Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Dysfunctional Public School System Continues to Drive Good Educators Away:

By , Published: The Washington Post, June 25, 2011




Bill Kerlina won a plum assignment when he was hired away from Montgomery County in July 2009 to become a principal in Northwest Washington. Phoebe Hearst Elementary was a small, high-performing school, right across the street from Sidwell Friends.
He grew to love its students, teachers and--for the most part--its parents. "If I could lift the school up and put it in a functional school system, it would be perfect," he said.


Instead, he said, the dysfunction he encountered in D.C. public schools led him to quit this month, fed up and burned out.

Thursday, June 23, 2011

There Is No Reason To Cut 6,000 Teaching Positions In NYC--An Open Letter to the People of New York by Alison Nelson

An Open Letter to the People of New York:

Our Mayor and the Department of Education have deemed it necessary to cut 6,000 teaching positions from our public schools. They have cited a shortage in the budget and claim $300 million is needed to fund these positions they state just isn't fiscally available. We are standing on the edge of a precipice that will come to affect all New Yorker's lives for decades.

Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Teach for America and Me: A Failed Courtship by Dr. Mark Naison

In "Teach for America and Me: A Failed Courtship," Fordham University professor Mark Naison outlines how the alternative teaching certification program Teach for America degrades the teaching profession and uses "students in high poverty areas as guinea pigs for an experiment in 'resume padding' for ambitious young people." I found this incredibly thought provoking.

Teach for America and Me: A Failed Courtship
Dr. Mark Naison
Fordham University

Every spring without fail, a Teach for America recruiter approaches me and asks if they can come to my classes and recruit students for TFA, and every year, without fail, I give them  the same answer:  “Sorry.Until  Teach for America changes its objective to training lifetime educators  and raises the time commitment to five years rather than two, I will not allow  TFA to recruit in my classes. The idea of sending talented students into schools in high poverty areas and then after two years, encouraging them to  pursue careers in finance, law, and business in the hope that they will then advocate for educational equity  rubs me the wrong way”

It was not always thus. Ten years ago, when a Teach for America recruiter first approached me,  I was enthusiastic about the idea of recruiting my most idealistic and talented students for work in high poverty schools and  allowed the TFA representative to make presentations in my classes, which are filled with Urban Studies and African American Studies majors. Several of my best  students applied, all of whom wanted to become teachers, and several of whom came from the kind of high poverty neighborhoods  TFA proposed to send its recruits to teach in.

Not one of them was accepted! Enraged, I did a little research and found that TFA had accepted only four of the nearly 100 Fordham students who applied. I become even more enraged when  I found out from the New York Times  that TFA had accepted 44 out of a hundred applicants from Yale that year.  Something was really wrong here if an organization who wanted to serve low income communities rejected every applicant from Fordham who came from those communities and accepted half of the applicants from an Ivy League school where very few of the students, even students of color, come from working class or poor families

Since that time,  the percentage of Fordham students accepted has marginally increased, but the organization has done little to win my confidence that it is seriously committed to recruiting people willing to make a lifetime commitment to teaching and administering schools in high poverty areas.

Never, in its recruiting literature, has Teach for America described teaching as the most valuable professional choice that an idealistic, socially conscious person can make, and encourage the brightest students  to make teaching their permanent career. Indeed, the organization does everything in its power to make joining Teach for America seem a like a great  pathway to success in other, higher paying  professions. Three years ago, the TFA recruiter plastered the Fordham campus with flyers that said “Learn how joining TFA can help you gain admission to Stanford Business School.” To me, the message  of that flyer was “use teaching in high poverty areas a stepping stone to a career in business.”  It was not only profoundly disrespectful of every person who chooses to commit their life to the teaching profession, it advocated using students in high poverty areas as guinea pigs for an experiment in “resume padding” for ambitious young people

In saying these things, let me make it clear that my quarrel is not with the many talented young people who join Teach for America, some of whom decide to remain in the communities they work in and some of whom become lifetime educators. It is with the leaders of the organization who enjoy the favor with which TFA  is regarded with  captains of industry, members of Congress, the media, and the foundation world, and have used this access to move rapidly to positions as heads of local school systems, executives in Charter school companies, and educational analysts in management consulting firms. The organization”s facile circumvention of the grinding, difficult but profoundly empowering work of teaching and administering schools has created the illusion that there are quick fixes , not only for failing schools, but for deeply entrenched patterns of poverty and inequality. No organization has been more complicit that TFA in the demonization of teachers and teachers unions, and no organization has provided more “shock troops” for Education Reform strategies which emphasize privatization and high stakes testing. Michelle Rhee, a TFA recruit, is the poster child for such policies, but she is hardly alone.

