NCATE�s Professional Dispositions: To be determined.

"To Be Determined"

That, literally, is what is written in the new NCATE standards (to go into effect fall 2008) in the glossary for professional dispositions. I just saw this in searching for some other materials.

It used to read (from the 2006 edition):

Dispositions: The values, commitments, and professional ethics that influence
behaviors toward students, families, colleagues, and communities and affect
student learning, motivation, and development as well as the educator�s own
professional growth. Dispositions are guided by beliefs and attitudes related to
values such as caring, fairness, honesty, responsibility, and social
justice.

Does anyone out there know how it is going to be determined? By whom? When? And why this highly (to me at least, if I was a part of NCATE) embarrassing phrasing? Embarrassing, of course, because of the ongoing social justice terminology controversy.

Where is AESA?

In the most recent issue of Rethinking Schools, Kristan Morrison details what occurred in Virginia concerning the possible elimination of social foundations of education. (I wrote about this earlier here.) While Kurt Stemhagen and others were able to keep foundations coursework as a part of the teacher education curriculum, Morrison states that:

According to the American Educational Studies Association, the major foundations organization, the process of eliminating or reorienting foundations courses has begun or has occurred already at teacher education programs in many states, including Connecticut, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Florida, Arizona, Maine, Missouri, Ohio, California, Tennessee, Texas, Michigan, Illinois, and Georgia.

This list, if accurate, is troubling. Are such (proposed) changes occurring at the state level? Institution by institution? Is anything being done to support foundations scholars and programs that are facing such challenges? Where�s AESA? Where�s CSFE?

What makes this issue double- (and triple-) pressing is that foundations scholars no longer have any policy levers by which to influence such institution-by-institution changes (as I detailed earlier). NCATE�s dropping of �social justice� due to immense pressure signals that foundational issues have little if any weight in educator preparation policy. Interestingly, the same issue of Rethinking Schools has an article by Therese Quinn and Erica Meiners �Do Ask, Do Tell� that details their (failed) attempt to have AERA weigh in on NCATE�s decision to drop such terminology, specifically as it relates to LGBTQ issues. Quinn has provided additional context here in her blog. The connection, for me, is that Quinn and Meiners are advocating for a larger arena in which to influence policy. And, now that I think about, so is the John Dewey Society.

Yet the very first thing I teach my students about foundations, and the one thing I hope and hope they remember from my course, is that one cannot understand individual problems at an individual level; one must look at larger contextual and structural issues that determine and constrain and guide individual actions.

And this is a structural issue. Foundations scholars cannot support themselves as individual programs. Foundations scholars cannot petition NCATE as individuals. And the John Dewey Society cannot, on its own, be heard to the extent necessary to actually accomplish what it wants. There needs to be a larger organization that can serve as a collective voice for the multicultural foundations on each and every single one of these issues.

Where is AESA?

Community Organizing and Urban Education XI: Scholarly Participation in Organizing Campaigns: Research that Makes a Problem �Hit Home�

[To read the entire series, go here.]

[Note: post has been revised for more accuracy]

Given the enormous gulf between the realities of life in the academy�even in relatively marginal research institutions like mine�how might education scholars contribute to organizing campaigns?

First, I think it is important that scholars resist the urge to �help� by trying to turn organizers and leaders into scholarly researchers, into people like us. Organizers generally use research very differently than do scholars. In organizing, research done by participants is almost always deeply intertwined with the day-to-day activity of social action. As I noted in a review of a book by Oakes and Rogers, in social action groups

data collection is [usually] integrated into efforts to build relational power. Survey efforts, for example, become opportunities to engage with and recruit potential members. Leaders and organizers in Alinsky-based groups do not learn to be �scholars� or �researchers� separate from their identities as activists. In fact, in my experience �research� is sometimes pursued as a thinly veiled strategy for engaging people in an issue. And it isn�t unusual for these organizations to simply hire someone to get the data they need to act, allowing them to keep their limited resources focused on activities more directly related to organizing.

