Ravitch Censors to Protect Clinton Complicity

Some people remain amazed at Diane Ravitch's "conversion" that came after she figured out that everyone with a brain had discovered the Big Lie that undergirded the ed policies that she had espoused for the past 30 years.  

What many people don't know is that Ravitch did not leave her Party--her Party left her as it dove over the cliff, stage right.  

Now that the Democratic Party has become the the party of Nixon, Diane has a home, and she is just as menacingly protective of this one as she was her last.

Ravitch at Clinton Fundraiser

The commentary below comes from Alison McDowell:

I have come to realize that the "personalized" blended/hybrid digital learning programs inundating our classrooms since the passage of the ESSA can be traced back to the creation (via Bill Clinton's Executive Order 13111 in 1997) of the Advanced Distributed Learning Program. This Department of Defense program utilized considerable resources from private sector interests and academic institutions.

I encourage all who truly care about public education in the 21st century to familiarize themselves with the Clinton family's involvement in promoting technology-based education and digital workforce badges.

While the primary function of ADL was to enhance distance learning for DoD and federal employees, it is clear from the implementation plan that the intention was to create an infrastructure that would fundamentally change the delivery of educational content well beyond those limits.

Almost twenty years later, the chickens are coming home to roost for K12 education, just in time for Hillary Clinton to step back in. The federal government's current plan to "redesign" public education for the 21st Century is based on a military-industrial complex model. I hope people wake up before it is too late.

The following links tell an interesting story. I encourage people to start digging in. There's a lot more material out there.

History of the ADL program: https://www.adlnet.gov/about-adl/

ADL (now xAPI) expands to track live human datastreams: https://www.adlnet.gov/…/performance-tracki…/experience-api/

Bill Clinton's Executive Order 13111: https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-1999-01-15/pdf/99-1185.pdf

“(3) mechanisms for the Federal Government to encourage private sector investment in the development of high-quality instructional software and wider deployment and utilization of technology-mediated instruction so that all Americans may take advantage of the opportunities provided by learning technology;"

DOD report on ADL Implementation: https://www.pdf-archive.com/2016/09/01/adl-implementation-dod/

Clinton Foundation's Support of Digital Badging:https://www.clintonfoundation.org/…/digital-badges-unlockin…
Clinton Family's Ties to the for-profit Laureate Universities International: http://www.laureate.net/OurNetwork/ExploreLaureate?q=clinton

Pearson 1997-2000: http://www.ulib.niu.edu/publishers/pearson.htm

I submitted the above comment on the morning of 8/30/16 on Diane Ravitch's recent post about attending a Clinton fundraising event. https://dianeravitch.net/2016/08/30/im-with-her-literally/#comments 

It has not made it out of moderation.

Pavlov, Meet Google's Classcraft

Classcraft is one of the hundreds of "gamifying" applications that is trying to cash in on the latest efforts to control human behavior in schools.  It uses 21st Century technology to implement a 19th Century form of primitive conditioning based on rewards and punishments.  What kinds of punishments, you say?

Well, have a look at this 2 minute intro, and you will see that a typical punishment comes in the form of learning and reciting a poem.   Can you imagine a more poetic form of pure punishment. Yuck! 

Here is a poem by E. E. Cummings that I am adding to the poetry punishment hopper:

AFT Affiliate Exec Among United Opt Out Admins

by Jim Horn
 
A friend sent me a link to some reactions by AFT members to the recent national conference, where it seems that everything that transpired was tightly controlled by Weingarten and TURN veteran, Mary Ricker, to advance the Clinton candidacy, rather than to advocate for students and teachers.  Surprise, right?

Take a moment to read it, and you will see why anyone who is not a hand-picked enforcer of Weingarten's corporate agenda has no chance to affect the direction of this faux union:

AFT Leadership controls the membership. This must change. We are a top down driven union. The international relations and domestic positions of the Democratic Party, and specifically Hillary Clinton (who was present and gave a very disappointing speech about supporting public charter schools) shaped the convention. It was tightly controlled.

Given this basic acknowledged fact, it is hard to imagine the resistance moving toward closer ties with AFT and its affiliates, which are tightly controlled by the AFT home office.  Yet this is what's happening, as I noted a couple of weeks back just after the United Opt Out splintered over these very issues.

Soon after I published my commentary on the shake-up inside UOO and the announced joint meeting with the Houston Federation of Teachers, Ceresta Smith posted at Facebook a message from HFT president, Zeph Capo, about Houston's big CBE model initiative, which doesn't seem to bother him all that much.  I hope you will read the comments that follow his dissembling letter (click on the "See More" just below to get the entire entry).



More recently, the "new" UOO announced a new line-up of administrators, which now includes an executive from HFT.  

From Common Schools to Corporate Education Reform: Similar Purpose, Different Century

By Timothy Scott

Common Schools were established in the U.S. to be an autocratic apparatus that could pacify and instill loyalty in the industrial empire’s “citizen subjects” by disciplining their minds to control their bodies. As a compulsory mass education system, the opulent founders of common schools designed them for the purpose of social and cultural reproduction, with the nationalistic aim of shaping future workers into a God fearing, capable and loyal industrial citizenry.

Over the past forty-years education reform policies intended to marketize, privatize and ultimately financialize the U.S. education system have spurred significant resistance across the political spectrum. Often galvanized by claims that reform policies undermine public education as a vital institution of U.S. democracy, many progressive public education advocates call to “save our schools” and return them to their original common good design. Within this “good ole days” or “Make America Great Again” narrative, romanticized notions of the original Horace Mann Common School movement are often referenced. This storyline is premised on the belief that the current attack on public education is therefore an attack on American democracy, which presupposes that the United States was founded as a democracy and struggled to remain so thereafter. While the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers often reproduce this storyline as they collude with education reformers, many individuals and groups who actively oppose education reform policies also disseminate this tale.

