Wade Rathke: Chief Organizer Blog » Education

USA and Global Educational Class Divide

Mariehurt — Mon, 21 May 2012 16:25:26 +0000

student protests in Chile

Mexico City World news reports on CNN from Mexico City are featuring huge rallies in Chile once again as students push back over increases in costs and other curtailments. In Quebec several schools have been closed down now in the 12^th week of student strikes over the same issues and the provincial government has also enacted extraordinary measures to require 8-day notice for protests permits and is attempting to not authorize any demonstrations of more than 50 people. Students have declared these actions by the government an “act of war.”

Perhaps more disturbing was the clear statement in The New Yorker by author and academic (and New Orleans native) Nicholas Lemann that the US in essence is now creating a huge educational divide where there are educational institutions for the elite 1% and then there are whatever is available for the 99%. The divide is defined by economic access. Lemann argues in fact that Ivy League-type schools are underpriced even at $60,000 per year where they are currently heading, because many of the 1% would be willing to pay far more if that was the price of admission. The public institutions and second-tier schools are pushing the price points without entering the elite status despite mimicking the business model that is only accessible and achievable by a few other schools. The efforts of Stanford and others to create on-line opportunities are nods in the direction of equity without even the pretense of equity, either domestically or globally, though arguably offering access to both.

Nicholas Lemann

Lemann makes this argument under the cover of claiming that, thankfully in his view, there is no substantial disagreement between Obama and Romney on the issue of continuing to offer interest support for student loans. This is a disingenuous way to make the case, since Lemann never bothers to try to make the argument that this interest matter will remotely address the class divide which he, correctly, claims is already embedded in the current educational system. He makes the throwaway point that there is 50% more unemployment among non-college graduates currently, but that’s hardly a glancing blow when today’s papers also argue that men are queuing up for traditionally female jobs, underemployment, contingent, informal, and intern “employment” are well documented, and there seems to be more weight to the case that a generation is being lost.

Having read Lemann’s The Big Test when it came out a dozen year ago, I know this is a disturbing retreat for him. That book argued among other points that standardized testing had at least the opportunity to create a funny kind of equity that lowered the class divide. Now in a new century to read him on a similar theme, it is hard to ignore his analysis that equity is in full retreat with little hope of victory. Reading that book allowed me to finally understand that it was the V-2 test in WWII that plucked my father and his test scores as a high school grad from Orange County who had worked as a clerk in Los Angeles and in Boeing aircraft plants in Venice before volunteering for the Navy out of the ranks and into an NROTC program that gave him a college experience at Millsaps in Mississippi and a degree from Tulane University in New Orleans and a solid, secure post-war career and life for our family that previously had been beyond even his most remote dreams.

That story, not unlike the human interest tale in today’s Times of a “wise soul” succeeding in school and egg picking to find a possible future otherwise outside his means, are clearly moving towards a place in the United States where we can simply smile and sigh at these exceptions proving the rule that what once we hoped might be a meritocracy has evolved into a financially unforgiving elite class divide.

Democracy and Revenue: Where the New Orleans Autonomous Charter School Model Breaks Down

Mariehurt — Wed, 09 May 2012 15:30:04 +0000

New Orleans New Orleans continues, past any notion of reality, to be touted as a model example of educational reform because of the huge number of charter schools, mostly run by separate and independent operators. There are many problems with this so-called model, but a huge, glaring deficiency has been the usurpation of any democratic, citizen-based governance in the independent charter systems. Finally, the rubber is hitting the road, not surprisingly around money, and the fundamentally unsustainable financing model of the charter aristocracies.

To refresh some number of the charters are actually run by the Orleans Parish School Board. They are still elected and responsible to the citizens of New Orleans, as they should be. Even more charters are run by the Recovery School District (RSD) accountable theoretically to the State of Louisiana, but really to nobody, since there is no elected governance. The charters have variously appointed boards. The local web-based newsweekly in New Orleans, The Lens, had a project to try to monitor these boards and their governance but was having trouble doing so, since many of them even wanted to pretend that they were not subject to the Louisiana open meetings law. You get the picture: these are rogue operations funded by taxpayer dollars.

