Fleecing the Taxpayer? The latest with a very outspoken educator.

More Shocking U.S. Statistics

Adolescent Literacy Reform in America has been undergoing great change with local, state, and national support, especially since the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) produced widely publicized reports of low reading achievement among students in U.S. schools. The National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) recognizes this issue and explains that part of this problem is due to the idea that, “traditionally, educators have focused on the development of literacy in the early grades, assuming that older students did not need special instruction.” However, this assumption is incorrect because “it has become clear that many middle and high school students are increasingly under-literate, lacking the complex literacy skills they will need to be successful in an information-driven economy,”

n 2006, NCTE reported that “only 13% of American adults [were] capable of performing complex literacy tasks,” “literacy scores of high school graduates [had] dropped between 1992 and 2003,” “8.7 million secondary school students – that’s one in four – [were] unable to read and comprehend the material in their textbooks,” and that the “2005 ACT College Readiness Benchmark for Reading found that only about half of the students tested were ready for college-level reading, and the 2005 scores were the lowest in a decade,” (4). These are shocking statistics, and NCTE predicts that low literacy rates in the U.S. predict employment woes for U.S. graduates due to the fact that modern employers are looking for a “highly literate pool of job applicants” and may turn to sources outside the U.S. if American graduates do not meet their qualifications....

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ACORN Joins in the Protest Against Charter Schools

Harlem lawmakers push for neighborhood-focused charter cap
by Elizabeth Green

The next front for the Harlem school wars could be Albany.

City Council member Inez Dickens yesterday proposed changing the state law to cap the number of charter schools that a single operator can open in a given school district.

She was speaking at a protest against the Success charter school network’s expansion into a traditional Harlem public school, P.S. 123.

Dickens said she had the support of state Sen. Bill Perkins, and Keith Wright, an Assemblyman representing Harlem, said he would introduce legislation to make that change on his side of the legislature.

A neighborhood- and operator-specific cap would add to what exists now, a cap on the number of charter schools across New York state at 200. There are 1,500 public schools in the city.

Such a cap would also squarely challenge the strategy the Success Charter Network has pursued of opening a large number of charter schools in a designated area; Eva Moskowitz, the network’s CEO, has said her goal is to open 40 Harlem charter schools in the next 10 years. A paper published last year by Democrats for Education Reform explains the strategy, which combines political and educational efforts with a goal of building public support for charter schools.

Charter schools now make up about 25% of public schools in Harlem, and that’s not counting schools opening in the fall. Debate about them reignited most recently after Juan Gonzalez of the Daily News reported that Moskowitz’s network had surprised P.S. 123 officials by moving into additional classrooms without warning. Moskowitz said in a statement that the Department of Education had turned over the rooms to her on July 1, but the DOE says she had not been given the go-ahead to actually move into them.

Joining the lawmakers at their protest yesterday were organizers from the group ACORN, which is an ally of the city teachers union and one of the community groups to which the union provides financial support....

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Fight Club! With Dr. Ben Chavis

Here is the first episode of Skooled by Dr. Ben, called "Fight Club"

We're Falling Behind the Rest of the World

Q & A with Sen. Michael Bennet
Linda Kulman - Politics Daily

Before Michael Bennet joined the U.S. Senate as a Democrat in January -- named by the Colorado governor to replace Ken Salazar, who became Secretary of the Interior -- he was Denver's public schools superintendent. He was also an outsider to education when he took that job in 2005, but quickly became known for his efforts to shake up Denver's worst-performing schools, expanding early childhood education and basing teacher pay on their accomplishments in the classroom, location, and special talents.

Although Bennet, 44, is not on the Senate education committee, he is known as one of Washington's leading voices on education reform. He and Education Secretary Arne Duncan have "had a lot of conversations over the months," he says, adding, "there are people on the Hill (with) committee responsibility who, like most of us, are very frustrated with the slow pace of change and the outcomes that we're seeing with our kids. To the extent that I can give them the perspective of somebody who's been on the receiving end of policies from Washington, I hope that will be useful." In an interview in his office, Bennet repeatedly drew several graphs to illustrate his points. The transcript that follows has been edited for clarity.