In a 2014 interview with Bill Moyers, education historian Diane Ravitch advanced this storyline when expressing her concerns about the future of public education by claiming, “I believe it is one of the foundation stones of our democracy: So an attack on public education is an attack on democracy.” In a 2013 blog posting, Ravitch promoted an article by Jeff Bryant of Campaign for America’s Future, who posits “Horace Mann… agreed that democratic citizenship was a primary function of education.” In 2016 Ravitch celebrated an article by Gene Glass who rhetorically asked if Horace Mann were alive today, “would he be lobbying Congress or Albany or Sacramento to secure big contracts for some corporation?” Glass answered his own question by affirming, “I think he would be alarmed by what is happening in this country to our public education system.”

Yes, resistance to current authoritarian “reform” policies is vital, especially due to harm being inflicted on children, families, communities and education workers. Yet, it is also vitally important for those of us who seek substantive progressive social change to critically examine our history so as to not reproduce myths about the origins of universal public education in the United States. By doing so, we can also extricate the many myths about American democracy. In fact, when we take a critical look at the true objectives of Mann’s Common Schools and the “equalizing” and “education for democracy” narratives attached to them, we discover they have more in common with the objectives and rhetoric of today’s corporate education reformers than many would like to admit.

The nationalistic origins of universal public education

 In the U.S. and Europe, compulsory mass education was born out of the marriage between nationalism and industrialization with regard to the utility of instilling a common cultural and national identity within the citizenry and workforce of the ever expanding U.S. empire. The American Revolution spawned an ideological creed that affixed human value to Protestant and free-market notions of individual self-sufficiency and individual merit, enacted by patriotic commitments to strive for moral improvement through one’s labor power. In the first decades of the 19th century, this edict, along with the solidification of modern political parties, industrialization, increasing immigration and the expansion of universal white male suffrage led large numbers of industrialists, state legislators, clergy and civic leaders to recognize the utility of a basic education for the white masses. The nation’s founding “minority of the opulent” had already foreseen the necessity of state supported schools for the purpose of building and maintaining their envisioned social order as the nation’s borders expanded and its population increased. These beliefs and concerns would soon culminate into efforts to establish a mass education system that was universal (common), publicly funded, state mandated, standardized and staffed by trained and disciplined teachers.

Within industrialized nations, compulsory mass education serves as an essential instrument in cultivating dutiful citizen subjects who will consent to (or champion) the demands and interests of those in power. Citizenship is therefore attached to duties and expectations relating to the maintenance, success and preservation of the nation-state in both domestic and international affairs. As a principal instrument of nationalism, mass education instills in children, as future citizens, a homogenous national identity and unequivocal loyalty to the nation-state – as an idealized and hallowed homeland – often attached to a transcendental authority. Essentially, it equips embryonic citizen subjects with the skills and worldview that enables them to eagerly participate in, or passively acquiesce, to a nation’s sources of cultural, political and economic power.

In the U.S., a state supported mass educational system was constructed as a means to transform white settler-colonists into citizens (yet restricting suffrage rights of white women) based on the ideological and legal dictates of white supremacy, capitalism, heteropatriarchy and Christian doctrine. To safeguard these undemocratic structures, citizenship in the U.S. was attached to a mythical belief that all citizens are endowed with a legal right of parity of participation in most aspects of political, economic and civic life. Foundationally, this duplicitous project required the construction of a uniform and standardized system of schooling in order to produce a common fidelity to the nationalistic aims of the opulent white elite. Schooling would thus deeply ingrain those aims as cultural scripts, disseminated as unequivocal beliefs and attitudes that are attached to awe inspiring symbols related to the polity. While the U.S. Constitution left education to be a responsibility of individual states, an intention to imbue state supported education with nationalism was clearly transmitted in the writings of the founders in their expansionist Land Ordinances and subsequent land grants, and in some cases through efforts in their home states (see Jefferson).

Instituting this immense top down project presented significant ideological and logistical barriers in the decades following the American Revolution. To begin with, citizen rights in the U.S. – in practice and as an idea – were attached to one’s individual sovereignty and autonomy; as the imperialist project of nation building was chaotically unfolding. The former was soon tempered by the institutionalization of schooling, wielded over subjugated and disenfranchised groups through Protestant orthodoxy. As for the latter, the establishment of the logistical technique of compulsory mass education could only proceed after other infrastructure projects were firmly established, including law and order through state and municipal governments, systems of transportation and communication, commercial activity, cultural and civil life; and basic schooling customs initiated by federally granted lands. Only once these essential logistical techniques of social control by an infrastructurally powerful federal government radiated outward in common cause with state and municipal governments, could influential Protestant social reformers, businessmen and government officials take steps to impose mass public education on the children of poor white citizen subjects.

Revisioning the Common School Movement

Between the 1820s and 1840s, as the federal government waged a genocidal war against Native peoples and the constitutionally protected structure of chattel slavery thrived, social and labor unrest was also prevalent due to growing wealth disparities and social and economic hardship for the naturalized and immigrant white working-class. Wealthy and middle-class Protestants – who associated poverty with moral decay, non-English-speaking and Catholic immigrants as cultural threats and labor solidarity as insurrection – began to unite to save souls and foster social cohesion through the advancement of civic nationalism (a concept that would later be referred to as “democratic citizenship”). Intent on creating a common culture within the republic, many members of this elite class advocated for common schools as an efficient means to provide a “moral education” for future generations of the labor force in order to instill “character, discipline, virtue, and good habits.” Basic literacy skills fit into this plan, yet “analytical ability” and “knowledge of the world” did not. This righteous calling required an autocratic apparatus, one that could pacify and instill loyalty in its subjects while disciplining their minds and controlling their bodies. It also had to be vested in, and capable of, executing social and cultural reproduction. Common schools were set up to become that instrument: a compulsory mass education system with the nationalistic aim of shaping future workers, whether native or foreign born, rural or urban into a God fearing, capable and loyal industrial citizenry.

