WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Jeb Bush:"Immigrants are more fertile, and they love families." -- NPR 

CTU president Karen Lewis

“Recently they announced a plan for a ‘quality, 21st century education’. Their 21st century plan looks more like a 19th century plan.” -- WBEZ

Tom Hayden

We are edging closer to the neo-conservative dream of total conflagration in the Muslim Middle East. Despite only 11 percent public support for US military intervention in Syria, a reluctant President Barack Obama is being pushed into escalation.  -- Tom Hayden Blog

Joe Nocera

 Instead, this has become one of the trademarks of the Obama administration: decry human rights abuses abroad, but hold men in prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, who have never been accused of a crime. Say all the right things about freedom of the press — even as you’re subpoenaing reporters’ phone records. And express outrage over Chinese hacking while carrying on a sophisticated spying operation of your own citizens. -- New York Times

Deb Meier

Irony of ironies, the richer we are, the more likely we are to select schools that resemble my earlier post rather than a "no excuses" school. (Friends' schools, Daltons, Lab School in Chicago, etc.) Why do those with a real choice elect for very small class sizes, highly credentialed and experienced staff, attention to the aesthetics of the environment, plenty of outdoor space, no dearth of arts of all sorts, plus sports, physical education, well-staffed support services, and even nice dining areas, well-furnished teachers' lounges, and usually paid non-instructional time for teachers to meet together? And actually a shorter school year! -- Why Don't We Fix Poverty, While We're At It?

The CPS Way? Really?

“Here they are coming right back after they claimed they were going to save money [by closing schools] ... and yet they’re saying, ‘Oh by the way we didn’t save any money, now we’re going to have to slash the budget of every school in the system.” -- CTU's Jackson Potter

Chicago principals, including those in charter schools, are still in shock after getting a glimpse of their shrunken school budgets and hearing Board President Vitale's instructions to "do more with less." That's the new mantra, now called The CPS Way, dressed up with slick brochures and videos complete with a new "5-Year-Plan". Many teachers and staff are already being told they will not be needed in the Fall.

“We fundamentally believe that all of our children are capable of success, and to ensure that success, every child must have equitable access to a high-quality education,” said Byrd-Bennett, accompanied at Westinghouse College Prep on Monday by a video called “The CPS Way” and a glossy, 25-page brochure titled “The Next Generation: Chicago’s Children.” -- Sun-Times

Yes, the squeeze is on. The air is filled with empty rhetoric and cliches about equity and "all kids can learn." But when 350,000 kids return to school in the fall, they will find hundreds of their teachers gone, many of their neighborhood schools closed, and the ones that remain open having class sizes of 40 students or more.

Once again my favorite quote comes from CPS Liar-in-Chief Becky Carroll who lays out her definition of equity.

“Many schools will see decreases, and many schools will see increases as well,” CPS spokeswoman Becky Carroll said. “This is truly equitable way to pay schools.”

And while the mayor turns CPS schools into beggars, he's threatening another big property tax hike to help him close a $1 billion budget gap. It's his way of turning the tables on the CTU and shifting blame for his mismanagement plunder onto the union, "greedy teachers" and pensioners. The one place he and Quinn and Boss Madigan won't go for new revenue, of course, is taxing Chicago's biggest corporations, many of whom don't pay a penny in taxes.

Block 37 Superstation built with TIF money

In case you really believed all of Rahm's poor-mouthing, just look at his hare-brained big-ticket schemes to invest in downtown and the lakefront at the expense of the neighborhoods. Aside from gambling casinos and a $360 million DePaul basketball arena and complex, and this multi-million-dollar ($46 million in TIF money which should have gone to schools) goofy Block 37 Superstation, now we're hearing about the city going further into debt, with loans arranged by Obama's people, for a $99-million makeover of the downtown Riverwalk. 

Under designs already floated by the city, each block would receive what officials term "a unique identity and landscaping." For instance, the stretch from State to Dearborn streets would be themed "the marina" and feature restaurant retail space, and LaSalle to Wells streets would be "the swimming hole."  -- Crain's

Really Rahm? The CPS Way? The "Swimming Hole"?  Really?

