Tag Archives: Arne Duncan

Special report on Atlanta Public Schools cheating scandal

In the wake of the recent Atlanta Public Schools test cheating scandal, Critical Education has just published a special report examining the performance of Atlanta students on the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

The report, written by Lawrence C. Stedman, an Associate Professor in the School of Education at the State University of New York at Binghamton and an expert on historical and contemporary student achievement trends, analyzes Atlanta students’ performance on the NAEP during the 2000s to assess the contention of former Superintendent Beverly L. Hall that students made “real and dramatic” progress during her tenure.

Critical Education
Vol 2, No 9 (2011)
Table of Contents

http://m1.cust.educ.ubc.ca/journal/index.php/criticaled/issue/view/30

Special Report

——–

A Preliminary Analysis of Atlanta’s Performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress

Lawrence C. Stedman, State University of New York at Binghamton

Abstract

The Atlanta Public Schools system has been rocked by a series of reports documenting widespread cheating on the Georgia state tests. Its reputation, and that of its leaders, has come into question. In response, former superintendent Hall asserts that, despite any cheating, the city’s students made “real and dramatic” progress during her tenure and cites the district’s trends on NAEP as part of her evidence (Hall, 2011). In this report, I analyze Atlanta’s performance on NAEP during the 2000s to assess this contention. I use diverse indicators: district trends, national comparisons, grade equivalents, and percentages of students achieving proficiency. My preliminary assessment is that Atlanta’s progress has been limited and, in many cases, slowed. In spite of a decade of effort, Atlanta’s students still lag 1-2 years behind national averages and vast percentages do not even reach NAEP’s basic level. Less than a fourth of its 4th and 8th graders achieve proficiency, a key national goal; in some subjects and grades, it is as few as a tenth. At current rates, it will take from 50 to 110 years to bring all students to proficiency. Such findings raise profound questions about current approaches to school reform, including No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top. The emphasis on targets and testing is failing and has contributed to cheating across the nation. More fundamentally, it has greatly distorted teaching and undermined authentic learning. While test tampering is a serious problem, we need to re-conceptualize what we mean by cheating. Every day, test-driven, bureaucratically controlled institutions are cheating tens of millions of students out of a genuine education. That is the real scandal.


Editors’ Note

From time to time, Critical Education will publish time sensitive and topical field reports that analyze issues challenging the existing state of affairs in society, schools, and informal education. Our first field report is Lawrence C. Stedman’s analysis of student achievement in Atlanta Public Schools subsequent to the investigation that revealed widespread cheating on state tests. In spite of the findings of the investigation that cheating was widespread, then school superintendent Beverly Hall claimed schools had made significant real progress in student achievement. Stedman’s field report investigates this claim.

Cheating scandals in schools have become almost commonplace. Campbell’s Law is often invoked as the explanation: “The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.” No Child Left Behind has led American schools down a path seeking ever higher test scores, aspirations that are unreasonable and, based on the best judgment of measurement experts, unattainable. In spite of the unreasonableness and unattainability of the goals set by distant policy makers and capitalist corporate interests, educational professionals are pulled down this path and do what they can or what they are told to do to demonstrate improvement in learning. Anyone paying attention to the ever increasing importance of standardized testing as the main means of evaluating students, schools, teachers, and principals will understand how cheating could be come widespread. Indeed, the investigation of the cheating scandal in Atlanta revealed a culture of fear, intimidation, and retaliation, which created a conspiracy of silence among educational professionals fostering deniability with respect to cheating. That teachers and administrators cheat should come as little surprise when educational policy creates unreasonable demands and then holds those educators to account through threats and intimidation. Cheating of this kind is not about trying to hoodwink any one; it is entirely about seeking to avoid the wrath of a system that will assuredly blame teachers and administrators for perceived failure to perform. It is about gaming the system, not about harming children. We should be left wondering why we have an educational system that backs educators into a corner that leaves them with little choice but to engage in actions even they find unethical.

The public is outraged by cheating, especially in its obvious forms, like in Atlanta where teachers and school administrators altered student test results by changing wrong to correct answers. Most people would agree that changing answer sheets is cheating, even if there are good explanations for why it might be done. But there are softer, maybe even acceptable forms of cheating, ones that reasonable people would argue may or may not actually be cheating. Is it cheating when schools and districts manipulate the pool of test takers by excluding groups of students? Is it cheating when teachers are exhorted to focus on students who are on the cusp of moving to ‘proficient’ at the expense of time spent with other students, either those who are failing miserably or obviously succeeding? Is it cheating when instructional time becomes intensive test preparation? Is it cheating when the subjects that are tested push out subjects that are not tested?

