Why Obama's education policy is a cruel joke

[Hannah Bell]

FROM 2001 through 2004, I taught in a public elementary school in Southeast Washington, D.C.--an area sectioned off from the city both geographically, by the Potomac River, and socially, by its dearth of everything from jobs to grocery stores. To borrow a phrase from the great educator and author Jonathan Kozol, the schools there are savagely unequal.

The elementary school at which I taught was almost completely segregated, serving 100 percent African American students--until my third year when one white student entered kindergarten. Directly across from the entrance of the school was a decrepit building with vegetation growing out through the windows. Around the corner lay a pile of cars that had been stripped and incinerated...

One lasting memory of my teaching experience in D.C. came on my third day of standing before these sixth graders. I had asked the students to bring a meaningful object from home for a show-and-tell activity. We gathered in a circle in the back of the room that Friday morning, and the kids sat eagerly with paper bags on their laps that concealed their autobiographical mementos.

One after another, each and every hand came out of those crumpled brown lunch sacs clutching a photo of a close family member--usually a dad or an uncle--who was either dead or in jail. By the time it got to me, all I could do was stare stupidly at the baseball I had pulled out and pick nervously at the red stitches as I mumbled something about how I had played in college...

http://socialistworker.org/2010/08/09/rhee-tire-the-chancellor

[snot]

1. K&R'd

[DrDan]

2. K&R - make sure to read the entire article

[WonderGrunion]

13. If you had actually read the article you wouldn't rec it

It has absolutely nothing to do with Obama or his education policy.

[DrDan]

14. I would still rec it - a worthwhile read

on edit

oh yeah, forgot to mention - I did read it.

[exboyfil]

3. At $15,000/student

Why isn't the money getting into the classroom? This translates into $300,000/yr for a class of 20. It is nearly double what we spend in my school district (and no I would not make twice as much if I worked in the DC area). I could see a 50% premium but double? The DC schools are failing and ours do well. How much should the per student figure be (would $20,000/student be enough?)? Is money unequally spent in the DC school district? Is it wasted?

I agree that making teachers accountable for a disfunctional family situation is unfair, but how do you get accountability for teachers. The first thing I could think of is separate the students with a desire to learn from those who don't. The disruptions destroy the ability of teachers to teach. It only takes a couple to ruin the learning process. I would only give two standardized tests to measure accountability - one at the beginning of the year before the teacher ever interacts with the students and the other at the end of the year. Progress is measured by comparing the ending test of the previous year to the ending testing of the current year with the control being the beginning of year test.

As far as giving bad teachers the boot, I do not know of a any process to evaluate those on the edge. I know of one English teacher that I would like to give to boot to. My daughter had him for two years, and he did not do his job. His focus and time were directed towards coaching. My younger daughter is scheduled to have him next year, but I am dual enrolling and homeschooling her in that subject. My way of adding a little market pressure to the situation. I have already notified my daughter's counselor of my intent and reasons. I am not sure what else I could do.

[bvar22]

4. K&R....+1 now.

"If we don't fight hard enough for the things we stand for,
at some point we have to recognize that we don't really stand for them."
--- Paul Wellstone

[Starry Messenger]

5. Education "reform" is being run by souless yuppies

Teachers' unions may give a big boost to the Democratic Party, but so do those working in finance. If Democrats for Education Reform can convince them to press issues like length of the school day and merit-based teacher pay, it could force a dramatic swing in the party itself.


Last week, Mr. Curry made his pitch to the Fortress Investment Group's head of global investments, Mike Novogratz, in a meeting in Mr. Novogratz's Midtown office. Leaving, Mr. Curry wondered whether Mr. Novogratz, whose company recently went public and made him a fortune, would sign on. He seemed to have bought the sell — about leverage, and the possibility of enormous change from a relatively small amount of money. But would Mr. Novogratz, a major Democratic fund-raiser, be wary to "break any glass"? Mr. Curry found the answer in his e-mail inbox: "I'm in." Mr. Novogratz has pledged $50,000 to Democrats for Education Reform.


