Tag: eli broad

OPEN LETTER TO BILL GATES ABOUT EDUCATION

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine

(from a public schools parent)

by Sue Peters

Dear Bill,

I am a public schools parent in your own general neighborhood (Seattle). I realize you have an interest in public education, and are a major participant and funder in the current “education reform” efforts being attempted nationally.

Unfortunately, I don’t agree with a number of the choices and “investments” you are making in our schools. I believe they have not been that effective, and some of them are even damaging.

Your all-tech $63 million “School of the Future” in Philadelphia, for example, apparently hasn’t worked out so well. Your $2 billion “Small Schools Initiative” was ultimately canceled (though the concept of smaller schools seems sound to me). And now you are promoting charter schools and “merit pay” for teachers as a measure of “teacher effectiveness,” even though recent reputable studies from Stanford and Vanderbilt universities cast serious doubts on both of these concepts, showing that most charters are not better than public schools and merit pay doesn’t work. (Also see “The Pillars of Education Reform Are Toppling.”)

In other words, you seem to be spending a lot of money and not getting good results.

Does “merit pay” actually improve “teacher effectiveness”?

As a keynote speaker at the national American Federation of Teachers (AFT) conference that was held here in Seattle last week, you said: “The truly impressive reforms share the same strategic core – they all include fair and reliable measures of teacher effectiveness that are tied to gains in student achievement. Public schools have never had this before. It’s a huge change – the kind of change that could match the scale of the problem.”

By this you mean teachers being measured by and paid according to student test scores.

But lashing teachers to test scores is the kind of “change” that will quash innovation and passion, and turn teachers into test-prep robots and schools into test-prep factories. It leads to teaching to the test. That’s already happening in some schools as a result of No Child Left Behind “Annual Yearly Progress” pressures. Not all students test well, by the way – didn’t Einstein famously get Fs in school? And not all learning shows up on tests. I have said before, how do you measure that “Aha!” moment when a child understands something for the first time? It will never show up on a standardized test, but those moments are the real measure of successful teaching.

Above all, research shows that “merit pay” for teachers doesn’t work – it does not lead to true and lasting improvements in genuine student academic achievement.

Meanwhile, perfectly good teachers and principals are being sacrificed and fired under such draconian rules, as this article in the July 19 New York Times attests, “A Popular Principal, Wounded by Government’s Good Intentions.”

One of the main problems with merit pay is that it’s based on the flawed presumption that teachers are motivated by greed and competition, and not by collaboration and helping students learn. But teaching is a cooperative profession; the best teachers are not motivated by making more money than their colleagues.

You yourself have said you want teachers to share their expertise with each other, so they can all become stronger teachers. They already do that, for starters. But how likely is it that they will continue to help each other if you set up a scheme in which they are pressured to compete with each other to get bonuses?

If you want teachers to improve, help give them the respect and salaries they deserve, the resources they need, and the autonomy to be creative and innovative and cooperative with each other, and small classes so they can give each student the attention s/he needs.

Why charter schools?

At the National Charter Schools Conference on June 29 in Chicago where you also spoke, you promoted charters – privately run schools that use public money but have little to no public oversight.  Why do you keep promoting this concept when growing evidence shows that most charters are no better than public schools? In fact, according to Stanford’s CREDO study, as many as 83 percent of charter schools perform no better or do worse than public schools.

Even the Secretary of Education Arne Duncan recently admitted at the same convention of charter operators that charters have serious problems: “…unfortunately, we have far too many mediocre charters and we have far too many charter schools that are absolutely low performing.” (Duncan’s address to the National Charter Schools Conference, July 1, 2010.)

(Also see: “Study Finds No Clear Edge for Charter Schools,” Education Week, June 29, 2010.)

Education reformers repeatedly claim to be “data-driven.” The data do not support charters.

If you support innovation, take a look around inside public school districts. Secretary Duncan recently toured Aviation High School, an innovative public school here in the Puget Sound area. Check out the Nova Project, an innovative alternative high school in Seattle that has some of the most independent thinking and civically aware kids I’ve ever met and some of the highest SAT scores in the district. In Seattle, we also have successful and award- winning schools for highly gifted kids that challenge these kids with an accelerated and deeper curriculum while keeping them in with their age group peers (Accelerated Progress Program), and a number of alternative schools that all have waitlists because they are so popular – Salmon Bay K-8, Thornton Creek. And yet your education reform colleagues and your own foundation are pushing curriculum alignment and standardization on all our schools, quashing any chance for individuality or innovation. That’s a mixed message you are sending.

