Team Obama Caves Once More to For-Profit College Predators

Some things just don't change, and Team Obama is one of them.  From HuffPo:

The Obama administration on Thursday retreated from an ambitious proposal to protect low-income students and taxpayers from wasteful career-training programs and for-profit colleges that saddle students with taxpayer-backed debts they can not repay.

Investors cheered the news, sending shares in major for-profit college chains soaring Thursday and significantly outpacing gains in the broader U.S. stock market. Student advocates and consumer groups accused the administration of selling out students. . . .

If You Think Ending Charter Co-location is a Good Idea, Read This!

Posted this morning at Memphis Schools Matter:

A headline by Chalkbeat Tennessee would lead us assume that public schools have scored a big victory: Shelby County to pull kids from schools shared with ASD: Co-location to end next Fall.   

The story attached to the headline, however, clearly shows that assumption to be wrong.  

If this new plan goes forward, ASD charters will get the ENTIRE BUILDING where they are now co-located, and the hundreds of public school students will be moved into segregated testing containment camps run by I-Zone.

Teachers and parents must be at the November 18 meeting in large numbers to make sure this giveaway of public space to corporate reform schools does NOT happen.

Shelby County Schools next fall will slam the brakes on its practice of sharing buildings with Achievement School District charter schools, pulling hundreds of students out of up to 10 schools that otherwise would be co-located with charters, Chalkbeat has learned.

District administrators say the move to end colocation is academically motivated. But it could also benefit the school district by slowing the steady exodus of students from SCS schools to the state-controlled ASD charters. It would also uproot several well-established school communities throughout Memphis and leave some school buildings with just a handful of charter school students in them.

Some ASD charter school operators take over low-performing schools a grade at a time. This practice, known as “phasing in,”allows charters to adjust their teaching model to local conditions as needed, and to share innovative strategies with traditional public school educators, according to charter leaders. . . . 

[Comment: Charters have one strategy, and it is not innovative but, rather, criminally abusive to both students and teachers.]

But colocation has led to morale, recruitment and retention problems among principals and teachers who work for traditional public schools, and who know their jobs will be phased out, said Brad Leon, the district’s chief innovation officer. This has hurt test scores in those schools, Leon said.

“We want our staff focused on student achievement,” Leon said. “We want them focused on the task at hand.”

Ending the colocation practice next year means a significant portion of students and teachers at Shannon, Westwood and Spring Hill elementary schools and Cory and Lester middle schools will be moved to other campuses.

If the ASD follows through with taking over Airways, A. Maceo Walker middle schools and Hawkins Mill, Brookmeade and Denver Elementary schools–all schools in which charter operators are considering phasing in at a grade at a time – students and teachers in the upper grades at those schools now will also be moved.

SCS administrators will present a proposal to board members at the next board meeting,  Nov. 18, detailing plans for those students.

ASD officials said they will not back away from its plans to phase-in charter schools, even if there will be no other students in the building.

Lies and Deception by Jesse Register

 Update from East Nashville United:

In light of the recent news that MNPS administrators had already cut a back room deal to convert Inglewood Elementary School to a charter school operated by KIPP-Nashville, we have been reviewing what we've been told along the way by MNPS leaders, like Alan Coverstone, Office of Innovation. On September 13, 2014, in Inglewood, Mr. Coverstone was gracious enough to travel to East Nashville to address parents who assembled after learning for the 1st time on September, 9, 2014 that Dr. Jesse Register intended to turn all East Nashville schools into "all choice" schools, aka the "third way."

Here is what Mr. Coverstone said near the outset of the meeting:

"I can say for a fact Dr. Register doesn't believe and I sure as *heck* don't believe that anybody at Bransford Avenue can draw up a plan, give it to you, so it's gonna create this kind of school. So, we're not gonna do that. That's not what we've done."

This is a contradiction of what the story linked above reveals, and that is on August 26, 2014, the deal to convert Inglewood Elementary to KIPP-Nashville wascemented. As the stories below further illustrate, converting Inglewood Elementary to KIPP-Nashville was the deal long before anyone knew there was going to be a deal.

We sent a public records request to MNPS back on September 22, 2014. A copy of the requests we made can be found here: http://eastnashvilleunited.org/?page_id=110. As of this moment, MNPS has not turned over any documents. There was a story out yesterday explaining the delay, as submitted by MNPS http://bit.ly/1pVxuKA. Here is what the Tennessee Coalition for Open Government has to say about the speed the government should have in returning public records to the public http://tcog.info/law-says-promptly-comes-public-records-requests/ 

For background information, please see links to stories below:

East Nashville United Blasts Register's Inglewood Deception

http://bit.ly/InglewoodtoKIPP

KIPP Charter school decision expected by December

http://bit.ly/KIPPgetsInglewood

If you would like to volunteer your time, please send us an email to EastNashvilleUnited@gmail.com. If you haven’t signed our petition, please do so: http://bit.ly/EastNashUnited

On behalf of East Nashville United, thank you!

P.S. We are just volunteers with kids, jobs, and families trying to get the word out to parents, families, and community members. So, it is vital that you "like," "comment," "SHARE" or tweet any information about this issue across the social media platforms you use daily. We want to HEAR from YOU. We try to keep the website up-to-date with fresh information, so please check it out http://eastnashvilleunited.org/

Hopson's Next Bad Idea

PHOTO: Tajuana Cheshier/Chalkbeat TN 

Look at what happened in Memphis this week, and then tell me that teachers, students, and parents standing up together doesn't matter.  