As these efforts were gaining traction in the North and Midwest, the South’s economy was tied to plantation agriculture, chattel slavery and subsistence farming for poor whites. During the first half of the 19th century, tensions were intensifying between southern states and the federal government and northern states over trade policy, economic determinism, slavery’s expansion into new territories, states rights and abolitionism. These mounting divisions resulted in many southern states establishing a uniform system of schooling separate from mass education movements and motivations in the North. Overall, the South resisted the infusion of mass public education until Reconstruction, when Jim Crow laws constructed intensely segregated public education systems. White supremacy as a fundamental structure of the founders’ social order also guaranteed separate and unequal schooling for Black and Brown children throughout the nation.

The Protestants fueling the mass schooling agenda in the North were often sympathetic to the abolition of slavery and were leaders of the Second Great Awakening, a mass evangelical revival that infused itself into the public arena during the 1830’s. They were typically Anglo-American and were a mixture of businessmen, clergy, philanthropists, professionals and politicians who saw themselves as social reformers; which according to Kaestle explains how their common views “provided the ideological context for the creation of state school systems” that were “centered on republicanism, Protestantism, and capitalism, three sources of social belief that were intertwined and mutually supporting.” Education historian Carl Kaestle goes on to describe the cultural scripts these affluent white men intended to advance through a system of compulsory education:

…the sacredness and fragility of the republican polity (including ideas about individualism, liberty, and virtue); the importance of individual character in fostering social morality; the central role of personal industry in defining rectitude and merit; the delineation of a highly respected but limited domestic role for women; the importance for character building of familial and social environment (within certain racial and ethnic limitations); the sanctity and social virtues of property; the equality and abundance of economic opportunity in the US; the superiority of American Protestant culture; the grandeur of America’s destiny; and the necessity of a determined public effort to unify America’s polyglot population.

These inspired social reformers, while conceptually clear about what the nation needed, began to look beyond their national borders for a model of mass schooling that would be compatible with their vision of the republic. Unfolding events in Prussia were shaping a national system of education that looked promising to many American social reformers. After Napoleon’s conquest of Prussia in 1806, the Prussian monarchy began to systematically restructure and modernize its military, state and economy along industrial lines. This was all part of a developing nationalist effort to unify long conquered and splintered Germanic states along cultural and economic lines. At the core of this project were major education reforms that synthesized into one of the first compulsory public education systems in the world. In the decades after Prussia helped to defeat Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815, its highly efficient and standardized industrial education system, staffed by a cadre of disciplined professional teachers, became the model to be replicated by industrializing nations the world over.

The Prussian primary education system introduced a free and compulsory graded system of schooling that involved an eight-year course of primary education for both girls and boys, including kindergarten. It mandated a prescribed national curriculum for each grade, which focused on teaching the technical skills – reading, writing, math, science, technology – needed to modernize the Prussian state and economy. It also required national testing to determine students’ vocational aptitudes. Prussian primary schools also provided music (mostly singing) and religious education that were important in transmitting a common culture and national identity with a strict ethos of duty, discipline and temperance. For its teachers, the Prussian state required advanced professional training by specialized private seminaries, state certification and national oversight of instruction through ongoing supervision. The state recognized teaching as a profession, which included a basic salary.

Many education innovators in the United States and elsewhere became enamored with Prussia’s primary, secondary and higher education systems. The 1834 publication titled “Report on the State of Public Education in Prussia,” further compelled U.S. educators and some state legislatures to replicate the Prussian model.  When constructing its state constitution in 1835, Michigan used the Prussian model to design its primary, secondary and university system.

Horace Mann, a Protestant moralist, member of the pro-business Whig Party and a phrenologist (a form of scientific racism), served as a Massachusetts State Senator, the first Secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education and in the U.S. House of Representatives. As other American education leaders were doing at the time, Mann traveled to Prussia in 1843 to study its primary education system and its teacher education seminaries (normal schools). With the Prussian emphasis on social cohesion, Mann was particularly interested in how they were using their primary public schools to unify the German people.

Upon his return to Massachusetts, Mann was even more determined to attach his elite and pious vision of society to a statewide public education system. Understanding that lasting social reforms must begin with children, Mann took up the mantra “Men are cast-iron, but children are wax,” to advance his “Americanized Prussian model” of schooling. Mann’s lobbying efforts for its adoption in Massachusetts persuaded enough of his political allies in the private sector and the state government to support a statewide compulsory system of public primary schools (or common schools), modeled after the Prussian system. Mann’s efforts led to the enactment of a compulsory primary school attendance law in 1852, which was the first in the nation. Mann’s critics, according to law professor Glenn Reynolds, “accused him of wanting to establish a ‘Prussian-style tyranny’ in the schools, arguing that the Prussian model was based on a presumption that government was wiser than the citizenry, while in America the presumption was the reverse.”

In line with this model, Mann worked to advance more “objective” methods of assessing teaching and learning, which led the state of Massachusetts to adopt formal written standardized tests in place of the traditional, and more subjective, oral exams. In his pursuit of greater efficiency in education, Mann’s tests quantitatively assessed students’ rote knowledge to determine the effectiveness of teaching and learning in the burgeoning state’s public schools. The test results allowed district and state authorities to then monitor and compare teachers and schools, to classify students, to streamline pedagogical practices; and to insure that there was a uniform curriculum that fostered civic nationalism. According to assessment and evaluation specialist, Ralph Tyler:

At a time when…universal education was developed, the testing movement furnished both an ideological and an instrumental basis for the practice of schools and colleges in sorting students rather than educating them … it promoted the simplistic notion that important outcomes of schooling could be adequately appraised by achievement tests…

Mann is most often remembered as a principled education and social reformer who was authentically motivated in all of his roles by well meaning, albeit religious, convictions. According to Mann’s Annual Reports during his first four years as the Secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education, he generally presented himself as being such a broker. Yet in his Fifth Annual Report in 1841, Mann made a case for how the value of a common school system would largely be based on the economic interests of the Boston business elite. In this report, Mann was explicit about his views of the hegemonic function of schooling:

Finally, in regard to those who possess the largest shares in the stock of worldly goods, could there, in your opinion, be any police so vigilant and effective, for the protection of all the rights of person, property and character, as such a sound and comprehensive education and training as our system of common schools could be made to impart…Would not the payment of a sufficient tax to make such training universal, be the cheapest means of self-protection and insurance?