Last week the group hosted a dinner for State Senator Malcolm Smith, the minority leader, one day before he was scheduled to attend a fund-raiser hosted by the president of the United Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten. "Nobody's going to be bought here," Mr. Williams said. "Any reasonable person that wants to become the Senate majority leader should be talking with Randi. We just want him to be talking to us too."


As investors, the group's leaders spend their days searching for hidden diamonds in the rough: businesses the market has left for dead, but a savvy investor could turn for a profit. A big inner-city school system, Mr. Tilson explained, is kind of like that — the General Motors of the education world. "I see very, very similar dynamics: very large bureaucratic organizations that have become increasingly disconnected from their customers; that are producing an inferior product and losing customers; that are heavily unionized," he said. A successful charter school, on the other hand, is like "Toyota 20 years ago."

http://edreform.blogspot.com/2007_05_01_archive.html

As long as the Party is beholden to pirates like Tilson, et. al. stories like those told in the OP are going to fall on completely deaf ears.

[TBF]

6. Recommended. nt

[alcibiades_mystery]

7. Could you be more explicit about how THAT article relates to specific policy

proposed by or implemented by the Obama Administration. It reads like a very cogent critique of the DC school system, which is well and good. But how does this relate to national education policy?

[WonderGrunion]

8. This article is about Michelle Rhee, it has nothing to do with Obama

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelle_Rhee

Professional life

Rhee taught in Baltimore, Maryland as a recruit of Teach For America for three years. According to her resume, over a two-year period she moved students scoring on average at the 13th percentile on national standardized tests to 90 percent of students scoring at the 90th percentile or higher.<8><9> In 1997 she founded the New Teacher Project, a non-profit organization which works with needy school districts to recruit and train new teachers. In ten years, the New Teacher Project has expanded to forty programs in twenty states and recruited more than 10,000 teachers.

Through the DC Teaching Fellows program, Washington, D.C. participated in the New Teacher Project, and was successful in recruiting highly qualified applicants.<10> On June 12, 2007, D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty announced that he had chosen Rhee to replace superintendent of D.C. public schools Clifford Janey and become the schools' new chancellor. Rhee initially rebuffed Fenty's offer, but relented when promised wide latitude and significant authority in decision-making as well as strong mayoral support for her proposed initiatives.<11><12><13><14><15> New York City Public Schools Chancellor Joel Klein highly recommended her to Mayor Fenty.

Rhee has served on the advisory boards for the National Council on Teacher Quality,<16> National Center for Alternative Certification, and Project REACH. She was a special guest of First Lady Laura Bush at President George W. Bush's 2008 State of the Union address.<17>

According to Wikipedia, she was hired during the Bush administration and was a guest of the Bushes at the 2008 state of the union. She seems to be a poster child for "No Child Left Behind". Obama has no power to remove her from her position.

Exactly what does any of this have to do with Obama's educatiion policy.

Total crap title for your OP.

[BlueIris]

9. K&R. Sad. nt

[WonderGrunion]

10. The only sad thing is how the OP twists an article that has nothing to do

with President Obama into an anti-Obama screed.

Again.

[Jeff In Milwaukee]

12. ...and again (nt)

[Jeff In Milwaukee]

11. Let's start with the lead.....

In A culmination of her three years as head of the D.C. public schools, Michelle Rhee acted on her union-busting pledge, firing 241 teachers, 5 percent of the district's total.

Union-busting? Really? Because 5% of teachers were laid off? 241 workers? GM has laid off tens of thousands of union employees, but nobody has been screaming about Obama trying to "bust" the UAW.

What's more, this article seems to be holding Michelle Rhee accountable for the deplorable living condition in DC. Like she's going to round up the crack dealers and give everybody a job?

Here is the truth the the teachers unions refuse to recognize: Some of you suck at your job. And if you suck at your job, kids are learning no matter WHAT their economic background. As taxpayers and as parents, we have expectations that the school is going to be effective, so if 5% of the teachers in the DC School District are sent packing for non-performance, then welcome to the real world.

[another saigon]

15. great article!

thanks!

<snip>

Only a few days after this lesson, the tragic attacks of 9/11 were carried out, closely followed by the government's launching of the war on Afghanistan. I received a higher degree in education theory that year as I witnessed the cynicism of our nation's ability to bomb children halfway around the world, but inability to care for them in the shadow of the White House.