Community organizing groups need research to serve very particular purposes. (Exactly what skills a particular group or individual needs (or wants) at any particular time is always an emporical issue, of course.) In any case, at least three key uses of research come to mind: research that brings a problem into stark relief, research that helps define a particular solution, and research that contests assertions made by the opposition.

Here, I want to talk about the first use, making often vague social problems more concrete, making them �gut� issues around which one might recruit participation.

Of course, it would also be wonderful to have more scholars with a strong social action background. But given limited resources this may be more an issue of recruiting particular individuals than a strategy for supporting groups.

In the last few years, the education committee of the organizing group I work with, MOVE, has been focusing on health in schools as an area ripe for intervention. The reasons for this choice of issue are complicated and emerge to some extent from the specifics of our situation in Milwaukee. In the simplest sense, focusing on health allows us to seek out support for schools that is outside the usual funding streams and that, therefore, doesn�t �count� under the caps that currently limit funding in Wisconsin. Further, we believed that it would allow us to seek funding on a city instead of a state level, avoiding the need for power to move the state legislature that, as a city organization, we lacked.

To rally support from our own members and from other groups, we thought we needed some simple document that would lay out the challenges the health problems of poor children and their effects on learning in the starkest terms. We didn�t need a document that went through everything; we didn�t need a research study; we didn�t need a forty page review of the literature; and we didn�t need a document that would meet the requirements of a peer-reviewed journal publication. We needed a brochure.

The fact is that I knew little or nothing about health problems when I started working on the brochure. But I knew how to read through a mass of research documents and pull out key information, and I knew how to locate information that seemed to come from reputable sources.

So I pulled together the documents we�d been collecting through the preparatory interview research we had been doing, and searched on the Internet, and searched on the proprietary databases available at my university, and I searched through the archives of our local newspaper.

What I was looking for was data that would make readers stop in shock. What I needed was information that we could state publicly and not fear being attacked about for its accuracy.

The brochure that I completed, with the input of my committee is pasted in, above. You can see a more readable version here.

The first panel on the inside left is the most important. As I have noted before, it is crucial in organizing to find a �gut� issue that makes people want to stand up and act. An abstract crisis, a need for more �money� in general is not very motivating. But thousands of kids with their teeth rotting in their heads, thousands of kids that can�t see well enough to read easily, that�s motivating on a visceral level.

Importantly, I don�t waffle about the data. I make clear statements about the condition of child health. Only in the footnotes do I record where I got this information and possible limits of the data. For example, two large studies of poor inner-city children in different cities that both showed that 50% of the children had vision problems. In the full text of the brochure I simply state that 50% of poor kids have problems with vision, and then in the footnotes I note my extrapolation. In other cases, I have not bothered to put conditions on my knowledge, even though (as with most research) the data may not be as clear as the specificity of these numbers imply. For example, some of the data comes from statements by the Milwaukee Public Schools (MPS) superintendent. I think I know where he�s getting this data, and in one case I think it�s from a study that seems somewhat more limited in the population it covers than he indicates. The fact is, this is frequently true of data like this on a district level, often gathered for one purpose and used for other purposes. I don�t go into this in the brochure. It just isn�t important for the reader. The superintendent�s conclusion and the magnitude of his number is quite reasonable given the other research I�ve read, even if I�m not certain about the exact percentage he cites. There is no reason for us to complicate issues by constantly qualifying our statements because of small (possible) differences or uncertainties that, in the big picture, are pretty meaningless. These are the kinds of issues that matter to scholars, but not to policymakers, politicians, and people on the street. Statistics I could not defend in this way I did not include. In any case, the data is as accurate as I could make it, and readers know where to go to pursue it in more detail if they want. As far as I can tell, there is nothing in the brochure that could subject our organization to critiques from reputable research or professional groups (and I passed a draft by a key local stakeholder just to make sure).

Then, in the next panel, the brochure goes on to lay out the kinds of issues these health problems may raise for learning. And in the final panel I give some key quotes. Some of these are from Milwaukee, and some aren�t. And the picture isn�t of a Milwaukee kid, but it�s a good picture. None of this is really important to the reader.