In 1845 a prominent group of businessmen praised Mann for his achievements by declaring, “You have demonstrated that the arm of industry is served, and the wealth of the country is augmented, in proportion to the diffusion of knowledge, so that each humble schools-house is to be regarded, not only as a nursery of souls, but a mine of riches.” In 1863, an eminent educator named John D. Philbirck reminisced about how Mann’s Fifth Annual Report had “probably done more than all other publications written within the past twenty-five years to convince capitalists of the value of elementary instruction as a means of increasing the value of labor.”

Mann’s standing in the larger Whig Party influenced many of his fellow education reformers to adopt his common school model of primary education (along with normal schools) in their states. Ultimately, the Prussian model and Mann’s common schools went on to serve as a standard by which rural and urban public education systems were organized throughout the nation. This led to a uniform network of public school districts piloted by municipalities, but centrally controlled by state governments, and influenced through federal funds. The model of schooling that Mann and others constructed was intentionally organized within an industrial model of efficiency and standardized in terms of graded classrooms, common curriculum and instruction, methods of assessment (written and multiple choice tests attached to letter grades) and uniform schedules and built environments. Mann’s “Americanized Prussian model” also laid the foundation for formalized teacher education and credentialing across the nation.

Conclusion

At the turn of the 20th century settler-colonialism had triumphed and imperialistic priorities of industrial capitalism were growing within an era steeped in perpetual economic crisis, intense racial inequity and violence, pervasive economic inequality and ongoing gender subjugation. As organized resistance to this social order intensified, the nation’s white political and industrial elite turned their attention to developing even more extensive and efficient mechanisms of social control (“social cohesion”). As part of this, the expansion of the common school model into secondary education was prioritized. Accordingly, universal primary and secondary public education in the 20th century went on to fuel the tenets of nationalism, social efficiency and eugenics; whereby schooling served the function of social reproduction and the perpetuation of cultural scripts that bolster an inherently unequal and deceptively undemocratic American “democracy.”

References 

Barkin, K. (1983). Social Control and the Volksschule in Vormärz Prussia. Central European History, 16(01), 31-52.

Bowles, S. (2014). Schooling in capitalist America: Educational reform and the contradictions of economic life. Haymarket Books.

Chas, DeGarmo. (1887). The German System of Normal Schools. Science, 302-304.

Carpenter, J. (2013). Thomas Jefferson and the ideology of democratic schooling. Democracy and Education, 21(2), 5.

Feuer, M. (1992). Testing in American schools: Asking the right questions. In Report prepared for the US Congress, Office of.

Franciosi, R. J. (2004). The rise and fall of American public schools: The political economy of public education in the twentieth century. Greenwood Publishing Group.

Gallagher, C. J. (2003). Reconciling a Tradition of Testing with a New Learning Paradigm. Educational Psychology Review, 15(1).

Glass, G. (2016). Would Horace Mann Tweet? Retrieved fromhttps://dianeravitch.net/2016/02/08/gene-glass-would-horace-mann-tweet/

Glenn, C. L. (1988). The myth of the common school. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press.

Groen, M. (2008). The Whig Party and the rise of common schools, 1837-1854: Party and policy reexamined. American Educational History Journal, 35(1/2), 251.

Gutek, G. L. (2012). An historical introduction to American education. Waveland Press.

Kaestle, C. F. (1988). Public Education in the Old Northwest:” Necessary to Good Government and the Happiness of Mankind”. The Indiana Magazine of History, 60-74.

Kaestle, C. F. (2007). Victory of the Common School Movement. A turning point in American educational history. Historians on America (S. 22-30): Washington, DC: US Department of State.

Kaestle, C. F. (2008). Victory of the Common School Movement. America. gov Archive, 3.

Kaestle, C. F. (2011). Pillars of the republic: Common schools and American society, 1780-1860. Macmillan.

Karger, H. (2014). Bitter Pill: Austerity, Debt, and the Attack on Europe’s Welfare States, The. J. Soc. & Soc. Welfare, 41, 33.

Kliebard, H. M. (2004). The struggle for the American curriculum, 1893-1958. Psychology Press.

Mann, H. (1841). The Fifth Annual Report: The Effect of Education Upon the Worldly Fortunes of Men. Retrieved May 1, 2015 from http://library.uml.edu/clh/All/hman.htm

Mann, M. (1984). The autonomous power of the state: its origins, mechanisms and results. European journal of sociology, 25(02), 185-213.

Mann, M. (2012). The sources of social power: Volume 3, global empires and revolution, 1890-1945 (Vol. 3). Cambridge University Press.

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Ravitch, D. (2013, July 4). Reflections on the Purpose of Education and the Manufactured Crisis. Diane Ravitch’s blog A site to discuss better education for all. Retrieved formhttps://dianeravitch.net/2013/07/04/reflections-on-the-purpose-of-education-and-the-manufactured-crisis/

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Thank you John Oliver for exposing how charter schools steal from children

“Fraud is a feature of deregulation, not a bug. When no one is looking, some people steal. Not everyone steals, but many do. That is why Ohio, Florida, Michigan, and California are scamming taxpayers.” — Professor Diane Ravitch

The vile poverty pimps and privatization pushers of the lucrative charter school industry were infuriated when John Oliver had the temerity to speak truth to their power. Given their fortunes at stake, the charter sector has launched an unprecedented attack on the truth teller. The Network For Public Education has begun a letter writing campaign to counter that of the well funded efforts by the school privatizers to silence Oliver and other public school supporters. Not one to use boilerplate text, I composed my own thank you note, reproduced here.

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Dear Mr. Oliver:

I've spent the past two decades of my life researching and writing about the lucrative charter school industry. For many of those early years I, and a few others, were subjected to scorn and abuse for our audacity to speak truth to power.