Within minutes after parents and teachers lined up to express their disgust with the planned corporate takeover of their schools, Hopson came up with a new scheme, this one hardly better than the first one.

American Way Middle School students protested during Tuesday night's Shelby County School Board business meeting. More than 20 people signed up for public comment with the majority opting to speak against the Achievement School District's takeover process. 

In response to the state’s steady takeover of Memphis schools, Superintendent Dorsey Hopson said Tuesday night that he would propose expanding his own turnaround efforts known as the iZone, and the school board’s chairwoman said she would push for a legislative moratorium on the Achievement School District’s expansion.

The district’s iZone has regularly outperformed the Achievement School District, a state-run district targeted at moving the bottom 5 percent of schools into the top 25 percent.  A full third of the district is eligible to be taken over by the state in the next three years. ASD officials are currently working to determine which seven schools they will hand over to a handful of charter schools next year.

Hopson’s and board Chairwoman Teresa Jones’ comments came shortly after more than 20 parents and teachers accused board members of allowing schools to be taken over by the state and charter schools.

“It’s time for you guys to do your jobs,” said Kenneth Ingram, a parent at American Way Middle School.  “Put a stop to this. Another charter school coming from another state and taking over our school? We’re not going to allow that to happen. Please do your job.”

Neither the board nor the Shelby County Schools administration has legal control over the Achievement School District’s takeovers of low-performing public schools, Hopson and board members repeatedly reminded the public Tuesday. The takeover process has led to contentious protests at several community meetings this week.

Hopson said he will propose to board members in the coming weeks closing several schools and merging them into one school that would join the iZone.  Similar to charter schools, iZone schools are given waivers from state laws, require teachers to reapply for their jobs, and receive extra resources to try innovative strategies to improve test scores.  Unlike charter schools, the iZone schools remain under district control.

“We’ve been kicking around some numbers and without any extra money, we would look at combining two or three schools and bring them in the iZone,” Hopson said. “That would take a few more low-performing schools out of play (for ASD takeover). At the end of the day, though it’s about what is going to be best for the kids.” . . . .

If Hopson and the Shelby County School Board want to match some schools, they should start matching economically disadvantaged schools with those that are not.  Mix the schools so that no more than 40 percent are poor, provide professional development for teachers and principals, infuse new resources, and then give it three years to see if improvements don't materialize. 

Meanwhile, the entire process of labeling schools should be audited to determine whose politcal machinations are involved to make sure that only black schools get set up for closure, when mixed schools like Cordova have weaker test scores.  Cordova, in fact, is on neither the Priority or the Focus list of low-testing state schools.  Who's pulling the strings to make sure the new penal system of pedagogy only comes to black schools?

How Did Cordova Middle School Avoid the ASD Hit List?

Is Cordova Middle too white to be handed over to a corporate reform charter chain gang operator?  With just 51 percent African-American, is ASD avoiding the more politically perilous territory of putting a more white poor school on the hit list?  Look at South Side scores, American Way, or Wooddale.  Do any of these black schools have lower scores than Cordova Middle??

Can you get any lower than all 1s, with only a single exception??

TFA Memo Details Positivized Propaganda Strategy

The Nation has acquired a lengthy memo (see below) detailing how TFA's Tier 1 temps are prepared to deal with the growing resistance to their fascist agenda.  The article is a must read.

  Case Study: TFA Responding to Bad PR

Comments on ASD Takeover Plans in Memphis

-->

I had planned to read sections of this piece last evening at the SCS School Board meeting, but with 90 seconds to present, nothing really got said.  So . . .

Since 2009 when Bill Gates bought his way into Memphis with $90 million, the business plan for Memphis schools has been based on public school closures and corporate charter start-ups and takeovers to replace them. A dozen schools are on the hit list for the coming year, and the charter operators are lined up waiting for the buildings to become empty. Parents and teachers, however, are not nearly as uninformed as county officials who are doing the Gates dirty work believe.

In fact, they know how the charter school takeover cycle works. They know that first you need public schools isolated by years of neglect, segregation, and poverty--schools that everyone outside the affected communities would rather forget about. Memphis has an ample supply of these schools in the poorest neighborhoods, and politicians are eager to make them someone else’s responsibility.

These neighborhood schools make easy targets for profiteers and politicians convinced (or pretending to believe) that these public schools have low test scores because of lazy teachers, public bureaucracy, unconcerned parents, unions, or other reasons having nothing do with the reality of poverty, racism, or a sordid history of inequality.

Since 2002, NCLB’s impossible demand for schools to reach 100 percent proficiency manufactured a state of crisis for public education, beginning with the poorest schools where students’ scores were the lowest.

Parents who could afford to moved or sent their children to schools not in the dreaded “Needs Improvement” zones, thus leaving the poorest schools with smaller and academically weaker student populations and with even less capacity to make test score targets.  Further deprived, then, these schools are eventually labeled “underperforming” and “priority,” thus clearing the way for school closure.

Waiting in the wings are the corporate operators and their manager, the ASD, ready to open total compliance charter schools staffed with temporary corporate missionaries from Teach for America, or one of the other organizations that emulate the TFA practice of placing white privileged young women with 20 days of classroom practice and no teacher prep into schools that require the most professional and mature teachers.

