If you create a level of equity and seek to eliminate racism in the classroom, results will shine, and you will out public schools.  If you try to teach and actually educate children, rather than “teaching to the test,” their reading and other scores on those [...]]]> New Orleans               News flash from the military of all places!

If you create a level of equity and seek to eliminate racism in the classroom, results will shine, and you will out public schools.  If you try to teach and actually educate children, rather than “teaching to the test,” their reading and other scores on those same tests will surpass their competitors.    In a column in the Times by Michael Winerip we got some good news for a chance from unexpected, uniformed sources.

The comparisons were stark.  Where states are uniformly muscling in on local school district governance and educational programs (he uses TN as an example, but Louisiana is the frontrunner!), the military “doesn’t micromanage” in fact they claim to let, “Individual schools decide     what to focus on.”  The class sizes on average are 18:1, on a par with private schools, despite the nay saying about class size from Mayor Bloomberg and other so-called reformers.  Relationships between military and their unions in the classrooms are smooth, imagine that, but of course collective bargaining and seeking agreements continues to be implemented federal policy so perhaps that should not be a surprise.

An op-ed in the same edition of the Times by several education experts, Helen Ladd from Duke and Edward Fiske formerly the Times education editor, underscores the same points.  The gut grabber:  “The Occupy movement has catalyzed rising anxiety over income inequality; we desperately need a similar reminder of the relationship between economic advantage and student performance.”  Hello!

In their argument they cite a new study that continues to find a huge achievement gap between high-and low-income children over the last 50 years that is even greater that the gaps created by race.  In fact one of the advantages the military seems to enjoy is the ability to press down those gaps in their classrooms where the differences are a matter of grade, not of class.  Ladd and Fiske note that nothing in Leave No Child Behind recognizes this reality, which is another reason for its abysmal failure under both the Bush and now the Obama Administrations, which continue to pretend to be income and color blind while children suffer without remediation.

Interestingly, the United States military has no choice.  They have to produce the kind of citizens they want to fill uniforms in the future, and keep happy the ones that are wearing them now, none of which seems to matter much to too many administrators in their flight to fashion and away from the children.  That’s their business.

The experts argue that it’s a question of morality for the country and past time citizens and their leaders faced up to the challenge.

Good luck with that.  The military seems to know that it has a job to do and there are consequences to failure.  For the rest of us, morality might be the question, but that turns out to be one of the easies questions American citizens have to ignore.

New Orleans In the wake of Hurricane Katrina the State of Louisiana conspired with various conservative interests to break the largest union in the state, the United Teachers of New Orleans (UTNO/AFT), fire 7500 school district employees, many of whom were members, remove democratic accountability in a state coup against [...]]]>

New Orleans Charter School

New Orleans In the wake of Hurricane Katrina the State of Louisiana conspired with various conservative interests to break the largest union in the state, the United Teachers of New Orleans (UTNO/AFT), fire 7500 school district employees, many of whom were members, remove democratic accountability in a state coup against the elected school board, and use federal Bush money to hijack the system creating the largest charter school system in the country.  Now, almost 6 years after Katrina a reckoning is finally coming, though there is no guarantee that citizens will be able to reassert accountability over our schools at least we will have an opportunity to try.  Several forces are coming together to make this possible.

A lawsuit filed after the storm has been approved as a class action in the name of teachers and principals and is being heard today about the illegal usurpation of the system which voided protected and contractually guaranteed layoff procedures including notice, creation of a layoff list by seniority, and other basic requirements of just process.  The state and the business community were in such a hurry to break the union and steal the school system from New Orleans taxpayers and voters that no rules or rights were allowed to stand in their way.  A system that has now been beat down from over 7000 employees to less than 600 because of the privatization of the schools into charters is not going to suddenly say “I’m sorry,” but some justice is long overdue, and the price could be steep.