'Wouldn’t it be nice if educational policy were driven by reality instead of snark hunts and iggernance...?/

I'm re-posting this piece from Maureen Downey's Get Schooled blog. -- M.K.

The Snark syndrome in educational policymaking 

  By Peter Smagorinsky

    In 1993, Eileen Byrne published "Women and Science: The Snark Syndrome."

    Snarks have been around for some time, first appearing in 1874 in Lewis Carroll's "The Hunting of the Snark." Well, actually they are imaginary, as I learned when sent on a “snark hunt” as a tenderfoot Boy Scout on my first camping trip long ago, much to the delight of the older boys in my troop.

     Byrne in particular draws on the following stanzas to coin the “snark syndrome” or “snark effect”:
   
    'Just the place for a Snark!' the Bellman cried,
    As he landed his crew with care;
    Supporting each man on the top of the tide
    By a finger entwined in his hair.
   
    'Just the place for a Snark! I have said it twice:
    That alone should encourage the crew.
    Just the place for a Snark! I have said thrice:
    What I tell you three times is true.'

    Byrne reads these stanzas as a commentary on the effects of repeating something until it becomes widely accepted, no matter how little evidence supports it or how much of a chimera the claim is designed to prop up. To Lewis Carroll and to George Orwell, who called this phenomenon "The Big Lie," the deception is deliberate. In the area of educational policymaking and teaching theory, the repetition may follow from ignorance as much as deliberate deception.

    Regardless of the source, the term provides a way to characterize how the repeated assertion of an idea that has no empirical support can indeed become institutionalized in policy discussions and affect those subject to its consequences.
   
    I find considerable evidence for this phenomenon in Arne Duncan and David Coleman’s educational world and their decision to barge ahead with Race to the Top and the Common Core State Standards, even though there is no evidence whatsoever to indicate a need for either, or the efficaciousness of either as planned and implemented. If anything, the evidence against the idea that massive testing improves teaching and learning, rather than disrupting teaching and learning and requiring teachers to spend as much time submitting reports as they do thinking about how to teach better, is quite convincing.

     Neither Duncan nor Coleman, however, has much use for things like research-based knowledge of educational processes, in spite of their roles as U.S. Secretary of Education and president of the College Board. Rather, they began with agendas and marshaled their evidence selectively to support it, and then repeated their claims endlessly until they became part of the national conversation, buttressed by the bully pulpits afforded these two men with a total of zero teaching experience between them.

     Duncan and Coleman have hardly acted alone; rather, they are part of a great national chorus of people repeating over and over that schools are in crisis, teachers are terrible, public education doesn’t work, market-based thinking applies as well to schooling as it does to commerce, charter schools work by virtue of being charter schools, vouchers can enable private schools to admit unlimited numbers of students who don’t want to attend their neighborhood schools, educators know less about education than people who have never taught in schools, teachers are greedy and selfish, principals all know what’s best for teachers and students and so should have unlimited authority, and countless other canards whose verity follows from repetition rather than documentation.

     The first time I met Roy O’Donnell, a Southern gentleman who taught at UGA from the 70s through the 90s and now rests in peace, he was speaking at a conference, where he told the following story: An adult overheard a young boy from Georgia telling his friends about another boy who, in the boy’s phrasing, was “iggernant” about something. The adult stepped in for a gentle correction, saying that the boy surely meant “ignorant.” The boy replied, “No, I meant iggernant. Ignorant—that’s when you don’t know nothin’. Iggernant—that’s when you don’t know nothin’, and you don’t want to know nothin’.

    Arne Duncan works in Washington, D. C., which is also the location of the headquarters of the American Educational Research Association, so he has plenty of access to cutting-edge educational research. He traveled to the recent AERA convention in San Francisco, where he said in a major address the “solution to mediocre tests is not to abandon assessment” but to generate “much better assessment." That statement is not only iggernant, it meets the classic definition of insanity, attributed to Albert Einstein, which is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

     Wouldn’t it be nice if educational policy were driven by reality instead of snark hunts and iggernance, driven by claims repeated so often that they are taken as axiomatic by stakeholders great and small, from the folks at the barbershop to the U.S. Secretary of Education and President of the College Board? Perhaps then we would not have one of the lowest levels of teacher morale ever measured, and instead have classrooms characterized by something more stimulating than preparing for yet another round of tests that even Arne Duncan finds mediocre.

