marksimon's blog

Lewis and WeingartenTogether, Weingarten and Lewis offer one of the most cogent analyses of the meaning of the Chicago strike below. It appeared as an Op-ed column in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, but in case you don't have a subscription...

 Read more

TeachersGreg Anrig writes in Pacific Standard magazine that Chicago teachers are rightly standing up to outmoded management philosophy as promulgated by Rahm Emanuel. Current education reform strategies amount to a Taylorist carrot and stick approach, resented by teachers, particularly the most thoughtful ones. More successful businesses in the US have actually moved to more of Demming's total quality managment approach. Chicago teachers are finally taking a stand for the entire education profession in objecting to this profound management blunder, says Anrig.

Elaine WeissA Column on the Huffington Post today by Elaine Weiss breakes through the uniform media stupidity and unified opposition from the nation's political class to clarify what the Chicago teachers strike is really about. She points out that by going on strike, Chicago teachers are "taking one for the kids." The issues are ones of serious disagreement over the vision of education reform. The teachers and overwhleming majorities of parents and the broad public take a "broader, bolder approach."

Although the national media has ignored the catastrophe unfolding in Philadelphia, the new interim chief of the public schools there is actually seeking permission from the City Council to dismatle public education entirely. Finally last week an article in the Philadelphia City Paper summarizes the carving up and privatizing proposal under consideration.

The new model of privatizing whole urban school districts is actually being celebrated by powerful spokespeople, including Washington Post editor Joann Armao, and its being promoted by the powerful Gates, Broad, and Walton education philanthropies. With all the spin and packaging money can buy, the end of public education in Philadelphia is being presented as a  bright and experimental future. The public is not buying it one bit.

Mark SimonAfter over a decade of “corporate reform” strategies in many places, we have a chance to compare the results of two drastically different approaches to improving public schools. In some places, such as Washington, D.C., we have seen teacher turnover skyrocket, in line with the belief that lagging student performance is due to inferior teachers. In Montgomery County, Md., the teachers’ union and district have been following a different path for the last 15 years, and are seeing dramatic results.

“Corporate reform” is the moniker earned by the dominant paradigm in school turnarounds, the one promoted by the U.S. Department of Education and championed by foundations established by successful corporate titans Bill Gates and Eli Broad. According to this approach, if students aren’t performing, start by getting rid of the adults who must be, by definition, responsible. This blame, fire, and hire strategy is imported from the corporate world where Jack Welsh and Donald Trump are the archetypal heroes. The problem is that after over 13 years of this approach there’s little success to point to on a national scale. Cleaning house, what we used to call “reconstitution,” has, at best, a mixed track record.Read more

The annual Survey of the American Teacher: Teachers, Parents and the Economy conducted by MetLife and the Harris Interactive that has tracked changing attitudes of teachers and parents for decades was released yesterday. The conclusion: over a decade of teacher bashing have started to take a toll leading to a dramatic drop in job satisfaction and concerns about teaching and learning conditions. But relationships between teachers and the communities they serve remain strong, and parent involvement is up. Education Week's article summarizing the survey results is HERE.

Marla UcelliThe Annenberg Foundation has just published a nice report on ideas that work to improve teacher quality. Authored primarily by Marla Ucelli, it draws on some of the best practices across the nation, including Cincinatti, OH, Montgomery County, MD,  Hamilton county, TN, and New York City. The six game-changing ideas in the report are: career pathways, measuring performance, supports not rewards, firing not a strategy, school culture and working conditions, teacher collaboration, and partnerships with parents -- no silver bullets, just what we know works. The Schott Foundation, which funded the report, offers this promo, here.

Richard KahlenbergRichard Kahlenberg looks back at 2011 with a year-end message that reminds educators that common sense is still on our side. The trend of re-segregating schooling along race and class lines saw important reversals, and the over-the-top demonizing of teacher unions also began to be rejected by voters and thoughtful commentators. Read his message here.

Stan KarpIn fact, we have successful models for what great, collaborative teacher evaluation looks like, but the feds and the philanthropists have asiduously avoided looking at them. Rethinking Schools journalist, Stan Karp just published an insightful piece about a long-standing model in Montgomery County Maryland, and what makes it very different from the approach now in fashion and being pushed by the corporate reformers.

Marc TuckerMarc Tucker's overview of what's wrong with the current fashion of all-out war on teacher unions in the just released Winter 2012 issue of Education Next is worth circulating. While he paints with a bit of a broad brush characterizing what unions have fought for, assuming that there are no union locals focused on the quality of teaching and learning or locals taking a collaborative road at present, his reasoning for why politicians and district administrators have to refrain from attacking unions if they want teachers on-board with education reform is spot on. His warning to US policy makers that they have to learn from those heavily unionized nations who are now out-performing us is just common sense.