At the same time the autocratic czar of the state education system is finally moving out of the way after a contentious several years which is allowing long silenced voices to finally be heard.  This does not just mean the that “amateur hour” is over as a state teachers’ union called the insertion of cheap and untrained labor from Teach for America and other Gates and billionaire funders, but it does mean that the silenced voices of experienced teachers with 20 and 30 years in good system are pushing back, including some who have been elected to head school boards in other big Louisiana districts that escaped the Katrina hijacking but are appropriately concerned about the both the unwarranted charter takeover, the lack of accountability, and the unfilled promises of test-based teaching.  For all of the sound and fury of the presumptuous and undemocratic “reformers,” they have not produced the improvements that their “ends justify the means” strategy tried to claim.

In short if you live and die by testing, and the needle doesn’t sufficiently move on the tests, then real teachers with real training and real lifetime commitments to children and education are going to be hard to continue to ignore.  Then no matter how many so-called “business leaders” are going to trumpet the union busting and the privatization or how many billionaires with private school background are going to try and impose their will, parents who are responsible for seeing their children actually learn something other than what is like to be part of a test tube lab experiment for school privatization and teachers who know what they are doing, are eventually going to come together in a coalition , unite at the ballot box and finally straighten this mess out.

New Orleans The facts of the matter are painful to read, but important not to overlook.  In a twist of the old James Carville line:  “It’s poverty, stupid!”   Meaning really that it’s the whole environment  and economy that matter in the development of people and individuals  and not just one or two factors or [...]]]>

New Orleans The facts of the matter are painful to read, but important not to overlook.  In a twist of the old James Carville line:  “It’s poverty, stupid!”   Meaning really that it’s the whole environment  and economy that matter in the development of people and individuals  and not just one or two factors or institutions taken out of context.  Not addressing poverty and all of its implications at home and abroad sentences people to one arrogant presumption of success after another which later ends in the finality of failure for millions.

This comes to mind on two fronts today.

One is an excellent column by Joe Nocera in the New York Times going to the heart of the matter about the issues avoided by school reformers when they pretend that everything can be controlled and determined inside the classroom by holding teachers accountable and ignoring what happens in the economy and the crushing real world of poverty which so-called elitist, largely private school educated rich folks would like to ignore.  Education seems like an easy fix compared to poverty for elitists.

The other was a depressing report on the fact that contrary to the “it’s getting better every day” claim of the neo-liberalist globalist booster club that argues that everything is rosy if we just have free trade and unfettered markets around the world, shockingly there were indications that very poor women in 14 African countries are getting shorter, a sure sign of health and nutritional failures, and that women in 21 other African and Latin American countries show stagnant growth.  The numbers were not back of the envelope but based on data analyzing information on 365000 adult women in 54 poor and middle-income countries (which is another issue as well!)  by the Demographic and Health Surveys reported in the online journal PLoS One. Rich women have gained a ½ inch on average over poor women.  Women in the poorest 20% averaged 5 feet 1 inches tall regardless of their age.  Guatemala and Honduras, great countries just south of the United States well known to North American tourists had the largest gaps in height between rich and poor women.

There are no piecemeal solutions.  There is an economic and environmental crisis in the community of the poor and the facts just keep getting harder to ignore, especially when one group of people are permanently able to look down on another group of people, solely because of their income.

Reading the hometown paper in New Orleans, there was an item a week [...]]]> New Orleans Ideologues with chips on their shoulders about the nation’s public school systems seem committed to doing everything possible to make sure there’s no level playing field to allow comparison of charter school performance as opposed to regular school district performances.