This is where the system finally breaks down. For all of the play-pretend of the charters, any revenue from property tax millage that supports them has to come through the Orleans Parish School Board. So, while the charters regularly flip off, ignore, and potshot at the public system run by the citizens, they have no independent access to revenues. Recently the Board announced a small millage increase to raise another $4 million for the system. Suddenly, the charters are all crying and whining, because they weren’t at the table and now want more in a sort of “have your cake and eat it too” move.

Let’s see. The charters are dragging their feet about coming under the authority of the school system and the voters, but somehow while trying to delay their inevitable reentry into the democratically accountable system, want to see if they can beg for more money from the voters and have the elected board members carry their water, even while they run from their authority. Shockingly to me, Stand for Children, run by an old friend Jonah Edelman, which has a newly organized chapter in the area is fronting for the charter cabal and trying to get a little petition forward to ask the board for more money while being silent on reentry, democracy, and accountability.

The millage is a fair number in our broke ass city, and this is a classic case of taxation for revenue where there is representation and not where there is none. The whole charter model breaks down when it comes to accountability and democracy. Our children need to learn that too!

Blowing the Students’ Keg: California, Quebec, and Chile

Mariehurt — Sun, 06 May 2012 16:26:09 +0000

Student Strike in Montreal March 2012

New Orleans This fall will undoubtedly see a huge number of students mobilized by the November election, but I’m starting to believe that the student army that is going to be activated this fall is going to be marching to a different tune for a change: their own self-interest. The evidence may be isolated, but once one begins looking, it is not hard to see signs of stirring that could interject student issues around education, opportunity, jobs, costs, and debt into the middle of political debate.

This is not merely a question of the tactical maneuvering between American political parties and Congress around student loans and debt, because the outcome being debated largely postpones the problem rather than looking at the core issues. In student strikes in Northridge, California, Quebec, and Chile triggered by rising costs we are starting to see the core issues confronted, and students are not stepping down or wearing out.

A piece written by Martin Luckas in The Guardian on the “Maple Spring” in the streets of Montreal expresses the issues at stake eloquently as a fundamental challenge to the increasingly entrenched policies of neo-liberalism:

The fault-lines of the struggle over education – dividing those who preach it must be a commodity purchased by “consumers” for self-advancement, and those who would protect it as a right funded by the state for the collective good – has thus sparked a fundamental debate about the entire society’s future.

Luckas’ point is well taken. The students in California engaging in a hunger strike now are partially incensed that administration is getting raises, including a 25% hike to $400,000 per year for the new Northbridge president, even while classes are being cut, fees increased, and teachers ghettoized as adjuncts without benefits. How is this fight different than reading about the complaints of shareholders to a $15 million package for the head of Citibank, when everything about the bank is on life support? One of the major themes of neo-liberalism is essentially “corporatizing” all debate about all public policy.

Student self-interest where debt is competing with ambition and opportunity and jobs are still in scant supply could be the match that lights a much better fire!

Students for Quality Education in California Strike against Fee Hikes

Is Head Start Obama’s “No Child Left Behind?”

Mariehurt — Sun, 29 Apr 2012 20:27:45 +0000

New Orleans HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has announced that about 132 Head Start agencies charged with providing pre-school education for the poor will go through “redesignation.” Redesignation really means that they will lose their contracts and go through a rebidding process because they have been found deficient in some respect. Many of the deficiencies seem trivial, but the impacts are large since agencies in parts of Los Angeles, New York City, St. Louis, and Houston are among the large districts impacted in this rebidding “auction.”

The Administration is spinning this as a push to make sure the poor are getting the best in Head Start services and support, and I hope so. Unfortunately, the federal free-for-all on $7 billion in funding also seems somewhat political because Head Start though largely protected by funding cuts under Obama is under fire from different directions on how much impact the preparation for poor children in preschool has on long term performance. I worry that Obama’s Head Start initiative here could become to Obama what Bush’s No Child Left Behind has been: a critique without a program or solution!

