew, who is entering 9th grade, had to write a legal brief defending or condemning Martin Luther, although he had not been taught anything about that writing form or that famous man in 8th grade.
With the new Common Core Standards, created by experts who will never be tested on them, school life will grow even more onerous.
Algebra has been moved down to the 8th grade, and geometry, always a tenth grade elective, is now required of all ninth graders. Wordsworth’s "Preface to the Lyrical Ballads," which I read as a graduate student, is on the 9th grade recommended reading list. Although, the knowledge, skills, and books in the standards are, on the whole, academically valid, they are scheduled to be taught to students two to four years too young to understand or appreciate them.
All this has happened because the politicians who now control America’s schools have adopted the worst aspects of European and Asian education, which were designed to maintain social class boundaries in those societies.
Out of a misguided belief that students’ test scores represent a country’s economic health and, perhaps, out of wounded pride; our leaders appear determined to convert our once great public schools into robot factories and to extinguish the brilliance and imagination that have fueled our country’s greatness for more than 200 years.

Exposing the Corporate Education Reform Fraud

The Obama Education Blueprint

Researchers Examine the Evidence

Edited by:
William J. Mathis, University of Colorado, Boulder
Kevin G. Welner, University of Colorado - Boulder

A volume in the series: The National Education Policy Center Series. Series Editor(s): Kevin G. Welner, University of Colorado - Boulder and Alex Molnar, Arizona State University
 
Published 2010
A Publication of the NATIONAL EDUCATION POLICY CENTER

In March 2010, the Obama administration released A Blueprint for Reform, setting forth its proposed revisions of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. If enacted, the Blueprint will shape the curriculum, standards, assessments, and accountability systems of schools throughout the nation. It will also determine how and where federal education funds will be targeted, further increase federal control over K-12 education, and increase the private-sector role in the operation of public schools.

In advancing this agenda, President Obama and education secretary Arne Duncan have maintained that their Blueprint recommendations are grounded in research, and in May the U.S. Department of Education issued a set of six documents presented as summaries of the research supporting their plan.

As an extension of the ongoing Think Tank Review Project, the staff and Fellows of the National Education Policy Center examine these research summaries and assess how well they represent the full body of knowledge in each of the reform areas. In The Obama Education Blueprint, prominent education policy experts from across the nation offer a comprehensive analysis of the research support for the U.S. Department of Education’s plan for the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

This volume is designed to provide policymakers, the media, and interested citizens with what the research actually says about the administration’s proposals.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgements. 1 Introduction: Assessing the Research Base for A Blueprint for Reform, William J. Mathis and Kevin G. Welner. 2 A Review of College- and Career-Ready Students, Diane Ravitch and William J. Mathis. 3 A Review of Great Teachers and Great Leaders, Paul Shaker. 4 A Review of A Complete Education, Beth Warren. 5 A Review of Meeting the Needs of English Learners and Other Diverse Learners, Janette Klingner. 6 A Review of Successful, Safe, and Healthy Students, Gene V Glass, Steven Barnett, and Kevin G. Welner. 7 A Review of Fostering Innovation and Excellence, Clive Belfield. About the Authors.

Write Rachel

My letter to Rachel Maddow, the best chance on Microsoft-NBC to get someone on screen to counter the media blitzkrieg from the oligarchs.  Please copy this one, or write your own today to Rachel@msnbc.com:

Dear Rachel:

During this week's wall to wall promotion of "Waiting for Superman" and the corporate solutions emanating from that film (the ones by Gates, the Waltons, and the rest of the "Billionaire Boys Club" (Ravitch, 2010)), I and millions of others are waiting, instead, for some coverage of the public educators' and parents' position regarding the agenda of total compliance charters, evaluations based on test scores, end of tenure, constant testing, etc.

We know that we can't count on 99% of reporters to know shit from shinola about ed issues, but we know, too, that you are very savvy and have a very savvy staff.  Can you please schedule one (just one) guest this week to counter the Microsoft-NBC message?  Some potential guests?  Diane Ravitch, David Berliner, Rick Ayers, Monty Neill, Deborah Meier, Linda Darling-Hammond, Henry Giroux.  I have a long list of possibilities.

For a primer on the WfS film, see points here at Common Dreams.org by Rick Ayers.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/09/27-10

For a primer on the bigger issue of present-day deform, Ravitch's book, Death and Life of the Great American School System. . .  Ravitch remains a conservative, but she is aghast at what she sees today as reform. Her blog at Ed Week:

http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/Bridging-Differences/

Thank you very much.

Pittsburgh Superintendent Bashes Imagine Schools

Some unkind words from Pittsburgh's Superintendent about Imagine's real estate practices.  An Imagine spokesperson willing to talk about how the money will be spent only AFTER the charter is granted.  Will Imagine win the appeal?