With empty buildings from the lowest scoring public schools scheduled to sit idle, the charter operators step up to claim them by offering a token payment to the County.

Further weakening of the surviving schools comes from further austerity measures by the County to pay the $7,500 for every student lost to a charter school. If another 2,000 students are lost to new charters next year in Memphis, that amounts to $15,000,000 leaving the public schools and going to corporate welfare charter operators getting rich on public money. Meanwhile, the SCS deficit is used to justify more cuts and further weakening of the surviving public school’s capacity to meet testing expectations.

None of this planned austerity is a surprise. In 2012, the Transition Planning Commission Report predicted a $212 million hole in Shelby County's school budget from charter expansion in 2016.  That $212 million will be headed into the pockets of out-of-state corporate charter operators:

However, with the projected share of students in non-district operated schools [will be] expanding rapidly in the next few years—from approximately 4% in FY2012 to 19% by FY2016 (equivalent to approximately $212M of revenues shifted to charter schools and the ASD in FY2016). . .

With a State and federal commitment to close the bottom five percent of schools each year based on invalid, unreliable, and unfair test scores, it is easy to see that there will be a continuing supply of bottom five percent-ers until all public schools labeled for corporate reform takeover are “turned around,” or turned over.

I am reading this now because some of you are new to the Board, and some of you continue to pretend to be ignorant about what is going on, and some of you are supporters of it all, even though I doubt that you have any inkling of the social fallout from turning public schools into corporate run penal-style testing camps that you would never consider offering to middle class parents for their children.

Parents and teachers at South Side, American Way, Raleigh-Egypt, and Wooddale deserve better.  I am glad they are among those who have been awakened to the threat to their neighborhood schools by corporate takeover, as they have decided to SKIP the KIPP and offer a loud NO to YES Prep and put a big red light in front of the Green Dot. 

Frederick Douglass knew that power concedes nothing without a demand.  It is time for Shelby County to concede what these teachers and parents demand, and that is nothing more or less than quality public schools for all children.

Have ASD Know Nothings Explain How They Chose American Way Middle for Hit List

Here is another grand example of another school, American Way Middle, that cannot be in the bottom five percent of schools in Tennessee.  Note the overall score of "5" on the Composite 3 year average!

Are these schools chosen to make it easier for the corporate reform schools to look better in their new building when the takeover is complete. Can't happen here!

Corruption Out in the Open on Shelby County Board of Education

Citizens came with their signs and their speeches tonight, pleading for their community schools.  Sitting on the School Board was a smug employee of Green Dot Charter Schools, one of the corrupt outfits scheduled to take over at least two Memphis schools.  Her name is Miska Clay Bibbs, and she got her start working for the ethically challenged Harold Ford in the late 1990s.

Not only was Bibbs endorsed in her School Board race by the enemy of public education, Stand on Children, but she is employed by Green Dot Charter Schools as Director of Community Engagement.  Conflict of interest?  Ask Ms. Bibbs.

Two significant items on tonight's agenda were contracts for a company, Cynthia Alexander Mitchell Academics, which is owned by Associate Superintendent, Cynthia Alexander Mitchell.  The contracts are worth $60,900 and $130,000, respectively.  The larger contract is for Mitchell to "train" 13 teachers at the corporate outfit, The Center for Better Schools.  How sweet a deal is that!

Tonight was the first night I spoke at a Shelby County School Board meeting.  The protocol calls for three minutes, but the Board, with so much business, cut the speaker time to 30 minutes.  And this is in the middle of a charter reform school takeover of 10 Memphis schools.  So we got 1.5 minutes.  I used a little more and was escorted from the podium by one of Memphis's finest.   I will post my comments tomorrow.

Keep Wooddale Middle School Out of the Hands of Corporate Profiteers

How can this school be in the bottom five percent in the state of Tennessee??

 

Below is the schedule for ASD takeover meetings this week.  Come out to your community school meeting and send the profiteers a message they won't forget.

 

KIPP Collegiate Among Lowest Performers on Tennessee Priority List

Yesterday the KIPP Memphis operation backed out of a plan to take over South Side Middle School:

Teachers at South Side Middle School protested the takeover process last week, sending a letter to government officials and the media arguing that their scores had improved in the past year.

KIPP said the protest didn’t play into its decision to pull out of the process.

“We view the matching process as just that, a matching process,” said Jamal McCall, the executive director of KIPP Memphis Collegiate Schools. “With me doing our reflection, I was looking at where we are as a network, and my focus right now is on the quality of our current schools and ensuring that we continue to commit to those we currently serve and serve as we expand grade levels.”

Really, Jamal?  You doing the reflection? 

Meanwhile, KIPP Collegiate Middle remains on the state priority list of ASD's lowest performers as it continues to look for teachers who are willing to martyr themselves for a lost cause.

Achievement School District	Corning Achievement Elementary**
Achievement School District	Westside Achievement Middle School**
Achievement School District	Frayser Achievement Elementary**
Achievement School District	Whitney Achievement Elementary School**
Achievement School District	Georgian Hills Achievement Elementary Schoo**
Achievement School District	Cornerstone Prep - Lester Campus**
Achievement School District	KIPP Memphis Preparatory Middle**
Achievement School District	Aspire Hanley #1**

Parents, Teachers, and Students Say NO to Charter Takeovers in Memphis

Momentum is building to demolish a plan by H3 (Haslam, Huffman, Hopson) to turn Memphis into another corporate reform school feedlot like New Orleans.  