What counts as cheating is contextual and necessarily dependent on our perception of who or what is being cheated. When teachers and administrators change answers it isn’t students who are cheated, it is the system. (Stedman’s analysis clearly demonstrates that whether the students’ answer sheets were changed or not, NAEP results show a school system in which children are not doing very well.) The response to this sort of cheating is ever increasing surveillance and policing of test administration and scoring. Increased monitoring is less likely to prevent cheating and more likely to alienate teachers, principals, and students. Whether answers are changed or not, students are cheated by the much larger context of test driven teaching that limits what they know and can do. It is the test driven educational reforms and simplistic notions of what a good school is that cheat students out of a quality education.


Rouge Forum Update: Happy Labor Day and Back to School Edition

Rouge Forum Update: Happy Labor Day and Back to School Edition

Reminder: Nominations for the Rouge Forum Steering Committee go to Community Coordinator Adam Renner at by September 15th.

Mayday Is the Real Labor Day! Here’s a Fine Poem Anyway:

Workers of the world, awaken!
Rise in all your splendid might
Take the wealth that you are making,
It belongs to you by right.
No one will for bread be crying
We’ll have freedom, love and health,
When the grand red flag is flying
In the Workers’ Commonwealth

ABC News “Crisis in the Classroom” with Arne, Michell Rhee, and AFT’s Weingarten Sucking up

Let’s Leash Arne and Barack

Putting a Noose on the Core (Regimented/Nationalist) Curriculum–States Take Bribe to Push More Tests: The Department of Education on Thursday awarded $330 million to two groups of states to design new standardized tests to replace the end-of-year reading and math exams used over the past decade to measure achievement under the federal No Child Left Behind law. The new tests, which are to be aligned with the common academic standards that nearly 40 states have adopted in recent months, are to be ready for the 2014-15 school year, the department said.

In Detroit, School Will Open but Where are the Teachers to Be? Hundreds of teachers without job assignments for the fall converged at a Detroit hotel Monday seeking a classroom spot before students return to school next week.Detroit Public Schools issued layoff notices to about 2,000 teachers earlier this year as it grapples with a $363 million budget deficit and declining enrollment. While some teachers had already been brought back, hundreds without assignments were asked to report to the Hotel St. Regis on Monday, the first day of school for teachers.

But Who Gets Laid off And How if, predictably, The Kids Don’t Show Up for the DPS Mess? The “Special Authority” provision of the contract allows the district to protect itself from incurring a deficit in the event student enrollment drops significantly, resulting in the district having more teachers than it needs to staff classrooms.

More Corruption in Detroit Schools–a Principal, an Accountant, and a Cop: A former principal, former school accountant and a former police officer will face felony charges in connection with embezzling nearly $150,000 from the Detroit Public Schools, officials announced today.

Connecting the War/Education Lies: As schools began to open for the 2010-11 year, two lies that need to be connected were kept apart in the for-profit media. On August 30, 2010, ABC News “This week,” chaired by Christiane Amanpour offered the usual tripe about educational reform, virtually praising the White House Race to the Top (RaTT) project. Washington D.C.’s school tyrant, Michelle Rhee, joined Obama errand-boy Arne Duncan and the American Federation of Teacher’s boss Randi Weingarten in a celebration of reform under the guise that “We are all in this together for the children.”

Read full update here.

Rouge Forum Update: Joy vs Organized Decay!

Check out the full Rouge Forum update here.

Reminder: Nominations for the Rouge Forum Steering Committee go to Community Coordinator

Little Red Schoolhouse:

Alfie on Assessments, Goals, and Big Tests: What is its basic conception of assessment? To get a sense of how well things are going and where help is needed, we ought to focus on the actual learning that students do over a period of time—ideally, deep learning that consists of more than practicing skills and memorizing facts. If you agree, then you’d be very skeptical about a program that relies on discrete, contrived, testlike assessments. You’d object to any procedure that seems mechanical, in which standardized protocols like rubrics supplant teachers’ professional judgments based on personal interaction with their students. And the only thing worse than “benchmark” tests (tests in between the tests) would be computerized monitoring tools, which the reading expert Richard Allington has succinctly characterized as “idiotic.”

The Bottomless Pit of Evidence vs High-Stakes Tests (does evidence matter?): Children perform best in exams when teachers are not overly concerned about their test results, according to research published today. Pupils show greater motivation, are better behaved and are more likely to be independent and strategic thinkers when teachers are not obsessed by grades, the study by the Institute of Education found.

Krashen on VAT: Value-added evaluations of teachers assume that higher test scores are always the result of teaching. Not so. Test scores are influenced by other factors. We can generate higher scores by teaching “test preparation” strategies for getting higher scores without students learning anything. We can generate higher scores by testing selectively, making sure that low scorers are not in school the day of the test. And of course we can generate higher scores by direct cheating, sharing information about specific test questions with students. Teachers who prepare students for higher scores on tests of specific procedures and facts are not teaching; they are simply drilling students with information that is often soon forgotten. Moreover, research shows that value-added evaluations are not stable year to year for individual teachers, and that different reading tests will give you different value-added scores for the same teacher. If The Times is serious about helping children, don’t bash teachers, address poverty. American children from high-income families do very well on international tests, but our children of poverty do much worse.