On the outside of the brochure, I summarize the key limitations of MPS�s approach to solving these health problems. As a committee, we worked to lay these issues out without attacking the school district. And we tried to emphasize the district�s limited funding so that people wouldn�t misread us as saying the district should cut other programs to fund health instead.

Finally, in middle panel on the outside, we lay out our plan for fixing these problems. It may be surprising, but this is probably the least important part of the brochure. The reality of a campaign often necessitates changes in abstract plans stated ahead of time. But at least we make it clear that we�re not just complaining. We have plans to do something about the problems.

I don�t want to overstate my case, here. The brochure isn�t perfect. In retrospect there are some other things I wish I had done. But it's the first time I've tried to put something like this together, and I'm going to cut myself some slack. And I believe that it has been a useful organizing tool for us. It looks fairly professional and gives us credibility among health professionals, administrators, and politicians. It also gives readers the sense that there is organized, coherent, and well structured campaign. (This is true regardless of the "reality." As Alinsky said, what is key is not the power you actually have but the power others think you have.) Participation on our committee increased significantly after we passed it out to MOVE members. And instead of moaning about the fact that life is difficult, it lays out a path for some postitive change. It is empowering to some extent, just to have the brochure.

In fact, we have actually been successful at some important first steps in getting better health care for Milwaukee kids. I�m not going to talk about that right now, however. Our effort is still ongoing, and there are good reasons not to talk too much about it publicly until it is farther along.

Let me conclude this long post by contrasting this example of scholarly contributions to social action with that discussed by Oakes and Rogers in their book. They describe the development of a robust education policy round-table that they put together with a range of different organizations, providing them with research and facilitating dialogue.

Their's seems like a wonderful model. But it clearly requires dedicated funding and a significant commitment of other resources. I don�t have either of these available to me. Mostly it�s just me and my computer and my �enormously messy� office, as my daughter says.

This example shows how a relatively isolated scholar (like most of us, I bet) with access to the basic data available to all professors, some limited facility with Microsoft Word, and a week or so of time (spread over a couple of months) can put together a key �research� document to support what could end up being a major campaign. Perhaps my key skill, here, was in understanding just which data might be reliably leaned on without undermining the credibility of our effort.

It is crucial to emphasize, however, that I could only create this document because I am a long-term member of this organization. In our meetings, other members helped restructure the brochure and change the layout. In fact, it probably helps that I generally don�t emphasize the fact that I�m a scholar in my participation. I understood what this group needed because I�m a part of this group, and the group didn�t have any trouble working with me, or trusting me to put this together, because I�ve been there for a long time. Without this kind of embodied knowledge, I probably would have ended up creating yet another �lit review� that wouldn�t have really helped them that much.

Of course, the reverse could be true as well. This familiarity may have also made me less self-critical about what I was doing. Others may want to respond with their own opinion.

YEARLYKOS: Education Uprising / Educating for Democracy - the "plan"

note: I am crossposting here a diary from dailykos today. As you read it, you will note that two of the key players in creating that diary, and in the underlying work effort, are members of this blog, which I why I am sharing it

Friday August 3, 1 PM:

The design of American education is obsolete, not meeting the needs of our students and our society, and ignores most of what we have learned about education and learning in the past century. This panel will explore a new paradigm, including some specific examples, of how education in America can be reshaped in more productive and democratic fashions.

This diary will present that new paradigm. It is the work of a group of kossacks who have circulated draft diaries to one another, commented back and forth, posted diaries, and absorbed the reactions. A complete list of all the related diaries will be found at the end of the diary.

The points of the plan were first outlined by Reino, then drafted into essay form by teacherken, with the version crafted by SDorn. I post it as the person with overall responsibility for the endeavor.

We invite you to read through the plan below the fold, perhaps referring to the diaries that got us to this point. We encourage your comments, which we will read and to which we may respond directly. Most of all, we encourage you to attend the panel, with SDorn, Mi Corazon, Marion Brady, and moderated by teacherken. Hope we see you in Chicago

Education Uprising � Education for Democracy

Historically, one of our society�s central problem in improving public schools has been our disagreement over the purposes of public schools. We believe in three central purposes: preparing students to participate in our democratic society, empowering students to learn on their own, and encouraging them to explore their dreams.