Local 100 represents Head Start teachers and staff in Houston, Little Rock, and Shreveport, so we see the daily sweat, blood, and tears in good times and bad that dedicated workers give to educating these very young children to prepare them for the future. When studies question whether or not the advantages of Head Start last past the 1^st grade, we wonder whether Head Start is the problem or what happens in the increasingly beleaguered public school systems, where we also represent workers in Texas. There are more and more expectations with less support and resources.

I wouldn’t say that Head Start should be a sacred cow, but attacking the programs after years of defunding and funding freezes under Bush and as one of the few remaining programs that seeks to give the poor a break early in their lives, seems risky politics and bad policy in these polarized times where the right is looking for more scapegoats.

Driving Down Ed-cost with E-Education

dine — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 15:37:16 +0000

Detroit It is very depressing to read about the inability to make advances in the equity and achievement of all levels of education despite the technological advantages and increasing availability of internet access. Costs continue to soar at both public and private educational institutions. E-education options now seem beleaguered by low standards, scams, and reputational issues, even as they should have been developing as real options and opportunities for millions both domestically and globally. There has to be a way to break through this mess.

I’ve read that Bill Gates and Steve Jobs in a final semi-deathbed conversation agreed that they had been surprised that the advent and growth of computers had in fact NOT contributed more to educational progress and attainment. I was struck by that failure. I remember when computers were heralded as the new day for education and the question of whether or not classrooms had computer access was sent as a benchmark of progress. WTF?!?

I read a long, frightening profile on Peter Thiel, one of the rich-as-Croesus Pay Pal co-founders and tech investors, in the New Yorker on the plane the other day. He had looked into beginning a high-tech, electronic higher educational institution but abandoned the notion even with his big bucks when he reckoned with the huge status pull of elite institutions like Stanford, Harvard, etc, and realized he couldn’t compete.

I find that discouraging, because it is hard to imagine replacing brick-and-mortar with more equitable and affordable electronic access to education with other configurations of the social and public space in communities substituting for “campus life.” if the argument to teachers, students, and, most importantly, future employers about high, demonstrable, and replicable standards are not present and provable. Teaching to the test doesn’t work, and I’m intrigued by the notions of “education as apprenticeships” to employment opportunities that I’ve seen recently in Cairo and in practice on a lot of union jobsites, but we need a mass model that works and can stand up in the debate.

I was intrigued by a piece several weeks ago in the Times that made the case for e-lectures becoming more popular, but some a lecture has a lot of growing to do in order to shape a curriculum, and the commitment of professors to both the process and the students would have to also be significant to offer an alternatives.

I’m coming up short. I hope some mega-domes are working hard to solve this problem, and the word just hasn’t trickled down yet to folks like me.

Military Schools Trump Charters in a Vote for Equity and Anti-Racism

dine — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 17:44:38 +0000

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.

The Exposed, Soft Underbelly of the Unsustainability of Charter School System

dine — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 14:40:26 +0000

New Orleans In New Orleans we have the most massive “charterization” of a public school system in America thanks to some fumbles and bait-and-switch plays immediately after Katrina. The public school system is bifurcated between a small number of schools (many of them charters) governed by the citizen elected members of the Orleans Parish School Board and a larger system, the Recovery School District, that emerged as a takeover of the majority of the public schools after Katrina, most of which are charters run by more than 20 different contractors. Now six years since the storm, many in the city believe that as tax-paying citizens in an ostensible democracy, the elected school board in New Orleans as opposed to some self-appointed state education bureaucrats should once again govern the schools system. There is screaming and gnashing of teeth about this from the so-called and self-appointed “reformers.” (See a lot more detail on this is my recently published book, The Battle for the Ninth Ward: ACORN, Rebuilding New Orleans, and the Lessons of Disaster, available at www.socialpolicy.org).