Steven Brill

Diane Ravitch offers a powerful critique in her New York Review of Books review of "Class Warfare" of hedge-fund managers who have claimed leadership of the reform movement as their pet cause. She contrasts Brill's myth-making with the truth-telling of a compassionate teacher from the Bronx, Janet Grossbach Mayer, in her new book, As Bad As They Say?

Steve Brill's new book is an unreleneting attack on teacher unions as the single source of what ails public education, but according to Dana Goldstein in The Nation it also is guilty of perpetuating the myth that the role of poverty in low student achievement is just not important. Her review is worth a read. Richard Rothstein's review in Slate shows how Brill's simple good vs evil narrative falls apart in the face of the facts just like the larger reform narrative being promoted by the education establishment. Toward the end of the book Brill's main heroine burns out and quits her job teaching at a charter school. She takes a job at a traditional school, protected by a union contract. Rothstein's complete review is well worth a read here.

Audrey SoglinAt an event in Washington Thursday at the Center for American Progress, IEA Executive Director, Audrey Soglin and representatives from the State Board of Education and State Legislature described the five month process of intense collaboration that led to Senate Bill 7. The result is big changes in teacher tenure, evaluation, and dismissal procedures. The event revealed details like an agreement not to use current state standardized test scores as measures of student achievement, and a recognition that snap judgement of teacher quality are unreliable. Its a unique picture of the hard work involved and an interesting result under very difficult political circumstances.

Meanwhile, a video clip has been circulating the blogisphere showing "Stand for Children" head Jonah Edelman bragging to an audience at the Aspen Institute's Ideas Conference about how he and his organization outmaneuvered and outspent the unions, taking credit for SB7. Edelman's display of arrogance also reveals the true purpose of his organization as a front for monied interests trying to counter the political and financial power of unions. It is worth watching as an object lesson in what posers and "reformer" opportunists look like.

Diane RavitchWashington DC's City Paper published an article this week detailing how Diane Ravitch got to be the clearest voice in oppostion to the reform narrative espoused by Michelle Rhee. It's a good read. According to Dana Goldstein's story, Ravitch may be the country's most prolific education user of Twitter. It turns out she tweets to her 13,000 followers as much as 99 times in one day.

DS Dept.of EducationThis past February The US Department of Education brought together 150 local/district teams from 150 school districts to talk about what makes labor managment collaboration work. The focus was on exemplar districts and the Case Studies have now been written up in a US Department of Educaiton Publication released this month.

TestingAccording to an article in Ed Week today, a new report by the National Accademy of Sciences looked at the real academic gains after a decade of NCLB and other test-based accountability requirements and found the gains to be slight or non-existant. The report, titled "Incentives and Test-Based Accountability in Education," co-published with NAS by the Board on Testing and Assessment(BOTA) and Behavioral Social Sciences and Education (BSSE) was authored by a committee of 17. The research and assessment luminaries who authored the report explain what standardized tests are useful for, what they should not be used for and why the strategies underlying the reform movement being promoted so assiduously by the federal government and large corportate philanthropies Report

didn't work, and won't work. The book/report, is now available for pre-publication purchase from NAS. It's about time that the accountability movement be held accountable for its stunning lack of success over more than a decade.

Dennis Van RoekelNEA's Board of Directors voted May 7th to bring a proposed policy shift on teacher evaluation to it's summer Representative Assembly. Delegates will be asked to consider responsible use of student test scores and other multiple measures to strengthen teacher evaluation systems. Ed Week reports this week that now both the NEA and AFT seem to be articulating leadership positions that are being viewed as both resonable and principled. Researcher Julie Koppich sees this as an important step forward, according to Ed Week. The NEA RA will also consider a report from a new independent Commission on Effective Teachers and Teaching that will be making recommendations on teacher quality more broadly. 

An investigative article in Michelle RheeUSA Today March 28th revealed possible cheating in up to 103 DC Public schools with unusually high rates of erasures on standardized test answer sheets over the past two years. Michelle Rhee and her former deputy, now Chancellor, Kaya Henderson have taken a defensive posture, at first denying cheating took place and attacking the authors of the article, but later acknowledging that the calls for an investigation were appropriate. Once it became clear that it was likely that administrators and other adults may have erased student answers in order to raise student test scores, a local grass-roots organization, Teachers and Parents for Real Education Reform DC called for a federal investigation of "erasure-gate." They want to get to the bottom of a possible cover-up by district leadership. A real investigation is needed to uncover the consequences of the high-stakes, fear-based culture in DCPS that may have created the motivation to cheat. A serious investigation is particularly important given the national role Michelle Rhee plays promoting the strategies she applied in DC Public Schools.

President ObamaIn response to a question from a high school student, president Obama this week articulated some new principles on testing and accountability that seem to conflict with the controversial approach the US Department of Educaiton has taken over the past couple of years. The publicly reported statement gives educators a sense of hope that perhaps at least the president gets it.