Maryland Tries to Do a Contortion Act

in order to be considered for Arne's blackmail money.

What's funny is there is NO evidence whatsoever these schemes he proposes would be effective, since schools can do little to alleviate poverty.

But the World Bank doesn't care. It's all about deprofessionalizing teaching so that teachers are little more than minimum wage technicians who spew nonsense out of scripts. The wealthy, though, will have their little hoity-toity private schools and "better" education the ignorant masses have no right to expect.

Diane Ravitch

writes of the lessons of what happened in Florida last week.

It is just a tiny blip in a huge battle against the profession of teaching and of the institution of public education:

Teachers, parents, and friends of public education understand that the Crist veto is not the end of the battle. The struggle is now engaged, as misinformed legislators seek to impose punitive measures on educators, thinking that such actions will help them win Race to the Top funding.

I tell my audiences that Race to the Top will turn out to be a poison pill for American education. It is based on the same "measure and punish" philosophy as No Child Left Behind.

The one bright aspect to the events in Florida is that teachers and parents there HAVE shown what can happen when people organize and take concerted political action. Despite the powerful, well-funded forces ready to destroy the teaching profession, the teachers and parents of Florida prevailed.

The friends of public education in Florida provided people a powerful lesson: united we stand, divided we fall. The education deformers have behind them the resources of hedge-fund managers and financial titans, but the friends of public education have something even more potent: they have people power.

If You Look Long Enough and Hard Enough,

you will find schemes such as charter schools, TFA, alternative certification, and other such schemes to deprofessionalize education are nothing new.

Here is another one that was tried about a century ago called the "Gary: Plan":

The Gary Plan, highly developed by World War I, quickly attracted national publicity because of its apparent efficiency and diversified curriculum. By 1929, now promoted by the National Association for the Study of the Platoon or Work-Study-Play School Organization, 202 cities had over 1,000 platoon schools. It also generated much controversy, with New York City, for example, rejecting it in 1917 after a three-year experiment. While the Gary schools, in many ways, captured the positive spirit of Progressive education, they also incorporated some troubling aspects. There was the perception in New York and elsewhere that the inclusion of manual training classes was designed to channel the working classes (the majority of Gary's students) into vocational trades; while the high school enrollment increased, most students did not graduate. The schools were also racially segregated, closely following the northern urban model. The 2,759 black children in 1930 mostly attended all-black elementary schools or the integrated (but internally segregated) Froebel School. The situation worsened as black enrollment increased to 6,700 by 1949 (34% of the student population), despite the school board's attempt in 1946 to promote building integration. By 1960, 97 percent of the 23,055 black pupils (over half of the 41,000 students) were in eighteen predominantly or exclusively black schools, with primarily black teachers and administrators, and the trend would continue as the black population increased and the white population decreased over the following decades.

No matter what the reformers try, they almost always fail, but like bad pennies they always return.

Good for AFT Massachusetts

for basically telling Obama and Arne to shove it:

The state’s second-largest teachers union organization, which represents teachers in Boston and other big cities, has decided to boycott Massachusetts’ application for the Obama administration’s innovative educational fund, possibly jeopardizing $250 million in grants.

The move, approved Saturday by the board of the American Federation of Teachers Massachusetts, stunned state education leaders, key legislators, and charitable organizations that work on education issues.

Word of the vote began circulating yesterday after the teachers federation sent an e-mail late Monday night to state education officials saying that both the statewide organization and its locals would not sign the application for the Race to the Top program, established by the Obama administration to reward states pursuing classroom innovations and aggressive overhauls of failing schools.

In addition to Boston, the federation represents teachers in some of the most distressed districts, such as Lawrence, Lynn, and Lowell.

More Good News for Teachers as Governor Crist Vetoes the Horrible "Reform" Bill

in Florida, the infamous SB 6. He might care about teachers in addition to his future political ambitions:

TALLAHASSEE -- Gov. Charlie Crist has vetoed merit-pay for teachers legislation. Crist said at a noon news conference today that it is "contrary to the best interests of the people of Florida."

The governor said he vetoed the legislation, in part, "because of the process by which it passed. This … sped through committees without meaningful imput" from teachers, parents and administrators.

"Sometimes stated goals do not match the words of the bill," Crist said. "I find the content of Senate Bill 6 and the manner of its adoption significantly flawed."

