Tag: education

The problem with Michelle Rhee’s report card for public schools

by Traci G. Lee, Melissa Harris Perry Show

StudentsFirst, a school reform lobbying organization headed by education reformer Michelle Rhee, recently released the results of its own national study of education policies by state. According to the results, no state received an A, but plenty scored just barely average, and 11 states received an F.

Each grade is the determined based on three areas: whether a state’s policies elevate teaching, empower parents, spend wisely, and govern well. The report highlights states that provide abundant school choices for parents (i.e. charter schools) and blasts states that fail to evaluate teachers and principals in “meaningful ways.” [..]

But a key area that StudentsFirst leaves out of its grading system also happens to be one of Rhee’s most talked-about issues: student test scores. Maryland, which ranked the highest in Education Week‘s 2012 state report card in terms of achievement and standards, only received a D+ from Rhee. [..]

Rhee’s standards have tied student performance almost exclusively to teacher performance, and as a result has unfairly targeted teachers whose students could not perform well on standardized tests. Unfortunately, what Rhee has left out of her sweeping policy reforms is the fact that a child is not two-dimensional and doing well on a test has little to do with a child’s intelligence or ability to perform well later in life.

While it’s believable that states across the country are struggling to close its schools’ achievement gaps, the criteria StudentsFirst used to grade each state seems to be part of Rhee’s personal agenda to reform schools nationwide using the standards she believed had a great impact during her time as D.C.’s chancellor.

Beware: “Pro-child” groups press corporate schools agenda

by Susan Webb, People’s World

What could be wrong with these self-proclaimed pro-student, pro-child groups? Plenty.

StudentsFirst is headed by Michelle Rhee, former head of the Washington, D.C., public schools. Aro notes that “Rhee’s time as the chancellor of the District of Columbia Public Schools was rife with anti-teacher policies, including illegally firing teachers.” Rhee has also been implicated in test-score tampering at D.C. schools during her chancellorship. Read more about her here.

Amidst a fog of “pro-student” rhetoric, here is just a sampling of “meat” contained in the StudentsFirst policy list:    

• shifting control of public schools away from elected school boards to one-person “mayoral control.” Why? Because, the group says, “Public employee unions invest in friendly school board candidates and expect handsome returns.”
• support for “turnaround” models that involve mass firing of teachers and principals and turning schools over to charter operators and other private managers – the vast majority of which are non-union.
• end all job security and professional protection for teachers. Put them at the mercy of individual supervisors’ whims, prejudices or favoritism. The organization states flatly: “State law should not grant, implicitly or directly, tenure or permanent contracts for PK-12 education professionals.”
• shifting teacher “defined benefit” pensions to individual 401(k) type plans, which put all the risk on the individual. StudentsFirst claims that “today’s district pensions and other benefits are not sustainable” and criticizes them for “excessively rewarding longevity.”

Rhee has refused to discuss funding for her organization, but Reuters reports that StudentsFirst has received big donations from hedge fund managers.

StudentsFirst Spending: National Education Reform Group’s Partial Tax Records Released

June 25 (Reuters) – The national education reform group StudentsFirst, which has set out to transform U.S. schools by introducing more free-market principles to public education, raised $7.6 million in its first nine months – and spent nearly a quarter of it on advertising – according to partial tax records released on Monday. [..]

Rhee, a political lightning rod since she closed scores of schools and laid off hundreds of teachers during her tenure in Washington, has refused to discuss her funding or her donors. The IRS forms released by her organization on Monday cover only the first several months of her work, through July 31, 2011. Updated filings are not expected until the end of the year, though Reuters has confirmed that recent donors include New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and hedge fund managers David Tepper and Alan Fournier, who have pledged substantial resources to a StudentsFirst partner organization in New Jersey.

The Laura and John Arnold Foundation, funded by hedge fund manager John Arnold, has also pledged $20 million to Rhee’s organization over five years, a donation that does not appear to be reflected in the IRS forms released on Monday.

Tony Harris takes a personal look at Baltimore’s inner city and an education system failing black Americans.

 Baltimore, Maryland has come to be known as ‘Charm City’ because of its harbour, which attracts a vibrant nightlife and thriving tourism business.

But just beyond the harbour’s calm waters is one of the toughest and most violent inner cities in the US.

Baltimore is also home to Al Jazeera presenter Tony Harris and in this episode of Al Jazeera Correspondent he takes us on an up close and personal journey to his old neighbourhood to witness the challenges facing black youth today as they struggle to get out of the dead end of life on inner city streets.

Most of the crime in Baltimore is committed by black males with other blacks as victims, making black males an easy target for the police.

And many believe that the stereotyping of black kids starts at an early age in the US – as early as grade school. In this film, Harris examines how the education system has failed black boys and reflects upon why he managed to make it out successfully while so many of his friends did not.