A free and adequate public education is a right of every child. Not all children attend public schools, but all Americans must support public education that both fosters democracy and is treated as a right. Public education is a public good. It is a part of the commons for which we are all responsible. We start this brief essay by discussing the nature of education as a public good before we delve into meeting the individual needs of students, the curriculum, instruction, teachers, and accountability.

Education as a Public Good

There are two parts of education as a public good. One is the role of education in developing citizenship�not reflexive obedience but a deliberative and engaged public. If adults need the skills and confidence to debate public policy and act wisely, students need to learn those skills. The other part of public education is the obligation to operate democratically�to provide equal educational opportunities and to operate transparently and accountably.

Fostering Democracy

Using public education to foster democracy is largely consistent with using public education for individual goals. Public schools should empower all students to follow their dreams and encourage them to have dreams worth having. �Proficiency� in math, science, and reading is not sufficient. There are two reasons for emphasizing breadth today. First, we need a counterweight to the current obsession about a narrow range of tested skills. If graduates can calculate but not understand misleading statistics, have we gained anything? If graduates can write a formulaic essay but will not read and do not know what they could be reading, we have lost some measure of citizenship. Beyond the limits of our narrowed curriculum today, education is a foundation for citizenship in an unpredictable future, not a factory that produces an easily-described workforce. We cannot predict the needs of our society, even if we were talking about the narrow confines of paid work. Nor can we ethically limit the dreams of our students by the social class of their parents.

Being Treated as a Right

We disagree with the president and with some Democrats in Congress on how to treat education as a right, providing equality of educational opportunities. The Federal government cannot impose its will without significant costs. It can and should help communities maintain equity, and it is in the area of equity where the federal government has the greatest obligation, where the inevitable costs of federal involvement are justified by the moral obligations of democracy. In addition, the federal government can and should support research in a range of approaches to learning and teaching. But the federal government is too far removed from the reality of individual communities and individual students to micromanage teaching. It is our job to craft a better balance.

Today, national educational policy uses the carrot of additional funds to effect change. Together with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act and several court opinions, Title I funding pushed Southern schools to begin substantial desegregation in the late 1960s. The lure of funding in the 1970s provided an incentive for states to accept federal guidelines on special education. But the power of the purse is a tempting power, and one that we have seen misused in the last 6 years. Both state and national policy must recognize that not all students learn the same way and that not every parent nor every community will want an identical education for their children. Yet there is a role for central governments, to guarantee equality; if we do not address questions of inequity, we will perpetuate many of the problems that have troubled our schools over recent decades.

Guaranteeing Equality

The obligation to guarantee equality covers inequality within schools and some aspects of inequality outside schools as well. First, schools need to be fairly and sufficiently funded. In many states, such as here in Illinois, there are still vast differences in funding levels between poor and wealthy communities. Even in states that equalize spending to some degree, it is highly imperfect. A major role of state and federal governments in education should be to make sure that there are enough funds to meet the needs of students, especially in areas with weak tax bases. Neither the No Child Left Behind Act nor the federal special-education law has been fully funded, and both must be. Even the buildings are a matter of equity and adequacy. The American Federation of Teachers has begun to document the extent of leaking roofs, rodent infestation, broken furniture, and moldy �sick� buildings, many of which will not be fixed without pressure and funding. Finally, states and the federal government can make sure that geographic location does not hinder opportunities. To provide broad access to alternative approaches, states can facilitate the ability of students to attend in neighboring districts and to use technology to give access to courses or different approaches not available in the home school or home community. While arguments rage about the effectiveness of online learning, there is no doubt that having virtual classes in unusual courses provides opportunities that many students would otherwise not have access to.