Reading the hometown paper in New Orleans, there was an item a week ago about $28 Million over the next 5 years going largely to the KIPP and First Line charter networks with $2.5 Million the first year.  This means something in New Orleans since the Katrina disaster allowed policy makers and public school system haters to use our city as ground zero in the remaking of a school system with charters.  KIPP is taking over Fredrick Douglass High School across the street from me, one grade at a time.  I watched some Saturday’s ago as they held a “fair” in the yard past the McCarty Square Arch to try to juice up recruitment with games, pizza, and whatnot.  You can really do some nice things, if you have the money and no limits on how to use it.  The folks giving the money to the charters claimed that they did so because the “test scores” seem to be improving more rapidly in the KIPP charters than in the Recovery School District.  The reports I have seen often contradicted this claim, but hey….

A national study by Western Michigan University researchers found that KIPP received significantly “more taxpayer dollars per student than regular public schools…” and “also noted that KIPP receives substantial amounts of private philanthropic money.”  I’ve met some of the founders of the KIPP network.  We invited one from Houston to come over and speak to the entire assembled family of ACORN organizers four or five years ago.  People were skeptical, pushed him hard on their anti-unionism, but no one questioned his passion or his sincerity.  I think he would be the first to admit that it’s a world easier to run 99 schools in 20 states from here and there than the tens of thousands of schools that make up the public charge of free education in America.

It also helps if you can spend more money.  The Western Michigan researchers found a 10% difference per pupil at the KIPP schools with a spread of $12,000 to $11,000 over public and a $3000 spread over other charters and when they estimated the private donor largesse then it bumped up another $5000 over that which meant that a KIPP school would have almost 50% more to spend per pupil that a regular public school.  Wow!   The KIPP people denied all of that, though reading the Times-Picayune, I had trouble believing them frankly, and furthermore, it’s not as if the KIPP network or any charter operation is as transparent as elected school board having to account for the millage are required to be.

Charters are getting a big bounce in resources and promo, but despite the unfair competition in resources and even performance, they still have a lot more to prove to establish that they are worth the money and are producing 50% better with their 50% advantage.  We need to be careful before buying this bridge across the Mississippi.

Nairobi The ACORN Kenya community organizers, Sammy Ndirangu and David Musungu, met Judy Duncan, head organizer of ACORN Canada, Drummond Pike formerly of Tides and now colleague at Paladin Partners, and me just outside of the Korogocho mega-slum at 350,000 people, the 2nd largest in Nairobi after [...]]]>

Raising the ACORN flag in the office

Nairobi The ACORN Kenya community organizers, Sammy Ndirangu and David Musungu, met Judy Duncan, head organizer of ACORN Canada, Drummond Pike formerly of Tides and now colleague at Paladin Partners, and me just outside of the Korogocho mega-slum at 350,000 people, the 2^nd largest in Nairobi after the more famous Kibera.   We were to meet a number of the officers and committee members representing the three or four of the “villages” where we had organized 700 family members over the last almost two years.  They wanted to show us their new office for ACORN Kenya and had a good day planned out for us to see the changes in the community and to more thoroughly understand the crisis in education they faced and the progress of the Bursary Campaign we had designed to impact it when we were all last together.

children at the formal, public primary school

Quickly with formalities over and the flag “raised” in the new office, our swelling numbers (eventually we were joined by 23 of the ACORN members on our rounds during the day) started walking the dusty streets.  Something was immediately new even before we made it to the first stop, one of the two grade 1 through 8 public primary schools in the area, and that was that the road paving had been completed and expanded through a joint project of the Italian and Kenyan governments.  It made a difference though the downside was hard to avoid since several hundred families had been displaced in the process with only four days notice.

The school’s attendance was only 100 students.  Meeting with the assistant principal there was a long and excellent discussion of the bursary campaign.  It had made a difference and where forms for the governmental funds that paid the school fees to secondary school from the bursary fund were formerly a closed and opaque process governed by favouritism, politics, and special deals, the campaign had forced openness and free distribution of the forms which led to 40 children winning the scholarships to secondary schools.  Even so, the principal noted many children even in the free primary school were hard press to come up with books, uniforms, and the money for the required meals.  One door was opening, while others were closing.

classroom at one of the informal school

We also visited two “informal” primary schools where children were sent by the parents when the “interviews” did not successfully get their children into one of the two public primary schools for a population of 350,000!?! Where the young seemed everywhere?!? These were good spirited and well meaning affairs where many of our members were also very active, but the conditions were rudimentary at best, if not haphazard.  There were some 40 odd informal primary schools in Korogocho, so this was the “normal” for education, and after that nothing.