While it is certainly good of you to be generous with your wealth, it would seem that you are funneling good money after bad, as the saying goes.

So I have some suggestions for you. As a parent with children in public schools, as someone who is the product of both private and public schools and an international education, I hope you will consider my thoughts on how you can direct your public education involvement in a manner that will get genuine and positive results for children. These would be investments in education that parents like me could get behind.

Here are three ideas. They are not flashy. They are not tech-oriented. But they will get positive results.

Invest in Smaller Class Sizes

If you want to fund education and make a difference, fund smaller class sizes. Help school districts hire more (and genuinely qualified – not short-term, inexperienced Teach for America type) teachers and reduce class sizes. Every child would benefit from more one-on-one interaction with a teacher. I don’t think it takes a multi-million dollar “study” to prove that. Here in Seattle our superintendent has laid off teachers two years in a row and closed schools. So class sizes are large and getting bigger.

One of the main reasons people who can afford it choose private schools is because they tend to offer smaller teacher-student ratios.

I’ve read you’d like to see kids taught en masse by one teacher on camera beaming a lecture via the Internet to thousands of students at once. While technology may have its place in our world and in schools, don’t you agree that the most valuable connection a child can have is not to the Internet, but with a teacher, a parent, a nurturing human who will give this child the individualized, personalized attention s/he needs?

Here’s a study that shows that class sizes matter:  “Smaller is Better: First-hand Reports of Early Class Size Reduction in New York City Public Schools,” as does this blog: Class Size Matters.

At the AFT conference, you said something that implied that funding for public schools has gone up in my lifetime and class sizes have gone down: “The United States has been struggling for decades to improve our public schools. We have tried reform after reform. We’ve poured in new investments. Since 1973, we have doubled per-pupil spending. We’ve moved from one adult for every 14 students to one adult for every eight students.”

I am confused by this claim because all my life (which began before 1973) public schools have been scrambling for money, school districts are constantly telling us parents, our kids and their teachers that cuts and layoffs and school closures have to happen. Our own state of Washington, Bill, ranks 46th in the nation for per-pupil funding! Washington State recently passed a law mandating full state funding of K-12 education, yet that is not happening. Meanwhile in California, the public education system has been drained of property tax revenue ever since the passage of Proposition 13 in 1978.

Are you referring to student-teacher ratios? Or do these “adults” you speak of include all adults in the school district,  from counselors to custodians to central district office staff? (If the latter, that would be true for Seattle, which has a disproportionately high and growing number of administrators in its overstaffed central office. (See “Central Administration Efficiency in Seattle Public Schools,” a very troubling report by parent/analyst Meg Diaz.)

Class sizes have not gotten smaller in my lifetime. Neither I nor any of my children have ever been in a public school class of eight – or 14, for that matter. Here in Washington, teacher to student ratio has not gone down, even though we voted for it on Initiative 728 which passed with 72 percent of the vote in 2000.

What is your source for this data? Is it that McKinsey & Corp study that Vicki Phillips, your foundation’s education director, has referred to in the past? The same discredited consulting firm that was “a key architect of the strategic thinking that made Enron a Wall Street darling,” according to Businessweek? If so, I think you can understand how one might question their research.

Lastly here’s a personal story: One day earlier this year, I sat at my kindergarten son’s lunchroom where some of the kids were goofing around. When I told them as group to settle down, I got a limited response. But then I knelt down and looked one of the boys in the eyes and asked him about one of his hobbies, he calmed down immediately and engaged with me. That personal engagement is priceless and essential to good and inspired teaching. It’s not possible when classes are too big and teachers are overwhelmed.

Consider Grants for Books

I sense you have mixed feeling about the value of books. I understand your “School of the Future” in Philadelphia is bookless, paperless and pencil-less, but offers a laptop and Microsoft portal for every child.