Recently there has started to be some discussion, it would be a stretch to call it a debate at this point, about the governance of the schools and whether to allow us sorry, no account New Orleans citizens to finally take our place again in a democracy where we might practice some accountability. Even writing my 6-year update for the book, I was scratching my head at the preposterousness of some of the problems, particularly one by Leslie Jacobs, now the head of the rebranded Chamber of Commerce, but previously a member of the state education board. She had proposed a Cerberus-headed monster which would ostensibly be under an elected board, but require the elected board to appoint a board underneath them just to administer the charters. Like I said, bizarre!

Suddenly though it has all become clearer to me thanks to the new, young, fast talking head of the RSD from New York. Reading the papers a quote jumped up to me, when John White, admitted that the “emperor had no clothes” and that “…the district will ultimately need new revenue sources to ensure the ‘long term sustainability of a system of independent charter schools.” This “network” of so-called independent charters is referred to as a “portfolio” system, since there are so many operators with independent systems and of course budgets. Independent budgets being the soft, exposed underbelly that they had all realized, but that I hanging out there as “joe sausage head” had been missing. The state reimburses each charter directly. It does not go through a central system as it does for the Orleans School System but goes directly to the charter. The charter kicks back a sliver to the RSD but that is capped at 1.75% by state law. All of the insiders from White to Jacobs and on up and down the line, knew they were sitting high atop a house of cards, just waiting for the next scandal, and there have been many, where money was missing or teachers were being imported from Turkey or whatever. The state minders don’t have the horses to ride herd on the portfolio of random charters, so they have trouble.

The code words about “other sources of revenue” means that they have to get their hands around the school millage money that goes to the Orleans system and they can’t get that legally since the state has usurped control of the schools. They all know there has to be a centralized school system to handle admission, train and hire teachers, do the legal and accounting, and myriad other tasks, but all of that costs way more than 1.75%.

What is really going on is the preparation for another bait-and-switch. The RSD will have to be subsumed under the elected Orleans Parish School System, but the so-called “reformers” want to try and figure out a way to bamboozle the situation so that we pay for their play, and they still escape all democratic accountability. All of these city slickers understand that in our broke ass city there is no way that we are going to pay school taxes to two systems and in fact legally there is no way the RSD could become a separately constituted system.

This is the story no one around the country is really telling. The charter system is “one off” and not a replicable system. At its heart where the dollars flow, it is simply not sustainable!

No Account and No Accountability Charter Schools

dine — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 14:41:17 +0000

New aOrleans Few do not know that New Orleans schools are “ground zero” in the so-called “reform” movement to privatize public school systems with charter schools. With the excuse of Hurricane Katrina the State of Louisiana, which had never run a school (never, ever!) in a wink-and-nod deal took a $20 million federal carrot to clobber the Orleans Parish School Board, which was slow to reopen, and gobbled up almost two-thirds of our schools to reopen as charters. This was supposed to be a five year deal. These schools usurped democratic accountability since they were no longer responsible to a citizen elected school board, and essentially got to “invent” their own boards. Now at almost Katrina Plus 6 (K+6), both the city and the experts are split over the analysis of whether or not the schools have gotten better or not with the States Recovery School District (RSD) czar swearing so, and former superintendents and other researchers looking at the same data and saying, “no!” Worse, some of these charter operators are solidifying their control with new 10-year extensions of their original takeovers.

That’s the necessary background for you to understand that now the wheels are totally coming off of this pimpmobile!

Two months ago the New York Times ran a front page story raising a wide variety of disturbing questions about a Turkish-related company (Cosmos Foundation and Atlas Texas Construction and Trading) connected to a religious movement in that country running a vast network of charter schools in Texas and others states, including in Louisiana and specifically Abramson Science and Technology Charter, a local high school. Nothing stirred in New Orleans at this news, not even a mouse. Suddenly, a whistleblower report inside the state Department of Education came into the hands of the local paper, The Times-Picayune. Some pretty serious allegations involving potential bribes, possible rapes, cheating on science projects by teachers, teachers missing in action, and more all came out as grist for the mill. Oh, and then the state and the city seemed to realize that this school was also linked to the Turkish movement and acted surprised. The state and its puppet, the RSD, reversed course and suspended the charter, leaving parents and students scrambling with only weeks to go before the opening of the 2011-12 school year.

