Tag Archives: charter schools

Critical Education to publish articles series “The Media and the Neoliberal Privatization of Education”

Forthcoming articles in the current volume of Critical Education will include a special series examining The Media and the Neoliberal Privatization of Education, edited by Derek R. Ford (Syracuse University), Brad Porfilio (California State University, East Bay), and Rebecca Goldstein (Montclair State University).

The series will be launched on March 30, 2015 and run through August 15, 2015.

Here is a full listing of forthcoming articles in Critical Education, from March through September 2015:

Critical Education
ISSN 1920-4125

Forthcoming Articles in Volume 6:

Volume 6 Number 6
March 21, 2015
‘That would give us power…’ Proposals for Teaching Radical Participation from a Society in Transition
Edda Sant
Manchester Metropolitan University

Volume 6 Numbers 7-16
Critical Education series The Media and the Neoliberal Privatization of Education
Editors: Derek R. Ford, Brad Porfilio & Rebecca Goldstein

Volume 6 Number 7
March 30, 2015
The News Media, Education, and the Subversion of the Neoliberal Social Imaginary
Derek R. Ford
Syracuse University
Brad Porfilio
California State University, East Bay
Rebecca A. Goldstein
Montclair State University

Lessons from the “Pen Alongside the Sword”: School Reform through the Lens of Radical Black Press
Kuram Hussain
Hobart and William Smith College
Mark Stern
Colgate University

Volume 6 Number 8
April 15, 2015
Breathing Secondhand Smoke: Gatekeeping for “Good” Education, Passive Democracy, and the Mass Media:  An Interview with Noam Chomsky
Zane C. Wubbena
Texas State University

Volume 6 Number 9
May 1, 2015
Speaking Back to the Neoliberal Discourse on Teaching: How US Teachers Use Social Media to Redefine Teaching
Kessica Shiller
Towson University

Volume 6 Number 10
May 15, 2015
Political Cartoons and the Framing of Charter School Reform
Abe Feuerstein
Bucknell University

Volume 6 Number 11
June 1, 2015
Neoliberal Education Reform’s Mouthpiece: Education Week’s Discourse on Teach for America
Michelle Gautreaux
University of British Columbia

Volume 6 Number 12
June 15, 2015
Re-Privatizing the Family: How “Opt-Out” and “Parental Involvement” Media Narratives Support School Privatization
Amy Shuffelton
Loyola University Chicago

Volume 6 Number 13    
July 1, 2015
Learning from Bad Teachers: The Neoliberal Agenda for Education in Popular Media
José García
University of Texas at Austin

Volume 6 Number 14
July 15, 2015
#TFA: The Intersection of Social Media and Education Reform
T. Jameson Brewer
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Matthew Wallis
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Volume 6 Number 15 
August 1, 2015
Engagement with the Mainstream Media and the Relationship to Political Literacy: The Influence of Hegemonic Education on Democracy
Paul R. Carr
Université du Québec en Outaouais
Gary W. J. Pluim
Lakehead University
Lauren Howard
Lakehead University

Volume 6 Number 16
August 15, 2015
Teach For America in the Media: A Multimodal Semiotic Analysis
Sarah Rose Faltin Osborn
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Jessica L. Sierk
University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Volume 6 Number 17
September 1, 2015
Capitalizing on Knowledge: Mapping Intersections Between Cognitive Capitalism and Education
Joseph Paul Cunningham
University of Cincinnati

New issue of Critical Education: “News framing and charter school reform”

Critical Education
Volume 5, Number 17
November 15, 2014

News Framing and Charter School Reform
Abe Feuerstein

Abstract

This paper reviews the historical development of charter schools and the ways in which charter schools are currently viewed by the American public. Using the tools of news framing analysis, the study also examines a sample of news reports from The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Philadelphia Inquirer in order to identify dominant news frames. This process reveals two dominant frames — Public Accountability, and Freedom, Choice, and Innovation – which are illustrated with excerpts from the news sample. The paper concludes by considering the implications of these frames for charter school reform and suggests several new directions for scholarship in this area.