From the Pittsburgh Channel:

Team 4: Pittsburgh Public Schools Rejects Charter School Company

Local Group Partners With Imagine Schools To Charter Burgwin Elementary 

PITTSBURGH -- A controversial out-of-state charter school company that stands to collect millions in Pittsburgh tax dollars has appealed a rejection by Pittsburgh Public Schools to charter a school in Hazelwood.

Team 4's Jim Parsons reported that the group that applied for the charter is local, but has a partnership with Imagine Schools, a commercial charter school company from Virginia that has drawn criticism from educators.

Pittsburgh Public Schools Superintendent Mark Roosevelt said Imagine Schools is a for-profit company more interested in making money than educating students.

For that reason, Roosevelt said the school board chose not to have Imagine manage a charter school at the former Burgwin Elementary in Hazelwood.

"What Imagine does through their real estate arm is they kind of sucker people into a relationship that they don't understand the extent of," said Roosevelt.

The appeal for a charter school at Burgwin Elementary includes a budget that would pay Imagine more than $7 million over five years in rent and management fees.

Imagine spokeswoman Sarah Martin is leading a local group appealing the charter denial.

Parsons asked her what the money to Imagine Schools is for.

"That's something to be discussed after we get the charter," Martin told Parsons.

Parsons continued, "But don't taxpayers need to get that answer before you get the charter?"

"I think a better comment for that will be after we get the charter," Martin said.

[Continued here] 

Waiting for Superman Point by Point

Published by Valerie Strauss at WaPo, reprinted at Common Dreams.org:

What ‘Superman’ got wrong, point by point

by Rick Ayers

While the education film Waiting For Superman has moving profiles of students struggling to succeed under difficult circumstances, it puts forward a sometimes misleading and other times dishonest account of the roots of the problem and possible solutions.

The amped-up rhetoric of crisis and failure everywhere is being used to promote business-model reforms that are destabilizing even in successful schools and districts. A panel at NBC’s Education Nation Summit, taking place in New York today and tomorrow, was originally titled "Does Education Need a Katrina?" Such disgraceful rhetoric undermines reasonable debate.

Let’s examine these issues, one by one:

*Waiting for Superman says that lack of money is not the problem in education.
Yet the exclusive charter schools featured in the film receive large private subsidies. Two-thirds of Geoffrey Canada’s Harlem Children’s Zone funding comes from private sources, effectively making the charter school he runs in the zone a highly resourced private school. Promise Academy is in many ways an excellent school, but it is dishonest for the filmmakers to say nothing about the funds it took to create it and the extensive social supports including free medical care and counseling provided by the zone.

In New Jersey, where court decisions mandated similar programs, such as high quality pre-kindergarten classes and extended school days and social services in the poorest urban districts, achievement and graduation rates increased while gaps started to close. But public funding for those programs is now being cut and progress is being eroded. Money matters! Of course, money will not solve all problems (because the problems are more systemic than the resources of any given school) – but the off-handed rejection of a discussion of resources is misleading.

*Waiting for Superman implies that standardized testing is a reasonable way to assess student progress.
The debate of “how to raise test scores” strangles and distorts strong education. Most test score differences stubbornly continue to reflect parental income and neighborhood/zip codes, not what schools do. As opportunity, health and family wealth increase, so do test scores.

This is not the fault of schools but the inaccuracy, and the internal bias, in the tests themselves.
Moreover, the tests are too narrow (on only certain subjects with only certain measurement tools). When schools focus exclusively on boosting scores on standardized tests, they reduce teachers to test-prep clerks, ignore important subject areas and critical thinking skills, dumb down the curriculum and leave children less prepared for the future. We need much more authentic assessment to know if schools are doing well and to help them improve.

*Waiting for Superman ignores overall problems of poverty.
Schools must be made into sites of opportunity, not places for the rejection and failure of millions of African American, Chicano Latino, Native American, and immigrant students. But schools and teachers take the blame for huge social inequities in housing, health care, and income.

Income disparities between the richest and poorest in U.S.society have reached record levels between 1970 and today. Poor communities suffer extensive traumas and dislocations. Homelessness, the exploitation of immigrants, and the closing of community health and counseling clinics, are all factors that penetrate our school communities. Solutions that punish schools without addressing these conditions only increase the marginalization of poor children.

*Waiting for Superman says teachers’ unions are the problem.
Of course unions need to be improved – more transparent, more accountable, more democratic and participatory – but before teachers unionized, the disparity in pay between men and women was disgraceful and the arbitrary power of school boards to dismiss teachers or raise class size without any resistance was endemic.

Unions have historically played leading roles in improving public education, and most nations with strong public educational systems have strong teacher unions.

According to this piece in The Nation, "In the Finnish education system, much cited in the film as the best in the world, teachers are – gasp! – unionized and granted tenure, and families benefit from a cradle-to-grave social welfare system that includes universal daycare, preschool and health care, all of which are proven to help children achieve better results in school."

In fact, even student teachers have a union in Finland and, overall, nearly 90% of the Finnish labor force is unionized.
The demonization of unions ignores the real evidence.

