Instead of repeating the words choice and accountability as if they are stand alone solutions and suggesting that the most important results are linked to fudge-able stats (test scores, graduation rates…) we should be demanding real educational accountability- for honesty; for integrity; for the good of all children, not just the ones with parents equipped to participate in the “choice” market.
And while those streaking across our public commons with their shiny, well-funded behinds hanging out, waving a banner saying “Me saying ‘accountability’ proves how much I care about the poors” can appear honest-we never really get into HOW the exemplar supposed stellar performing charter schools achieve their results.
This should also be part of the conversation.
Now I am fully in favor of parental right to choose. My wife and I spent a lot of our time chasing down choices that according to regulations should have been available, and then got told it depends on whether a school can afford to or wants to provide them. When alternative choices or settings exist, parents should be free to choose them but better questions would be:
Why all the praise for the opaque, privately controlled, selective charters who are held up for comparisons to disrespected and underfunded traditional schools?
“If they backfilled older grades, [Moskowitz] said, the incoming students’ lower relative academic preparation would adversely affect the schools’ other students.”
Traditional, truly public schools are not free to operate this way and their doors are open to any student coming to them regardless of their readiness to learn. They don’t filter their enrollments to artificially stroke and protect their testing and graduation stats (ala’ Moskowitz). They plow ahead, underfunded and over-mandated, trying to meet the needs of a mixed group of students that include top students and peers needing maximum support. It’s not just disingenuous to disparage obligation and prop up artifice-it’s shameful.
And yet every time a pro-choicer wants to prove the value of “choice”, Moskowitz’s “high performing” Success Academy is held up like a beacon with little examination of how she and the school is allowed to operate in order to make protecting those results first (putting students second). Not only is she more than willing to defend how the school filters in and pushes out students, she is shameless in her self-promotion, willing to empty her schools of staff and students to lobby in the streets for her private, selective enterprise during school time!
AND she had the nerve to call it a civics field trip or something. But who wrote that lesson plan?
“An option was not presented. The schools assigned everyone with a job, so you were either going to be an instructional coach or a bus captain,” one teacher explained. “They weren’t really asking us if that’s what we wanted to do. They were telling us that that’s what we were going to do instead of teaching for the day.”
Can you imagine the Education Post articles that would have been written if local schools had done this in order to push for and end to the ongoing failure of the Governor to meet public school funding obligations?
I do believe high quality choice means honest choice through valid comparison of earned (not manufactured) results that include test scores but go beyond.
Maybe the NAACP has some ideas on how to make this happen. Some way where we can have honest choices and valid comparisons instead of transparent campaigns to undermine schools that belong to the public.
If you haven’t yet, read it here first and then consider these for thought/discussion:
Does this story lead you to believe the people of China are better off because of Emperor Juan’s rule over them?
What does the story say either about the sacrifices made for the benefits of safety, beauty, tranquility –as opposed to the benefits and beauty to be found breaking away from safety and security?
Does Emperor Juan serve his own priorities first, or his people’s?
These are questions I got into with my girls when I shared this story (and I’ve been tempted to do a drama club production but an on-stage beheading in a public school serving a tiny community where I teach and everyone knows me is just unfeasible). When I get the chance to sip some wine and talk deep with friends from way back it’s usually analyzing stories and current events this way, and whenever possible I like to push students to see what might be under the words written and be able to explain it in their conversation and their writing while referring to the text.
As a teacher, I understand we need to be doing more for more students. The fact is that billionaires, corporations, and the politicians who we believe we elect have done so much damage that more and more children need our help. These “elected” are clearly paid to be unwilling, so it falls upon us to help them-we have no choice.
I say “help” because schooling and teaching them isn’t enough anymore. The needs go beyond connecting them with the curriculum, maximizing their academic abilities, and preparing them to progress through the stages of learner-to-doer and then onto capable, young, productive citizen of the world. Student needs are beginning to fall more and more into the realm of the social, emotional and psychological. Yes, I know that when most teachers signed onto the job, they imagined behavior/classroom management would be part of an essential toolbox- and it had better be. But the tools needed by the regular education classroom teacher are starting to be those that are traditionally found in the toolboxes of the school counselor; the school psychologist; the crisis intervention officer; the family therapist…
But sometimes there’s no time to walk down the hall to borrow that tool from one of those other professionals. Sometimes that person isn’t even in your school because your school can’t/won’t pay to have one on hand. Regardless of toolboxes and tools, when a first grader is throwing a chair around the room in a rage and melts down on a regular basis requiring the room to be emptied (and halting formal instruction); when kids are sleeping in a different “home”/place, on a different couch, and moving frequently because of the economic and emotional instability in their family lives; when kids draw cartoon pictures of why their night was so bad…and you immediately need to make a “hotline” call because what that one big stick figure is doing to that other little stick figure doesn’t look right…and your pretty sure that’s a police officer stick-man taking that other one away with its stick-arms behind its back…the job of “teacher” has gone far beyond what it was meant to be.