After yesterday's angry meetings at Raleigh-Egypt High School and at American Way Middle, the ASD's profiteers are reeling.  

Yes Prep had to pack up and go home after parents would hear none of the corporate plan to turn American Way Middle over to inexperienced and unprepared non-teachers and their CEO school "leaders." 

At Raleigh-Egypt High, where the Green Dot profiteers (backed by Eli Broad) are lined up to feed, parents and students gave warning that they will not send their children to Green Dot's corporate chain gang if the H3 plan moves forward.

from WREG:

MEMPHIS, Tenn. — Families in Raleigh fear they’re losing control of their schools. They’re calling it a hostile take-over. Parents tell WREG they’ll transfer their kids to another school before they let them stay here under charter control.

An out-of-state program known as Green Dot is coming in to take over Raleigh Egypt High School, but the community isn’t rolling out the red carpet for them.

Chasity Balfour has two kids in this high school.

“If they change I will not keep my kids in this school. Period,” she said.

Balfour isn’t ready to accept that they don’t have a choice in this. She says great things are happening under the new Raleigh Egypt Principal James Griffin, and she wants to see it continue with local control.

“I feel that if they just give them a year or two to boost the grades up it will make a big difference,” she said. . . .

. . . . The Achievement School District invited these families to the table to talk, but the pizza was far from an olive branch. Parents didn’t have questions — they had demands and threats.

Students from Fairley High School already under Green Dot control were on hand to talk about the transition process. They told WREG it’s not an overnight fix, and it involves a lot of change.

Jameka Elam is a senior at Fairley Student.

She said, “Maybe, probably ten teachers that I recognize from last year.”

Families in this school district aren’t ready to say the same thing. They say the fight is far from over.

ASD Backs Off Southside Middle

I was getting ready to go to a meeting at South Side Middle School this afternoon to advocate against Shelby County's school board decision to hand over SSMS to the KIPP cultists when I got an email that South Side had been removed from the ASD hit list for next year.  Congratulations to the hard-working teachers and parents at South Side!

If there is reason to doubt the sanity of closing South Side Middle for a worse KIPP school, then there is every reason to take Wooddale Middle off the list as well.  Presently Wooddale is scheduled to be turned over to the Green Dot charter profiteers from California. 

Below are the numbers from the State website that clearly indicate that Wooddale cannot be in the bottom five percent of schools in Tennessee.  

the "that-which-shall-not-be-named" standards and testing program

Dolores Umbridge, chair of  a newly formed but unnamed  committee with representatives of the US Department of Education, The Gates Foundation, PARCC, and the Pearson organization today  announced  spectacular progress in creating new labels for the "that-which-shall-not-be-named" standards and testing program now adopted by most of the United States. 

At a press conference Umbridge assured reporters that regardless of which of the many new terms are adopted by individual states, all versions will remain true to Susan Ohanian's characterization: “a radical untried curriculum overhaul” combined with “nonstop national testing."

Hat-tip: Peggy Robertson

October 26 I'll be discussing Wall Street banker Marshall Tuck on Dr. James Miller's The War Report on Public Education radio

Sunday, October 26, 2014 at 14:00 PST (2:00PM)
The War Report on Public Education
Call in number: (888) 627-6008

Host: Dr. James Miller
Co-Host: Lucianna Sanson

Guest: Jonathan Pelto (2:00PM) Democrats vs. Democrats vs. Teachers

Guest: Robert D. Skeels (3:00PM) Experienced educator Torlakson vs. business banker Tuck, the SPI race in California

I'll be discussing how Wall Street banker Marshall Tuck is supported by anti-public school billionaires and charter industry moguls. Moreover, I'll be discussing the various violations exposed by the MALDEF and Public Counsel cause of action filed against Tuck in the context of his vicious war on students and their families.

The concrete facts about school performance

Sent to Time Magazine, Oct. 23, 2014.
Re: Taking on Teacher Tenure, Time, November 3, 2014

   "Unassuming" tycoon David Welch is also unformed. He claims he prefers a world of "concrete facts" but still maintains that the American education system is "failing" because of bad teachers who can't be fired. 
   The concrete facts are these: When researchers control for the effects of poverty, American students score near the top of the world on international tests. Our unspectacular (but not horrible) performance on tests is because of our high child poverty rate, about 23%, second highest among 34 economically advanced countries, according to UNICEF. High-scoring countries such as Finland have a child poverty rate of about 5%.
   Poverty means, among other things,  poor nutrition, lack of health care, and little access to books. All of these have powerful negative effects on school performance. The best teaching in the world has little effect when students are hungry, ill, and have little or nothing to read.
   Our main problem is not teaching quality, unions, or the rules for due process. The main problem is poverty.

Stephen Krashen


Sources:

Control for poverty: Payne, K. and Biddle, B. 1999. Poor school funding, child poverty, and mathematics achievement. Educational Researcher 28 (6): 4-13; Bracey, G. 2009. The Bracey Report on the Condition of Public Education. Boulder and Tempe: Education and the Public Interest Center & Education Policy Research Unit. http://epicpolicy.org/publication/Bracey-Report. Berliner, D. 2011. The Context for Interpreting PISA Results in the USA: Negativism, Chauvinism, Misunderstanding, and the Potential to Distort the Educational Systems of Nations. In Pereyra, M., Kottoff, H-G., & Cowan, R. (Eds.). PISA under examination: Changing knowledge, changing tests, and changing schools. Amsterdam: Sense Publishers. Tienken, C. 2010. Common core state standards: I wonder? Kappa Delta Phi Record 47 (1): 14-17. Carnoy, M and Rothstein, R. 2013, What Do International Tests Really Show Us about U.S. Student Performance. Washington DC: Economic Policy Institute. 2012. http://www.epi.org/).