*Waiting for Superman says teacher education is useless.
The movie touts the benefits of fast track and direct entry to teaching programs such as Teach for America, but the country with the highest achieving students, Finland, also has highly educated teachers.

A 1970 reform of Finland’s education system mandated that all teachers above the kindergarten level have at least a master’s degree. Today that country’s students have the highest math and science literacy, as measured by the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), of all the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) member countries.

*Waiting for Superman decries tenure as a drag on teacher improvement.
Tenured teachers cannot be fired without due process and a good reason: they can’t be fired because the boss wants to hire his cousin, or because the teacher is gay (or black or…), or because they take an unpopular position on a public issue outside of school.

A recent survey found that most principals agreed that they had the authority to fire a teacher if they needed to take such action. It is interesting to note that when teachers are evaluated through a union-sanctioned peer process, more teachers are put into retraining programs and dismissed than through administration-only review programs. Overwhelmingly teachers want students to have outstanding and positive experiences in schools.

*Waiting for Superman says charter schools allow choice and better educational innovation.
Charters were first proposed by the teachers’ unions to allow committed parents and teachers to create schools that were free of administrative bureaucracy and open to experimentation and innovation, and some excellent charters have set examples. But thousands of hustlers and snake oil salesmen have also jumped in.

While teacher unions are vilified in the film, there is no mention of charter corruption or profiteering. A recent national study by CREDO, The Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University, concludes that only 17% of charter schools have better test scores than traditional public schools, 46% had gains that were no different than their public counterparts, and 37% were significantly worse.

While a better measure of school success is needed, even by their own measure, the project has not succeeded. A recent Mathematica Policy Research study came to similar conclusions. And the Education Report, "The Evaluation of Charter School Impacts, concludes, “On average, charter middle schools that hold lotteries are neither more nor less successful than traditional public schools in improving student achievement, behavior, and school progress.”

Some fantastic education is happening in charter schools, especially those initiated by communities and led by teachers and community members. But the use of charters as a battering ram for those who would outsource and privatize education in the name of “reform” is sheer political opportunism.

*Waiting for Superman glorifies lotteries for admission to highly selective and subsidized charter schools as evidence of the need for more of them.
If we understand education as a civil right, even a human right as defined by the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, we know it can’t be distributed by a lottery.

We must guarantee all students access to high quality early education, highly effective teachers, college and work-preparatory curricula and equitable instructional resources like good school libraries and small classes. A right without a clear map of what that right protects is an empty statement.

It is not a sustainable public policy to allow more and more public school funding to be diverted to privately subsidized charters while public schools become the schools of last resort for children with the greatest educational needs. In Waiting for Superman, families are cruelly paraded in front of the cameras as they wait for an admission lottery in an auditorium where the winners’ names are pulled from a hat and read aloud, while the losing families trudge out in tears with cameras looming in their faces – in what amounts to family and child abuse.

*Waiting for Superman says competition is the best way to improve learning.
Too many people involved in education policy are dazzled by the idea of “market forces” improving schools. By setting up systems of competition, Social Darwinist struggles between students, between teachers, and between schools, these education policy wonks are distorting the educational process.

Teachers will be motivated to gather the most promising students, to hide curriculum strategies from peers, and to cheat; principals have already been caught cheating in a desperate attempt to boost test scores. And children are worn out in a sink-or-swim atmosphere that threatens them with dire life outcomes if they are not climbing to the top of the heap.

In spite of the many millions of dollars poured into expounding the theory of paying teachers for higher student test scores (sometimes mislabeled as ‘merit pay’), a new study by Vanderbilt University’s National Center on Performance Incentives found that the use of merit pay for teachers in the Nashville school district produced no difference even according to their measure, test outcomes for students.

*Waiting for Superman says good teachers are key to successful education. We agree. But Waiting for Superman only contributes to the teacher-bashing culture which discourages talented college graduates from considering teaching and drives people out of the profession.
According to the Department of Education, the country will need 1.6 million new teachers in the next five years. Retention of talented teachers is one key. Good teaching is about making connections to students, about connecting what they learn to the world in which they live, and this only happens if teachers have history and roots in the communities where they teach.

But a recent report by the nonprofit National Commission on Teaching and America’s Future says that “approximately a third of America’s new teachers leave teaching sometime during their first three years of teaching; almost half leave during the first five years. In many cases, keeping our schools supplied with qualified teachers is comparable to trying to fill a bucket with a huge hole in the bottom.”

Check out the reasons teachers are being driven out in Katy Farber’s book, "Why Great Teachers Quit: And How We Might Stop the Exodus," (Corwin Press).

*Waiting for Superman says “we’re not producing large numbers of scientists and doctors in this country anymore. . . This means we are not only less educated, but also less economically competitive.”
But Business Week (10/28/09) reported that “U.S. colleges and universities are graduating as many scientists and engineers as ever,” yet “the highest performing students are choosing careers in other fields.” In particular, the study found, “many of the top students have been lured to careers in finance and consulting.” It’s the market, and the disproportionately high salaries paid to finance specialists, that is misdirecting human resources, not schools.