In addition to providing sufficient resources inside schools, governments have an obligation to dampen the inequities that children face when they are off campus. The inequalities in wealth, housing, environmental quality, and health care are far greater than the inequalities in school funding. While most of those topics deserve their own sessions at YearlyKos (and many have them!), a few issues are directly related to schools. Too many students do not have access to adult support, computers, books, and other opportunities outside of the school day that many middle-class children take for granted. Many lack a safe and quiet space in which to do school work, or to interact with peers. Before and after school programs can address these issues at least partially. Children�s physical needs can also be partially met on school grounds. Vision and hearing screening should be an essential part of school, and students with identified problems should have access to glasses and hearing aids where appropriate. The same need for access to care is also true of psychological and psychiatric needs.


The �Stuff� of Education

The above issues fall into those areas which central governments can feasibly address, in supporting schools and in safeguarding the equal opportunity all should have. But in most of the day-to-day operations of schools, redesigning education is a state and local matter.

Building Relationships

One issue that can only be addressed at the local level is the student perspective. Schooling to foster democracy is consistent with redesigning schools to accommodate student perspectives and needs. Fundamentally, we need to structure schools to encourage personal relationships. Students tend to do better in an environment where they feel trust, which in turn develops when students have relationships with adults who know them as individuals, more than their performance in one class. Schools are an essential opportunity for building relationships between adults and children, what sociologists call social capital. Schools should be structured so that meaningful relationships are easily formed. Meaningful contact between adults and children will also improve peer-to-peer relationships. Students do not learn as well if they are either afraid physically or emotionally, or if they feel as if they are being treated as inmates.

Experimenting with Curricula

A second issue that must be addressed at the local level is the curriculum. Despite the various arguments about whether we need a centralized curriculum, we have one. It is determined by the cultural script of what a �real school� is, and it is reinforced by the textbook purchasing practices in the largest states. McGraw-Hill and other publishing companies tell teachers in Wisconsin and Indiana what math they teach, a math curriculum that is remarkably similar to the math taught in California, Texas, and New York. While the current structure may work for some students and satisfy the desires of some parents and communities, we should be exploring alternative approaches. There is wealth of material that has been put out, some well examined, from modified traditional to Montesorri, Orff schools, Waldorf, and the radical but comprehensive approaches of panel member Marion Brady.

We need a diversity of approaches�in instruction, in organizing the curriculum, in assessment�because our children have different interests and needs and our parents and communities want different things for their children. Public education must be structured in a fashion that not only allows but encourages a diversity of approaches while ensuring some minimum commonality of education: common skills in math, scientific understanding, history and government, and the use of language. But that commonality should not define a good education. Students need more. Note: Curriculum is one of those areas which Education Uprising diarists debated vigorously, and this is a majority rather than a consensus statement.

Supporting Teachers

We need to change how we select, train, support and retain our instructional staff. This will have to include reexamining issues of compensation, workload, responsibility and flexibility in delivering instruction and mentoring. Teachers need to be flexible to meet the needs of students, but they also need to have a better education in the repertoire of skills necessary to adjust and individualize instruction. They should have a greater voice in designing curriculum and assessment, and they need sufficient time to consult with one another, reflect on what has happened in their classrooms, and use all sources of information to modify instruction and classroom environment for a more productive learning environment for their students. A scripted and so-called �teacher-proof� curriculum may succeed in raising test scores in the short term, but it is not conducive to long-term learning nor for modeling how adults think and work.

Because teachers have great responsibility for and influence on the successful development of our young people, they should have more support and feedback in learning how to be effective. Teachers should gradually transition from learning about teaching to taking full responsibility for classes, with a period of gradually decreasing supervision from experienced teachers who can mentor them. Those who mentor need to be appropriately educated for the task and given sufficient compensation and time away from teaching responsibilities to do the job properly.

Using Assessment

While there is a separate roundtable on assessment and accountability, we have discussed it extensively online, and it is one of the areas of greatest divergence among Education Uprising diary writers. On the other hand, we all agree that assessment needs to improve instruction as much as evaluate overall performance. In the language of evaluation, we need formative as well as summative uses of assessment. Those who wrote the diaries have different views of standardized testing, but we all agree it should not be the sole method of assessment nor have high stakes consequences assigned as the result of a single test.