Peter Smagorinsky is Distinguished Research Professor of English Education in the Department of Language and Literacy Education at the University of Georgia.

Lies, spies, and videotape

I guess the Sun-Times saw which way the wind was blowing in the surveillance society -- towards them. Now fascist-minded Rep. Peter King is calling for the jailing and prosecution, not only of whistle-blower Ed Snowden, but of journalists as well.

Today's S-T editorial in support of the ACLU suit, is decent.

The American Civil Liberties Union took a step in the right direction Tuesday by filing a lawsuit in federal court. It may be the only way we find out exactly what was going on.

They should have gone even further and called for an end to the massive spying/hacking program on every U.S. citizen and beyond.


 Watch White House Liar-In-Chief Jay Carney come to the defense of admitted liar, James Clapper.

The U.S. media as a whole has been shameless in its support for the mega-spying operation, even as they themselves have become its targets. I'm thankful that there are still some journalists left with courage and integrity, like Glenn Greenwald and those at the Guardian and Washington  Post who help exposed the criminal hacking program at great risk to themselves even as top government officials like James Clapper were looking us right in the face and lying to us about it.

Byrd-Bennett's 5-year plan is perfect, except for that fact that ...

...there really is no plan and BBB probably won't last 5 years.

For the first time since Mayor Rahm Emanuel took over CPS, his CEO laid out an education plan, calling for high academic standards, more focus on parental engagement and greater accountability for the district, including an annual scorecard. -- Catalyst

Ok, but what are the specifics of the plan? The Sun-Times supports the plan. Here what they have to say about it.

"Much of the plan already has been announced, and it was short on details... But where’s the money to do this well? Ditto for arts education and better attendance (it takes people and time to hunt down truant kids). Byrd-Bennett says they’ll redirect resources and tap outside funds. That’s a start but not a recipe for lasting change."

Umm, no specifics, no recipe for lasting change, and no money to implement. So what is it you actually support here, S-T editorial board?

Well there is "parent engagement". Doesn't saying those two words constitute a plan of some sort?

Well it might, if we didn't already know what BBB means by parent engagement. 20,000 turn out for sham hearings to protest school closures. BBB attends none of them. The she announces that all 20,000 supported closures. Parent engagement.

More from Catalyst:

 But Byrd-Bennett’s announcement at Westinghouse High School raised immediate questions about how the board would pay for the initiatives. And following the announcement, Board President David Vitale confirmed that principals, who received their school budgets just last week, will have to make do with less.

Making do with less? Why, that's the same 5-year plan we just had. Thanks President Vitale.

OK, so what do the teachers, who have to carry out the plan, think of it?

We don't know. No one's asked them.

 “It is amazing that CPS’s first impulse, no matter who heads it, is towards an autocratic, top-down approach that people who actually work with kids are expected to implement without the appropriate resources or tools. When will CPS understand that having a ‘plan’ that never includes the voices of parents, students, CPS workers and a realistic blueprint on how to generate revenue will continue to foster mistrust, alienation and lowered expectations, especially after the tragic closing of 50 schools?” -- CTU Prez Karen Lewis

So much for the plan.

Who's muddying the waters and who's minding the schools?

Common Core standards began as an attempt to level the field. After all, why should poor kids in Mississippi be taught dummy math while rich kids in Connecticut are exposed to calculus?  But it didn't take long for the Common Core idea to be turned into another adventure into top-down reform complete with profit-heavy contracts for testing companies and sink-or-swim consequences for students, teachers and schools.

Peter Cunningham is no educator. He's is a PR guy, and a pretty good one, who worked for Arne Duncan in Chicago and then followed him to D.C. where Duncan made him an assistant secretary of education.

On Monday, Flypaper, the blog of the right-wing Fordham Institute carried Cunningham's polemic ("Muddying up the waters"), aimed at Common Core critics Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus. Hacker is an emeritus professor of political science at Queens College, City University of New York. Dreifus teaches at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs.