The One-Sided Truth About Value Added Teaching: From the LA Times owner’s perspective, they tell the truth on behalf of important sections of the ruling class, and occasionally those sections fight it out both on the editorial pages and in the rest of the paper too. Within that context of what is really their truth, the value added research “works,” in that it sees school workers (who have always been workers and have been professionals almost only when bosses want educators to make sacrifices) as people whose minds must be stripped; their minds and creativity replaced with the minds of managers as in the common (bourgeoisie) core standards, in other regulated curricula, in high-stakes exams (production quotas), and who must be won to this alienation as a necessity for, on one hand, the chance to keep a job, and on the other hand, for the good of the nation’s kids (future workers and warriors)…

The Lines of Influence in Education Reform (check the link to the draft/chart): Another example is the AFT, the American Federation of Teachers, where Bill Gates gave AFT $3.4M for “teacher quality initiatives” and $217, 200 for AFT conference expenses. See: Did Bill Gates Buy His Podium at the AFT Convention? Sometimes a breakdown of the numbers provides a more clear picture of the power and influence of money. Then there is money “with stipulations” that the Gates Foundation provided to NPR. The purpose of that money is “to support coverage of education issues on NPR programs, including the Morning Edition and All Things Considered”. The amount provided was $750,000. I don’t feel comfortable with that on many levels.

UC Boss Lives Like Czar (Flees Lease): Mr. Yudof, 65, moved with his wife into a 10,000-square-foot, four-story house with 16 rooms, 8 bathrooms and panoramic views. He said he needed the house, which rented for $13,365 a month by the end of the lease and was paid for by U.C., to fulfill his obligation to host functions for staff members, donors and visiting dignitaries.

Mr. Yudof held 23 such functions over a two-year period, according to the university. He also ordered a list of improvements and repairs — including air conditioning and 12 phones — that drove up costs and, according to staff members, tied up university officials in meetings and lengthy negotiations on issues ranging from water bills to gopher eradication.

After the Yudofs vacated the property at the end of June, Brennan Mulligan, the landlord, informed university officials that he intended to keep the U.C.’s $32,100 security deposit. Mr. Mulligan requested an additional $45,000 to cover the repairs for hundreds of holes left from hanging art, a scratched marble bathtub, a broken $2,000 Sivoia window shade and other claims.

WSU’s Tragic Detroit Trajectory–Falls to 4th Tier, then This: Wayne State University is failing its African-American students, graduating fewer than one in 10 while success for their white counterparts is four times higher, according to a report issued this month. The graduation gap between white and black students at WSU is the worst in the nation among public universities, according to a report by the Washington, D.C.-based Education Trust.

After Painting School Doors Blue (closing 40, laying off hundreds of teachers) Detroit PS sends 62 page Homework Packages to Students 2 Weeks Before School Opens but 2000 teachers and Dozens of Principals Have No Assignments: Detroit elementary and middle-school students don’t resume classes for two weeks, but they already have homework. Detroit Public Schools announced Monday it will mail 62-page packets of homework this week to 28,650 students in grades three through eight. The packets, which must be finished and turned in the first day of classes, focus on areas in which DPS students have tested poorly.
The initiative is the first time DPS students have been given homework before the start of school, said DPS spokeswoman Kisha Verdusco.

Detroit Foundations Release List of Worst Schools in Detroit (August 25): The first-ever ranking of the city’s public, charter and private schools is being released today in an effort to help parents choose good schools and pressure failing schools to shut down…
listing of schools in the city is produced by Excellent Schools Detroit, a broad coalition that includes Detroit Public Schools, charter school leaders and several foundations. The list is divided in three categories — elementary, middle and high schools — and the schools are ranked based on test scores and other data averaged over a three-year period.

What if There Was a Parade for Schools and Only Fools and Crooks Came? (Cosby pops up waiving his bogus doctorate): Waving from the final float were Mayor Dave Bing, activist Rev. Jesse Jackson, comedian and activist Bill Cosby, and Robert Bobb, the district’s emergency financial manager under whose watch the parade was launched last year…The crowd was fairly thin.

California–No School Funds for September: California will delay paying $2.9 billion of subsidies to schools and counties in September, a month earlier than projected, to save cash amid an impasse that has left the state without a budget for 54 days.