And still, the second lieutenants of education reform line up for a spot at the billionaires’ funding trough to spout off on the greedy, recalcitrant unions and the harm they do to children. As an example, I saw a recent twitter-share regarding a Chicago school librarian eliminated, parents willing to somehow “run” the library, and union resistance to that situation. My take is not that the union resists parents, but that unions hold leaders accountable when they cop out on responsibilities to provide quality education and qualified educators. The reform debate is already heavy with wealthy, amoral pirates looking to profit by reducing schools for the poor to second hand stores.
The conversation can become more transparent than artful…which I think it’s intended to be-“spreading freedom and democracy with bombs” type stuff. Blame the firefighters, but never the arsonists. You get the picture. Sadly, people are making money doing this.
school faces budget cut. Parents volunteer to fill gap. Union forces library to close. Kids lose. Great outcome.”
So Chicago, the womb that has spat out so many non-teaching education expert-geniuses guts it’s own schools further suppressing the poor and starving it’s children (only the poor ones though, not the Emanuels, Obamas, Duncans…) and “Union forces library to close” ??? Good god, folks. Without getting into the dripping sarcasm of “Great outcome”, or the fact that a temporary stint with TFA is the most classroom/school experience I ever see in people wanting to throw these tomatoes:
Where are you and have you been on ANY of the more systemic evils tearing our communities apart and really knee-capping these children and their families?
It’s sad that we have to turn to comedians more and more for a satirical, honest, and often depressing look at what is happening to this nation, the liars trying to spin it, and the rats in the hold looking to feed on the crumbs the liars spread around.
Jimmy Dore is an example of a really funny and at the same time excruciatingly truthful comedian who appears to understand the plight of being truly dedicated to people-especially children, and at the same time attacked by those looking to exploit children. Last April, as the theater called the Democratic Primaries rolled on, Dore tweeted:
Besides astute and accurate assessments of B.S. limited to 140 characters or less, I have watched and listened to him speak about the narrative cleverly pushed out to the public on “those greedy teachers”. I first saw Dore on The Young Turks when I fell further from the fold of mainstream cable/network news. He’s described himself as an admirer of George Carlin and I would say Carlin is watching and is proud.
If you haven’t seen him-check this out.
But getting back to tools: now we have a President-Elect Donald Trump.
I saw him coming, it made me sad then, and it makes me sad now. Not just because this entitled, arrogant asshat got elected, but because our nation which has become no more than a trademarked corporate tool and a pretend democracy made it happen. They had nothing to offer, nothing to inspire, no promise to get behind other than the continuation of proliferating Mid-East bombing and intrusion, establishment corporatism, de facto Wall Street rule, voter hypnosis and blind obedience, subjugation of organized and politically active workers…
THAT’S the real sadness, and THAT’S what education reform should be about: TAKING OUR NATION BACK. We owe our children much more than this privatizing “choice” market that stands proudly behind segregating what it deems the good eggs that can be efficiently trained and tested from the bad eggs it has created and now wants to wash its hands of-blaming the very teachers and schools those children will be left in or sent back to when they don’t assimilate to the “choice” model.
So now, faced with the consequences of a nation so disillusioned they are willing to go with a Trump because they were offered no other option to change all of this: they are all wringing their hands like a bunch of ninnies with their knickers in a twist, when they didn’t just do it to themselves, they did it to us and to our children.
And to MY children. I’m okay with making this personal because my three daughters will be here to deal with the repercussions of what our so-called leaders have created someday after I’m gone.
So with my mind on all of this, I get this video from a Facebook connection. The gist is a cheer for the honesty of Rep. Ruben Gallego. I say honesty is great, after you committed a crime. Even better would be to not commit the crime to begin with. Below is the comment I made to the Facebook post of this video.
“These representatives are babies and liars. The ranks of the working poor have grown. We are bombing in more countries than ever and giving more money than ever to take more lives than ever-often civilian…all with no declaration of war or public examination of why. Its all in the middle east…guess why it is. For the iddy biddy babies and democracy? Pshht, right. C’mon. Banker criminals skip away from crimes freer and wealthier, corporations buy influence from the white house to the state house to school boards. Meanwhile the urban poor watch as police crack down on them, undermine schools for their children, see natives hosed and tear-gassed while oil corporations use private troops, local police and push a pipeline through their water supply…Trump is a self-promotional clown, and dangerous. But the greedy liars and babies made him happen. They ignored the people, they were swayed into worshiping a hope and change charmer who didn’t change a thing (except taking habeas corpus away so citizens could be jailed indefinitely without cause). I don’t weep for this loser, I expect more, and they need to get behind real change or this whole planet is in even more danger.”
We owe more than “choice” for our children, and we’ve seen how “hope and change” has worked. It’s time to step up and demand more.
realedreform.com 