My motivation has always been to defend those with the most to lose because of the charter project's existence—students with disabilities (SWD), students with disciplinary issues, low-performing students, and so on. All these students are discriminated against because they threaten charter school revenues.

Today our voices are no longer alone, ignored, or silenced. The recent NAACP announcement, and your brilliant segment are testament to that. I understand that the charter industry has been launching vile attacks against you for exposing their insatiable greed. Please know that people of good conscience stand behind you. The neoliberal corporate education reform project backing the charter industry puts profits before pupils, and that's unacceptable.

It's time to end the horrifically failed charter school project, and turn our attentions to public schools.

Thank you for your courage.

Robert D. Skeels
Juris Doctor Candidate

Does your candidate hold left wing or right wing views on education?

“Hillary Clinton, who, for me, is a neoliberal disaster…” — Professor Cornel West

Is your candidate progressive or reactionary on education issues? One measure is to compare their views to those of the notoriously right-wing JBS. Here we look at some critical issues facing students, families, and our public schools.

Severe media bias persists

Groundhog Day: A comment on “Americans like their schools just fine - but not yours.”
The headline of this article should have been “Severe media bias on education persists.”
As is the case every year, the Gallup poll found that people rate their local schools much more positively than they do schools in the US in general.The differences, as usual, were striking: Seventy-six percent of parents said they would give the public schools their oldest child attended a grade or A or B, but only 25% would give public schools in the nation an A or B.
Lorraine McDonnell, a professor of political science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has an explanation: Parents have direct information about the school their children attend, but their opinion of American education comes from the media. The image of public schools, she notes,  “is somewhat vague and increasingly negative though media images."In reality, American schools are doing quite well: When researchers control for the effects of poverty, American students' international test scores rank near the top of the world. This is strong evidence of media bias.  When parents rate the nation’s schools and their children’s school the same, we will know this bias is gone.

Stephen Krashen
http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2016/08/23/490380129/americans-like-their-schools-just-fine-but-not-yours
This comment posted on nprEd Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/pages/nprEd/402441646563033

Understanding KIPP Model Charter Schools: Part 6

Part 5 is here (earlier excerpts can be accessed by googling the title above).

If you are a new teacher in a "no excuses" school, you may be discovering a level of Hell that you previously did not know existed.  In the excerpt below from my book, former teachers and teachers begin to recount some of their experiences in KIPP Model schools.  I would say, enjoy, but that is not the right admonition.  Rather, read a bit, and go outside and look at the sky, then continue.

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Chapter 6

The KIPP Teaching Experience

It’s like you’re being used up and thrown out.  –1160

. . . looking back on it, it just seems crazy that people are willing to do the things that KIPP requires of them without a second thought. You know, you have to have blind obedience, if that makes sense. –1184

         As noted elsewhere in this book, KIPP teachers are at-will employees, which means that the teacher or KIPP can terminate the contract at any time without notice.  While this arrangement provides a tangible motivator for teachers to try to keep up with KIPP’s expectations, it also allows KIPP to quickly replace teachers who are not producing measurable results in the form of test scores. 

This arrangement, in turn, creates higher stress levels among teachers who are already under intense pressure, and the ability to fire teachers at-will creates a negative energy that runs counter to KIPP’s advertised face of positivity and widespread “joy factor.”  Teachers report that job insecurity was a major stressor, which creates negative energy from knowing that termination might come without warning:  “I think that KIPP is kind of fueled by negative energy in some ways. You know, it’s easier to try to scare people into doing things than to motivate them or encourage them. And I think that was kind of the attitude that I ran into a lot is, you know, you’re an at-will employee, so if you don’t like it, you can go somewhere else.”

Another teacher noted that his lowest points at KIPP were related to his anxiety about job insecurity, which caused him to lose sleep:  “. . . a part of the culture among staff at this particular school, and I think at most KIPP schools, because there’s no contract, there’s this idea of you could go at any time.  You could not be re-hired next year.  You could be let go with absolutely no notice.  I felt that pressure a lot, to the point where I was losing sleep.”

         Another teacher who had worked in public schools before coming to KIPP talked about the downside of KIPP’s system of at-will teacher contracts:

. . . public schools aren’t all perfect. . . . I’m not a wholesale believer in everything that the union has done, because I’ve seen a lot of ineffective teachers get tenure and things like that.  And I’ve seen a lot of teachers not be protected when they should have been. But I believe that there is a reason for the protections that teachers have. And at KIPP, there is no such thing. You know, you're an at-will employee all the time [and] there’s no guarantee that, if you’ve been there for five years, that year six, they’re going to even ask you to come back. And they don’t have to give you any notice.

The Teaching Day

         Teachers in KIPP Model schools have long days that range from 10 to 14 hours.  It is not uncommon for teachers to arrive at school between 5 and 6 AM and to leave after 6 or 7 PM, and all KIPP teachers are on call Monday through Friday until 9 or 10 PM for homework tutoring or questions.  Some KIPP schools have Saturday school for a half-day, but most have Saturday school every other week. “And then,” as one teacher said, “there’s the lesson planning and grading” to be done as well. 

Most teachers arrive well before 7:00, in order to get their photocopies done before the children begin to arrive at 7:05.  School leaders make the rounds checking to see if rooms are ready.  At 7:20, children are signaled with a series of hand motions to line up for breakfast, and they are marched silently in single file to the cafeteria.  Children return to the classroom for “advisory” at 7:50, where they find the morning work on the board or they are handed a worksheet that may or may not be relevant to the curriculum. 

During this time of silent work, teachers check homework folders to make sure all homework has been completed correctly and that the proper paycheck deductions for sloppy or missing work and credits for correct work are made for each child.  With as many as 30 students in advisory with four subjects, each requiring written work every night, this task rarely gets completed with complete accuracy in the time allotted.  At 8:40, children get the readying hand signals once more and are silently marched to their first class. 