The bill would require school districts develop teacher evaluations that rely mostly on how students perform on standardized tests. Districts would be prohibited from basing teacher pay on advanced degrees or years served. New teachers would be hired under probationary contracts that would allow termination without cause for the first years of service.

Of course teachers all over the country are going to have to be vigilant because somewhere some bill is going to pass and be signed into law, and public education will be a thing of the past if it does. Remember, these attempts to destroy it aren't isolated events; they are part of a plan fostered by the World Bank and others to destroy public services for private profit and to limit higher education for most people.


A message from State Senator Dan Gelber:

Here is the Video of

the Ravitch and Weiner remarks about public education and the neoliberal assault.




link

If Obama's Ideas About Education

are simply going to be World Bank/neoliberal hogwash, it's time for Democrats to find an opponent to run against him in 2012.

I am serious. I am so sick of his right-wing shit I can hardly take him anymore.

President Obama aims to reinvent the Education Department as a venture capitalist for school reform, investing more in schools with innovative ideas. The Title I program, which supports Adelphi and thousands of other schools in low-income areas based on formulas of need, is not facing extinction. But Obama would freeze the core of that program even as he sends billions of dollars to states that harmonize their policies with his.

The proposal splits congressional Democrats. They are staunch protectors of education funding for their states and districts, but many worry about promoting innovation at the expense of equity. Obama's $4 billion Race to the Top, a prime example of what he wants to expand, in March awarded large payouts to Delaware and Tennessee but left 39 applicants empty-handed.
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Most states will not receive a dime this year from the school reform fund. Some senior lawmakers say there's a limit to the value of competition at a time of enormous fiscal strain on schools.

Who the fuck needs Republicans with a "Democrat" like this?

link

Why Shouldn't Doctors Have Their Pay Docked

when their patients die or lawyers lose out on fat paydays when they lose their cases? Those ideas are just as sensible as paying teachers on the basis of what their students do, even if their students "blow off" standardized tests and "Christmas tree" them.

It couldn't be any outside influences that affect learning — not the inattention of parents, not whatever roiling events outside school walls might make it difficult to learn, not too-crowded classes, not administrators and policy makers who don't really get what teachers do.

Something very detrimental to learning has been happening under the guise of education reform for nearly two decades. Americans have been convinced that standardization is education. They have been convinced that the way to "excellence" is to treat children's minds like one treats tomatoes during canning season.

In the process, too many Americans have swallowed the propaganda that those who don't buy the standard (King James?) version of school accountability employed by state after state don't support excellence.

If Florida's Draconian Senate Bill 6

actually becomes law, public education will be officially dead in that state, which of course is what the crooked privatizers want.

They'll just hire a bunch of TFAs or H1Bs to "teach" students when the regular teachers leave the state in DROVES and no regular certified teacher will move to the state.

This "reform" will spread like wildfire all over the country.

We have a "Democratic" president who encourages this. He will NEVER, ever get my vote. He's a fucking disaster.

How Did Public Education Get So Screwed Up?

Look no further than the "Chicago miracle" under Arne Duncan:

Into the breach stepped Duncan, another education amateur who had given up on an Australian professional basketball career to return to his hometown and work for Vallas. A Harvard grad and the son of a University of Chicago professor, Duncan had political connections to Daley's Chicago Democratic machine and a rising political star, state Sen. Barack Obama, his neighbor in the liberal Hyde Park neighborhood.

With the passage of the NCLB law in 2002, Duncan made use of George W. Bush's toolkit, putting pressure on schools that failed to meet their "adequate yearly progress" in raising standards. Three elementary schools were closed in 2003, the first in a long list of shutdowns that Duncan would impose.

In 2004, Duncan and Daley dropped the big one: Renaissance 2010, a plan to close dozens of "failing" schools and replace them new ones or charter schools. The plan was based largely on a blueprint drawn up the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago, an institution of wealthy individuals and business executives determined to socially engineer Chicago to suit their interests.

Ren2010, as it's known, revealed the Daley-Duncan-business agenda for public education in Chicago. Rather than ramping up funding for smaller class sizes and additional classroom resources, their aim was to create distinct tiers of education and ration access to the best schools.