RaTT Saps: The department chose nine states – Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Maryland, New York, North Carolina, Ohio and Rhode Island – and the District of Columbia for the grants (which means that teachers in the “winner states” will suffer, but so will education workers in the “sucker states” which entered the shell game, and lost–States that did not apply are: Alaska, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Minnesota, North Dakota, Oregon, South Dakota, Texas, Vermont, Virginia, West Virginia and Wyoming. Delaware and Tennessee, as Round 1 winners, were not eligible to apply). USE RATT MAP

Obamagogue’s Errand Boy, Duncan, Wants More Data For Merit Pay and Firings: U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan will call for all states and school districts to make public whether their instructors are doing enough to raise students’ test scores and to share other school-level information with parents, according to a text of a speech he is scheduled to make Wednesday.

SoCal Bans Literature With Help of Teachers and Profs: “The Old Man and the Sea,” “The House on Mango Street,” and “The Great Gatsby” are so last century when it comes to high school English classes in Chula Vista and National City. Once literature-based, English classes throughout the Sweetwater Union High School District — and elsewhere in California — have been revamped in an attempt to better prepare students for college and the real world.

That means reading lists once dominated by the classics now consist of newspaper editorials, historic documents, advertisements and some nonfiction. Assignments no longer dwell on the symbolism in a poem or focus on an entire novel. Instead, they emphasize expository, analytical and argumentative writing.

Developed by professors from the California State University system with help from high school teachers, the new “rhetorical approach” to English was designed to curb the growing number of high school graduates who need remedial instruction in college…the district saw a jump in scores on statewide English tests.
Vita For Professor McClish

Secrets of the Wag-the-Dog CSU Foundations Begin to Leak: California State University officials are concerned that they have erroneously mixed public and private funds in accounting for the foundations that support the system’s 23 campuses, according to a report the California Faculty Association is releasing today.

Rouge Forum Update: The Sky is NOT Falling. NOT! Falling. NOT Falling!

The Sky is NOT Falling. NOT! Falling. NOT Falling!

Reminder: Nominations for the Rouge Forum Steering Committee go to Community Coordinator Chicago Says No Concessions! Chicago Teachers Union delegates voted unanimously to reject the Board of Education’s demands that the teachers give up nearly $100 million — in salary adjustments and other concessions (such as furlough days) — at a special delegates meeting on Wednesday, August 11. More than 500 delegates and other union members filled the auditorium at the Local 399 Operating Engineers union hall for the two hour meeting.

Detroit Paints Itself Blue to Lure in Children: Dunson was among 40 volunteers who painted 25 doors the signature blue color of the district’s campaign and assembled lawn signs extolling the district. (beware, kiddies, of the school board president)

Detroit Fed of Teachers Opposes Charters/Starts Charter: For their students to be admitted, parents or guardians must sign a Parent Contract to ensure they support the concept of the program. “The teacher-led school presents a unique and unprecedented opportunity to DFT and DPS,” said Keith Johnson, president of the Detroit Federation of Teachers. “This school will allow teachers to take ownership and direct responsibility for the educational destiny of the children.”

Emergency Financial Manager, Bobb, Leaves Detroit More Broke Than Ever: Although Bobb has worked hard to make cuts and get the district in proper order, the district’s deficit has grown to $363 million from $219 million at the end of last fiscal year.

100 Teach For America’s Invade Detroit PS: Their arrival has sparked excitement among educators who embrace the enthusiasm corps members bring. But their presence has reignited concerns from the teachers union, which is upset certified teachers still have layoff notices. The union will challenge the hiring of Teach for America members over qualified teachers waiting to return to work… the applicants aren’t certified teachers. (They’ll study at University of Michigan to earn their certification.) Johnson said certified teachers aren’t automatically better and those without certification aren’t inherently inferior.

Michigan’s Really Really Totally Horrible Schools Under Gun: Sixty-five of the lowest performing schools are in Metro Detroit; 52 are in Wayne County, including 40 Detroit public schools. Seven are charters. Roseville Community Schools had two middle schools ranking as low achieving; Taylor’s Truman High School also landed on the list, as did public high schools in Highland Park, Pontiac, Inkster, Harper Woods, Oak Park and Mount Clemens.

Berliner: Rich Schools Get Richer and Poor Schools Get Poorer (a shocker!): When poor children go to public schools that serve the poor, and wealthy children go to public schools that serve the wealthy, then the huge gaps in achievement that we see bring us closer to establishing an apartheid public school system. We create through our housing, school attendance, and school districting policies a system designed to encourage castes—a system promoting a greater likelihood of a privileged class and an under class.

UTLA’s Duffy Hung on His Own Petard on LA Times Value-Added Farce: Duffy attacked the reliability of standardized tests in general, but then defended the performance of his members in part by pointing to the rising graduation rates and Academic Performance Index scores at many campuses. The API is a separate statistical measure for schools which, at the elementary and middle school level, is entirely based on standardized tests.

Haiti Hide Your Children! Here Comes Paul Vallas! An international development bank interested in helping Haiti rebuild its devastated schools has turned to Recovery School District Superintendent Paul Vallas for advice.