*Waiting for Superman promotes a nutty theory of learning which claims that teaching is a matter of pouring information into children’s heads.
In one of its many little cartoon segments, the film purports to show how kids learn. The top of a child’s head is cut open and a jumble of factoids is poured in. Ouch! Oh, and then the evil teacher union and regulations stop this productive pouring project.

The film-makers betray a lack of understanding of how people actually learn, the active and engaged participation of students in the learning process. They ignore the social construction of knowledge, the difference between deep learning and rote memorization.

The movie would have done a service by showing us what excellent teaching looks like, and addressing the valuable role that teacher education plays in preparing educators to practice the kind of targeted teaching that reaches all students. It should have let teachers’ voices be heard.

*Waiting for Superman promotes the idea that we are in a dire war for US dominance in the world.
The poster advertising the film shows a nightmarish battlefield in stark gray, with a little white girl sitting at a desk in the midst of it. The text: “The fate of our country won’t be decided on a battlefield. It will be determined in a classroom.”

This is a common theme of the so-called reformers: We are at war with India and China and we have to out-math them and crush them so that we can remain rich and they can stay in the sweatshops.

But really, who declared this war? When did I as a teacher sign up as an officer in this war? And when did that 4th grade girl become a soldier in it? Instead of this new educational Cold War, perhaps we should be helping kids imagine a world of global cooperation, sustainable economies, and equity.

*Waiting for Superman says federal “Race to the Top” education funds are being focused to support students who are not being served in other ways.
According to a study by the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights under Law, NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., and others, Race to the Top funds are benefiting affluent or well-to-do, white, and “abled” students. So the outcome of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top has been more funding for schools that are doing well and more discipline and narrow test-preparation for the poorest schools.

*Waiting for Superman suggests that teacher improvement is a matter of increased control and discipline over teachers.
Dan Brown, a teacher in the SEED charter school featured in the film, points out that successful schools involve teachers in strong collegial conversations. Teachers need to be accountable to a strong educational plan, without being terrorized. Good teachers, which is the vast majority of them, are seeking this kind of support from their leaders.

*Waiting for Superman proposes a reform “solution” that exploits the feminization of the field of teaching; it proposes that teachers just need a few good men with hedge funds (plus D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee with a broom) to come to the rescue.
Teaching has been historically devalued – teachers are less well compensated and have less control of their working conditions than other professionals – because of its associations with women.

For example, 97% of preschool and kindergarten teachers are women, and this is also the least well-compensated sector of teaching; in 2009, the lowest 10% earned $30,970 to $34,280; the top 10% earned $75,190 to $80,970. () By comparison the top 25 hedge fund managers took in $25 billion in 2009, enough to hire 658,000 new teachers.
--
Waiting for Superman could and should have been an inspiring call for improvement in education, a call we desperately need to mobilize behind.

That’s why it is so shocking that the message was hijacked by a narrow agenda that undermines strong education. It is stuck in a framework that says that reform and leadership means doing things, like firing a bunch of people (Rhee) or “turning around” schools (Education Secretary Arne Duncan) despite the fact that there’s no research to suggest that these would have worked, and there’s now evidence to show that they haven’t.

Reform must be guided by community empowerment and strong evidence, not by ideological warriors or romanticized images of leaders acting like they’re doing something, anything. Waiting for Superman has ignored deep historical and systemic problems in education such as segregation, property-tax based funding formulas, centralized textbook production, lack of local autonomy and shared governance, de-professionalization, inadequate special education supports, differential discipline patterns, and the list goes on and on.

People seeing Waiting for Superman should be mobilized to improve education. They just need to be willing to think outside of the narrow box that the film-makers have constructed to define what needs to be done.

Thanks for ideas and some content from many teacher publications, and especially from Monty Neill, Jim Horn Lisa Guisbond, Stan Karp, Erica Meiners, Kevin Kumashiro, Ilene Abrams, Bill Ayers, and Therese Quinn.

Obama's "Laboratories of Excellence" Hemorraghing More Students than "Dropout Factories"

"You can't defend a status quo in which a third of our kids are dropping out," the president said this morning during a live interview on NBC's "Today Show." "You can't defend a status quo when you've got 2,000 schools across the coutry that are drop out factories."  --President Obama, today

The corporate reformers now in charge of federal education policy want to replace urban public schools with the penal pedagogy corporate charter school model.  They have a big problem, however.  According to a national study by CREDO at Stanford U., charters outperform matched public schools in only 17 percent of the cases, not exactly a ringing endorsement.  Can you imagine the FDA approving a drug that had worse results than the old treatments 38% of the time? 