I personally want my children to know the pleasure of reading an actual book, the smell of the paper, perhaps the feel of the embossed letters of the title or the details of the illustrations, the joy of summer reading while lying on the grass or idly spinning from a tire swing with a book in hand, unplugged from the wired world.

If you and Melinda were to simply create an endowment that would provide every school in the district, for example, a grant to stock their libraries, buy complete textbooks for classes, that would be an amazing gift and would go a long way toward endearing you to the community for such an obvious, tangible contribution. Because, as you may or may not know, schools like Rainier Beach High School in Seattle don’t have complete or updated sets of history books. Hard to believe, but true. Teachers across the nation still scramble and scrounge to buy class sets of books. My own brother, a public school teacher in California, is trying to gather enough copies of Shakespeare plays for his class. I’m helping him out by scouring local used bookstores up here and mailing them to him. Is this the way it should be? Don’t you agree that every child in every class should be able to take home and spend time with a book, read it on the school bus, even if they are not fortunate enough to own a laptop, and that the cost should not come out of the teacher’s own pocket?

I can imagine a bookplate with your and Melinda’s name on it. (I believe Paul Allen does something similar.) If my children were to grow up believing that you are the providers of books to Seattle school children, believe me, you would rank high in their pantheon of heroes. They love books. (The thrice-yearly Measures of Academic Progress™ computerized test your foundation may be funding, not so much.)

How about Nutrition & Health here in the U.S.?

There are kids who come to school hungry, as I’m sure you know. School districts serve packaged food of questionable nutritional value. Good nutrition would manifest itself in positive and tangible ways. I know you are concerned about health in other parts of the world — how about in your own backyard?

Imagine a Gates Foundation program that supported the creation of freshly cooked meals made of locally and sustainably grown organic produce for all of Seattle’s public schools. (I don’t mean Monsanto-style GM foods, by the way.) I promise you that a well-fed child will do better in school than one who is hungry or on a nutritionally empty diet. This would also create business opportunities for local farmers.

In sum, these ideas, simple as they might seem, will work. They will help kids do better in school. Charters, merit pay have a very mixed and inconsistent record.

I know you and Eli Broad and others have some notions about how you would like schools to be. But as you have acknowledged yourself, you are not an education expert, and I understand that neither you nor your children have attended public schools. So I am asking you to listen to parents and teachers and kids who are in the public schools, who are on the receiving end of all that is good and not so good about our current system, and on the receiving end of all your “reforms,” and learn what we really need and want for our kids.

I suggest you take a look closer to home at the town of Everett, Washington, where the school district has managed to decrease high school drop-out rates significantly in the last few years. (See: “Simple, steady is way to win,” by Danny Westneat, Seattle Times  and “Once shamefully low, Everett’s graduation rate soars,” by Linda Shaw, Seattle Times.) How? With computers and Smart Boards? No, with old-fashioned follow-up, teachers and counselors getting to know kids and keeping them in their sights, engaging and challenging the students with interesting classes. What this requires is the time and care of sufficient staff. Meanwhile, here in Seattle, the school district (SPS) continues to lay off needed teachers and counselors. If you could offer a grant to SPS to rehire these crucial people, you would see results, I guarantee it.

I would value the opportunity to meet with you to discuss these and other thoughts about education. Your new foundation headquarters are not too far from where I live. You can reach me care of Seattle Education 2010, a blog some parents and I started up last year in response to the school closures and “reforms” our children and their schools have been subjected to.

Sincerely,

Sue Peters

Seattle public schools parent

July 2010

Sue Peters is a Seattle-based writer and public schools activist. She co-edits the Seattle Education 2010 blog which can be found here
and here.

Bill Gates, co-chair and trustee of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, was a speaker at the AFT convention held in the Seattle last week. His speech can be found here.

PUBLIC EDUCATION

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine

bostonlatin_school

The first publicly supported secondary school in the United States, the Boston Latin School, founded in 1634, in its current location in Boston’s Fenway neighborhood.

HECKUVA JOB, ARNE

Why is Obama continuing the failed conservative & corporate-driven “education reform” policies of George Bush?

by Horatio Guernica

It’s not been a great few weeks for Obama’s education secretary and basketball buddy Arne Duncan.