One teacher explained the students’ transitioning in this way:

They would move into transition, which was always a stressful time.  It’s mean to be very routinized.  They have a thing called one, two, three dismissal, where they’re given about 20 seconds to pack up.  Not about 20 seconds; it is an exact 20 seconds.  Give them 20 seconds to pack, then they have one, two, three dismissal, where the teacher raises one finger and that indicates that all students should be tracking them. 

When all students are tracking the teacher, the teacher raises the second finger, which shows that all the kids can stand.  On three, the students go to line order, which is a very specific, students line up single file.  They’re meant to have out an independent reading book at all times during this time so that during transition while they’re waiting in line, while they’re walking, they’re reading.  Everything is done completely silent.  The students line up and then leave the classroom, file out single file to their next class.

Between 8:40 AM and 4:40 PM, teachers have a plan period and a half-hour for lunch, during which time most teachers remain on duty while trying to eat.  Because lining up and marching has to be performed perfectly or it must be done again, lunch usually lasts less than the thirty minutes allotted in the schedule.  Throughout the day, teachers carry clipboards and spend their time maintaining total compliance and teaching content. 

Following the minute details of management, demerit, and punishment plans takes up considerable chunks of class time.  One teacher described the “demerit clipboard” this way:

And I really struggled with this demerit clipboard, because there was a whole, you know, each type of different demerit had a different number from one to nine. And you had to note it in a certain way. And you had to put your initials. And you had to put it next to the student’s name. So finding all of this on a clipboard that’s legal size with 30 kids on it, while you're in the middle of a lesson on the spot, so you [must] remember to record it—it can interrupt your whole lesson and derail it. I mean, some teachers can just do it quickly. At [another charter school where she taught previously], they have a barcode scanner and they just literally scanned the student’s name and the kind of demerit. And they do it instantly. I joked that they should just put the barcodes on the kids’ foreheads, you know?

The after school KIPP teacher experience looks something like this: At 4:40 students begin to get ready for home, and at 4:45 KIPP teachers march their students to the buses.  The teachers board the buses with the students to make sure everyone is settled with something to read.  Teachers leave the buses and are instructed to wave until the buses are out of sight.  Teachers then walk back to the building, where they tutor children until 5:45, except on Mondays and Wednesdays, when professional development meetings last until 8PM. 

Afterwards, teachers compile data for exit tickets that provide “concrete data” that children have learned what was expected of them that day. Then teachers organize their classrooms, prepare lessons for the next day (which must be typed later and turned in to the school leader each Friday), and make sure the independent worksheets are ready for the next morning.  By 8 or 9 PM, it’s time to head home to fix dinner and grade papers.

“Trying to put your finger on every potential leak”

         One teacher, who compared his 80-100 hour weeks at a KIPP school to “sprinting a marathon for two years,” provided insight into KIPP’s control strategies and the “intensity” with which they are maintained.  At his school, silence was not only maintained at school—it was also enforced on school buses—by teachers.  There are no ellipses in this excerpt, as it is verbatim from the audio transcript:

It wasn’t just working on being at the office or something like that.  It was we had to create and own an environment that was difficult to manage, and had to do that over a very long period.  I’ll give you two or three examples that will hopefully illustrate what I’m speaking about.  In the mornings, we decided, or the school decided, that kids should be reading as much as possible.  The bus drivers picking the kids up and dropping them off wouldn’t be able to discipline them or create the same kind of culture that we had expected of our students and that a lot of the culture that we’d created would break down on the way to school and after school.  We thought that if kids were unsupervised on those buses, they would inevitably lead to some sort of drama, fighting or conflict of some sort, and that would carry into the school day and distract them from their learning. 

         Our kids came in performing well below grade level, and we were trying to get them not just on track and caught up, but prepared academically and propel them forward.  We felt that was a risk that we couldn’t really take in terms of the amount of potential disruption that might come from getting off the bus with fires to put out before 7:30 in the morning.  Our solution was to ride the bus with the students.  This is actually something that a bunch of schools do.  I don’t think we were the only ones to do it.  What we did on the bus, was we had policy that we introduced that kids were not allowed to talk.  They could read their books.  They could look out the window.  They could sleep.  They could just relax.  But you’re getting ready for school—get yourself prepared.  Take a moment, gather yourself, read.  That was the policy.  As you can imagine, that’s not something that’s very typical for a group of 10, 11, 12 and 13 year-olds to abide by, especially at 6:30 in the morning. 

Actually it was certainly harder on the way home from school. It became an exercise in discipline, where the teacher was expected to ride the bus each day, either going out or coming back or sometimes both.  The ride would be an hour and you had to sit there and make sure that the kids didn’t talk.  That’s an extra hour or two added on top of the school day that’s already extremely intense where as a teacher I felt like I had to be extremely focused.  I had to be extremely professional.  I had to be extremely consistent.

         In retrospect, the benefit of that policy was probably extremely limited.  But it was something we decided to do.  We were on board with it.  We executed to the best of our ability.  However, it had a long-term cost of creating this experience for the teacher that was very intense.  And the experience with the kids that were very intense, too.  That created, as I mentioned briefly earlier, almost a pressure-cooker kind of environment where you felt—or I should say our strategy was trying to put our fingers on every potential leak.  But you’d feel like it’s going to explode if you’re not putting your hands in the leak.

Upon reflection, this teacher characterized his school’s approach as the “far extreme of control,” which, for him was “something that creates teacher turnover every two years.  It creates kids dropping out of the school.  It creates nervousness and stress among parents and students.”   

Silence and Stress

         Enforced silence is one of the chief sources of stress among KIPP teachers.  Failure to meet silence expectations is attributed by school leaders as teachers’ shortcomings, rather than any examination of unrealistic expectations of children with real social needs that were not being met:

…there is a huge pressure in terms of behavior and the way that kids act in your class ….I feel like if there is ever any behavior issue, it is automatically the teacher’s fault, when I don’t necessarily feel like that is true and those expectations that the kids are supposed to be silent in the hallway, they need to be silent when they are in your room, they need to be SLANTing and tracking you and silent when you are talking—I just feel like it is not realistic, especially developmentally, to expect that from middle school kids.