The only charters that are consistently out-testing the public schools are the total compliance brainwashing camps like KIPP and the KIPP knockoffs.  Ten hour days, three hours of homework, Saturdays, and 3 weeks more school in summer, etc.  The problem here, besides the moral one exuding from KIPP's psychological sterilization program, is that these chain gangs lose 40-60 percent of their students to dropping out and pushing out.  They don't hold low flyers or recalcitrants or "miscreants"--it would mess up the success story.  From USA Today:

Ed Fuller, a University of Texas-Austin researcher, found that Harmony schools throughout Texas had an "extraordinarily high" student attrition rate of about 50% for students in grades six through eight.
"It's not hard to be 'exemplary' if you lose all the kids who aren't performing," Fuller says.

The problem for Obama and the oligarchs on this part of their corporate takeover plan is that this loss of students is worse than the "dropout factories" that they decry as shameful.  I'm sure they'll figure something to smooth out this small bump in the superhighway to the corporate takeover of schools.

President Obama, also today:

"There's no silver bullets here," the president said. However, he said, "There are some charters that have figured out how to do a very good job. What we've got to do is look at the success of these schools and find out how do we duplicate them... What I'm interested in ... is fostering these laboriteies [sic] of excellence."

Microsoft-NBC Kicked Off Week of Corporate Ed Promotion with Rhee's Likely Replacement, Bonus Bobb

Looks like Eli Broad's corrupt henchman who is being run out of Detroit under a thick cloud of impropriety has the inside track to replace the snarling Michelle Rhee as Chancellor of DC Schools.  After all the WfS clips got aired to set the stage, the Meet the Press roundtable got rolling, with union prostisuit Randi Weingarten, the Dunc, Michelle Rhee, Bonus Bobb, and Mr. Infotainment, David Gregory.  Arne had nothing but good thing to say about Bonus Bobb:

Robert Bobb, state-appointed emergency financial manager for the Detroit Public Schools, said Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press" that cooperative leadership is necessary at the local, state and national level if the district is able to successfully implement sweeping reform efforts.

"Every major decision that I have made, I have been sued, either by local leaders or school board members," Bobb said. "There is a sense of urgency in urban school districts. You cannot sit back and not take care of what's needed for children." . . .

L. A. Times Provides Thumbnail Coverage of Teacher Suicide

Ever since he received his "less than effective" rating published in the pages of the LA Times, Rigoberto Ruelas, a highly regarded teacher at Miramonte Elementary School in South LA, has been stressed out.  At least he was until he jumped off a bridge in the Angeles National Forest and killed himself.  The LA Times coverage amounts to a blip from the AP and does not mention their crack reporting that likely set this horrid act into motion.  One can only hope they will pay for their utter irresponsibility.

From the Pasadena Star News:

A missing schoolteacher from South Gate apparently committed suicide in the Angeles National Forest, it was reported Sunday.

Rigoberto Ruelas, 39, a teacher at Miramonte Elementary School, was last seen last Sunday dropping off a present for his sister's birthday, according to the South Gate Police Department.

Ruelas notified the school he would need a substitute teacher assigned for his classes on Monday and Tuesday, but he did not show up to work on Wednesday and had not called in, police said. His family reported him missing that day.

Ruelas' body was found just before 9 a.m. in the forest, said Deputy Jeff Gordon of the Sheriff's Headquarters Bureau.
"(Sheriff's deputies) had been conducting training exercises near the Big Tujunga Canyon area of the Angeles National Forest," he said. "On Big Tujunga Canyon Road near mile marker 6.6, they located a vehicle connected to Rigoberto Ruelas, who had been reported missing. A subsequent search in the ravine approximately 100 feet below a nearby bridge lead to the discovery of Rigoberto Ruelas, who was deceased."

Suicide was suspected, authorities reportedly said.

Family members told a TV station that he scored low on a teacher rating report recently published by the Los Angeles Times, and that may have caused Ruelas to go missing.

The newspaper's database lists Ruelas as being "less effective than average overall," "Less effective than average in math," and "average in English." . . .

Fighting Back

Why Its Called Microsoft-NBC

The Oligarchs are in gear, pushing Arne hard for their corporate takeover of public schools.  Schedule from Russo:

THE WEEK AHEAD: Sunday, Sept. 26 - Friday, Oct. 1 (All Events are EDT)

Sunday, Sept. 26

10:30 a.m.

The Secretary will appear on Meet the Press on MSNBC.

Monday, Sept. 277 a.m.

The secretary will appear on Morning Joe on MSNBC.

 

1 p.m.

The Secretary will appear on Andrea Mitchell Reports on MSNBC.

 

1:20 p.m.

The Secretary will appear on Power Lunch on CNBC.

 

2:00 p.m.
The Secretary will make a major announcement at NBC’s Education Nation Summit in New York City. The one hour event will feature a conversation with college students and will be moderated by Tom Brokaw.  It will be carried live on MSNBC and streamed online at http://www.educationnation.com.           

Tuesday, Sept. 289:10 a.m.

The Secretary will appear on The Daily Rundown on MSNBC.