A clearly over-matched Cunningham was responding to their New York Times piece, "Who's Minding the Schools?". Why he chose Flypaper for his polemic is anyone's guess. But in the process, Cunningham winds up defending conservative supporters of CC against those goofy, nasty Tea Party critics like Glenn Beck who, Cunningham explains, "is paid to stir the pot, to counter conservative education scholars (who are paid to actually think it through and get it right)."

What is it about this moderate brand of conservatism and right-wing think tanks like Fordham that historically seems so attractive to White House liberals? (Remember,  Arne Duncan's term at the DOE began with a partnership on charter schools with Newt Gingrich).

The Hacker/Dreifus piece is actually pretty good. It illustrates the problems connected with top-down reform and high-stakes testing. Although they never mention the role of testing giants Pearson or McGraw-Hill, Hacker and Dreifus do emphasize the connection between Common Core and the testing madness inevitably packaged with this latest version of national standards. They show how CC can negatively affect teachers, ultimately leading to "backlash" from many teachers and parents, including the current Opt-Out movement.

They include this ominous warning about what they say "may be the most far-reaching experiment in American educational history."

 Whether the Common Core is called a curriculum or not, there’s little doubt that teachers will feel pressured to gear much of their instruction to this annual regimen. In the coming years, test results are likely to affect decisions about grade promotion for students, teachers’ job status and school viability. 

In response, Cunningham plays the scold. Don't the two professors know the difference between standards, curriculum, and assessment? Standards, Cunningham carefully explains, "are agreed-upon expectations for what children should know in certain subjects by certain ages, with curricula, which are the materials and the approaches that teachers use to help kids learn." And then there's the separate category of assessments, "which are tests to determine what students know, with accountability, which are systems of tracking student performance, determining which schools and teachers are succeeding or struggling, and providing support or intervening where necessary."

"The standard is the bar..."

For anyone still confused, Cunningham offers up a track-and-field metaphor.

The standard is the bar that students must jump over to be competitive. The curriculum is the training program coaches use to help students get over the bar. The assessment is the track meet where we find out how high everyone can jump. And the accountability system is what follows after its all over and we want to figure out what went right, what went wrong, and what it will take to help kids jump higher.

Peter Cunningham would do well to take a couple of education courses or maybe even try teaching in a classroom for a while, if for no other reason than to deepen his own understanding of curriculum, before engaging in such empty theorizing. He might learn that education is much more complex than a track meet, and curriculum so much more than a "training program" or simple skill-building regimen. Curriculum concerns the much broader question of what knowledge and experiences are most worthwhile for students, including how they should be taught and assessed.

Of course, there's bound to be ongoing debate among educators and within society as a whole over these questions. For example Hacker and Dreifus worry that Common Core is being pushed from the top down, "introduced with hardly any public discussion. Americans know more about the events in Benghazi than they do about the Common Core."

For people like Duncan, Bill Gates and now Cunningham, CC's purpose is supposedly to make the U.S. more competitive in the global marketplace. But like all good educators, Hacker and Dreifus worry about the unintended consequences of this grand experiment. So do I. Public education has to be about democracy -- building an educated social base for democracy to exist and to flourish, as well as preparing young people to fully and equitably participate.

I'm not so sure Hacker/Dreifus are right about this being "the most far-reaching experiment in American educational history." To me, Common Core is more a continuation of an ongoing debate that has gone on for years, over national standards and the role of the feds, the states, and the deeply invested textbook and testing companies who have for decades shaped the curriculum discussion. Teachers have always had to deal with shifts on standards and curriculum, and the pendulum swing accompanying each regime change.

For Cunningham, the debate is mainly about definitions and therefore easily solved , as long as you accept his and Arne Duncan's vision of education being a race to the top, a high-stakes track meet with winners and losers. It's a vision which I hope lots of  teachers, parents and students will refuse to accept.

Back from Portugal. Little has changed.

Bacalhau

Well, vacationing in Portugal was nice but it's always great to be back home, sleeping in my own bed and getting back into the swing of things. Also, getting back to work. summer quarter starts next week and someone's got to pay for all that bacalhau and natas.

