Why the Racist History of the Charter School Movement Is Never Discussed | Education | AlterNet

“The now-popular idea of offering public education dollars to private entrepreneurs has historical roots in white resistance to school desegregation after Brown v. Board of Education (1954). The desired outcome was few or, better yet, no black students in white schools. In Prince Edward County, Virginia, one of the five cases decided in Brown, segregationist whites sought to outwit integration by directing taxpayer funds to segregated private schools.”

Why the Racist History of the Charter School Movement Is Never Discussed

Why Teaching People to Think for Themselves Is Repugnant to Religious Zealots and Rick Santorum | Truthout

Another excellent piece by Henry Giroux…

“As the anti-public politicians and administrative incompetents in Arizona made clear in their banning ethnic studies and censoring books critical of a conflict-free version of American history, critical pedagogy is especially dangerous. Not only does it offer students a way of connecting education to social change, it also invokes those subordinated histories, narratives and modes of knowledge in an attempt to give students often rendered voiceless the capacities to both read the word and the world critically.”

Why Teaching People to Think for Themselves Is Repugnant to Religious Zealots and Rick Santorum | Truthout.

For Profit Colleges Lose Accredidation?Just Accredit Yourselves!

So, it seems something fishy is going on in NC, thanks to right-wing corporate hacks ALEC.

Apparently they are in the process of pushing a bill through the NC legislature that would set up a new state accrediting body for for profit colleges. Who will run it? The same people who run those colleges:

“While the new North Carolina regulatory law stipulates that a minimum of four board members must come from the for-profit college industry, at least six of the new board members herald from the for-profit school sector…”

More on this sneaky little trick in a Truthout article found HERE.

Henry Giroux-Book Burning in Arizona

 

I just discovered a great article about the racist/radical right attack on Chicano studies and self-empowerment in Arizona, written for Truthout by the always great Henry Giroux:

“There is more at work in the attack on ethnic studies and the banning of books considered dangerous to children in the Arizona schools than the rise of Tea Party politics and specific acts of censorship (this would be a typical liberal interpretation of these events). There is also the emergence of deeper structures of a systemic racism and the increasing mobilization of neoliberal ideology to justify the ongoing attacks on people of color, immigrants and those considered other by virtue of their class and ethnicity.”

Full article at Truthout.org.

A Look At Rhee’s Replacement in DC, Kaya Henderson

“Henderson replaced Rhee as chancellor of D.C.’s public schools one year ago this month. Though her name might not be well known,  the  fate of education reformers around the country  just might rest on Henderson’s shoulders. Over the past year, Henderson has been finding out what school reform looks like in the wake of a bloody, district-wide overhaul. While reform hot spots like New York and Chicago wrestle with change, Washington is learning about politics and progress in a post-reform city. After the multi-year struggle with the D.C. teachers union that turned Rhee into a celebrity and District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) into a veritable war zone between 2007 and 2010, Washington has been focusing on the nuts and bolts of education, like standardizing its curriculum and improving low-performing schools.

And instead of Rhee, there’s Henderson, who took charge of the district mid-transformation and is working to keep it on the trajectory Rhee started. Henderson and Rhee have a long history; she had been working for Rhee for 11 years prior to Rhee’s departure from D.C. public schools and served as deputy chancellor while Rhee was at DCPS.

For those who champion urban education reform as a solution to all that ails public education in the United States, there’s more at stake now than there was when Rhee arrived at DCPS in the spring of 2007. Education reform is popular and hotly debated, but reformers have yet to prove that their strategies can revive a school district in a sustained, measurable way. Maintaining D.C.’s momentum and gaining the support of skeptical city residents poses a huge challenge for Henderson. She will have to do both if she wants the political clout to follow through on her reform agenda. Complicating matters further is the fact that, for the first time in 11 years, Rhee is not there to do the political dirty work..”

Full article from Salon is HERE.

On US Education: It’s the Socioeconomic Segregation, Stupid | Common Dreams

On US Education: It’s the Socioeconomic Segregation, Stupid | Common Dreams.

“Just as red-lining was used for many years by the FHA to maintain racial purity and avoid ethnic mixing in housing, red-lining is a good description of what is going on today in urban public education to contain and isolate children of the poor in the new chain gang charter schools.  Thanks to requirements of NCLB, residents of urban areas who send their children to public schools with their sub-par testing results must contend with the federal label of failure and high risk, with public monies often withheld because the poor children in these schools cannot pass tests whose pass rates are directly correlated to family income. And as the teachers and principals in these schools have been blamed, then, for the student failure that poverty has assured, these red-lined schools are labeled, shut down, or reconstituted per the NCLB plan.”

Hey Michelle, About Those Test Scores

Michelle Rhee, the darling of the corporate “education reform” movement, likes to tout rising test scores during her tenure in DC as proof that she’s right and her critics are wrong. However, what if those high test scores were obtained by CHEATING? Apparently:

In 2007-08, six classrooms out of the eight taking tests at Noyes were flagged by McGraw-Hill because of high wrong-to-right erasure rates. The pattern was repeated in the 2008-09 and 2009-10 school years, when 80% of Noyes classrooms were flagged by McGraw-Hill.