Child Poverty: UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre 2012, ‘Measuring Child Poverty: New league tables of child poverty in the world’s rich countries’, Innocenti Report Card 10, UNICEF Innocenti Research Centre, Florence.

Resistance to CorpEd Takeover of Memphis Schools Alive and Energized

I met with a group of parents and teachers in South Memphis last evening to discuss ideas and actions to resist the corporate takeover of Memphis's poorest schools.  The group represented teachers/parents from four of the 12 schools on the ASD hit list for 2015: South Side Middle, Wooddale Middle, Raleigh-Egypt High, and Florida-Kansas Elementary. 

Expressing her determination to turn back the assault on the local schools by the Shelby County School Board and the corporate foundations, Toni Jackson said during the meeting, "we've got to stand up--we are fighting for our lives." 

All affected parents and teachers are urged to join this group of teachers and parents on Monday at South Side Middle School, where KIPP, Inc. and Shelby County school board officials are sure to face tough questions and determined resistance.  Parents and teachers do not want their school turned into a corporate reform school chain gang.

MTA Responds to Corporate Teacher Licensure Plan by DESE

MTA Position Statement on DESE’s Performance-based Licensure Plan

The Department of Elementary and Secondary Education is floating a series of dangerous proposals that would link your license to your evaluation and/or student performance measures. The MTA is strongly opposed to all of the options outlined by DESE – and to any proposal that would tie an educator’s license with the state to his or her school- and district-based evaluations or student performance measures. 

On October 20, DESE released “Design Principles and Policy Options” for a “reimagined license system.” DESE has contracted with TNTP¹ and the Keystone Center² to hold “town halls,” ostensibly to get stakeholder feedback on these options. Members who attended the first session reported that the conversations were controlled and participants were not given the option of challenging the faulty premises being promoted by DESE. Meanwhile, DESE plans to issue proposed policy changes in the spring of 2015 and to have built a “performance-based licensure system” that includes “a link between licenses and district work assignments” by October 2015.

The policy options include a number of ideas about how to change the licensure system for those entering the profession as well as for those who are already licensed and experienced teachers. Based on a preliminary analysis, the most alarming proposals are the three options for “License Renewal and Advancement for Teachers” that are the subject of this position statement.

All three options, called Models A, B and C, would link license renewal and advancement to performance as determined by different means. We urge MTA members to demand “none of the above” as an option. Here are some highlights.

Model A: One provision: “License A automatically renewed for all educators with summative performance ratings of at least Proficient each year and at least moderate student impact rating each year.” 
 
In other words, the Student Impact Rating – based on MCAS growth and DDM scores – could be used to deprive you of a license to teach and drive you out of public school employment forever if that rating was less than “moderate.” What happened to the state’s promise that these questionable, yet-to-be-implemented ratings would only be used to help determine the length of an educator’s growth plan? Such a provision would make the high stakes attached to mandated tests even higher. Why would DESE even consider this option at a time when educators and parents across the state are saying that there is already far too much emphasis on standardized tests? How does this benefit students?
 
Model B: One provision: “If educator fails to demonstrate to the state [emphasis added] progress towards growth identified in the Educator Plan, the license may be conditionally extended for one additional year if LEA [school district] or its designee(s) provides additional coaching.” 
 
In other words, DESE – which claims it doesn’t have enough staff to regularly answer routine licensing phone calls – could be given the job of analyzing the plans of some 80,000 educators for the purpose of determining whether they have made progress toward meeting their goals. How many millions of dollars would this cost and, cumulatively, how many thousands of hours would teachers have to spend complying with such a requirement rather than teaching students? Why should the state have any role whatsoever in reviewing or analyzing an educator’s locally developed growth plan? How does this benefit students?
 
Model C: One provision: “Educators may renew a license by completing (or demonstrating) any two of the following:
 
• Recommendation from the employing LEA for license renewal
• Satisfactory results based on Student Feedback through a survey or other means
• Successful and Effective Parent Engagement….”
There are eight bullets altogether, but the first three give an idea of the direction. Under this model, the yet-to-be-implemented student feedback systems could play a role in determining whether you keep your license. This is a perversion of the stated purpose of obtaining student feedback. Why would DESE want to further undermine the validity and usefulness of an evaluation system that is already subject to deep and sustained criticism by educators? How would students benefit?
 
We strongly oppose all three models under consideration by DESE. 
 
• Linking licensure to evaluation is wrong. No other profession links job performance with licensure. Of course, the license of any professional can be pulled for grievous offenses, but not for employment-related performance reviews. Evaluations relate to educators’ employment status, not to their licenses. Linking performance measures to licensure puts vocal and activist teachers – indeed all teachers – on notice: Be careful or you will not only lose your job, but the ability to teach in Massachusetts.

• The state’s role is to determine if an educator is qualified. The appropriate role for the state is to determine whether an aspiring educator has met the education, training and experience requirements for obtaining a license and whether a practicing educator has met the professional development requirements for renewing a license. To link licensure to job performance would further extend the state’s reach into the choices educators make in the classroom.