Today the state fired the whistleblower, who had raised questions about Abramson and its operator over a year ago, along with his boss. What?!? No explanation given of course, just a call for a “change in direction.” Egads!

Critics, or frankly anyone who thinks about any of these no account and no accountability charters, have long questioned how in the world the state could effectively supervise thirty (30!) different school charter operators under either the RSD or the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (BESE) Board. Now it is clear from the squirming that the DOE didn’t really bother to tell the BESE board or others about the problems they were finding here. And, remember there is no elected school board control and the charters appoint their own, self-perpetuating boards who never face the citizens.

This is a prescription for disaster, so who should really be surprised when disaster unfolds?

Now everyone who should have known and should have acted is playing “he said, she said,” and I dunno nada! The local RSD superintendent is now claiming Abramson will reopen in a month or so with some kind of new operator, but there still are no assurances that anyone is on first, and I’ll guarantee that no one is on second. Meanwhile these are all taxpayer supported playgrounds for so-called reformers and play-pretend “experts” who know better than parents and citizens, while flaunting and making a farce of democratic standards and traditions.

Hasn’t New Orleans suffered enough already?

Access to Higher Ed for Lower Income and Working Students

dine — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 14:34:38 +0000

New Orleans Props to David Leonhardt, the Times financial columnist, and Louis Menard, the oft published New Yorker critic at large for raising the issue of both opportunity, access, and value for higher education for the masses. Leonhardt did so in a recent column about the job shift of the former president of Amherst who had made an more egalitarian rebalancing of opportunity for low income students a signature program (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/25/business/economy/25leonhardt). Menard made a different case, but related in a piece published in his magazine’s June 6^th issue. I wish such articles would ignite real debates about education, opportunity, access, costs, and the society and country we want to build, and how we are crippling the future by deepening the stratification all around us. Unfortunately, it won’t. Voices in the wilderness though are better than no voices at all, and eventually perhaps they will be heard.

Anthony Marx leaving Amherst was not deceived about having solved the problem though there was some begrudging progress made at that institution, largely by raising the money to cover the costs and doing actual recruiting. Nonetheless, these comments in Leonhardt’s piece are telling:

“…he mentioned a Georgetown University study of the class of 2010 at the country’s 193 most selective colleges. As entering freshmen, only 15 percent of students came from the bottom half of the income distribution. Sixty-seven percent came from the highest-earning fourth of the distribution. These statistics mean that on many campuses affluent students outnumber middle-class students.

“We claim to be part of the American dream and of a system based on merit and opportunity and talent,” Mr. Marx says. “Yet if at the top places, two-thirds of the students come from the top quartile and only 5 percent come from the bottom quartile, then we are actually part of the problem of the growing economic divide rather than part of the solution.”

Meritocracy? Hardly! By and large the middle class can’t even push through the few open cracks, much less aspiring students from poor families.

If in fact they even know that such elite institutions exist, which is part of the point that Menard makes more obliquely. Menard’s argument is that the classic arguments for education either tracking potential students to serve as an elite or offering all students broader education to make them better citizens and give them a more rounded life, are breaking down before a rising third wave which might be called “technical” training or job development training found in the massive increase of university business majors. Menard is not sure what anyone is learning any more, though he is pretty clear that he doesn’t think the business majors are either learning or retaining much from the studies he has seen, and certainly there’s nothing out there in the current economy that would disprove that thesis. He doesn’t make the same direct point as Amherst’s Marx about discrimination and blocked opportunity for lower income and working students, though he could when he describes his experiences teaching at large public universities rather than elite private colleges, though he should, because part of what is yielded through tracking as well as the luxury of “education for education’s sake” is the product of the elite and income bias that permeates the entire educational system.