In USA Today on July 12 “Chicago schools report contradicts Obama and Duncan,” he took a hit for padding his resume with false triumphs.

A new report shows that the so-called Chicago Renaissance 2010 that happened on his watch as “CEO” of Chicago’s public schools for seven years before being tapped by Obama didn’t actually happen as stated. Writes Greg Toppo:

The Civic Committee of The Commercial Club of Chicago, a supporter of Duncan and Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley’s push for more control of city schools, issued the report June 30. It says city schools have made little progress since 2003.

Its key findings stand in stark contrast to assertions President Obama made in December when he nominated Duncan as Education secretary.

Uh oh.

Toppo continues: In December, Obama said that during a seven-year tenure, Duncan had boosted elementary school test scores “from 38% of students meeting the standards to 67%” — a gain of 29 percentage points. But the new report found that, adjusting for changes in tests and procedures, students’ pass rates grew only about 8 percentage points.

It would appear that many measures President Obama touted to explain his promotion of Duncan to top edu spot have turned out to be false.

The article likens this story to a similar tale of trumped up “improvements” that happened in Texas on Superintendent Rod Paige’s watch, who became George Bush’s education czar. Unfortunately, Obama’s education guy and Bush’s education guy share more than padded resumes.

In fact, through Arne Duncan, Obama is pretty much continuing the failed No Child Left Behind mindset and policy of the Bush era, which lashes everyone to the whipping post of standardized testing, blames teachers for all of schools’ (and by extension, society’s) ills, and quashes pretty much all chance of creativity, ingenuity in the classroom and, essentially, happy kids and schools. The so-called “education reformers” are now comprised of an unholy alliance of conservatives and neo-liberals who meet on the board of the Broad Foundation or their indoctrinating retreats. They preach the gospel of the business model as the panacea for all that ails our public schools, and are frothing at the mouth to privatize one of our last remaining public assets, public schools. They weren’t able to convince the nation of the virtue of vouchers so now they demand charters –or else!– which follows a similar scheme: public funding gets rerouted into private hands.

Until recently, Duncan was on the board of directors of the Broad Foundation, the pro-charter, pro business-model organization of AIG billionaire Eli Broad, which practices what it labels “venture philanthropy,” along with Obama’s checkered economic advisor Larry Summers, KIPP charter’s CEO Richard Barth, Teach for America CEO Wendy Kopp, and controversial reformite school superintendents Joel Klein, Michelle Rhee, and Maria Goodloe-Johnson.

It’s the “or else!” part of the equation that’s the most disturbing and, frankly, offensive. Duncan has said he will award grants from the $4.35 billion Race to the Top fund, education money from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, only to states that implement merit pay for teachers and allow charters into their public schools. (The 10 states that currently do not allow charters are apparently SOL.)

President Obama and Arne Duncan are essentially dangling money over funds-starved school districts and saying “Do it our way, or no stimulus money for you!”

The problem is, it’s becoming more and more evident that the reformers’ “solutions” don’t work, and above all, may even harm the very kids whom they claim to be concerned about.

In fact, according to a recent (6/15/09) study by the Center For Research On Education Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University (ironically funded by the pro-charter Dell and Walton foundations), charters schools do not necessarily perform any better than public schools. In fact, 37 percent perform worse. And 46 percent perform no better than public schools. Only 17 percent of charter schools performed any better than public schools.

Education Week reported, “If this study shows anything, it shows that we’ve got a two-to-one margin of bad charters to good charters,” said Margaret E. Raymond, the director of the center and the study’s lead author. “That’s a red flag.”

Apparently charter schools have long had a mixed record.

The CREDO results are not surprising when you consider that the media is peppered with fairly constant reports of negative or disturbing stories about privatized charters (including the reformers’ ballyhooed KIPP model), like “Charter school faces withdrawals over punishment” or even this supposed “success story” in the L.A.Times.

Faced with such evidence, Duncan himself was recently forced to make a distinction between good charters and bad ones.

Even fellow reformite Bill Gates’ School of the Future has failed. The bookless, pencil-less, high surveillance (Gates proposed video cameras in the gym for instant replays– okay, but has also proposed having cameras in classrooms so principals can monitor teachers—creepy), high tech experiment for poor kids of color in Philadelphia hasn’t produced great results. For one thing, the kids are afraid to take home their Microsoft donated laptops for fear of getting robbed on the way.