Recently, President Obama gave a speech at the U.N with a recurring theme I found disturbing. The whole bluster involved with the U.S “making sure there is not a nuclear Iran ever” as if repeating the straight up ignorance of the neoconservatives on Iran, is not dangerous and ignorant like anyone making excuses for it. It is.

Serious signs of this kind of ignorance are unfortunately coming from the President’s  Secretary of Defense; Leon Panetta who says “all options are on the table” with Iran. That’s really not OK. It’s actually insane. All Options were on the table when Bill Clinton bombed Iraq(which was used as an excuse for the 2003 invasion) as well so that is anything but an innocuous statement.

Make no mistake, the real danger here is a country and now two administrations addicted to war while we linger here without jobs.  I don’t find the case convincing at all that they are building a nuclear weapon in the NIE, but even if they are it doesn’t matter. There are a number of reasons; some which involve a basic education on the Middle East and Islam our President and too many Democrats didn’t take the time to learn.  

Cross posted at our new beta site Voices on the Square and The Stars Hollow Gazette

Yes, another crash is coming. I can’t predict precisely when as that would be a fool’s errand, but much closer than you think. It will probably be after our President is reelected and will care very little what you or I think once he and his treasury push for criminal TBTF banks to bailed out once again. Doctor Doom: the nickname for economist Nouriel Roubini: one of the relatively few outside the mainstream(part of the Got It Right (pdf) project) who predicted the last crash thinks 2013 is a perfect storm for another one which will be even worse and it makes sense.

Despite on theoretical fiscal policy limits with regard to the US, Roubini is absolutely right on the political deadlock with the coming crisis. We wasted our last crisis and that’s something Conservatives have not done whether we’re talking about the stagflation crisis of the 70s or 9/11. There won’t be as many political options this time to prop up the underlying economy in 2013 because Democrats have failed to change the Senate rules because most of them secretly like the way things work or don’t work in Washington. Sadly, if Republicans take over both houses again, they will change the Senate rules as they threatening to do in 2005 and 2006.

Anyway some might still want to scoff at Roubini’s prediction, but that will come back to bite them in the ass. Not even Roubini can predict the exact moment it will happen, but if one knows anything about the history of financial crashes, since the 80s when the 1933 banking reforms passed by FDR started slowly being dismantled, they started happening once again in a 5-7 year time-frame(and even closer than that if you count global stock crashes which count now more than ever since our markets turned dark with OTC derivatives and Information Asymmetry all around); some worse than others as the 2008 bust was on par with 1929 but you get the idea.

• Black Monday (1987)
• Black Wednesday (1992)
• Asian financial crisis (1997)
• Mini-crash (1997)
• Dot-com bubble(2000)
• Economic effects arising from the September 11 attacks (2001)
• Stock market downturn of (2002)
• United States bear market of (2007)
• Global financial crisis (2008)
• European sovereign-debt crisis (2010)

Conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg thinks some people are too dumb to vote:

   Personally, I think the voting age should be much higher, not lower.  I think it was a mistake to lower it to 18, to be brutally honest.

   (…)

   It is a simple fact of science, that nothing correlates more with ignorance and stupidity than youth.

In some cases he may be right except that he wouldn’t agree. 46% of Americans believe the creationist view of human existence:

The prevalence of this creationist view of the origin of humans is essentially unchanged from 30 years ago, when Gallup first asked the question. About a third of Americans believe that humans evolved, but with God’s guidance; 15% say humans evolved, but that God had no part in the process.

Click On image to enlarge

Hmmm, why would that be? Could it be a failure of our schools? Scarecrow at FDL says:

assume these numbers reflect the effects of private religious schooling and the growing trend of devising various schemes to use public dollars to subsidize private/religious schools, as reported in the New York Times.

Every time I hear Arne Duncan go on about NCLB or his Race to the Top and how we ought to be promoting clever ways to give parents more choices outside the public school system in how they teach their children, so as to improve their children’s math and engineering scores, I have to wonder why he just doesn’t make moving the numbers on this chart in a more enlightened direction as a measure of what “success means.” That chart shouts “failure” when I look at.

Or could it be more that our country’s “youths”, as Chris Mooney points out in his new book The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science and Realityyou’re too misinformed to vote if you get your news from Fox News:

In June of last year, Jon Stewart went on air with Fox News’ Chris Wallace and started a major media controversy over the channel’s misinforming of its viewers. “Who are the most consistently misinformed media viewers?” Stewart asked Wallace. “The most consistently misinformed? Fox, Fox viewers, consistently, every poll.”

Stewart’s statement was factually accurate, as we’ll see. The next day, however, the fact-checking site PolitiFact [weighed in http://www.politifact.com/trut… and rated it “false.” In claiming to check Stewart’s “facts,” PolitiFact ironically committed a serious error and later, doubly ironically, failed to correct it. How’s that for the power of fact checking?