Her counterparts can be found in New Orleans ( where they led the movement toward a system dominated by charter school)  in New York ( where they play an important role in the Bloomberg
Education bureaucracy) and in many other cities.

 And that  elusive goal of educational equity.   How well has it advanced in the years TFA has been operating? Not only has there been little progress, in the last fifteen years, in narrowing the test score gap by race and class, but income inequality has become greater, in those years, than any time in modern American history. TFA has done nothing to promote income redistribution, reduce the size of the prison population, encourage social investment in high poverty neighborhoods, or revitalize arts and science and history in the nation’s schools. It’s main accomplishment has been to marginally increase the number of talented people entering the teaching profession, but only a small fraction of those remain in the schools to which they were originally sent.

But the most objectionable aspect of Teach for America –other than its contempt for lifetime educators- is its willingness to create another pathway to wealth and power for those already privileged,  in the rapidly expanding Educational Industrial Complex, which offers numerous careers for the ambitious and well connected.  An organization which began by promoting idealism and educational equity has become, to all too many of its recruits, a vehicle for profiting from the misery of America’s poor.

Mark Naison

Tuesday, June 21, 2011

Ravitch To Attend "Save Our Schools March & National Call to Action" On July 30th in Washington D.C.

Diane Ravitch, author of The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education and outspoken opponent of the current White House education policy explains why she will march in Washington D.C. on July 30th.

Why I Am Marching On July 30

Dear Deborah,

I will be marching with the Save Our Schools coalition of teachers and parents on July 30 in Washington, D.C. I know you will be, too. I hope we are joined by many thousands of concerned citizens who want to save our schools from the bad ideas and bad policies now harming them.

Our Schools Are Not Broken: The Problem is Poverty--by Stephen Krashen

President Obama should replace Arne Duncan with Stephen Krashen as Secretary of Education; Krashen's analysis is accurate and insightful. 
I've included some key highlights from Krashen's speech entitled: "Our Schools Are Not Broken: The Problem is Poverty" originally given as the commencement speech at the Graduate School of Education and Counseling, Lewis and Clark College on June 5, 2011

To hear the full speech, begin at 34:34


Video streaming by Ustream

Krashen Explains Why Poverty, Not Poor Teaching, Is The Real Problem:
Reduce poverty to improve education, not vice-versa.The fact that American students who are not living in poverty do very well shows that there is no crisis in teacher quality. The problem is poverty.

I Don't Want to be a Teacher Anymore----How the Education Deformers Are Driving Quality Teachers Out of the Profession

The Education Deformers are driving quality teachers out of the profession. Check out the post "I Don't Want to be a Teacher Anymore" by Thalli on Daily Kos. A 34-year veteran teacher outlines the changes public education has undergone over the past 3 decades and the demoralization that comes along with the increasing lack of teacher autonomy we are seeing under the current high-stakes testing obsessed "reform" (deform) movement:

Monday, June 20, 2011

Schools will never fix inequality: Diane Ravitch vs. Arne Duncan fight misses point on poverty

Check out this editorial, Schools will never fix inequality: Diane Ravitch vs. Arne Duncan fight misses point on poverty, by John Marsh published June 19, 2011 in the NY Daily News:


"The inconvenient truth: If you care about poverty and economic inequality, you would be better off forgetting about education. Because, even if schools could overcome the effects of growing up in poverty, they cannot reshape the structure of an economy that produces poverty and economic inequality in the first place."


Why the President Must Remove Arne Duncan and End High-Stakes Testing Policies in Our Public Schools: A Letter to Barack Obama--by Jenna Schlosbon

Shame on you, Barack Obama. I voted for you. I campaigned for you. I donated to you and raised money for you. When I heard you speak about the problem of educational inequality in this country at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, I felt inspired. This is an issue that has been extraordinarily important to me for some time now, and I believed that you actually intended to do something about it. But instead, you continue to support the high stakes testing agenda and business-like competition among our public schools.