New "Superman" Coalition

It's hardly a secret that Waiting for "Superman" is a major PR effort by corporate reformers, philanthrocapitalists, and reformy types.  Here are two updates:

1.  The Broad Foundation gave $500,000 for advocacy related to WfS.  The foundation also gave $50k for promotions related to Madeleine Sackler's schlockumentary, "The Lottery," which I've seen (and it's terrible).

2.  Education Reform Now, the 501c3 arm of Hedge Funds Democrats for Education Reform, is managing a new marketing campaign, "Done Waiting."  An earlier EdWeek article mentioned ERN and the National Alliance of Public Charter Schools was putting together a campaign audaciously called "We Are Superman" - is this the fruits of their (anti-union) labor?

The Broad Foundation is a "National Partner" in the "Done Waiting" campaign.  Other sponsors include: EEP, Center for Education Reform, GreatSchools, Charter School Growth Fund, Education Breakthrough Network, and the (Milton and Rose Friedman) Foundation for Educational Choice.

Respectable Academics Standing Up to Chief Corporate Goon, Rick Hess

Of the many things I get red in the face about is the fact that education academics, my colleagues,  have been sitting on their hands in in their pre-fab towers (ed school people don't get into the real university Tower), thinking they are above the dirty fray or the screamers on the Right who want to take down the Republic by dismantling public instituions.  Recently, however, I have noticed a number of relevant and readable pieces coming from Teachers College Record, one of the chief hangouts for academics who usually write for an audience of 5.  I was so impresse that I actually gave up $16 to renew an online subscription. 

Apparently the bots of the Borg have noticed, too, for recently they sent out their chief ed hack unit to attack a TC article by Valente and Collins on the idiocy and unfairness of RTTT.  Well, Valente and Collins have come out of their mobile home tower to defend themselves.  Here is a clip, but do read the whole thing here:

. . .  .Who is getting Race money? It is those who are already achieving on standardized tests and who were already winning the Race.

Take a look at the numbers on who receives the benefit of the Race to the Top funds, this from a joint report by the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights under Law, National Action Network, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc., National Council for Educating Black Children, National Urban League, Rainbow PUSH Coalition, Schott Foundation for Public Education:⁹

1) 37 percent of the finalist states receive free and reduced lunch

2) 14 percent of the finalist states are Hispanic

3) 2.5 percent of the students who are eligible for free and reduced lunch nationwide receive monies from Race to the Top

4) 3 percent of Black students nationwide receive monies from Race to the Top

5) less than 1 percent of Latino, Native American, and Hmong students receive monies from Race to the Top

In short, the Race to the Top disproportionally benefits affluent or well-to-do, white, and “abled” students.  

Is this a race to the top or a race rigged for the top? . . .

Ooh, good one.

If You Think It Can't Get Any Worse, Look Behind You

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Postcards From the Pledge
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor Tea Party

School Voucher Failure Record Continues Unabated

Where vouchers have been offered as "choice" for parents to get a private school education at public expense, the results have been anything but convincing for such "choice."  The latest from Ohio, where test scores comparisons that are now mandatory under new state law show that the lowest-performing public systems are still outperforming the private voucher schools more often than not.  Meanwhile, this failed experiment continues to drain approximately $65,000,000 from the Ohio public schools every year.  Never mind the hundreds of millions that are being drained every year by the charter dollar sinks run by industrialist, David Brennan.  From the Columbus Post-Dispatch:

On the whole, Ohio students who used tax-funded vouchers to attend private schools last school year did no better on state tests than public-school students.

That was true in the Columbus City Schools, too, where district students outperformed voucher students on seven of 12 standardized tests. The public-school students bested their private-school counterparts most often in math.

But middle-school voucher students had better passing rates, particularly on last school year's state reading exams. Eighth-graders outscored Columbus district eighth-graders on all three tested subjects - math, reading and science. . . .

New Dem Strategy: Stop Voting on Anything That May Bring Corporate Ire

Today the Dems showed once again what cowards they truly are, preferring to be led by their own pack of Blue Dogs, those Democants with their noses closest to the wallets of corporate America.  It seems there will be no vote on discontinuing tax cuts for the wealthy until after the election.

This brilliant move that was apparently approved by the bumbling Axelrod takes away the only remaining issue that may have brought a breath of enthusiasm to the dead calm around Dem headquarters in Anywhere, America.  To show further support for the strategy to stop voting on any issue that may upset corporate America, the Dunc announced today that ED's plan for implementing new regs for the for-profit diploma mills is being reconsidered at present.  Could the news of a back down be part of a Friday news dump?

(Reuters) - The U.S. Education Department's schedule for implementing proposed regulations on for-profit schools is not final, according to a media report that caused share prices in the sector to rise.

"We are keeping our options open," Education Secretary Arne Duncan was quoted as saying when asked about a possible delay in finalizing the regulations. His comments appeared in a blog run by Washington publication The Hill.
The remark pushed up share prices for the schools, which have been volatile on news that the Education Department may declare some programs ineligible for financial aid.