So it is just frustrating because they are just doing what is natural to them to kind of interact and like play around, and I feel like there is a big pressure for the kids not to be acting that way.  Then if they are choosing to act that way, it is your [the teacher’s] fault, like “well what should you be doing, you need to be doing more for them to be not acting that way.”

         As this same teacher noted, the emphasis on silent behavior had so sensitized her to that expectation that more teaching energy was going into enforcement than into offering more effective learning strategies.  The result was a focus on constant policing rather than teaching:

In terms of teaching, retrospectively if I look at it, it has made me a worse teacher because now I feel like I am constantly thinking of these expectations that I am supposed to have in terms of behavior—having them be silent and all those things—and I feel like it is making me a bad teacher because it is like constantly looking at the negative, “oh they are not doing good.”  I feel like it has not helped me to focus on the positive things as much.

From Stress to Distress

I feel like there are a lot of really good teachers who did leave and it wasn’t because they were bad teachers; it was just because they couldn’t deal with the pressure and the hours and the stress that is kind of put upon people (1177).

         A former KIPP teacher was headed for a visit to the KIPP school where he had resigned the year before.  He had found a different job since leaving KIPP, and he was able to sleep again.  He had started to gain weight, and his hair was starting to grow back.  While at KIPP, he had made friends with other KIPP teachers, and he missed the kids that he had come to know, despite all the organizational rules that discouraged that from happening.  He recalls:

I was walking down the sidewalk outside of the school, and I ran into one of the teachers who was going to the deli on the corner to go grab a Gatorade, and he said, ‘every time I see somebody who’s left this school, they always come back looking ten times happier.’ So when I think about KIPP now, I think about how grateful I am that I’ve been able to get some sleep and have some of my hair start growing back.

Other teachers found school time consumed a great deal of personal time, which brought added stress from a loss of connection with family and friends.  One teacher who had her first child while employed at KIPP placed the baby with her mother during the four years she spent teaching there.   She supported her mother so that her mother could retire and be the full-time caregiver for the child.  She offered this tearful explanation:

At the end of the school year in ____ is when I left, and my son started school that same year.  That’s when I realized I just had missed out on one of the most important things in my life.  He was my first child.  I had him late.  Yeah, that was hard.  I realized I didn’t know my four-year old because I had spent four years focusing on KIPP.  I was a first time parent so I didn’t understand.  I actually I gave him to my mother.  My mother quit her job to raise him.  I supported my mother and myself so my mother could retire from her job to take care of my baby so I could work for KIPP.  Then I realized it wasn’t worth it.

         Teaching at KIPP has many stressors, but factors related to organizational policies and practices, time demands, and the weight given to tests figure significantly to most of the teachers interviewed.  The following quote provides insight into how all three of these factors figure into the stress that this teacher acknowledged:

. . . there’s a lot of stress to do good in terms of making the [state testing] goals, and also for each teacher wanting that group to do at least as well as the teacher the year before, and in a lot of cases because you get a lot of turnover, that’s a big thing to hold over somebody.  It’s like, ‘Well, this teacher got this [state] scores for her English class,’ so there’s a lot of stress on that, and that’s a lot for the English and math departments, which are tested more often.  There’s also stress that the other departments have to cram stuff into a smaller space in time, because a lot of time is spent on those two subjects, Math and English, because those are the ones that are tested, and so I know that I had to squeeze a lot of curriculum into a smaller space in time that I shouldn’t have had to do. 

         This same teacher said the stress was “more continuous” than in his previous school, where test prep had been restricted to the month prior to the state test.  As with the other KIPP teachers I talked with, this teacher’s school did not hire substitute teachers, for fear of altering the behavioral regimen.  Outsiders could not be trusted to maintain the level of academic and behavioral compliance that the KIPP Model demands, and as this teacher put it, “it was hard to get anyone trained to be a sub.” 

         Because other KIPP teachers would have to take up the slack when a teacher was ill or needed to be off for other business, the teachers I talked with only took off for emergencies. Even then, the principal might “call you at home, and say, ‘can you possibly come in for part of the day?’  And you could be really throwing up, or whatever, and it was like you feel so guilty, and you’re trying to get in.”

         One teacher, who compared KIPP with her other charter school experience, found KIPP less fulfilling and less successful, even though she made between three and four thousand dollars more per year at KIPP:

. . .if you break down how much I am making an hour, I am making way less an hour than a public school teacher is and I am just constantly stressed and worried about school.  This is something that I didn’t experience in student teaching or when I was at the other charter school in New York:  it was a lot more laid back than KIPP, and the day was not as long as a KIPP day, either.  And I feel like that school was way more successful than the KIPP that I am at now.

Another teacher, who had landed a public school teaching job in a wealthy community after leaving KIPP, had a similar sense of relief that came when the yelling stopped.  She apologized for using the military analogy, but she could not come up with a more appropriate one:

I felt like I was almost coming out of, I don’t feel totally right saying this, but I guess I can, in a minor way, understand how military might feel coming home. And again I don’t feel totally right saying that, but that is the only parallel or metaphor I can make right now, but just sort of like this kind of shell shock sort of feeling and then like coming to a place where you know people are normal and act like humans.

That is kind of how it felt, and I just felt so grateful. I was like wow, we have books, like wow, I don’t have to yell at anybody for talking, and I can actually sit down and have lunch. I didn’t feel so stressed, and I almost didn’t know what to do with that feeling. So it was just liberating, and I felt like I didn’t know what to do with all this liberation.

         After the grueling work schedule at KIPP Model schools, the time left for family is often consumed with trying to recover from mental and physical exhaustion.  One teacher, ironically, pointed to the weekends as her low points while teaching at KIPP:

. . . I was just absolutely exhausted, my body was exhausted.  That happened so often, I would just sleep like all day on Sunday.  Where most people look forward to the weekend to run their errands, to spend time with their family, that would be my time to sleep.  Everyone knew it, like don’t call her—she’s sleeping.  Those are my low points—the weekends. 