For more discussion of assessment and accountability, come to the Assessment and Accountability roundtable August 4 at 10:30.

Our work began back in October, when teacherken posted YEARLYKOS 2007 - Educate America - what do you think?. This diary solicited ideas to be considered for a new plan for education.

Next came Educate America - Yearlykos 2007 - doing the impossible?. This laid out the scope of the task, and readers were warned:

The task before us is realistically undoable. So was electing Jim Webb and Jon Tester. So I invite you to continue reading. I warn you, this is a long diary.

In early December we offered Yearlykos2007 - the education panel - an update. In this we presented the 11 categories which we were proposing to address in our efforts. These categories came from the many comments to the two diaries above, and one previous diary of teacherken entitled I think we have lost our way. The ideas from these three diaries circulated for group consideration, were put into these divisions by DeweyCounts.

On December 30 we reported back to the community again in Ed/Up Education UpRising - Educating for Democracy (Yearlykos). Among other things this diary introduced the members of the education working group at that time. Others have joined, some dropped out, but it gave an idea of the scope of effort involved.

Near the beginning of the year, our resident educational historian took over. SDorn first posted a diary entitled History diaries starting Saturday for Education UpRising (Yearlykos) notifying the dailykos community of what was to come. This was followed by the first of his four diaries reviewing some of the key issues in American educational history, The purposes of public education (YearlyKos). That was followed A thumbnail history of school bureaucracy (Ykos), then The history of teaching (YKos), and finally (In)equality of educational opportunity (Ykos), four significant diaries over a period of 5 Saturdays.


Next Marion Brady offered a new view of curriculum, first by notifying us on a Friday of what was to come, then the following day, Saturday as is our practice offering Education Reform: The Curriculum, in which he analyzed the weaknesses of our current approach to curriculum and offered his own unique perspective, the product of a lifetime of thinking about the subject.

Reino followed two weeks later with [YKos Ed/Up] Serving Students Better Through School Reform in which he presented a series of recommendations to better serve students.

Mi Corazon took over. First he offered an annotated list of diaries to date. He followed that with two more diaries on teachers and teaching, entitled respectively It's the teachers, stupid! Ed/Up:Ykos, and then, as might be expected, It's the Teaching, Stupid! YKos, Ed/Up

DeweyCounts then took over for two Saturdays, addressing the issue of educating for democracy, in Yearly Kos: Education for Democracy followed by A Democratic Education Pt 2 (YKos Ed/Up). He offered five basic tenets of a democratic education.

plf515 offered an example of a specific program that makes a difference, the Math Circles of Bob and Ellen Kaplan, in his wonderful diary The joy of participatory learning Ed/Up.

In April, va dare offered us an examination of how NCLB is limiting some of the good things that were happening in our schools in her diary Like Oil and Water - TAH, NCLB, and the decline of K-12 Education in Democracy.

Finally, Mi Corazon added on additional diary in June, Ed/Up-YKos: 2.4 Million Ways To Reform Public Schools, in which he argued that the best single way of improving education is to change how we bring new teachers into our schools and classrooms.

As you can see, a lot of people did a lot of work in preparing for the panel, and the list of diariests does not represent all who contributed. Some offered suggestions on diaries, and many members of the community not part of our group contributed through their participation in the discussions.

We hope as many of you as possible will come to the see the results, not only at the Education Panel on Friday August 3, 1-:215, but also to the separate Roundtable Discussion on Assessment and Accountability, Rethinking Educational Accountability, Saturday August 4rd, 10:30-11:3o.

Hope we see you in Chicago!

Peace.