More

Lots of Cluelessness in the Florida Legislature

while Democrats there tried to amend the horrendous Senate Bill 6 to restore some teacher protections and keeping compensation for advanced degrees and such, but to no avail:

On Thursday, March 25, I was present during the first two and a half hours of the Pre-K-12 Committee debate of HB 7189. Unfortunately I had to leave before I was called to speak, and obviously also before the bill passed the committee, though from what I have heard and read, it was pushed through despite a great many speakers who had traveled from all over the state not having a chance to speak, and despite not having finished examining all the proposed amendments.

What I observed during the first two and a half hours was a very divisive partisan struggle. The Democrats, particularly Rep. Mia Jones (D-Jacksonville), Rep. Martin Kiar (D-Parkland) and Rep. Dwight Bullard (D-Miami), had crafted a number of amendments that could have helped mitigate some of the damage to public education and especially to the recruitment and retention of qualified teachers. These amendments included ones that would make advanced degrees relevant to salaries (SB 6/HB 7189 nullifies the financial benefits to teachers of holding advanced degrees); that would continue to provide financial benefits for National Board Certified teacher (another casualty of SB 6/HB 7189); that would prevent teachers transitioning between schools from losing certification based on standardized test scores; that would allow new teachers to earn tenure though it would hinge on performance (the current bill eliminates tenure for all new teachers, putting all of them on annual contracts ad infinitum); that would ensure that the as-yet unwritten and unbudgeted end-of-course exams would include a pre-test so that evaluations could be made based on learning gains rather than a simple pass/fail rate; that teachers would be guaranteed to earn at least the national average. Each of these amendments was voted down along straight party lines, 10-5 (10 Republicans to 5 Democrats).

A few interesting arguments made during the debate of the amendments: Rep. Will Weatherford (R-Wesley Chapel) argued that there was no reason teachers should necessarily be compensated for advanced degrees, because in an insurance agency, an insurance agent would not be paid more for having a higher degree. His pay would depend on how much insurance he sold. This comment scarcely deserves comment; that one would draw a parallel between a sales job functioning on commission and education is flatly absurd. His point seemed to be that if the advanced degree were truly of some benefit to the students and the educational process, that that would show up on the tests according to which the teachers would be paid. I could easily refute this argument from a very personal perspective. I hold a Master degree in French literature. A teacher with only a Bachelor could easily produce the same results on a standardized French I test that was crafted according to the textbook, because this is a written test, most likely testing only the reading and grammatical skills of the student in the target language. Does this mean that my MA does not make me a better teacher? I would certainly argue that it does. For one thing, my accent improved dramatically throughout graduate school, as all of my courses were in French, I became friends with a number of French exchange students in my school, I was teaching elementary courses in French at the time, and it afforded me the opportunity to spend a year in France through an exchange program with my graduate school. My improved accent helps the students with listening comprehension and their own speaking skills--two things not tested on a standardized test. Those same experiences also gave me a great deal of cultural insight, which I share with my students on a regular basis--one of the most important aspects of learning another language. Furthermore, studying French literature in depth and from so many different periods has given me a great knowledge bank that has aided me in choosing appropriate texts to have my students at different levels read and respond to. All of these things make my class more engaging and richer, yet none of them would necessarily show up in a student's standardized test scores. Does this mean that my Master is worthless as far as my teaching skills or my students' educational experience goes--just because it would not necessarily increase their score on a single written test? With all due respect, Rep. Weatherford obviously does not understand very much about education, to make such a comparison. Anyone who understands education understands its complexities and nuances, and can plainly see that it has nothing in common with selling insurance.

These legislators need to know education is not a business and to try and compare it with businesses fails.

The States Tend to Be a Little Skeptical

of the Race to the Top bribery scheme, now that only two states "won" the loot in the first round:

A dozen governors, led by Bill Ritter Jr. of Colorado, sat with Secretary of Education Arne Duncan in a hotel ballroom in Washington a few weeks back, praising his vision and gushing with enthusiasm over a $4 billion grant competition they hoped could land their states a jackpot of hundreds of millions of dollars.

But for many of those governors, the contest lost some sizzle last week, when Mr. Duncan awarded money to only two states — Delaware and Tennessee.

Of course Delaware is Vice President Biden's home state.

About Senate Bill 6

Teachers will be $8 an hour babysitters and script readers while the administrators will pull down gigantic bucks. Teachers' rights are almost nonexistent now, but it will get WORSE with these "reforms."