Actually, let’s pause for a moment on this simple image: a school without books or pencils. Is that a school that anyone would like to go to? That doesn’t even sound like a school, but some kind of sterile institution. It would seem that Gates and his allies want to prepare our kids for a life as computer drones.

Meanwhile, Duncan’s record in Chicago is more troubling the deeper you look.

The disturbing alliance between private charters and the military has brought multiple ROTC schools to Chicago, also on Duncan’s watch. This makes Chicago’s school system “the most militarized in the country,” reported writer Andy Kroll back in January when Duncan was first tapped by Obama. In “The Military-Corporate Legacy of the New Secretary of Education,” from Tom Dispatch, Kroll wrote of Duncan:

“He was described as the compromise candidate between powerful teachers’ unions and the advocates of charter schools and merit pay. He was also regularly hailed as a “reformer,” fearless when it came to challenging the educational status quo and more than willing to shake up hidebound, moribund public school systems.”

“Yet a closer investigation of Duncan’s record in Chicago casts doubt on that label. As he packs up for Washington, Duncan leaves behind a Windy City legacy that’s hardly cause for optimism, emphasizing as it does a business-minded, market-driven model for education. If he is a “reformer,” his style of management is distinctly top-down, corporate, and privatizing. It views teachers as expendable, unions as unnecessary, and students as customers.

Disturbing as well is the prominence of Duncan’s belief in offering a key role in public education to the military. Chicago’s school system is currently the most militarized in the country, boasting five military academies, nearly three dozen smaller Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps programs within existing high schools, and numerous middle school Junior ROTC programs. More troubling yet, the military academies he’s started are nearly all located in low-income, minority neighborhoods. This merging of military training and education naturally raises concerns about whether such academies will be not just education centers, but recruitment centers as well.”

In March, blogger Kenneth Libby at Our Global Education also cast doubt on Duncan’s accomplishments. At Ariel Community Academy, for example, kids are indoctrinated in the glories of capitalism. They are given a $20K portfolio to manage. When they graduate from eighth grade, they are expected to hand over the profits to the first graders. This past year, their investments have suffered the ravages of the economy and profits have been scarce. Talk about a “teachable moment.” Maybe the Ariel kids are learning a valuable life lesson after all, about the empty values and promises of capitalism.

Meanwhile, over in D.C., the accomplishments of another “education reformer” have come into question recently.  According to the Washington Post on July 16, a report says D.C. School Chancellor Rhee tweaked test results too. Writes Bill Turque,

“These include intensive test preparation targeted to a narrow group of students on the cusp of proficient, or passing, scores, and ‘cleaning the rosters’ of students ineligible to take the tests — and also likely to pull the numbers down. Chancellor Michelle A. Rhee described some of these approaches as the pursuit of ‘low-hanging fruit.’”

The practice is not illegal, but it does spike test results and create the illusion of student “improvement.”

The saddest part about this is that the kids who need the most help are not getting it from these schools district chancellor/CEOs/superintendent “reformists” who appear to care more about test scores and their own self-aggrandizement than actually educating kids.

So why is Obama forcing bad policy down everyone’s throats? Moreover, why is he continuing the conservative NCLB policies of George W. Bush? And why does the president persist in dashing everyone’s hopes with policy capitulations like “education reform” and by consorting with discredited recidivist capitalists who helped bring our economy down in the first place?

The original idea of charter schools was a much more organic one. Parents, community members banded together to create schools that can have some independence in curriculum while still open to public school kids. Most public school parents I know have no problem with that idea. But that model has been hijacked by the free marketers who want a piece of that public funding action, and think they know better how to run a school, or can at least feign it long enough to cash in before they ship out. They talk about “eliminating the achievement gap” but measure that solely, it appears, through test scores. But their real results are questionable. There are too many reports of charter schools that limit or don’t admit special needs kids (that’s one way to keep test scores up, right?) or throw challenging kids out of the school mid-year, after they have cashed in the kids’ per-pupil state funds, and sometimes before the testing season so these kids’ scores don’t sully the schools’ records.