Shares of Corinthian Colleges were up 10.53 percent at midafternoon at $6.80. Apollo Group was up 2.91 percent at $51.91. DeVry Inc was up 3.7 percent at $45.96 and Career Education Corp was up 6.22 percent at $22.01.

The share prices rose on hope that the Education Department would push back plans to implement the rules.

"There has been a hearing scheduled for next week in the senate. ... I think there is a continued optimism perhaps that the gainful employment rules maybe delayed or perhaps modified. And I think that is what is driving the group up a little bit," said ThinkEquity LLC analyst James Maher.

The Education Department declined to comment on the scheduling. "Tomorrow we will announce our timeline for moving forward with gainful employment," said spokesman Justin Hamilton in an email. . . .

Why I Closed My Facebook Account: Zuckerberg Going Oprah

Last updated 9/23 8:49
I just closed my Facebook account with this reason:

Your CEO wants to get into the school privatization game with other oligarchs.  I am not interested in supporting your efforts to dismantle America's public schools.  Go Cheney yourself!

I urge you to do the same, i. e., close your Facebook account. 

From the Star-Ledger:

LOS ANGELES — N.J. Gov. Chris Christie and Newark Mayor Cory Booker will make a surprise appearance on the Oprah Winfrey Show Friday to announce an unprecedented restructuring of Newark's school system and the gift of $100 million from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, two officials with direct knowledge of the plan told The Star-Ledger tonight.

Christie and Booker will proclaim that the long-troubled Newark schools, which have been under state control for 15 years, are going to be placed under Booker’s authority. Together, Booker and the school system will embark on a massive program of educational change long opposed by teachers unions.

It will include an expansion of charter schools, new achievement standards and methods for judging which schools and teachers are effective, the sources said. 

The announcement was confirmed by a third person with knowledge of Booker and Christie’s arrangements. The sources detailed the plans on the condition they not be identified because they were not authorized to go public before Friday's show. . . .

"Caring about education," according to Arne Duncan

The Christian Science Monitor has announced that "Education Secretary Arne Duncan will campaign for Democrats" (Sept 22) and "support candidates that really care about education."
Clearly, the secretary's definition of "really caring about education" means support for his plan to spend billions on national standards and new tests, increasing the amount and scope of testing far beyond the already excessive amount now imposed on children.
"Caring about education" means doing this despite research showing that increasing testing does not increase achievement. Rather, it converts schools into test-prep factories, encouraging the learning of test-taking strategies that result in higher scores without students learning anything.
"Caring about education" means spending billions on test construction, validation, revision, etc. at a time when schools are already very short of funds, when many science classes have no lab equipment, school libraries (those that are left) have few books, many school bathrooms lack toilet paper, school years are being shortened, and teachers are losing their jobs.
Those who really care about education, those who have carefully studied the issues and understand what goes on in classrooms and in students' lives, support a policy of "no unnecessary testing," testing only as much as we need to, and no more.

Stephen Krashen

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Politics/monitor_breakfast/2010/0922/Education-Secretary-Arne-Duncan-will-campaign-for-Democrats

We Must Sing, Loudly

Poetry as song, song as poetry.  By Leonard Cohen:

"Democracy"

It's coming through a hole in the air,
from those nights in Tiananmen Square.
It's coming from the feel
that this ain't exactly real,
or it's real, but it ain't exactly there.
From the wars against disorder,
from the sirens night and day,
from the fires of the homeless,
from the ashes of the gay:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.
It's coming through a crack in the wall;
on a visionary flood of alcohol;
from the staggering account
of the Sermon on the Mount
which I don't pretend to understand at all.
It's coming from the silence
on the dock of the bay,
from the brave, the bold, the battered
heart of Chevrolet:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

It's coming from the sorrow in the street,
the holy places where the races meet;
from the homicidal bitchin'
that goes down in every kitchen
to determine who will serve and who will eat.
From the wells of disappointment
where the women kneel to pray
for the grace of God in the desert here
and the desert far away:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

Sail on, sail on
O mighty Ship of State!
To the Shores of Need
Past the Reefs of Greed
Through the Squalls of Hate
Sail on, sail on, sail on, sail on.

It's coming to America first,
the cradle of the best and of the worst.
It's here they got the range
and the machinery for change
and it's here they got the spiritual thirst.
It's here the family's broken
and it's here the lonely say
that the heart has got to open
in a fundamental way:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

It's coming from the women and the men.
O baby, we'll be making love again.
We'll be going down so deep
the river's going to weep,
and the mountain's going to shout Amen!
It's coming like the tidal flood
beneath the lunar sway,
imperial, mysterious,
in amorous array:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.

Sail on, sail on ...

I'm sentimental, if you know what I mean
I love the country but I can't stand the scene.
And I'm neither left or right
I'm just staying home tonight,
getting lost in that hopeless little screen.
But I'm stubborn as those garbage bags
that Time cannot decay,
I'm junk but I'm still holding up
this little wild bouquet:
Democracy is coming to the U.S.A. 