• Too many mandates on top of too many mandates. It is outrageous that these proposals are being made at a time when even top state education officials have acknowledged that the state and federal governments have imposed too many mandates and new initiatives on educators. State Education Secretary Matt Malone has described the current mandate madness as akin to educators “trying to drink water from a fire hose.” And yet now the state is proposing a controversial new mandate that is strongly opposed by the field – with no clear explanation of why it is so urgent to impose these burdens at this time or how students will benefit. Stop the mandates! Let us teach!

October 22, 2014

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¹TNTP was found by Michelle Rhee in 1997 as The New Teacher Project.

²The Keystone Center has been mostly an environmental and energy consulting firm, with Dow Chemical, Monsanto, Dupont, Duke Energy, Pacific Gas & Electric (the utility company in the movie Erin Brockovich), Coca-Cola and General Mills as clients. Keystone is becoming a player in education issues. Will it have equivalent corporate sponsors?

Failing KIPP School Set to Take Over Southside Middle School

The Achievement School District (ASD) has a new hit list of Memphis schools, all of them poor and black.  Below is the list copied from the ASD website, which is run by semi-literate businessmen who don't know to turn the spell check off before the turn a Word doc into a pdf:

You will note that South Side Middle School is to be taken over by KIPP Memphis Collegiate Schools.  I did a check on the TN website to see how South Side Middle scores compare to KIPP.  The only KIPP middle school in Memphis with three years of data is KIPP Memphis Collegiate Middle School, whose value-added scores are below, followed by South Side Middle School's VAM scores:

Now you don't have to be Bill Sanders to see which of these two schools has better growth scores (green indicates above the target and red below the target).

In comparing the school level evaluation composites from the state website (click to enlarge), we get another picture of how South Side Middle, now set for takeover, is doing better than the KIPP outfit that is poised to turn it into another franchise (level 5 is best, level 1 is worst).

Now you must tell me whose interests are being served here by this scheme to turn a public school with a committed faculty and parents into another corporate welfare reform school with its penal system of total compliance schooling.

We will meet with South Side Middle parents and teachers at 5:30 today at Glenview Community Center at 1141 S. Barksdale in Memphis.  Be there. 

Arne’s sudden interest in improving testing

Sent to the Denver Post, Oct. 21.

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has been an enthusiastic supporter of the common core testing program, accurately described as "nonstop testing" by education expert Susan Ohanian.  The common core imposes more testing on our children than has ever been seen on our planet, and no attempt was made to determine if the new tests result in higher student achievement.

Now Secretary Duncan ("A test for school tests," Oct 20) says he supports a movement to eliminate redundant and inappropriate tests.  This should have been done using small-scale studies before the tests were forced on millions of children. 

Stephen Krashen

original article by Arne Duncan: http://www.denverpost.com/opinion/ci_26762648/test-tests?source=infinite

A Response to Gates/Duncan

from Peg Robertson at her blog:

Please comment on this article Arne Duncan: A test for school tests. Even if you have time for just one line of comment - we must not allow these lies to stand as truth. Thank you everyone.

Here is my comment on the article:

First - we must understand that the call for less testing is simply an appeasement - and a distraction - from the privatization agenda which requires immense testing PLUS the full implementation of the common core standards. The high stakes testing and the common core standards MUST stay in place if corporations wish to continue cashing in on public education to the tune of 800 billion dollars and growing. So, Arne can say whatever he wants to attempt to appease the public but we must understand clearly that the goal is to privatize. And they will happily decrease the testing to appease the public so that they can continue to dismantle the public school system.

These tests test what matters least. None of these tests support instruction, unless of course your goal is to teach to the test - which requires becoming savvy at multiple choice and formulaic writing. In our public schools the testing never ends. At the elementary school level we are testing weekly in some shape or form. The common core standards, upon which all this testing and curriculum is based, are developmentally inappropriate, not internationally benchmarked and not based on research. The PARCC test, which Arne claims is oh so fabulous, has no peer review research to demonstrate that it is valid. PARCC is an experiment. Experiments require informed consent. There is no parental informed consent for the PARCC experiment, which public school children in Colorado will be subjected to this year.

The PARCC is already estimated to fail 70% of our children. When CMAS social studies and science scores come out on October 27th, the citizens of Colorado will also see that Colorado's children have failed those tests. Then, watch the corporate reformers say - YES - see??? Our schools are failing! Our children are failing! Our teachers are bad! Watch them add more common core curriculum (Which by the way is nothing but test prep of the worst kind...mundane, boring and requires children to practice for the common core tests day in and day out using all the new fancy technology necessary for these tests.) Watch them fire more teachers because our evaluation will be tied to these tests and since 70% of the children will fail it - well, you do the math. Watch the schools buy more technology in order to increase test scores  and watch the CDE gather more student data because data is the new gold. Watch this data get shared with corporations so they can churn out more products and better manage and monitor our children.

Watch teachers spend more time getting trained to administer tests versus actual professional development to support teaching. In the last year I have received "professional development" on how to administer TCAP, ACCESS, PALS, and TS Gold and CMAS. I wonder what new tests will be ushered in next year? Oh yes - and I have received "professional development" on new common core curriculum which is scripted - for the day in which teachers will simply be teacher as technician. Look up Carpe Diem schools if you are wondering what that looks like. The end goal is to have very few experienced teachers - that would be dangerous as we know too much. Teacher as data puncher is all that is needed in the privatization agenda. Thinking is dangerous  - we might wake up the masses  - and then the cash flow would end. Teachers must be obedient and follow the rules of the privatization agenda, therefore, making sure that our evaluation is tied to these high stakes tests keeps us silent as we teach to the test. It also pits teacher against child as teachers soon realize that their livelihood depends on the test scores of these children.