Obamagogue’s Boy Duncan Loves Those Test Scores (thanks, unionites, for all that campaign money, and thanks to Tom Hayden, Katha Pollit, and all the liberal saps who urged the Demagogue on others): U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said Monday that parents have a right to know if their children’s teachers are effective, endorsing the public release of information about how well individual teachers fare at raising their students’ test scores.

“What’s there to hide?” Duncan said in an interview one day after The Times published an analysis of teacher effectiveness in the Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s second largest school system. “In education, we’ve been scared to talk about success.”

Duncan’s comments mark the first time the Obama administration has expressed support for a public airing of information about teacher performance — a move that is sure to fan the already fierce debate over how to better evaluate teachers.

Ohanian on the Common Core Curriculum (common to Gates and Freedom House): James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is recommended for “advanced” 8th graders. Here’s how it begins:
Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby tuckoo

An Oldie but Goodie (From Hell): Milton Friedman on the Role of Government in Education

Rouge Forum Update: All out October 7th!

Up the Rebels on October 7th! The Rouge Forum Flyer

Sixty Five Years Ago Fat Man and Little Boy Fell on Japan

Opposing Views on The Bombings:

Richard Frank in the Weekly Standard

Gar Alperovitz on Hnet

Little Red Schoolhouse:

Obamagogue Defends Education Agenda As Class War Agenda:
Saying that reforming education is perhaps “the economic issue of our time,” President Obama went before a major civil rights organization on Thursday to defend his main education program against criticisms from some minority and teachers groups.

KIPP and Teach For America Boost Duncan Grants–$50 million plus for Toadies.

Civil Rights Groups Hide Their Own Report On Obamagogue’s RaTT:
Seven civil rights groups have written a “Framework for Education Reform” that while not a trouncing of the Obama and Duncan education agenda definitely is critical of it and offers up a remedy for the nation’s education ills. That document was supposed to be released on July 26, 2010, but the press conference scheduled was cancelled. A spokesperson quoted in the Washington Post said it was due to scheduling conflicts by leaders of the groups.

Jesse Hagopian: What I learned from Teaching in DC Schools:
The problem with Rhee’s thinking is that our goal should not be to discover “success stories” of kids who were able to transcend the deplorable conditions of life that make it so hard for so many to succeed, but rather to change those conditions in the first place.

Detroit Bamn Loses Lawsuit vs Bobb’s Private Funding:
Foundations that help pay the salary of Detroit Public Schools emergency financial manager Robert Bobb do not harm the public good by making the contributions, a Wayne County Circuit Court judge ruled Thursday.

GAO: 15 For-Profit Colleges Frauding: Many of the largest for-profit entities were named among the 15 sites targeted by GAO investigators:
University of Phoenix, with more than 400,000 students; Argosy University, part of the 136,000-student Education Management Corp.; Kaplan College, part of the 119,000-student Kaplan Higher Education operation owned by The Washington Post Co.; and Everest College, part of the 110,000-student Corinthian Colleges.

Read the full Rouge Forum Update here.

Rouge Forum Update: Firings in DC–Build October 7th!

Don’t forget Rouge Forum 2010 next week! More info here.

Little Red Schoolhouse:

Michelle Rhee of DC Fires 241 Teachers After Hugging AFT’s Weingarten for Helping Out on Sellout Contract. The AFT Does–Nothing Much and More Educators are on Firing Line: D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee announced Friday that she has fired 241 teachers, including 165 who received poor appraisals under a new evaluation system that for the first time holds some educators accountable for student improvement in standardized test scores….Last month, union members and the D.C. Council approved a contract that raises educators’ salaries by 21.6 percent but diminishes traditional seniority protections in favor of personnel decisions based on results in the classroom. The accord also provides for a “performance pay” system with bonuses of $20,000 to $30,000 annually for teachers who meet certain benchmarks, including growth in test scores

States RaTT Each Other Out: Less than two months after the nation’s governors and state school chiefs released their final recommendations for national education standards, 27 states have adopted them and about a dozen more are expected to do so in the next two weeks.

Their support has surprised many in education circles, given states’ long tradition of insisting on retaining local control over curriculum. The quick adoption of common standards for what students should learn in English and math each year from kindergarten through high school is attributable in part to the Obama administration’s Race to the Top competition. States that adopt the standards by Aug. 2 win points in the competition for a share of the $3.4 billion to be awarded in September. “I’m ecstatic,” said Arne Duncan, (Obamagogue’s Boy Toy)

Stimulus Bait and Switch: The San Dieguito high school district must return $2.8 million of already-spent stimulus funds to the state. The district has to give back the money because it automatically converted to a different category of school system that is entitled to drastically less stimulus funds. The expense comes at a rough time for the district. It’s also facing a $2.78 million reduction in property-tax revenue calculated since June. To deal with the loss of funds, the San Dieguito Union High School District board Tuesday approved laying off 15 nonteaching workers and reducing several school services as steps toward adjusting future budgets.