On the 2009 reading test, for example, seventh-graders in one Noyes classroom averaged 12.7 wrong-to-right erasures per student on answer sheets; the average for seventh-graders in all D.C. schools on that test was less than 1. The odds are better for winning the Powerball grand prize than having that many erasures by chance, according to statisticians consulted by USA TODAY.

Full article can be found HERE.

A New Year, New Wishes, and New Issues

First Post Of The New Year!

So in trying to organize my thoughts here, I’ve decided this post will have 2 halves-wishes and predictions. I think i’ll start on a positive note with some wishes for the Ed world in 2012.

WISH LIST:

That corporate/pro-privatization shills like Michelle Rhee will cease to be considered reliable leading lights in education, and her rather shoddy record and croneyism will come to light, and with her all the puffed up, teacher bashing crap churned out this year including “Waiting for Superman” will fall by the wayside.

That coalition building will take place between teachers, students, and parents to fight for real accountability and democratization of schools. I think Occupy could help make this happen.

That instead of pretending all schools are on an equal footing, the media, and ed pundits who push charters and high stakes testing would note the effects of structural inequality, poor teacher pay, high turnover, child poverty, family stresses on working poor parents, and lack of community engagement on how students and staff perform.

That teacher training programs reach out more to men and people of color, inviting them into a profession that needs more of them, and badly.

That the Democratic party starts standing up for education again rather than swallowing the corporate line and pushing “reforms” that only line the pockets of testing companies and for profit charters.

That teachers unions take the lead on school reform, pushing out those who don’t speak for the best interests of their members, and that the unions and professional organizations put out strong, really well thought out statements to go toe to toe with the faux reform PR.

Predictions:

The GOP (led by people like Rick Santorum) will continue to try to tell poor kids that college is a useless endeavor and they should aspire to manual labor-and will continue to bash higher education.

Attempted hijackings of cash strapped public school systems by for profit charters will intensify.

Anti-teacher and anti-collective bargaining bills will keep rolling on, sometimes in the same bill.

There will be some changeups in the Dept. of Ed, but Arne Duncan will stay.

Occupy (what’s left of it) will make an issue out of student debt reform.

More cutbacks will occur in schools and school districts.

So there you have it-my initial thoughts as we start a New Year.

Charter Or Die: A Bad IDEA?

So unfortunately,  it looks like the IDEA  charter school takeover of East Austin’s public education from AISD is going to happen. And with as little input as possible-judging from the initial attempts to keep the public out of the last meeting where it was voted on (they eventually allowed the public in, then ignored them.) by the Board, and where it seemed that the objections of the majority of East Austin parents, teachers, and students were totally ignored.

AISD has problems with their East Austin schools,  to be sure: drop out issues, inadequate facilities, high poverty, gangs, violence, higher then average levels of remedial ESL and Special Ed students are all part of that equation. However, I’m doubtful as to the positive net effect IDEA will have, and find the way that Tom Torkelson and company basically barged in to Austin with a major attitude problem alarming. Torkelson and his people came and basically said “Give us what we want, our we will put ourselves in competition with your local school system.”

And what does that mean? It means that if IDEA isn’t handed the number of students it wants from AISD (what is this, a slave auction?) then they will go to war against AISD. They basically did this with poor school districts down near Brownsville and other border towns, and now, with AISD in fiscal crisis, they’ve decided our schools make good targets, and our students make easy cash cows. So why I am concerned by this? Well:

1. Everyone from our former Mayor Gus Garcia to Carol Keeton Strayhorn has noted a woefully poor attempt at engaging the community on this issue. This is further born out by the way in which community members, opponents in particular, where shut out of the final meeting where the vote was taking place, only let in after a “procedural agreement” was made that the stakeholders could have their say. This is disgustingly undemocratic and shows the fact that AISD KNEW the proposal was wildly unpopular and did’nt care.

2. Tom Torkelson’s utter contempt for anyone who would question his right to steal Austin public schools is beautifully summed up by his absurd remarks that his opponents are “professional protestors – people who are paid to oppose public school choice for parents.”

3. AISD teachers would not be in the new IDEA schools-because they are organized, represented professionals who would have to be paid, gee, a real salary! Instead, IDEA like most other public schools will bring in or hire it’s own, less experienced, lower paid teachers, who lack Education Austin or ATPE affiliaton, so IDEA can cut corners and focus on profits. Remind me again how struggling schools benefit form inexperienced and overworked teachers? Oh, that’s right, they DON’T. In fact, IDEA often uses Teach for America teacher trainees-of whom a very small percent ever go in to teaching. It’s cheap for IDEA but it means very high turnover of teachers-most of whom are gone before they’d ever have the opportunity to move up-something revealed in leaked emails from Torkelson discussed HERE.

4. IDEA’s retention rate, at best, is only about 65%. With rates like that, how can it turn around schools in East Austin that already have high drop out rates as an issue?

But now it’s a done deal. Let’s see what IDEA delivers-or does’nt.

Free Resources for Self-Education!

Because I believe knowledge should be freely available, see this incredible list of free educational resources from a variety of subjects/academic disciplines:

12 Dozen Places To Educate Yourself for FREE Online