Neither of them follow the roots back to the educational debate in public schools around privatization, charters, unions, and testing as tracking mechanisms that will channelize even more of the US educational system around hard class and racial lines. Nonetheless, they both were at least willing to engage the issues of the fake meritocracy, wealth bias, and other cancerous problems that are skewing our educational system and our entire society as we face the coming generation and the issues they will address on a daily basis without much help, preparation, or understanding about what to do and how to do it.

The Gates Foundation is Pimping Educational “Reform”

jstuart — Tue, 24 May 2011 15:01:32 +0000

New Orleans Reading back newspapers on my return from Honduras as always are an education. Seems to be some rich fellows out there in business and politics who think that they have a “do anything I want” card that will let them out of every jam in life. They almost seem surprised that regular people would be shocked and awed by their wild and off beat antics.

Speaking of rich people, it’s hard not to think of Bill Gates, and given the rest of the headlines, I supposed I shouldn’t have been surprised that he and his foundation were all over the front page of the Times with revelations of how they are pimping out education reform by paying and planting talking heads, “advocates,” fake grassroots groups, and so-called experts to tilt the playing field while at the same time trying to throw some money out to the teachers’ unions and more traditional advocates like the NAACP just to cover their tracks.

One piece of the article by Sam Dillon was pretty clear:

“The foundation paid a New York philanthropic advisory firm $3.5 million “to mount and support public education and advocacy campaigns.” It also paid a string of universities to support pieces of the Gates agenda. Harvard, for instance, got $3.5 million to place ‘strategic data fellows’ who could act as ‘entrepreneurial change agents’ in school districts in Boston, Los Angeles and elsewhere.”

What in the heck is a “strategic data fellow?” Is that something like a CIA agent planted on the foreign soil of a local USA school district? What is an “entrepreneurial change agent?” Is that a paid provocateur without a station manager back at the control desk in DC?

That’s not all of course when money is no object and Gates certainly has a gold plated “do anything I want” card!

Alliance for Excellent Education picked up $551K “to grow support for the common core standards initiative…”
The Fordham Institute got $959 K “to review common core materials and develop supportive materials.” Dillon notes that the NYT swallowed the bait and quoted Fordham’s chief without revealing the fact that he was a paid spokesman. I wondered if that grant was why a more progressive educational reform institute had lost support at Fordham?
The New Teacher Project financed by Gates produced a report asserting that teacher tests were too easy and graded on a soft curve, which helped a “string of Gates-backed nonprofit groups” to impact legislation in 20 states considering rewriting teacher evaluation tools.
Gates spent $2 M on a “social action” campaign focused on union bashing the president of the American Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten by promoting the film “Waiting for Superman.” Tell me that isn’t about as sleazy and underhanded as it gets?
They have more than a half-million to a front for Jeb Bush, former governor of Florida, and Bush-brother for pretend advocacy for educational “reform” and a soft landing after his stint in Florida in office.
They spent $3.5 M to start an advocacy group to front for its almost $300M effort to tilt the fight against teachers in Tampa/St. Pete, Pittsburgh, Memphis, and Los Angeles.
They have paid things like “Teach Plus” to operate as grass-tips or “Astroturf” groups to front for them.

No doubt it goes on and on.

Is this fair? Are they transparent? Can there be a real dialogue when the riches are so unevenly distributed in only one direction? In fact why is Gates not funding both sides of the debate, if they really are a foundation deserving of a tax exemption to study critical public policy and find real answers that would include both the public and the teaching professionals?

Sure seems like they are pimping out the whole process to me and making streetwalkers of a whole lot of folks that out to know better.

Finally Days of Reckoning for Hijacked New Orleans School System

dine — Mon, 23 May 2011 13:18:28 +0000

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.

It’s Poverty, Stupid!

dine — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 13:07:46 +0000

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.