Watch specifically in the urban areas, where children live in poverty and do not have books or computers at home which already puts them at a disadvantage for these online tests. Not to mention that they are hungry, many are sick, and many are tired due to having no consistent place to sleep at night. These children in poverty already suffer from toxic stress which damages the pre-frontal cortex of their brain - add toxic testing and toxic test prep to the mix and the damage increases. Watch these schools get labeled as failing schools - when in truth they are abandoned schools. Watch the reformers come in and hand them over to a charter, fire the staff, and usher in Teach for America folks who have 5 weeks of teacher training. Watch them continue to ignore poverty.

Meanwhile, when teachers do nothing but test and test prep day in and day out, we have no time to actually support the learner. This nonsense about "college and career ready" is so short sighted. What about problem solving citizens?  The common core and high stakes testing together are designed to destroy our public schools. The federal mandates under Race to the Top have opened the door wide to allow corporations to cash in using our children's data . If we hope to stop it, we need to revolt by refusing to allow our children to take these tests. I, personally, have refused to administer the PARCC test. See here, and I will continue to support parents in refusing these tests.  If anyone expects politicians, or mainstream media - such as the lovely Denver Post - to listen to anything that speaks to the truth, it will require a full-on revolt from the parents. Starve the beast - no data means no profit - game over. If I can help let me know. My email is writepeg@juno.com and my blog is 
www.pegwithpen.com

Isenberg Offers Antidote to the Ravitch Sedative

When Diane Ravitch published Death and Life of the Great American School System, it broke down a bunch of barriers and gained mainstream attention for long-neglected insights and observations that formed the core of her book.  Since then, Ravitch has grown her new anti-reformy fiefdom built on borrowed material into a sprawling empire that includes a growing cadre of speechifers and worshipful, protective acolytes who vie for her attention while hoping that some of her celebrity will rub off on them.  

Meanwhile, Ravitch has used the excuse of friendship to support corporate unionism and the malfeasance of the prostituted toadies that run the AFT and NEA.  She has used corporate education reform as an effective foil to sell her books, while refusing to use her firsthand knowledge of how the corporate education complex operates to bring it down.  And while she delays the sharing of her knowledge of how the fetid inner circle of CorpEd works, she continues to insist that these self-serving and corrupt Koretians, Hooverites, and other fascist thought misleaders are good people with misguided agendas.  Good people don't keep doing the same bad things even though they know better.

If you're tired of righteous panel discussions, blog posts turned into lucrative book deals, corporate unionists posing as the resistance to the corporate education agenda, and endless talk about getting rid of "over-testing," then it could be that there was someone in the last feel-angry Ravitch meet-up that you attended who feels the same.  Obviously, Leonard Isenberg is one who wasn't even there who feels that way.

Ravitch's role in creating and nurturing the corporate monster is a part of history she refuses to tell.  If the truth would set Ravitch free from her role in keeping NAEP cut scores impossibly high and the Sandia Report off the front pages, it could also bring her demigod status back down to the ground level that is so alien to her.  And that could ruin, too, the place she has chosen for herself between Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Jane Addams in the history of great American women. 

I think just to the left of Elizabeth Dole and the right of Hillary Clinton would be much more appropriate. 

Smoking Gun! Wall Street Banker Marshall Tuck violated student and parent civil rights!

"...raises significant concerns that [Marshall Tuck run] PLAS continues to disregard state law, regulation, and LAUSD policy and is failing to implement transparent and uniform procedures to ensure parent and student rights are protected." — MALDEF / Public Counsel

Those of us who have had the great misfortune of watching Eli Broad's protegé, Wall Street Banker Marshall Tuck, operating in Los Angeles over the years have witnessed numerous nefarious activities. From Tuck's thinly veiled white supremacy, to his cutting of vital health education classes, to his gutting ethnic studies, to his overall failure as an administrator, no reasonable person would ever support Tuck, if they were aware of his actual record. Unfortunately the corporate media have had no interest in discussing what Tuck actually did rather than what he says he did. If the media were doing their jobs, there were plenty of things that they could have done some investigative reporting on. In addition to Tuck's corporate, top-down management, there were persistant rumors of California Education Code violations, civil rights violation, and more, but we had difficulty finding people willing to come forward.

Back in July, a high profile bilingual education activist sent the following to a group of us.

I know that LAUSD and PLAS, under the leadership of Marshall Tuck, had a Uniform Complaint filed against them in 2009 for their actions at Ritter Elementary School. The complaint, on behalf of the parents, was filed by the Office of the Public Counsel (OPC) in conjunction with MALDEF. The complaint was upheld, remedies were directed, but no change of procedures or actions ever took place. How can I track down the UC? Do you think I should contact the OPC and the lawyer I was working with on behalf of the parents of the students in their now defunct Dual Language Program? Any advice would be appreciated.