One of the highlights was meeting the mother of one of the campaign “winners,” as she sold rice along the road in Kusuvu village.  She proudly took us to her home.  Her daughter had stayed out of school for a year and now with the bursary funds was attending secondary school at 18 years old, and very happy.

We were winning and victory was sweet for the leaders, but as much as the road was paved, it seemed it stretch on as one rough patch after another for miles into the future with many holes to fill and rough spots to smooth before one could really feel that the children of Korogocho had a real chance at education.

But, how do we reconcile the fact that at the same time we’re reading about her initiatives here, we are also reading about children being dunned, [...]]]> New Orleans Michelle Obama is doing a great high-profile job around children’s fitness and obesity.  These are health issues that are critical in the community and deserve full support.

But, how do we reconcile the fact that at the same time we’re reading about her initiatives here, we are also reading about children being dunned, shunned, and just about starved because here in the Great Recession they can’t come up with the dough to pay for the lunch.  This is incredible to me!  It’s also a matter of fact that children who are hungry are not able to pay attention very well in the classroom.

An article in the New York Times about the city’s efforts to collect back lunch money opened a window to some of the national dimensions of this problem:

Of the city’s 1,600 schools, 1,043 owe a collective $2.5 million to the department for meals served in the first three months of this school year. That puts them on track to be $8 million behind by the end of the school year.

New York City’s lunch money problem is costly and complicated, but not unique. The economy has school administrators all over the country scratching for savings even as more parents are falling behind in lunch fees. A September survey by the School Nutrition Association, a professional organization, showed that in 2009-10, 34 percent of school districts saw an increase from the previous school year in the number of meals not paid for.

The school district in Albuquerque was among several last year to start serving cold sandwiches and milk, instead of full hot meals, to students whose parents had not paid what they owed. In Wake County, N.C., those students may eat as many fruits and vegetables as they want, but not the rest of the lunch offerings.

In Louisiana, some districts did not feed the children whose parents were in arrears at all, until, in November, the State Legislature passed a law ordering that they be given at least a snack, while directing districts to notify child welfare authorities if a student got just a snack on more than three consecutive days. Framingham, Mass., hired a constable to hand-deliver notices to parents whose bills were still unpaid after the schools had sent them several letters alerting them to their debt.

This is all draconian!  How can we expect to really deal with childhood nutrition and obesity if we are now subjecting children to dunning at school and shaming at the lunch line.  Once upon a time it was illegal to discriminate against a child in the lunch line by marking the child as somehow second-class if receiving free or reduced price lunches.  Though this article and the rest of the drum thumping doesn’t mention that, I bet if we still have lawyers able to file class actions for the poor, they would be running into court as fast as their little legs would carry them to sue against this kind of discrimination.  Legal aid lawyers, where are you now?

I’m really embarrassed to live in Louisiana and not to have realized that a school district has to report the parents to child welfare if their child only gets a snack for 3 days running.  OMG!  The legislature in their wisdom says to arch-conservative, Republican Governor and Presidential wannabe, Bobby Jindal, that he cannot just starve the kids, so in their mercy in wisdom they give them a 2^nd class snack (what might that be?  Potato chips and an apple?) and then threaten to take the children away from their parents.  Does this make economic sense?  Solve a twenty-five cents a day problem with one that would cost the state thousands in foster parent payments and medical bills later for unhealthy children with a chip on their shoulder from being shunned at the lunch line?

Who is on first?  What’s on second?

Michelle, you can’t solve one problem without solving this problem PDQ.

Help!