Glad to see nothing's changed much back home in the past week. Rahm's still the most hated man in town -- even the cops hate him. Too pushy? Maybe, but that's the least of it.

Two dead and 17 wounded in weekend shootings. Rham will probably say we're behind last year's schedule and declare another victory in the war on gangs.

The machine still has both ends covered with corrupt union leaders like John Coli, who runs the Teamsters like a family business. Just in case you're not sure how the City That Works works, Marty at the Red Line Tap lays it all out for my brother, Fred.

CTU's Jackson Potter

And CPS seems to be preparing to follow the lead of Supt. Hite in Philly, who just pink-slipped nearly 4,000 school employees, including hundreds of teachers.

“Seeing what happened in Philadelphia, we are definitely concerned,” said the CTU's Jackson Potter. 

“They’re going to threaten Armageddon and a disaster scenario where we have to raise class sizes to 40 and lay off thousands of teachers, and there are other options,” Potter said. “Why not take the TIF surplus and put it back where it belongs, in schools, parks and libraries?”  -- Sun-Times

It's alll part of BBB's 5-year plan which she announced to under-enthused staffers today.  The plan, which is very optimistic given the short tenure of BBB's last two predecessors, can be summed up in  just a few words: "It's for the kids." Right?

Actually, the whole idea of a 5-year plan sounds like something out of the Kremlin in the 50's. Hmmm.

The end of Europe?

Cabo Da Roca, the end of Europe

That's the ominous name given to the wild, rocky coast on the westernmost end of Portugal. On another level, lots of folks here are talking about the end of Europe. While I don't believe that the end  is in sight, the standard of living here is in free-fall and millions of people are truly suffering under imposed austerity and are ready for change. Educators are a big part of the protest movement and lots of debate is taking place over the role of schooling in Portuguese society.

I know,  I'm supposed to be on vacation.  And believe me, we've been taking that seriously, enjoying great seafood, taking in the music and art, visiting Moorish castles and hitting the beaches and all that good stuff. Not to mention, getting up at 2 a.m. to watch the Spurs beat the Heat in game 1.

CGTP's Fernando Mauricio

But I'm also drawn to the complex political life of Portugal, both for its role as a brutal colonizer in Africa and for its 1974-75 "Carnation Revolution," which toppled the fascist Salazar dictatorship. The revolution helped the emerging liberation movements in Portugal's former colonies win their independence in 1975. Every country has its two sides and I like to see them both.

During a break in sightseeing, we were able to visit with Fernando Mauricio, one of the leaders of the CGTP, Portugal's largest union, which along with the smaller and not-so-militant rival UGT, is organizing for the upcoming general strike.  Fernando, who was a public school teacher before becoming a union organizer, gave us an update on the current struggle and some background on the history of the union movement here. As a young political activist in the 1960a and 70s, he spent time in prison and underground and in exile during the years of the dictatorship.

Students at Bento de Jesus Caraça High School

We also got to visit and meet with the leaders of Bento de Jesus Caraça Vocational High School, one of half a dozen public schools run by the union -- this one housed in  the union's downtown Lisbon headquarters. It's named after the revolutionary Portuguese educator who was a notable figure both in the field of popular education and in the resistance movement against Salazar dictatorship.

The classrooms are airy and inviting. The view from the classroom windows out over the Tagus River is so beautiful,  if I were a student here I'd have a tough time focusing on my lessons.

The school's curriculum, while called voc-ed, is really about educating the whole child and providing a step up towards either  university or  career. It includes a mix of technical skill-building and general core courses--science, languages, arts, social studies, etc... Assessments are mainly performance-based, although all Portuguese students must pass exit exams to graduate. Caraça represents, at least to me, a kind of mixture of John Dewey and Paulo Freire.

Caraça talked about "a school that is life" and the school's philosophy is laid out in a book presented to us, called A School For Life, which includes this statement of purpose:

"Looking at the students as a whole -- taking into consideration their personalities, backgrounds, and aspirations, and not just as recipients of knowledge or as future professionals... Our school has small clusters, which allows a human approach to all situations."

Not bad.