How Did Dirtbag Bill Gates

insinuate himself into the Race to the Top mess? Easy:

Every so often we glimpse small stories stuck into the back pages of the corporate press on the continuing payouts by Microsoft for settlements to years-old State claims that Gates "had stifled competition and broken state antitrust laws by overcharging consumers for software and computers." California settled for $1.1 billion, and this story last week shows more payouts continuing today, with Wisconsin figuring out how it will use $80 million that Gates promised years ago while continuing to deny any wrongdoing.


So bare-knuckled tactics are nothing new to the Gates team, as Bill's cadre of crooks continue to demonstrate in the big all-in bet to help Arne stifle any competition in the rigged RTTT, corporate ed reform's blueprint for the dismantling of public schools and the destruction of the teaching profession. Eerily, this is the same pattern of philanthro-capitalist bullying that Gates has used in other venues to restrict any diversity of views, as within the World Health Organization in the fight against malaria, as documented by Diane Ravitch in her new book:




The chief of malaria research for the World Health Organization, Dr. Arata Kochi, complained in 2008 that the Gates Foundation was stifling a diversity of views among scientists, because so many of the world's leading scientist in the field were "locked up in a 'cartel' with their own research funding being linked to those of others within the group," making it difficult to get independent reviews of research. The foundation's decision-making process, he charged, was "a closed internal process, and as far as can be seen, accountable to none other than itself" (p. 204).




This pattern is at work, of course, in the RTTT, which awarded its first grants last week to Tennessee and Delaware. Not only does Gates have the house keys at the Department of Ed where the Gates and Broad Foundations have set up shop, but the Foundation has also tutored each state in how to write grants to fit the criteria of judging that the Foundation "helped" to develop. In addition, the Foundation is actively funding pilots at the state level, such as the 90 million dollar one in Memphis, which served as Exhibit A in Tennessee's winning proposal. And let's not forget the lobbying and lunching that Gates's goons did in Nashville in the months leading up Governor Bredesen's presentation of the Foundation's plan to clear the way for teacher evaluation by test score and uncapped corporate charter schools. The easiest part was then to buy the cheap and cowardly prostisuits who run the Tennessee Education Association.

Schools Matter

Read the part of what Tennessee proposed for RTTT. Note they would yank teachers out of the classroom if they are deemed "inefficient" or "incompetent" even if it is in the middle of the year.

The kids aren't told what happens to their teachers; to hell with the kids. What constitutes those grounds, anyway, and WHO does? The principals, of course. And who is going to judge the principals? Nobody, because their bosses are typically clear across town.

Florida Teachers and Others

engaged in a massive protest against the proposed "reforms" which seek to destroy teacher protections in that state:

Their chief target: legislation that would make it easier to fire teachers and base part of their salaries on test scores.

``We just couldn't sit at home and do nothing while our profession is being attacked,'' said Carole Robinson, a biology teacher at Dunedin High School who is driving to Tallahassee for the rally. ``There is just no collaboration going on. We were shut out of the process.''

Teachers are focusing their energy on House members and Gov. Charlie Crist, whom they see as their last line of defense on SB 6, the education bill that passed the Senate and is pending in the House.

Crist's office received 700 calls on the issue last week. House lawmakers have received hundreds of thousands of e-mails and thousands of phone calls, according to Speaker Larry Cretul's office.

Read more: http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/03/31/1555936/teachers-stage-massive-protest.html#ixzz0k3TnzB1b

It's a Small Miracle I Suppose

that Valerie Strauss even has a job with the pro-privatization Washington Post. In her latest writing, she mentions the outrages in Florida whereby attempts are being made to gut teacher tenure, put teachers on renewable contracts, and gut the step system, which prevents further principal abuse of teachers:

Teachers and their supporters in Palm Beach County are communicating about the bill on Facebook at a page called Testing is Not Teaching, and in response, someone apparently connected to Republican legislators launched a counter page deceptively called “Support Florida’s Teachers.”

The folks running that page write in support of the legislation, and then delete posts from people who oppose it. Now that’s right in the spirit of the openness of the web, isn’t it?

The Senate bill was sponsored by state Sen. John Thrasher, the new head of Florida’s Republican Party. He calls the bill “the hammer,” which he says is necessary to force the Florida teachers union to end its opposition to merit pay for teachers.

I will say this for Thrasher: He doesn’t make any pretense about the heavy hand he believes should be used with Florida teachers.

This approach could easily spread beyond the borders of Florida. It’s everybody’s business.