Q: Since 1983, when "A Nation at Risk" kicked off the reform movement in public education, there doesn't seem to have been substantial change. Why not?

A: There's a big difference between now and then in that we have a number of examples of schools that have been successful in the delivery of education, particularly to poor kids. What we haven't seen is anything approaching the kind of success that we would want at scale. So when you look at the achievement gap numbers, when you look at high-school graduation rates, all of that has basically stagnated in the United States. There are other countries that have made a substantial amount of progress in their outcomes since that report was released, so though we've stayed essentially the same, we're falling behind the rest of the world.

Q: You've said one of your gripes about the U.S. education system is that the incentives don't match the objectives. What do you mean?

A: We have not updated our theory of human capital, which is a fancy word for saying how do we attract and retain people to public education, since the labor market was one where women had two professional choices: being a nurse or being a teacher. We say to people, "We'd like you to come be a teacher, we imagine that you're going to teach "Julius Caesar" every year for the next 30 years, we're going to pay you a really terrible wage compared to what you could make doing almost anything else. ... The way most school districts and states pay teachers in this country (is) if you leave any time in the first 20 years, you leave with what you've contributed to your retirement system ... but if you stay for 30 years, you (get) a pension that's worth three times what your Social Security is worth.

No matter what else you want to do, you have to stay, (because) you've worked all these years just to get to that place. When you think that between 70 to 80 percent of what we spend on K-12 in this country is spent on compensation and this is the way that we spend it, you need to ask yourself, "Are we providing a set of incentives that actually makes sense?"

Q: You've obviously thought about how to keep good teachers.

A: Forty to 50 percent of teachers leave the profession in the first five years. And year after year after year we face chronic shortages in high-needs areas like math, science, special ed, English-language acquisition. High-poverty schools in urban and rural areas are constantly begging to try and find teachers and principals. There's not a harder job in the world than being a teacher, and there's not a more important job. And there's nothing you can do that's more compelling if you're in a school where the leadership is excellent, where the adults in the building have a commitment to the work and to making each other better at what they do, and where kids are being supported well. My view is, the reason why quality of scale has eluded us is that we have all of these obstacles in the way of people being able to unleash their creative potential. ... We've been so prescriptive at every level ... from the federal government to the state government to the school district level ... about what we should and shouldn't do that we've basically disempowered people closest to our kids.

Q: Accountability is such a buzzword in education these days. What's your view?

A: In general the Democratic Party in Washington since "A Nation at Risk" came out has been about spending more money for education, but the money that's been spent has not yielded the results we all would like. The leadership on the other side ... said, "Well, if we're going to spend this money, we need to hold people accountable for that expenditure." It shouldn't be surprising to anybody that in its first iteration the accountability system we came up with was an incredibly crude one.

If you're saying to people, "We're going to be a lot less prescriptive about everything and we're going to be much more focused on the what the outcomes are," but you don't have a system that measures outcomes in an intelligent way, it's going to be hard to convince people that they want to sign up for that. So what I have in mind is this: Our accountability system, which is based on tests and standards in 50 different states, asks essentially the wrong question, which is: How did this year's fourth-graders do compared to last year's fourth-graders? It's not even the same kids. We should be measuring how did this year's sixth-graders do compared to how they did as fifth-graders and as fourth-graders. (In Colorado), we'll take a child and find all the kids ... that have a statistically similar test history, and that forms a basis for us to say, "With this similar history, what we see is, this child has actually outperformed this huge number of people here." We can start to get a much deeper and richer picture of right direction/wrong direction. On a district or school level, you can start to look into this data and say, "What's different here?"

My hope is that with better accountability we'll say, "Here are the outcomes we'd like to see, we're going to equip you with tools to be able to get to those outcomes, but decisions over use of time, use of (money), human resources – those are decisions that should be made closer to kids rather than farther away." You ought to have the autonomy in the school as a unit to work collectively toward these objectives, and if you don't succeed, then we should intervene and say, "What do you need that you don't have? Is there a problem with the leadership in the building? Are there other issues that are idiosyncratic that need to be addressed?" It's very rarely a one-size-fits-all answer. The system we have right now is sort of the reverse of what I just described. If you read Education Week, you'll see the debate that says, "You'll have autonomy but first it has to be earned."