Keywords

Charter Schools; School Reform; News Framing; Politics of Education

Rouge Forum Update: French Students + Workers Take the Lead

Rouge Forum Update: French Students + Workers Take the Lead

French Students and Workers Show the Way!
French students blockaded more high schools and universities Thursday, as the third straight day of nationwide strikes over the government’s retirement reforms snarled train travel and sent a renewed challenge to President Nicolas Sarkozy.

France’s BFM TV showed groups of students toppling trash cans in southeast France, erecting barricades in the middle of a Paris avenue, and being closely watched by police in several areas.

While the protesting students won’t reach retirement age for decades, the government is keeping a close eye on their rallies because student protests have brought down major government reforms in the past.

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Video embedded in Daily Californian Reports

Little Red Schoolhouse

The Education Agenda is a War Agenda; A Class and Empire’s War Agenda: Navy Takes Over San Ysidro Schools: The Navy is teaming with the San Ysidro School District in the service’s largest initiative of its kind. Partners in Education pairs locally-based ships with schools to ensure students leave with “academic, technical, and employability skills necessary to be successful in the workplace,” Navy officials said.

Divide and Rule–California to Gut K-12 Schools, Hit State Workers, the Poor and Disabled, and Prisoners, with a Small Bribe to Colleges and Universities: California’s in-home healthcare program for the elderly, blind and disabled would shrink by 3.6%, the document says. Child-care services provided by the state would be trimmed by $48 million.Winners in the plan would be the state’s two higher-education systems, the University of California and California State University. Both would receive $200 million to compensate for cuts made last year and enough money to fully fund projected enrollment growth, according to the report.

Rhee Going Going Gone but Rotten Contract, Sellout Unions, and Racist System Hold Strong: D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee will announce Wednesday that she is resigning at the end of this month, bringing an abrupt end to a tenure that drew national acclaim but that also became a central issue in an election that sent her patron, Mayor Adrian M. Fenty, to defeat.

For Those Who Thought They Could Vote In Real Social Change in DC Schools: Presumptive mayor-elect Vincent C. Gray introduced Kaya Henderson on Wednesday as the interim chancellor of D.C. public schools and vowed that reforms launched under Michelle A. Rhee would continue when he takes office in January….In Henderson, Gray inherits someone in tune with Rhee on the fundamentals of education reform, especially the belief that teacher quality is the most important determinant of student success. Rhee and Henderson worked together at the New Teacher Project, a teacher recruiting nonprofit group that Rhee founded and ran before she was appointed by Fenty in June 2007. Henderson was a vice president for the group. She was Rhee’s first appointment and was named her top deputy the day Rhee was introduced to the District. At the time, Rhee made it sound as if they had come to the District as a package. “I told Kaya, ‘I can’t do this without you,’” Rhee said at the time. “She’s everything you’d want in a leader. She has an ability to motivate people. She’s a critical thinker, and she’s an innovative thinker.”

From the Same Reporters Who Brought Us VAM (and the ACLU)–Will UTLA Dump Tenure and Seniority? “This is a shifting of the tectonic plates,” said David Gregory, a professor of labor law at St. John’s College in New York City. “If this were to move forward, every major district in the country is going to look to this as the model…. It would be the most innovative system in the country — if it comes to pass.”

You Kiddies Good and Better Do your Salutin: The Poway Unified School District clarified its Pledge of Allegiance policy after outraged parents said students shouldn’t be able to opt out of saying the pledge. Superintendent John Collins announced the change at Monday’s school board meeting, saying the district sought legal advice to make sure it was following both state and federal law. State education code says every school should have a daily patriotic exercise and the pledge fulfills that requirement. On the other hand, federal law says no one shall be compelled to say the pledge

Wall Street’s Fake Successful Charter in Harlem: The parent organization of the schools, the Harlem Children’s Zone, enjoys substantial largess, much of it from Wall Street. While its cradle-to-college approach, which seeks to break the cycle of poverty for all 10,000 children in a 97-block zone of Harlem, may be breathtaking in scope, the jury is still out on its overall impact. And the cost of its charter schools — around $16,000 per student in the classroom each year, as well as thousands of dollars in out-of-class spending — has raised questions about their utility as a nationwide model.