Read the full RF Update here.

Rouge Forum Update: Support Oakland’s 4/29 Strike! March on Mayday!

Open Letter to March 4th Activists: “The central issue of our time is the rapid rise of color-coded social and economic inequality coupled to the promise of perpetual war, this challenged by the potential of mass, class-conscious, resistance. If the above paragraph is wrong, completely baseless, then save time, stop reading, as most of what follows flows from it.”

Substance News Censored by Chicago School Bosses: For several days in April 2010, Chicago Public Schools Chief Executive Officer Ron Huberman, or one of his top aides, ordered and monitored the suppression of traffic on the SubstanceNews Web site by putting a “block” between teachers and others in Chicago’s schools and access to the site.

California Community College System on the Brink: “As some students are blocked from state universities, the community college system has trouble absorbing both them and the laid-off workers who are going back to school for retraining. All are trying to fit into a community college system that lost $520 million in state financing over the last academic year, about 8 percent of its overall budget.”

Duncan To Detroit: You’re On Your Own: “But these issues have to be worked out at the local level. We want to be supportive of change, we want to challenge the status quo, but again this has to be worked out at the local Detroit community.”

Kenneth Burnley of DPS Fame Moves To Alaska (avoiding prosecution): “Kenneth Burnley, the former CEO of Detroit Public Schools, has landed a new leadership post — in Alaska. The Mat-Su Borough School Board unanimously selected Burnley on April 24 to become superintendent of the district with 16,600 students and 44 schools. Burnley led Detroit Public Schools, now down to 85,000 students and 172 schools, from 2000-05 during the state’s takeover of the district. He is working at the University of Michigan under a fellowship.”

No Rhee, No Funds for DC Schools–So Say the $ Tyrants: “Private foundations pledging $64.5 million for raises and bonuses in the District’s proposed contract with the Washington Teachers’ Union have attached a series of conditions to the grants, including the right to reconsider their support if there is a change in the leadership of the D.C. school system.
The leadership condition, set by the Walton Family Foundation, the Robertson Foundation, the Laura and John Arnold Foundation and the Broad Foundation, makes it clear that they could withdraw their financial support if Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee leaves or is fired through the funding agreement’s expiration in 2012.”

Detroit Public School Gangsters Busted Again: “indicted for converting more than $3 million of district funds to themselves, friends and family, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office. Named in the indictment are Stephen Hill, 58, of Detroit, former executive director of the risk management office and Christina Polk-Osumah, 59, former risk management finance manager. Also named are Sherry Washington, 53, and Gwendolyn Washington, 66, both of Detroit, who are partners of Associates for Learning, a vendor hired to administer a health awareness program for DPS. The eight-count indictment unsealed today alleges bribery, fraud, extortion and money laundering committed between 2005 and 2006. Such crimes are punishable for up to 10 to 20 years in prison.”

Univ. of Wisc. Cancels 4/26 Antiwar Forum Over ‘Security Concerns’

Read the full Rouge Forum Update here.

Rouge Forum SuperBowl SchmooperBowl Update

Suberbowl Cartoon
Spectacle Schmectacle: Remember the March 4th Strike!

Check Out Miami’s Paul Moore on the Superbowl:
“The poverty of our century is unlike that of any other. It is not, as poverty was before, the result of natural scarcity, but of a set of priorities imposed upon the rest of the world by the rich. Consequently, the modern poor are not pitied but written off as trash. The twentieth-century consumer economy has produced the first culture for which a beggar is a reminder of nothing.” John Berger

On the Little Rouge School Front:

A Rouge Forum Broadside on March 4th, Resistance, and Fear

Call For Proposals–Rouge Forum Conference August 2-5, 2010

Critical EducationCall for Manuscripts: A Return to Educational Apartheid? >: “This current series will focus on the articulation of race, schools, and segregation, and will analyze the extent to which schooling may or may not be returning to a state of educational apartheid.”

Whose School? Our School? Occupations in Glasgow: “Parents in Glasgow occupied yet another primary school this week; the latest in a series of school occupations which have taken place over the past year.”

Harvard Initiates Educational Leadership-Business Partnership (this is new?): “ The Harvard doctorate broadens the reach of traditional programs by collaborating with the Harvard Business School and the John F. Kennedy School of Government, he said. The first year of studies is devoted to a rigorous core curriculum. The next year, students chose from a slate of courses at the three schools–such as “Managing Human Capital” at the business school or “Marketing for Non-Profits and Public Agencies” at the Kennedy school.”

What They Do With The Kiddies After High School–Pedagogy With Those Fun Loving Marines

Arne Duncan: “Atta Boy Detroit Bobb (Broad): “Duncan praised Bobb and what he’s done in the district, calling him “a breath of fresh air.”

