The
average person might think: “Education
isn't rocket science.” No, it's a good deal more difficult than
that as it involves understanding and working with human beings.
Billions
of dollars and millions of hours from reformers have produced very
little in the way of results because those reformers haven't actually
spent much time in schools, learning about what makes learning
different from other fields. “Unlike working
educators, most leaders in the reform movement have never taught a
five-period day, felt the joy of an unquantifiable classroom victory,
lost instructional time to a standardized test, or been evaluated by
a computer. And unlike the vulnerable students targeted by so much
reform, most policy elites have not gone to school hungry, struggled
to understand standard English, battled low expectations, or feared
for their personal safety on the walk home.”
Education commentary. Blog was originally devoted to economic effects of Iraq War. All posts by Rich Gardner unless otherwise specified.
Wednesday, October 22, 2014
Sunday, October 19, 2014
PA Governor adopts educational plan that will hurt students
An “unelected,
unaccountable entity charged with school oversight” abruptly
canceled a state contract with the Philadelphia Federation of
Teachers “and demand new healthcare contributions from its
employees.” The Philadelphia school system had lots of problems
under Governor Corbett, but very few of those problems owed anything
to the schools themselves, most of the problems had to do with
deliberate malfeasance from the Corbett Administration. Having been a
sailor, it was my experience and as my father was also a sailor, it
was his experience too, that we never had to take money out of our
own pockets to fulfill our mission. There were many instances where
we were obliged to do so temporarily, but we always got reimbursed.
Under Corbett, teachers have “to contribute thousands of dollars
out of their own pockets for the most basic supplies.” And of
course, the school bureaucracy under Corbett insists that a mandatory
extra contribution to health care doesn't constitute a reduction in
their paychecks.
Tuesday, October 14, 2014
How do charter schools make money if they're non-profits?
Naturally, no one wants to be paying for a for-profit school as it would then be far too easy to identify excessive charges and then, even if parents didn't make complaints about obvious money-making moves by the school, resentment would grow. The answer is shown in Pro-Publica's piece on profits and schools. Essentially, profits are collected at one remove, with the suppliers of books, furniture, cafeteria food, computers, even teacher training. There is, of course, no competitive bidding for anything as the supply line is set up before the school itself is even built.
Thursday, June 19, 2014
Is education worth spending money on?
The fellow who
replaced Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA), the House Majority Leader (Second
in the House after the Speaker) has an, uh, interesting view of
education and spending. "My hero Socrates trained in Plato on a
rock. How much did that cost? So the greatest minds in history became
the greatest minds in history without spending a lot of money."
He has a lot
of other strange views. Personally, I read I.F. Stone's “The
Trial of Socrates” and was left considerably less than
impressed with Socrates. I think he was far too abstract a thinker
and could have been more down-to-earth and immediately practical. I
had read Plato's “The
Republic” in Junior High (Called Middle School these days) and
recall having been pretty unimpressed by that as well. So no, I don't
agree with Rep. David Brat as neither Plato nor Socrates count as “my
hero.”
Monday, May 19, 2014
Charter Schools must obey civil rights laws
Good!
“...the same federal civil rights laws that apply to other public
schools apply equally to public charter schools.”
The piece also makes
some snarky points about how long the problem has been around.
Monday, January 27, 2014
Backlash against high-stakes school testing
Seems
parents and students and teachers
are
against putting too
much reliance into testing
(April
2013).
Why
are privatized schools (I use that term to distinguish the corporate
schools from traditional private schools that are designed to draw in
wealthier clients) so
fond of testing? “They
don’t want parents to measure a school on anything other than a
number because they’re not offering anything other than a number.“
Privatized schools looking good, in theory anyway, because of the
tests that students constantly take, not because students are turning
out any more thoughtful or competent or skilled.
Saturday, January 25, 2014
Students take exception to privatization
About 1,000 students
of a half-a-dozen Newark, NJ, high schools walked out in April 2013
in
response to Governor Chris Christie's plans to balance the state
budget by taking money out of education.