Soon, too, it became apparent in all of the No Child Left Behind rhetoric about accountability that I was being asked, from inside of the classroom, to correct for all of the mistaken priorities of the politicians.

As much as my youthful energy and ambition helped reach many of my students that year, it became painfully obvious that so many factors shaping my students' lives and educations were beyond my control: homelessness, a prison-industrial complex that had torn so many of the families apart, the lack of jobs for even the better-educated parents, the war budget that necessarily left so many students behind.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

NOW, NEARLY a decade later, official Black unemployment in Washington, D.C., has reached 20.4 percent, many of my students no doubt have been sucked into the school-to-prison pipeline, and the war in Afghanistan rages on with a price tag of over $345 billion, more than 1,200 American casualties, and thousands of Afghan deaths.

[WonderGrunion]

17. It's a fantastic article that has NOTHING to do with Obama's

education policy. That makes the OP totally disingenuous.

[another saigon]

18. are you defending Obama & Arne's Privatization of Public Schools?

because that is what it is.

[WonderGrunion]

19. The article is about Michelle Rhee

who was a "special guest" of W during his 2008 State of the Union address. It doesn't mention Arne Duncan or President Obama.

The op is just adding that title to an article that has nothing to do with Obama.

[another saigon]

20. you can put all of the lipstick on you want

but this pig is too ugly. Rhee is merely doing the dirty work for this administration.....

<snip>

In the past few weeks, D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee made headlines for firing 241 teachers, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan gave a major speech on education reform and Race to the Top finalists were announced for Round Two, many of which agreed to overhaul their state’s teacher evaluation and tenure system.

Even President Barack Obama took up the theme of education, weighing in on his administration’s reform agenda for three-quarters of an hour at the National Urban League Centennial Conference – although the president who relied on teacher-union support in his election treaded carefully.

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/answer-sheet/


Were some D.C. teachers fired based on flawed calculations?

<snip>

But this simply cannot be. The difference between 498 and 499 is a tiny difference among very high achievers in the fourth grade. But the difference between 499 and 500 is the difference between the highest performing fourth-grader and the lowest performing fifth-grader; and there are many fourth-graders who outperform low-scoring fifth-graders.

And heaven help the poor teacher who is teaching a class filled with students who’ve been retained in grade.

A fifth-grade student who got every question wrong on the reading test at the end of fourth grade and every question wrong at the end of fifth grade would show an actual gain of 500–400=100 points.

A fifth-grader repeating fifth grade who had a scaled score of 510 the first time through, and a scaled score of 530 during his or her second year in fifth grade, would show an actual gain of just 20 points. DC’s value-added methods may, of course, simply exclude students who are retained in grade from the calculations, but that sends an unpleasant message about whose scores count when teachers are evaluated.

Did DCPS completely botch the calculation of value-added scores for teachers, and then use these erroneous scores to justify firing 26 teachers and lay the groundwork for firing hundreds more next year?

According to the only published account of how these scores were calculated, the answer, shockingly, is yes.


And this. Obama's RTTT. Another corporate scam like LNCB....

RHEE HAS made a career doing battle on the frontlines of the free market crusade against teachers and public education. Her latest move puts D.C. even more at the forefront of the national movement toward expanding charter schools and a "flexible" workforce of non-union teachers.

That movement is currently being led by the Obama administration and its education secretary, Arne Duncan. Rhee's most recent onslaught is a bid to meet the criteria of the administration's Race to the Top (RTTT) program, which offered state governments the chance to compete for $4.3 billion in federal funding if they remove caps on charter schools and use student test scores to evaluate teacher performance.

By forcing states to compete for desperately needed education funding, RTTT is the Obama administration's main strategy for pushing school "reform" and making education a game of winners and losers. Rhee has fought to win RTTT money by attacking teachers and charterizing the school system in D.C.

So it was no surprise that a few days after the firings were announced, the U.S. Department of Education announced that D.C. and 18 states remain in the running to win a piece of the remaining $3.4 billion RTTT prize.


http://socialistworker.org/2010/08 /03/rhee-ratchets-up-the-attack

[LWolf]

16. k&r