SF City College Cancels Summer Sessions: “Thousands of students who expected to make up missed courses or simply move their education forward will have to put those plans on hold this year because City College of San Francisco is canceling its popular summer session.”
Read more:

LA Times Exams the Explosion of Charters in the Second Largest School District: “Los Angeles is home to more than 160 charter schools, far more than any other U.S. city. Charter enrollment is up nearly 19% this year from last, while enrollment in traditional L.A. public schools is down.”

Read the full RF Update here.

Rouge Forum Update: Great Depression Halloween Special: Boo!

Below are some some links from the most recent RF Update, read the full update here.

The core issue of our time: The real promise of perpetual war and rising inequality met by the potential of a mass class conscious movement for equality and justice.

Smile of the Week:
Student asks his principal, “Where is my teacher?”.
“Citywide layoffs”, replies the principal.
“My text books?” asks the student.
“State austerity plan”, says the principal.
“Student loan?” continues the student.
“Federal budget cuts”, says the principal.
Finally, exasperated, student asks, “But how am I going to get an education?”.
To which the equally exasperated principal replies, “This is your education”.

The Education Agenda is a War Agenda and the War Agenda is an Education Agenda Featurette:

Duncan Flunked Chicago School Closing Project: “This report reveals that eight in 10 Chicago Public Schools (CPS) students displaced by school closings transferred to schools ranking in the bottom half of system schools on standardized tests. However, because most displaced students transferred from one low-performing school to another, the move did not, on average, significantly affect student achievement.”

Hey Kids, Photograph that Recruiter

DFT Praises Extension Of Broad’s Bobb Contract

Detroit: An Individual and Collective Wrong–Award Winning Counselor Mr Z has to Go

NEA Loses NCLB Suit; How Many Hundreds of Thousands of Your Dues $s did NEA Waste?
“Depending on whom you ask, the No Left Child Behind Act might be described in many ways: bold, ground-breaking, noble, naïve, oppressive, all of the above and more,” Judge Sutton wrote. ” But one thing it is not is ambiguous, at least when it comes to the central tradeoff presented to the states: accepting flexibility to spend significant federal funds in return for (largely) unforgiving responsibility to make progress in using them.” NEA will do anything, like courts and ballots, to avoid educator/student alliances to control work places and communities, as those actions would make NEA as irrelevant as it already is.

NEA Bosses Escalated Their Once-Secret Effort to Boost Their Salaries and Merge With the Worst Union in the USA, the AFT and AFL-CIO, When NEA Prez Dennis Van Roekel Directed Key Committees to Revisit the Issue. This is what one researcher rightfully concluded about what would happen some time ago:

And this is what happened last time NEA tried the merger scheme

DPS Lost Millions on Corrupt Land Deals

$30+ Million Detroit Public School Fraud and Growing Every Day

Smashing Protest at Southwestern College, San Diego

Public Universities Gut Student Life, Charge More: “The stimulus isn’t a bridge; it’s a short pier…This fall, flagships still had to cut costs and raise tuition, most by 6.5 percent or more. And virtually all of the nation’s top public universities are likely to push through large increases in coming years.”..“The students are at a point of rebellion, because they’re paying more and getting less,” Flagships are attracting more wealthy and better-prepared students. At U.C.L.A., class size has increased by 20 percent over three years ..Today, UM is largely protected from Michigan’s plummeting economy. Only 7 percent of its budget is provided by the state.

Meet the new boss/Same as the old boss: Obama’s education policy ignores role of poverty in educational achievement (and evidence that NCLB should be scrapped)

In a Chicago Daily Observer column, which also appeared in the print version of the Chicago Sun-Times, Don Rose gives “Bad Grades for Obama on Education.”

Rose cuts Obama a break and doesn’t “fail” him because of his commitment to early childhood education (the federal stimulus bill he signed last month will provide $5 billion to grow the Early Head Start and Head Start programs nationwide, and expand access to child care for 150,000 more children from working families) and parental involvement. While I agree with Rose’s criticisms, he goes way too easy on Obama, who is betraying his “progressive” base in many areas, but none more so than on education policy where he is intensifying George W. Bush’s disastrous No Child Left Behind scheme.

As I’ve pointed out previously, Obama’s education plan is a continuation of the discredited and destructive No Child Left Behind Act. Rose makes this same point and notes that the rhetoric from Obama, and his education secretary Arne Duncan, is that NCLB just needs to be fixed, but the research evidence is clear that NCLB needs to be scrapped—see, for example, The Nature and Limits of Standards-Based Reform and Assessment and Grading Education: Getting Accountability Right, both published by Teachers College Press, for extended critical analyses of NCLB.

How exactly is Obama failing on education?