The Special Needs of Georgia's Voucher Advocates

"Private schools are private schools, they are not obligated to take all these students. There's nothing in the law that requires them to do that." --Jeff Gagne, Overseer of the new Georgia voucher program

A significant cluster of all those children that conservatives do not want to leave behind is comprised of individuals with special needs. Since NCLB became law, these children, not to be left behind, have been forced to take tests that were not made for students with special needs and that, furthermore, do not assess learning that was supposed to accrue from these students' individual educational plans (IEPs). And because no NCLB subgroup's failing scores can be left behind, hundreds, if not thousands, of schools have been added to the federal failure lists because of entirely-predictable shortcomings of special needs students to score high enough to make AYP.

Enter, stage Right, parents and their legal advisors from the conservative think tanks to argue that public schools are not meeting the needs of their special needs students, and that, therefore, the parents of these children should be given vouchers to enroll their children where they can get the special attention they deserve. Remember the tests?

That was January, and now it is July, and Georgia has a brand new law that allows parents to receive a school voucher for their special needs child that is redeemable at any approved private or public school, religious or otherwise. Over a hundred private schools (50 of them religious) have already been approved by the state, and conservatives are high as a kite. In order to not get in the way of the sacred, invisible hand of the marketplace or God, as the case may be, the State has not intruded with bureaucratic requirements for these approved schools, such as certification requirements for teachers, the presence of programs for children with special needs, or regional accreditation (as required by public schools). Most importantly, however, these children now placed in private and religious schools no longer need to take the tests, remember the tests?, because the private schools, by virtue of being private, are not required to be accountable. The invisible hand, or the not so invisible one reaching into the taxpayers' pockets, will take care of all that accountability business.

Coming on the heels of the resegregation decision by SCOTUS, Georgia's voucher advocates have had most their special needs met now. Wealthier parents will be able to have their children classified special ed, declare they are not being served, and head off to the local Baptist academy with a fresh voucher. Poorer parents will have their children, who have been dragging down their schools' test scores, classifed for them and given the choice of a segregated religious school or a segregated secular private school. And that's the kind of choice that the choice advocates are shouting hallelujahs for. From Jim Wooten in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

. . . .The truly significant lesson from the week�s education news is that the marketplace has shown a willingness to embrace concepts that educrats think radical and that their interest groups and unions have resisted forever.

A successful introduction is not, however, success. Johnson [Georgia Senate sponsor of the Bill] and other supporters managed to resist attempts to saddle potential competitors with all the rules and regulations that cover traditional public schools. Critics note, for example, that private schools aren�t required to have curriculums tailored to special-needs children, or to hire certified teachers or those trained in special education. True enough.

They note, too, that competitiors are free to accept or reject applicants. True enough.

And hallelujah.

What�s happening here is that the locus of authority is tranferring from government to parents. For the first time in well over a century, the earth is moving in a direction that empowers parents � all parents, not just those with money.

For choice to be real, providers of education services should never, ever, be required to take every applicant. If they can�t serve a child�s particular needs � either because he�s disruptive, not up to grade, or deemed to have problems the school�s not equipped to address � they should be free to reject him.

When enough like-needs children exist, creative educators and entrepreneurs in the free market will create new schools. . . .

The freedom to "accept or reject applications" does not just apply to the white Georgia country clubs of a bygone era.

Cross-posted at Schools Matter.

A higher education mess

Since I'm here in my office anyway, on a Saturday, I thought I'd take a brief break and describe some of the politics of Florida higher education... by video. Yes, Education Policy Blog is now including vlogging! I'm curious whether the video panel below will show up on RSS aggregators...

New Bush Version of NCLB: Privatization 2.0

From an earlier post at SM:

. . . .when it became apparent in 2001 that a school voucher provision would not be included in NCLB, the White House�s inside man in the Senate, Sen. Judd Gregg, rallied support among disappointed Republicans. In doing so, he offered this glimpse into the Rovian education strategy to bring down public schools and, in the process, dump billions into the laps of tutoring concerns run by corporate and fundamentalist supporters:

�Well, the supplemental services [tutoring] are a foot under the door for vouchers. They�re going to show that these schools aren�t working properly, and we�ll finally be able to show that the schools aren�t doing well. The assessments are going to prove the same thing� (Debray, 2006, p. 96).