[Apr 2013]
Tuesday, January 21, 2014
Suspicious test scores
Michelle Rhee took a
corporate-reform approach to getting better test scores and
graduation rates from her students. It involved the firing of many
teachers and the elimination of tenure. Unfortunately, it also meant
that Rhee did not have any education professionals within her
leadership circle, nor was anyone experienced at running urban school
systems. It appears to have worked, but in April 2013, it
turned out that in her first year as Schools Chancellor in
Washington, DC, she knew that there was a considerable amount of
cheating, erasures of student answers on tests and substitution of
correct answers. Reports of this happening went back to November
2008. The ral problem was that the erasures “suggested widespread
cheating by adults.”
Unfortunately,
that's a predictable response to high-stakes testing that isn't
difficult to manipulate. Could she have taken a better approach once
cheating was discovered? Perhaps, but “a cheating scandal might
well have implicated her own 'Produce or Else' approach to reform.“
Rhee strongly denied that she was pressuring principals to produce
results regardless of whether students were actually learning more,
but it appears that's exactly what was happening.
Has her system actually improved teacher retention, a key measure of
job satisfaction? Actually, no. “For teachers, DCPS has become a
revolving door. Half of all newly hired teachers (both rookies and
experienced teachers) leave within two years; by contrast, the
national average is said to be between three and five years.”
Sadly, “Rhee’s
former deputy is in charge of public schools, and Rhee continues her
efforts to persuade states and districts to adopt her approach to
education reform–an approach, the evidence indicates, did little or
nothing to improve the public schools in our nation’s capital.”
[April 2013]
Saturday, January 18, 2014
Proposal to reform school funding
In March 2013,
Pennsylvania Representative James Roebuck, Jr., proposed to reform
the way in which cyber and charter school were funded and how they
were called to account for their performance. He estimated the PA
school budget could
save up to $365 million that way. Included is a chart that shows
exactly what would be affected.
Sunday, January 12, 2014
Pleading poverty, Philadelphia closes 23 schools
From Channel
6 (March 2013): “Officials contended the cash-strapped system
couldn't afford to keep open the 27 buildings, more than 10 percent
of the district's schools. Many of them are under-enrolled and in
poor condition. But opponents said the move would irreparably damage
dozens of neighborhoods and further fuel a student exodus from the
district.”
The closures were
defended as a response to declining enrollment and a consolidation of
under-attended schools. But money was also a factor. Governor
Corbett tries (April 2013) to get
clever with the school budget so that he can pretend that
privatization is necessary. But what's really
causing
PA to be short of money are Corbett's tax cuts. A study by the
Pennsylvania Budget and
Policy Center showed that “corporate
tax breaks that will continue to shift costs to individuals and local
taxpayers, while failing to restore deep cuts to public schools, keep
college affordable for middle-class students, or ensure working
families can obtain basic health care.” Backgrounder
from Truthout as to how private charter schools are
sucking money out of the system and causing public schools to be
starved for funds.
Video
of reaction in front of the School District Building.
Media
summary from PCAPS.
Thursday, January 9, 2014
Testimony to the Philadelphia City Council on school closing moratorium
Black
Radical Congress – Recognized that demographic changes meant
some school closings and consolidations were inevitable, but proposed
that charter schools should be closed first.
Laura
C. Dijilo, PCAPS member - The state of Pennsylvania took over
the schools 10 years ago because the schools were in debt. How has
the state done? The schools are still in debt and underfunded and
even more buildings are in disrepair.
Philadelphia
National Writers Union – The PNWU endorses the PCAPS proposals.
UFPJ-DVN
Education Committee – We recognize that the charter school
movement is not driven by parents or students or even by educators,
but by money-seeking corporations. This is an ineffective approach to
education.
The
Notebook – Summary of the testimony of four public school
advocates.
[February
2013]
Friday, January 3, 2014
Privatized school vouchers – unpopular but persistent
Despite the
unpopularity of vouchers for corporate private schools, we see a lot
of voucher programs persist anyway, programs that take money out of
the popular public education system and funnel money into an system
that has no real accountability. Think
Progress examines the cases of several millionaires and
billionaires and their “school choice” front groups.
[May 2011]
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)