Obama and Duncan, alleged Democrats, are aiding and abetting the destruction of public education and thus democracy.

How in the HELL did Obama EVER get to be the nominee?

As We Know,

Delaware and Tennessee were the first states to receive the Obama administration's blackmail money in order to implement "reforms" disastrous to teachers, students, and parents. And naturally the unions go right along with this, thus sealing their fate:

The Obama administration on Monday named Tennessee and Delaware as initial winners in its “Race to the Top” education initiative. The two states, which were granted a combined award of $600 million in federal funds, were those in which local and state union affiliates carried out the greatest collaboration in undermining public education and teachers’ job security.

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced the Race to the Top program last year as the centerpiece education program of the new administration, offering up to $4.5 billion in federal funds to those states that were the most “innovative” in their policies.

As the World Socialist Web Site warned at the time, this had nothing to do with achieving education excellence or improving conditions in the schools, and everything to do with promoting a political agenda of privatization (charter schools) and destruction of wages, jobs and working conditions for teachers and other school workers (“accountability”).

Only 16 of the 50 states were selected as finalists. Tennessee will get $502 million and Delaware, a much smaller state, $107 million. Both states have Democratic governors who were better able to make deals with the unions and insure their support for the bid for additional federal funds.

Both states have merit pay plans for teachers, which allow principals to award pay raises based on alleged “performance,” which means, in practice, discriminating against teachers who defend working conditions and job security against management demands.

One of the reasons the "step system" of compensation for teachers was instituted was because principals couldn't be trusted with "awarding" raises. It was a recognition of how utterly political the public education culture is.


So-called Democrats propose and implement far right Republican policies and get away with it.

I'd like to know who writes the New York Times editorials:

Washington has historically talked tough about requiring the states to reform their school systems in exchange for federal aid, and then caved in to the status quo when it came time to enforce the deal. The Obama administration broke with that tradition this week.

It announced that only two states — Delaware and Tennessee — would receive first-round grants under the $4.3 billion Race to the Top initiative, which is intended to support ambitious school reforms at the state and local levels. The remaining states will need to retool their applications and raise their sights or risk being shut out of the next round.

That includes New York State, which ranked a sad 15th out of 16 finalists.

There is such brazen ignorance about public education by this paper, it simply means to me it is completely in bed with Mayor Bloomberg.

Race to the Top "Winners" Will Be Announced Monday,

while teachers, students, and parents all come out the losers thanks to this destructive scheme.

In This Salon Interview, Diane Ravitch

spells out why we need to preserve the public education system which has helped to make this country so great but is now being dismantled and being encouraged by the WHITE HOUSE for reasons of ideology:

Yet why not create competition if the public schools aren't doing well? What about the mantra that my own school's principal says all the time about standards and test scores, that the "data doesn't lie"?

Has your principal heard of Ponzi schemes? Has he heard of Enron? The data lie all the time. Business lies all the time. It's easy to fudge the numbers. In New York, for instance, the Board of Ed dropped the passing mark for the tests. In 2006 a seventh-grade student needed to get 59.6 percent to be considered proficient. By 2009 the mark dropped to 44 percent. That produced a dramatic increase in "proficiency."

...

You've lived and worked through countless moments of crisis in education. What makes this one different?

Public school has always had critics. But we now have for the first time a movement to eliminate public education. We have never in our history had a strong push to privatize a large piece of the public education system. And when you have it coming from the Oval Office, that's different.

Obama and Arne Duncan have completely aligned themselves with the Jack Welches and Joel Kleins. There's this idea that teachers are the enemy. Everybody has drunk the Kool-Aid, because if you want to keep your job, you walk the walk. It's doing a really good job of stigmatizing public education.

Arne is Silent on the Florida Mess

because he silently ENDORSES it; so does his boss.

The privatization movement is happening so quickly most people have no inkling of what is going on.

To get rid of the "step system" for teachers is utter insanity. Principals are already abusing their power, and this would make it worse.

From the article:

Despite a growing chorus of opposition from teachers, students and even school superintendents, the Republican-dominated state Legislature is intent on passing a bill that would make eliminate teacher tenure, link teacher pay to student standardized test scores, and add a heap more tests on already test-plagued students.

Each one of those items will negatively impact every student in a Florida public school. But that’s not all.

No PROFESSIONAL teacher will want to work in Florida; there will be nothing but TFAs in that state if this rotten bill passes.