And, of course, this strategy is working. More and more schools, teachers, and children are being labeled as failures each year as we move inexorably toward impossible test targets that were cynically crafted to produce failure, rather than success. . . .

Well, the dependable water carrier, Senator Gregg, is back with the Administration's version of NCLB 2.0. It comes with all the previous privatization features intact, but the strategies have been fine-tuned and intensified. Despite the allowance for "growth models" in all fifty states, which the media will no doubt portray as a good, flexible compromise, the demand for steady test score increases toward the impossible 100% proficiency test target by 2014 remains unchanged. The unyielding and unreachable proficiency target by 2014 makes growth models irrelevant to the continuing and expanded list of sanctions that are included in 2.0 in order to hasten the privatization goals. From Education Week:

. . . . The Senate bill was introduced July 12 by Sen. Judd Gregg, R-N.H., a former Senate education committee chairman and another architect of the NCLB law.

The measure, which is co-sponsored by Sen. Richard M. Burr, R-N.C., would echo some of Rep. Miller�s ideas by introducing more flexibility into the accountability system at the center of the law.

It would permit all 50 states to participate in the Department of Education�s growth-model pilot.

. . . .

The bill would retain the deadline of the 2013-14 school year for bringing all students to proficiency. . . .

In the new and improved privatization plan, the menu of sanctions for failure to meet AYP (replacing staff, private management, charter conversion, state takeover) remains in place, but two more options have have been added that will make privatization through outsourcing much simpler, administratively: school closure and mayoral takeover. Gone from NCLB 2.0 is the "Other" restructuring menu item, which most systems with below-the-cut-score-schools have thus far opted for as they try to survive.

Call and write Congress to insist they say NO! to reauthorization and YES to helping us save public education and make it better. Ask your Senator or Representative if schools in Chicago can honestly be held accountable for the same world-class standards as schools in Grosse Point, MI, given the kind of Third World realities of our cities, brought to light here by Bob Herbert's latest column:

The colorful playground outside Frederick Funston Elementary School has swings and sliding boards and a heartbreaking makeshift memorial for the 13-year-old girl who was shot to death in the playground a few weeks ago.

�It�s difficult out here,� said a woman who sat on a bench, watching her two small boys scampering around the playground.

What she meant was that there was nothing particularly unusual about schoolchildren getting blown away in Chicago�s black and Latino neighborhoods. Since September, when the last school year started, dozens of this city�s public school students have been murdered, most of them shot to death. As of last week, the toll of public schoolchildren slain in Chicago since the opening of the school year had reached 34, including two killed since the schools closed for summer vacation.

�That�s more than a kid every two weeks,� said Arne Duncan, the chief executive of the city�s school system. �Think about that.�

The girl killed in the playground was Schanna Gayden, who, according to the police, was shot in the head by a gang member who was aiming at someone else. Blair Holt, a high school junior, was shot to death on a city bus. Another teenager was killed as he walked home from a library.

Lazarus Jones, a 13-year-old computer-lover who was looking forward to beginning high school in the fall, was jumped by several members of a gang and beaten to death. Twelve-year-old Laura Joslin was stabbed to death, police said, by an 18-year-old girl on Thanksgiving Day. Victor Casillas, 15, was killed in a drive-by shooting.

And so on.

This should be a major national story, of course, and it would be if the slain children had come from more privileged backgrounds. But these are the kids that most of America cares nothing about � black, Latin and poor.

CNN�s Anderson Cooper covered the story. He said of the kids, poignantly: �Their names should be known. Their lives should be honored. Their deaths should be remembered.�

But that was an exception. Outside of Chicago, very little reporting has been done on this horrifying wave of murders. The truth, of course, is that Chicago is not alone. It may be jolting, even in our blood-drenched society, to have so many students from one school system killed over the course of a single school year. But most people know (and take for granted) that boys and girls growing up in America�s inner cities often have to deal with conditions that can fairly be compared to combat. . . .

Ask your Congressperson if these realites are enough to justify turning these urban children's struggling schools into privately-managed prison camps with no public oversight. Ask them.

Cross posted at Schools Matter.