The last few months have seen us encounter myriad dead ends trying to obtain documentation of the successful Uniform Complaint, but once we finally got copies last weekend, it became obvious why people have been trying to hide it. The Uniform Complaint Cause of Action filed jointly by Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) and Public Counsel Law Center on behalf of families whose civil rights had been violated by Marshall Tuck is perhaps the most damning documents I've ever seen. United Teachers of Los Angeles' Cheryl Ortega has already written a piece: Marshall Tuck Betrays Latino and African American Parents, that outlines the history, background, and details surrounding this tragedy at Ritter Elementary School. Therefore, I want to look at some of the more salient points in the Uniform Complaint against Tuck.

A. Failure to Provide Notice of Placement in an English Immersion Program

Here the lawyers discuss how Marshall Tuck and his Partnership for Los Angeles Schools (PLAS) lieutenants violated state law, and cite a common law case supporting their interpretation of PLAS's violation.

B. Failure to Notify Parents of Their Right to Apply for a Parental Exception Waiver.

The attorneys outline how Marshall Tuck and PLAS ignored the California Education Code. I love how the section ends with: "...violated the parents' rights under California law."

C. Failure to Form an Alternative Language Class When 20 Waivers in a Given Grade Have Been Provided.

MALDEF and Public Counsel show unequivocal evidence that Marshall Tuck failed to adhere to the provisions of the California Education Code.

D. Failure to Provide Required Response to Waivers, to Assess Each Waiver on Its Individual Merits, or to Provide Notice of the Right to Appeal if the Waiver is Denied.

Citing numerous violations of the California Education Code, Proposition 227, and other state laws, the lawyers take Marshall Tuck and his corporate team to task for blatant law breaking. Tuck, as demonstrated above, would eliminate any program that he believed was interfering with preparation for standardized tests. Students weren't important, their test scores were. Like all neoliberal corporate education reformers, PLAS and Tuck were entirely ignorant on pedagogy. The Uniform Complaint's answer to PLAS's insistence that Dual Language Programs hurt test scores is instructive:

PLAS's response that the existing program at Ritter Elementary was not producing the desired results is insufficient. There is ample evidence in LAUSD and statewide that Dual Language Programs, when implemented by a competent school-site team, not only produce far superior results in terms of academic achievement for all participating children but result in children who can speak and write in two languages, a clear assest in our world economy, and who may also have better appreciation of cultural and linguistic differences. It was PLAS's responsibility, in keeping with its goal of creating an excellent school, to create an excellent DLP, not to abolish the existing program.

Marshall Tuck abolished the existing program.

As the Uniform Complaint document segues into the section that outlines Marshall Tuck and PLAS's ongoing violations, there's one more passage that I want to reproduce. Bear in mind that these events had been going on for over a year, and that both PLAS's executive team, headed by Chief Executive Officer Marshall Tuck, and PLAS's unelected Board of Directors had been entirely intransigent and uncooperative for that entire duration. The community, parents (and their lawyers), teachers, and everyone else tried to work in good faith with PLAS, but that good faith was not reciprocated.

Public Counsel and MALDEF expected that this year PLS would make every effort to ensure it followed state law, regulation and LAUSD policy consistently and uniformly. This appears not to have happened.

Please read the entire document to get and idea of how egregious Marshall Tuck and his cabal really were. The opening quote of this essay, reproduced from page one of the Uniform Complaint, shows exasperation with Tuck's lawlessness. Ironically, Tuck's entire campaign has centered around the abject lawsuit filed by reactionary millionaire David F. Welch. The Welch suit was designed to strip teachers of their bare modicum of protections they currently have, including their small degree of academic freedom. The suit, which used students who for the most part weren't even public school students, is being appealed, and hopefully will be overturned in its entirety. Tuck is quick to talk about the rights of students, but as it has been demonstrated, he methodically violated the civil rights of both his students and their parents on an ongoing basis.

The cretinous GOP candidate for California, a banker just like Tuck, keeps insisting (with no substantive evidence) that "Jerry Brown is betraying the children of California." Perhaps he's alluding to the two charter schools Brown has ties to. But here we have a clear, unequivocally documented case of multiple betrayals, deceptions, and malfeasance by another candidate for a different office:

Marshall Tuck betrayed parents and ignored the law!

Let's reelect State Superintendent Tom Torlakson

Smoking Gun: Marshall Tuck Violated Student and Parent Civil Rights! by Robert D. Skeels

Let Coakley Lose

Some of us are done with "Democrats" who support corporate education agendas.  I say let Coakley's incompetence take her where it will.

By Matt Murphy STATE HOUSE NEWS SERVICE Posted Oct. 20, 2014 @ 5:49 am
MALDEN

BOSTON, OCT. 19, 2014.....Democratic gubernatorial nominee Martha Coakley spent part of her weekend trying to patch up her campaign's relationship with a key constituency after her recent comments about charter schools left members of the state's largest teachers union feeling "deep anger and disappointment" with their candidate .

The Massachusetts Teachers Association has endorsed Coakley in the race for governor, but their alliance began to show signs of strain after Coakley reacted last week to the state's disqualification of two proposed charter schools in Fitchburg and Brockton.

Coakley, who said she supports lifting the cap on charter schools, called on the Department of Education to reconsider, and issued a statement saying, "Families and children in Brockton and Fitchburg deserved better. We shouldn't let a technicality get in the way of offering increased opportunities to our children in school districts across the state."

That statement, according to MTA President Barbara Madeloni, left members of the teachers union who could be critical to Coakley's get-out-the-vote effort angry and confused by their candidate's position. . . .