Ohanian And Metro Times Show Depth Of Detroit Schools’ Economic/Social Crisis: Metro Times has learned that twice in the past 10 months, the state has approved two short-term loans totaling $443 million. Department of Treasury spokesman Caleb Buhs confirms that the loans, obtained through bond sales, were approved by his department. However, no mention of the loans — $256 million in March and $187 million in August — was made on the DPS, Department of Treasury or governor’s websites. Buhs tells Metro Times the loans must be repaid by August 2011. Currently, the state is withholding $45 million per month in funding to satisfy the debt, Buhs says.

Read the full RF Update here.

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 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: On to the March 4th Strike To Transform Education and Society!

Ed Not Profit Max

On to The Twenty Tens!

“When everyone is dead, The Great Game is finished, not before.” Kim, speaking for Kipling.

On the Little Rouge School Front This Week:

The Rouge Forum News Latest Edition is Now Available

The Call For Papers for the Next Edition of the Rouge Forum News

Louisville Education Dean To Plead Guilty; Those of us who have followed this case wish the dean every bad year he deserves. “…Bryant Stamford, a former faculty member who worked at U of L for more than 30 years and who has joined other former education faculty in criticizing the university for its handling of Felner, said Monday he had “mixed feelings” about news of a plea agreement.… It was good that he was finally caught and held accountable for his actions, but I think all of us still sort of default back to: How is it possible that this man was allowed to operate in such a manner for years? He wasn’t operating in a vacuum.”

The Detroit Federation of Teachers’ Contract–the Worst Ever? “The core issue of our time is the rapid rise of color-coded social and economic inequality and the promise of perpetual war, challenged by the potential of mass, class-conscious, resistance. Will we win? The best news is: we do not know. We might if we form trusting communities of care and resistance. If we do not, we can wind up alone disappearing like Johnnie Redding. It is a choice. Community or barbarism.”

Detroit Reading Corps Gears Up (Old South African Saying, “Before the missionaries arrived, we had land but no bibles; now we have bibles and no land”): “Soon the Detroit Public Schools could be overrun with thousands of retirees, former teachers, grandparents, stay-at-home moms, corporate employees and even a student from Cranbrook School in Bloomfield Hills.”

Charters Blossom in LA: “Even now, there are those who believe that charter schools are private (they aren’t), that they are run by for-profit companies (rarely in California), that they primarily serve affluent communities (the opposite is true) and that they are better than traditional public schools…Nearly 9% of Los Angeles public school students now attend charters, which offer great variety. Ocean Charter, a predominantly white, middle-class school on the Westside, emphasizes “experiential learning” based on the Waldorf model. The Alliance for College Ready Schools, whose 16 schools south and east of downtown mostly serve low-income black and Latino students, use a strict and structured adherence to state curriculum standards.”

No Charges Filed in Attack on UC Boss’ House: “Eight people arrested after protesters vandalized the campus home of the UC Berkeley chancellor have not been charged with any crime and may never be, according to the Alameda County district attorney’s office.
“There is insufficient evidence…”

Dan Perstein on Attack on UC Boss’ House: “I believe that the university administration not only set the stage for a violent turn in protests by acts which have repeatedly raised tensions and undermined belief in its good will, but actually engaged in most of the violence that has occurred… “

Walton’s, Broad, Fund Top Brass in LA United: “Private money is paying for key senior staff positions in the Los Angeles Unified School District — providing needed expertise at a bargain rate, but also raising questions about transparency and the direction of reforms in the nation’s second-largest school system.”

Michigan Signs Up For Ratt: “Gov. Jennifer Granholm on Monday signed into law a sweeping series of education bills that give the state new power to close failing schools, dump bad teachers and administrators and measure if students are moving ahead… legislation also expects more from students, requiring them to stay in school until age 18, starting with the class of 2016. Students now can leave school at age 16. It allows up to 32 more charter schools to open each year but gives the state the power to close poorly performing charter schools. It also gives professionals from areas other than education an alternative way to become teachers and allows merit pay for excellent teachers and cyber-schools for students who have dropped out.”

Read the complete RF Update here.

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.