First, and most importantly, Obama and Duncan ignore the 800 lbs. gorilla of educational achievement, which is poverty. Poverty is the major factor in the differences in school performance. As Rose points out

“poor education is an economic issue; failure to acknowledge that is the single most egregious omission in their statements. Regardless of what the “bell curve” advocates tell you, or the way Duncan talks about education as a “civil rights” issue, it isn’t race, but class.”

Studies have repeatedly shown that socio-economic factors have the highest correlations with student test scores.

Randy Hoover, a professor at Youngstown State University, has conducted a number of studies that show that tests scores are primarily predictors of class and race. In Hoover’s latest study, the three factors he found were most likely to predict test performance were the percentage of single parent wage earners, the percentage of poor children and the median family income in a school district. When Hoover combined those factors into what he calls the “lived experience index” He found they were responsible for at least 61 percent of a district’s test performance. (Hoover studied about 60 variables to see which correlated best with test performance and “on most of them I got no correlation whatsoever,” he said.)

The US has made “closing the achievement gap” among racial and ethnic groups a key goal. This is the one of the main purposes of No Child Left Behind Act. NCLB uses student testing as the primary strategy for promoting changes within schools to accomplish that goal. The problem, of course, is analogous to the old saying “you don’t make the pig grow by weighing it,” and as many educators have pointed out you don’t improve educational achievement by giving tests.

A recent policy brief by David C. Berliner, Regents Professor at Arizona State University, makes this point crystal clear. Berliner’s report, Poverty and Potential: Out-of-School Factors and School Success, details six out-of-school factors (OSFs) common among the poor that “significantly affect the health and learning opportunities of children, and accordingly limit what schools can accomplish on their own”:

  • low birth-weight and non-genetic prenatal influences on children;
  • inadequate medical, dental, and vision care, often a result of inadequate or no medical insurance;
  • food insecurity;
  • environmental pollutants;
  • family relations and family stress; and
  • neighborhood characteristics.

Berliner also discusses is a seventh OSF, extended learning opportunities, such as preschool, after school, and summer school programs.

Because America’s schools are so highly segregated by income, race, and ethnicity, problems related to poverty occur simultaneously, with greater frequency, and act cumulatively in schools serving disadvantaged communities. These schools therefore face significantly greater challenges than schools serving wealthier children, and their limited resources are often overwhelmed. Efforts to improve educational outcomes in these schools, attempting to drive change through test-based accountability, are thus unlikely to succeed unless accompanied by policies to address the OSFs that negatively affect large numbers of our nations’ students.

One has to wonder how a supposed “progressive” president who, because of his own personal background, is sensitive to issues of poverty and its connections to race and ethnicity doesn’t see the connection between what goes on inside of schools and the social and economic conditions that affect students’ lives outside of schools. The simple answer is that Obama’s “progressivism” is a chimera and his education policy is not oriented to serving the needs of students, but rather interests of the corporate-capitalist class.

There is really no other logic to Obama’s pronouncements on education.

Obama wants give teachers pay for student test scores, ignoring the fact that history has proven such schemes to be debacles.

Obama praises charter schools for creativity and innovation, ignoring the fact that charter schools perform no better and often worse than public schools, pave the way for privatization, and allow teacher unions to be sidestepped. As Gerald Bracey says “you can’t bash the public schools on test scores then praise the charters which have lower scores.”

Like his predecessors, Obama misrepresents public education performance as a scare tactic and to open the door for the privatization. Obama claims that graduation rates have fallen from 77% to 67%, but the U. S. Department of Education says the best method for estimating it puts it at 74.5% nationally. Obama says dropout rates have tripled over the past 30 years. But how does a 10% decline in graduation rate equal a 300% increase in dropout rate?

Obama claims “Just a third of our 13- and 14-year-olds can read as well as they should.” Gerald Bracey calls this claim “outright garbage.”

Obama has “raved about South Korean schools but neglected to say that thousands of South Korean families sell their children–yes, sell–to American families so their kids can a) learn English and b) avoid the horrible rigidity of Korean schools. And while the US trails Korea on average test scores, it has a higher proportion of students scoring at the highest level on the Program of International Student Achievement (PISA). Moreover, it has the highest number of high scorers (67,000) of any country. No one else even comes close.”

Obama’s education stimulus package continues the regimentation of curriculum and test-driven approach to education by bribing states and school districts to apply for $5 billion in grants largely aimed at boosting student test scores. These grants, administered by the U.S. Department of Education, are known as the “Race to the Top Fund.”

Obama, Duncan, and the rest do this because that is what they must do in the social context they are in, and because they have chosen sides in what is the class war, the international war of the rich on the poor, which the rich recognize and the poor, at least in the US, do not—yet.

The core issue of our time is the interaction of rising inequality and mass, class-conscious, resistance. That is why the education agenda is a war agenda.