There probably is a small group of media consumers out there somewhere in the world who are more misinformed, overall, than Fox News viewers. But if you only consider mainstream U.S. television news outlets with major audiences (e.g., numbering in the millions), it really is true that Fox viewers are the most misled based on all the available evidence-especially in areas of political controversy. This will come as little surprise to liberals, perhaps, but the evidence for it-evidence in Stewart’s favor-is pretty overwhelming.

I am fairly certain Jonah wasn’t pointing his pudgy conservative finger at the religious right or Fox News but if the shoe fits

The Great Teacher Bashing Tour continues in the great state of Washington. All kids will be saved when we have charters and evaluations that work as well as the evaluations of Wall Street bandits.

http://seattleducation2010.wor…

http://saveseattleschools.blog…

The teacher bashing onslaught soared to new heights in September 2010 with the release of “Waiting For Stuporman”. 1 September day, I was privileged to get home from work & be channel surfing & see my Ex-Boss, (7 clicks removed) Bill Gates, sitting on Oprah’s couch with Michelle Rhee, while the 3 of them ooh-ed and ahh-ed over this little piece of propaganda.

Below is a leaflet I distribute at ed deform events, and at sundry other local Seattle community events. I enjoy leafleting.  I enjoy telling people I’m leafletting because I’m prejudiced:

I’m prejudiced against well paid managers, AND

I’m prejudiced against well paid CON$ultant$, because as members of the 1% and as agents of the 1%, their greatest skills are blaming us working stiffs for problems we didn’t create –

I’ve been teaching high school math for over 6 years now,

I actually worked at Microsoft in Redmond as a low level support serf for 5 years,

I was a chef for 15 years, and spent 5 of those years cooking in fine dining in Boston (the Boston Four Seasons Hotel from ’85 to ’87).

I KNOW what high priced CON$sultant$ look like,

I KNOW how little they help my kids learn math, AND

I know how little they help kids at our school, AND

I know how little they help any kids in our district,

I’m prejudiced against well paid managers, AND

I’m prejudiced against well paid CON$ultant$, because as members of the 1% and as agents of the 1%, their greatest skills are blaming us working stiffs for problems we didn’t create –

Below is my leaflet.  

The Great Teacher Bashing Baloney Tour continues tomorrow night in Seattle, Tues., 1 Nov. at our downtown public library.

http://www.educationvoters.org…

The teacher bashing onslaught soared to new heights in September 2010 with the release of Since “Waiting For Stuporman”. I was privelaged to watch the the acclaim of this propaganda from the classroom experts of Michelle Rhee, Bill Gates and Oprah over a year ago.

I enjoy leafleting against these Teacher Bashing Baloney Tours put on by the toadies of the 1%, and I enjoy telling people I’m leafletting because I’m predujiced –

I’ve been teaching high school math for over 6 years now,

I actually worked at Microsoft as a low level support serf for 5 years,

I was a chef for 15 years, and spent 5 of those years cooking in fine dining in Boston (the Boston Four Seasons Hotel from ’85 to ’87)

I KNOW what high priced CON$sultant$ look like,

I KNOW how little they help my kids learn math, AND

I know how little they help kids at our school, AND

I know how little they help any kids in our district,

I’m prejudiced against well paid managers, AND

I’m prejudiced against well paid CON$ultant$

because as members of the 1% and as agents of the 1%,

their greatest skills are blaming us working stiffs for problems we didn’t create –

Below is my Leaflet –  

Crossposted at Daily Kos and Docudharma

Reposted from Daily Kos

I graduated from a relatively large public high school in a impoverished area in rural Maine last year, having completed all 12 years in the local public school system. In case you haven’t noticed, there has been a lot of discussion on this site since the attacks on teacher’s unions. As someone who has experienced first hand the effects of No Child Left Behind and the budget shortfalls at the federal, state, and local level, I feel like I should share my experience. There have been quite a few diaries posted here by teachers and parents, but I haven’t seen any by students.

Before I begin to talk about everything that is terribly wrong with the public school system in this country, let me just say that I’m not doing it because it ended badly for me. I couldn’t be in a better place, and I’m happy to have spent all my years in the schools and surrounded by the people that I was. However, it worked out so well for me largely because I had a solid family situation, and I was self-motivated enough to accomplish what I needed to accomplish. However I did stand witness to all of those kids that it didn’t work out so well for, and it was obvious that things were only getting worse as I left.

So, let us begin.

Posted at DKos as “Just Looking.”

I have a few pleasant photography stories to tell from a week ago. Between the autumn color and the desperation of one last warm weather week, it was a good week for a photo buff. Now don’t go busting my bubble by just looking at the photos because you can learn a lot from a photographer. We see things.

Below you will find a Third Rock from the Sun brief encounter during an evening walk in the Village. I have several memories from a lecture I attended on photojournalism. There is a pleasant Veterans Day walk under the George Washington Bridge on the New Jersey side followed by a sunset from the New York side. Then a Friday afternoon walk in Central Park with some music videos I made and all day Saturday there too. There is even a little taste of Florence, Italy.