Introducing: National Education Policy Center

From the National Education Policy Center:

Leading Education Researchers Announce Creation of National Education Policy Center

NEPC Focuses on High-Quality Education Research on Policy

BOULDER, CO (September 20, 2010) – With the demand for education research at its highest level in a generation but growing concern about the quality of such research, experts and researchers from across the United States today announced the establishment of the National Education Policy Center (NEPC). Housed in the School of Education at the University of Colorado at Boulder, NEPC (nepc.colorado.edu) stands at the forefront of efforts to bring the highest quality education policy research to bear on policymaking and public understanding of key schooling issues.

The NEPC Fellows, a network of 100 mostly university-based education policy scholars, will work with NEPC because they care about the goal of bringing quality research to the task of policymaking. These Fellows include some of the most accomplished and knowledgeable researchers in the nation, and they will assist NEPC in meeting the national demand for education reform and improvement. “The national need for progress in our schools makes it more important than ever that policy be based on reliable research,” Welner said. “NEPC is committed to providing researchers, practitioners, policymakers, and the community at large with policy analyses and recommendations based on high-quality social science research.”“We are launching NEPC at an important time for American education research and policy,” said Kevin Welner, NEPC director and Professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder. “Policy decisions are too often made without supporting research, or even in conflict with what the research tells us. To help push research to the fore, the National Education Policy Center brings together some of the most important education research and analysis currently being conducted across the nation and around the world.”

NEPC will feature three ancillary activities in support of research-based education policy analysis:

• The Commercialism in Education Research Unit (CERU), which is the only research unit in the world dedicated to studying the impact of commercialism on education, is now part of NEPC.
• NEPC will be the new home for Education Review, the foremost open access book review journal in education, accessed by more than 1,000 readers each day.
• NEPC will house the new Education Research Global Observatory (ERGO), a resource dedicated to the promotion and dissemination of open access scholarship in education from around the world.

NEPC will combine the efforts of two previous major players in the education policy-making scene – the Education and the Public Interest Center (EPIC) at the University of Colorado at Boulder and the Education Policy Research Unit (EPRU) at Arizona State University. NEPC will continue to produce think tank reviews, policy briefs, research briefs, and legislative policy briefs. “Over the years, EPIC and EPRU have seen growing demand for their research publications,” said Alex Molnar, NEPC Publications Director and professor at Arizona State University. “NEPC will build on and extend the work begun by EPIC/EPRU. We have a very aggressive publication agenda.”

The NEPC Mission

The mission of the National Education Policy Center is to produce and disseminate high-quality, peer-reviewed research to inform education policy discussions guided by the belief that the democratic governance of public education is strengthened when policies are based on sound evidence. To learn more about NEPC, please visit http://nepc.colorado.edu/.

And here's an announcement about an upcoming forum co-hosted by NEPC and the Economic Policy Institute:

Education Policy: Separating the junk from the science

NEPC and EPI host forum on Thank Tank Quality and NEPC Book

BOULDER, CO (September 22, 2010). Education policy over the past thirty years has been powerfully influenced by well-funded and slickly produced research reports produced by advocacy think tanks. The quality of think tank reports and the value of the policies they support have been sharply debated. To help policymakers, the media, and the public assess these quality issues, the National Education Policy Center created the Think Tank Review Project, which provides expert third party reviews.

On September 29, 2010, NEPC and the Economic Policy Institute will host a forum to discuss the lessons learned through the think tank review project, as compiled in a new book called Think Tank Research Quality: Lessons for Policy Makers, the Media and the Public. Several of the book's editors and contributing scholars will discuss the challenges in finding quality research to support education policy-making and delve deeply into the core issues surrounding teacher pay and evaluation.

The Project has, since 2006, published 59 reviews of reports from 26 different institutions. This book brings together 21 of those reviews, focusing on examining the arguments and evidence used by think tanks to promote reforms such as vouchers, charter schools and alternative routes to teacher certification. The reviews are written using clear, non-academic language, with each review illustrating how readers can approach, understand and critique policy studies and reports.

The book will be of interest to practitioners, policymakers, researchers, and anyone concerned with the current debates about educational reform and will be distributed free to forum participants.

Agenda

> Introductory Comments - Lawrence Mishel, Economic Policy Institute, contributor

> The Need for the Think Tank Review Project - Alex Molnar, Arizona State University, editor

> Themes, Patterns and Lessons Learned - Kevin Welner, University of Colorado at Boulder, editor

> Assessing the Quality of Available Research

Vouchers: Clive Belfield, Queens College, CUNY, contributor

Teacher Pay: Sean Corcoran, New York Univ. & EPI Research Associate, contributor

Wednesday, September 29, 2010

9:30 - 11:30 am

Economic Policy Institute, Washington DC

Registration begins at 9:00 am

Coffee, tea and refreshments will be served.