Q: Arne Duncan is offering states financial incentives to develop common standards. Are they a good idea?

A: The administration is committed to the idea of working with states to create a more useful set of standards to measure progress. If I were able to wave a magic wand, what I would say (is), "Look, one of the problems is that we have is too many standards at every grade level and we're testing too many things. We're exhausting our teachers; we're exhausting our kids." For accountability purposes, I think what we need is to reduce the standards at every grade level substantially. We should benchmark those standards against international norms so we can stop kidding ourselves about whether we're actually being rigorous or not. And then we should design assessments that align with those standards.

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AZ Budget delay could hurt charter schools

Michelle Reese - Tribune

Arizona's 475 charter schools - like their district cousins - have eyes on the state Capitol and what may happen to education funding in Arizona.

Unlike their district counterparts though, the charter schools don't have access to lines of credit through the state to get them through the next few weeks.

"The schools are scared. They're panicked," said Stephanie Grisham, director of communications for the Arizona Charter Schools Association. "The districts operate in a different year. This is current year. It's a really big deal."

Charter schools got their last payment from the state on June 15, but it's unclear if they'll get a July 15 payment. That's because Gov. Jan Brewer put a line-item veto on the education budget passed by lawmakers last week. Without a 2009-2010 fiscal year education budget in place, no more money can go out to schools.

District schools received a $600 million payment last week that was due to them from the 2008-2009 fiscal year after the state rolled that money over to help with cash flow. District schools are also owed a payment - about $330 million - on July 15 that may be delayed without a budget.

Unlike school districts, charter schools receive funding based on current-year enrollment figures. If charter schools lose kids to district, private or even other charter schools, they lose dollars in the current school year. District schools may lose enrollment, but it won't have a big impact on the budget until the following year, allowing school leaders to plan.

With the state grappling with a more than $3.3 billion budget shortfall, all public schools - district and charter - face budget cuts.

The proposal passed by the Legislature cut $1.5 million in funding to Arizona's 475 charter schools. But Brewer's veto put any planning back at the ground level.

"Now we don't know where we are," Grisham said.

Charter schools serve about 100,000 of the 1 million children in public schools in Arizona...

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Arne Duncan and Merit Pay

By NIA-MALIKA HENDERSON

Education Secretary Arne Duncan borrowed the Obama campaign theme Thursday in a tough-love speech to the nation’s largest teachers union, telling educators that they must be willing to change their ways, specifically around the issue of merit pay.

“It’s not enough to focus only on issues like job security, tenure, compensation and evaluation. You must become full partners and leaders in education reform. You and I must be willing to change,” Duncan said at the annual meeting of the National Education Association in San Diego. “I ask you to join President Obama and me in a new commitment to results that recognizes and rewards success in the classroom and is rooted in our common obligation to children.”

Duncan, former head of Chicago schools, said that the administration is working with Congress to ask for more money to develop teacher compensation

programs tied to test scores, teacher evaluations, and extra work

. The administration has allotted $100 billion in stimulus funds to prevent teacher layoffs and support education reform initiatives, such as innovative teaching, charter schools, and merit pay programs.

Unions have been vocal opponents of linking teacher pay to test scores, saying that the work of a teacher can’t be reduced to tests, which can sometimes be biased.

Duncan acknowledged this position, yet said that student performance must be a part of the equation when measuring teacher effectiveness.

“I understand that tests are far from perfect....

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Check out the trailer for another Flunked project coming soon!

Minnesota schools fall behind in math and reading

By EMILY JOHNS, GREGORY A. PATTERSON and GLENN HOWATT, Star Tribune

July 1, 2009 - 5:49 AM

The results of this year's statewide tests are in: Minnesota students performed slightly better on math and reading tests, but the gains won't be enough to prevent more schools from being added to the list of those falling behind under the federal No Child Left Behind law.

The Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments results were released today by the state Department of Education.

It is likely that for the first time, when the list is released in August, more than half the state's schools will be defined as not making adequate progress because their performance increases can't keep pace with rising targets.

"We're pleased that the scores are going up, but we just don't feel like we made enough growth," said David Heistad, director of research, evaluation and assessment for the Minneapolis schools.

Statewide, 64 percent of students were proficient on math tests, compared to 62 percent last year, and 72 percent were proficient on reading tests, compared to 71 percent last year.

Results "should only be one of many that parents and the public look at in evaluating whether their individual school is performing well," said Chas Anderson, deputy commissioner of the Minnesota Department of Education.

A 2014 deadline

According to the federal No Child Left Behind law, states must test how different student groups are faring. If one group -- such as poor students -- fails to meet state targets, the school is labeled as not making "adequate yearly progress..."

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30 Failing Schools in Massachusetts Face Takeover

By James Vaznis Globe Staff / July 2, 2009

The Patrick administration, in a sharp deviation from previous state policy, will seek legislative approval to take over about 30 of the state’s worst schools and dramatically weaken their teacher contracts, as part of the governor’s effort to overhaul public education.

The move took superintendents, school committees, and teachers by surprise because the state has long been hesitant to usurp local control, a tradition that dates back to Colonial times. State education leaders have preferred to work with local leaders and have allowed them to take the lead in developing and executing turnaround plans.

Glenn Koocher, executive director of the Massachusetts Association of School Committees, said the changes, which would require legislative approval, represent the “most extraordinary extension of power in state education history.’’

But Secretary of Education Paul Reville said the state needs to be more aggressive, as many of the state’s worst schools continue to flounder. He did not disclose which schools are being targeted, but said there are about 30, mostly in urban areas.

“We have not moved quickly enough to turn around underperforming schools,’’ Reville said. “For each year that goes by where students are not learning at the rate and pace they should be, that’s a tragic loss for students, parents, and the state.’’

The governor plans to file legislation this month to enact the changes, Reville said. Reville has been discussing the proposal with some legislators, professional groups, and other stakeholders in recent weeks.

The state has threatened schools with takeovers in the past, but has never followed through. Reville said Massachusetts law allows state officials to take over entire districts, a strategy used at least once, but is ambiguous about the takeover of individual schools. While the federal No Child Left Behind Act authorizes states to seize control of failing schools, it remains unclear whether that trumps state law.

Patrick’s legislation would change state law to allow the state commissioner to waive portions of union contracts at these schools, eliminating provisions that state officials say could block the school’s turnaround....

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One person's opinion on online charters

Letter: Legislature passed law against charter schools (July 1)

There is a stench wafting down from Salem that emanates from Senate Bill 767. This bill, introduced on behalf of the Oregon Education Association and other teacher unions, is the OEA’s first step in eliminating competition in education from online charter schools in Oregon.

The OEA’s legislative agenda for 2009, posted on their Web site, blatantly declares a recommendation “That the OEA shall develop legislation to repeal current charter school statutes.” The Oregon Legislature, by passing SB 767, has abdicated their own authority and allowed a group of unelected and unaccountable union lobbyists to re-write the law in order to destroy virtual schools in Oregon through which 4,000 children receive public education.

Sara Gelser, chairperson of the House Education Committee, championed this bill. Rep. Gelser helped ram through this egregious piece of legislation with little public debate, despite declaring on April 1 in the well of the House that her committee would welcome open and robust debate.

In fact, the House Education Committee never debated SB 767 at all. Ms. Gelser allowed her committee to shut down early in full knowledge that SB 767 was on its way from the Senate. So who does Ms. Gelser really represent?

And for that matter, when the OEA says it’s going to repeal Oregon law, and the Legislature rolls over and makes it happen, who are they really representing? Is it the people of Oregon or union lobbyists?

SB 767 is a disgrace. Here’s hoping Gov. Kulongoski has the good sense to veto it.

John D. Jones, Philomath

Click here for editor's note.