        It is not uncommon for KIPP teachers to have no more than 4-5 hours of sleep each night during workweeks of 12-14 hour days. One KIPP teacher spoke of a principal whose sleep deprivation while at KIPP had contributed to an inability to get pregnant.  Upon resigning from KIPP, “she slept for about a month straight and she was pregnant a month later.  So it had a pretty profound impact on other people.”

        One teacher, who was still under the care of a therapist following her time at KIPP, said that she would leave her house at 4:30 AM in order to get to school at 5 AM.   This way she could get her photocopying done before most of the other teachers showed up, and get to her classroom by 6 AM so that she should organize for her day, which started at 7:05 with students.  Having gotten to bed around midnight after getting home between 9 and 10 PM, the alarm came earlier each day that she followed this routine.  She said of the hours she kept, 

I was never the last person in the parking lot, and I was never the first person in the parking lot either. And I worked non-stop. I also have to say KIPP was very isolating when you work those horrible hours.  I left my family and my boyfriend in Arizona and I wanted to forge this great life out here. And I wanted to be this great teacher. And I gave it everything I had.

By October, she was getting up at 4:17 AM and out the door by 4:30.  It was at this time that she said, “I stopped taking regular showers because I wanted to get 20 more minutes sleep.” 

While many KIPP educators lose sleep because of the workload and the pace of work life, one teacher found KIPP colleagues who were “very, very, very much committed,” but he said that, because of the workload, he was unsure “how many of them last a long time at KIPP” (1170).  Sleep is not only an issue for teachers, but also for students.  One former teacher told me that the first thing he would change about KIPP would be early start time, which is commonly around 7 AM. 

He framed his argument in terms of test scores achievement:  “How much are we harming these kids’ scores and their cognitive development by depriving them of sleep because a lot of them are still going to bed at midnight or 1 o’clock in the morning and then getting up at 5 or 6 in the morning? Many of them have the same schedule as the KIPP teachers.”

From Distress to Other Health Issues

You wind up sacrificing your physical health and most of your social life. . . . I put my relationship with the students before my physical health.  (1166).

         With the kind of pressure-filled hours described above, it would be surprising if teachers reported no ill health effects.  All the teachers interviewed did report negative health effects from working inside No Excuses pressure cookers.  The mental health effects range from PTSD symptoms, anxiety disorders, unusual sadness, nightmares, depression, anger issues, nervous exhaustion, emotional and mental breakdowns, and classic teacher burnout.  One teacher spent a week in the hospital in November after a “mental breakdown,” and another who was still in treatment described her condition as a “nervous breakdown.”  A third teacher reported that she saw four teachers have “complete nervous breakdowns:”

I can definitely in my mind right now identify four teachers that I saw unravel that had a nervous breakdown and I would just explain it as crying and shaking and talking and not making sense.  Babbling, a lot of babbling.  Asking for help.  Crying.  I felt horrible. 

         Self-reported physical manifestations included weight loss, weight gain, bad nutrition, more colds and respiratory infections, poor hygiene, and alopecia.  One teacher was so unavailable to his partner as life became “completely the job” that her partner began an active job search for her while she was trying to survive the rigors of KIPP.  She said, “I lost a lot of weight.  A lot of people voiced concern about my weight.”  The job search proved productive, and she left KIPP for health, relationship, and ethical reasons having to do with the treatment of special education students.

         Another teacher who suffered from alopecia and other work-related illnesses resigned from KIPP for health reasons.  She talked about not being able to “handle working there,” even if it meant not finding another teaching job immediately:

I am just going to hope that I can find something. I just decided that regardless of whether or not I get another job—I would like to have another job—I just can’t handle working there. It is just not worth my health to do that for another year, because even other than my hair falling out, I have had a lot of other health issues.  I have had pneumonia, I have had my hair fall out, I have had stomach problems, and I have had a lot of anxiety and it is just not worth it at all. And I am constantly in a bad, bad mood and my boyfriend tells me like all the time that he has noticed a big change in the way I am since I have been working there.        

         One teacher I talked with came to KIPP after teaching for some time in her home state and winning praise as Teacher of the Year in one of the schools where she worked.  She had a non-education Bachelors degree and a prior successful career in her field.  Her Masters was in Education, and it was a short video that she saw during her graduate school experience that sparked her desire to be a KIPP teacher:  “I really bought into the mission about helping kids who might not otherwise go to college. And also the video made me think, like, if they didn’t go to KIPP, they were going to die. Like it was very drastic.  And so I worked really hard. And in the back of my mind, I really just wanted to be a KIPP teacher.”

She finally made the decision to apply out of state to a KIPP school, and she was hired to teach middle school.  She packed up her car with all her teaching materials, which left room for a single suitcase, and moved to begin her dream job at KIPP.  The new KIPP regimen proved brutal.  In order to get everything done the KIPP way, she found it necessary to work 16-18 hour days, which left no time for anything else, including taking care of herself:

…I had no time to grocery shop ever. So my roommate would do all the grocery shopping. She would cook things for me, and she would leave them in the fridge. And if it wasn’t for her kindness, I think I would have starved to death. And I’m not exaggerating. I’m so embarrassed that I let my life get like that.

         When she told her grade level supervisor that she was breaking down and thought she needed to see a therapist, she was sent on to the principal, whose first reaction was to ask to observe her class.  Following the observation, the principal opened their meeting by saying, “I’m just really worried about you. I hear you have no joy.”  It was at this point that she “fell apart” and told the school leader that she didn’t know how much longer she could “take this.”

         A distinct lack of joy is not only apparent among many KIPP teachers.  One teacher noted that students “look like adults walking down the hallways.  They’re stressed.  One thing you always notice at the [KIPP] school I was in—you will not see a student smiling.  You would not see a teacher smiling.  I mean the difference in the school culture from [my] previous school is so different—like the kids were literally breaking down.”