Do these kinds of practices help the most needy kids at the bottom of the gap? Obviously not.

Is it good business though? You betcha—it makes these “enterprises,” which are run by CEOs, by the way, so much more “efficient.” Why, after all, waste resources on a troublesome product (or is it “customer”)?

This is pretty damn unconscionable.

It appears that more and more of these ‘miracle’ charter corporations are discovering that educating a child takes something other than a laptop, a uniform, rigid discipline or an energetic young teacher with a shallow education background who is easily spent and replaced after a couple of years.

Educating kids is hard work that takes a long time. A lifetime, even. Results are not always immediate or tangible. Sometimes the most significant measure of a child’s development is that spark in their eye when they understand something for the first time, and not by how many little eggs they can fill out correctly on a Scantron test card using a No. 2 pencil in a set amount of time. Knowing how to teach well doesn’t happen immediately either. Time, experience, familiarity with what comprises an inspiring curriculum, a deep understanding of the ways and wiles and woes of children–these conspire to make a teacher great.  And yet another mantra of the reformists is that all older teachers are bad and need to be replaced. This of course has more to do with the privatizers’ mission to break the teacher’s union, than actually support of good teaching in our schools.

President Obama should can No Child Left Behind. He should sic his basketball pal on the harder task of listening, observing, talking to local school communities and finding out what really works, what parents really want, and expand and duplicate those models.There are terrific public schools out there giving kids a great and nurturing education. They should not be destroyed in the name of “reform” or because they represent someone’s idea of “the status quo.”

If Obama is going to play the conservative game, then why doesn’t he honor state’s rights and let each state decide for itself, each school district, even, how it will spend the stimulus money, with a plan and goals that are germane to the children in their community?

And how many more signs of the Apocalypse will it take for these “reformers” to see that the American way of doing business is not necessarily the best way to run things? It hasn’t worked well for our economy, has it, so why foist it on our kids’ schools?

Right now, schools and school districts are being ravaged or short-changed in the name of “education reform” from Oakland to Antioch to Seattle.

I am willing to believe that if Barack Obama were to listen to the parents, teachers and communities of America’s public schools – instead of just the Gates, Broads and Walton billionaires who have no background in education, but financial incentives to meddle with education — he would not continue with this failed agenda.

The president should read ex-Microsftie Scott Oki’s book Outrageous Learning in which he says things like: “When it comes to education, one size does not fit all. Despite our highly-industrialized modern society, there is no way to automate learning. Even today, every child’s education should be hand-crafted, with knowledge patiently passed from the teacher to the mind of the student.”

President Obama should read and heed Herb Kohl’s insightful “Open Letter to Arne Duncan”.

“It is possible to maintain high standards for all children, to help students learn how to speak thoughtfully, think through problems, and create imaginative representations of the world as it is and as it could be, without forcing them through a regime of high-stakes testing. Attention has to be paid to the richness of the curriculum itself and time has to be allocated to thoughtful exploration and experimentation. It is easy to ignore content when the sole focus is on test scores.

Your administration has the opportunity, when NCLB comes up for reauthorization, to set the tone, aspirations, and philosophical and moral grounds for reform that develops the intelligence, creativity, and social and personal sensitivity of students.”

It makes one wonder why Obama didn’t instead choose an educator like Linda Darling-Hammond for his top post, as suggested by education scholar and author Alfie Kohn back in December 2008?

Perhaps this punitive approach to “reforming” public schools is a way for the neo-liberal Democrats to divert attention from the fact that they too have failed our poorest, most vulnerable families and kids, with their bankrupt rah rah Wall St. alliances and capitulations on issues that would make everyone’s standard of living better, from single payer health care to gun control.

That’s really what’s at the heart of the matter—how to help the kids who already have hurdles in their life. To what extent can a teacher or a school be expected to transcend all the obstacles of poverty, racial inequity, language barriers?

It’s all too easy for the rich “philanthropists” to blame teachers or public schools for failing our most vulnerable kids, rather than acknowledge and address the truly difficult, profound and complex social injustice and class inequality in our country that hold too many kids down – and the free market system that helped create this inequity in the first place, not least of which by sending our economy into its current Depression.

Our nation’s public schools should not be forced to accept failed “solutions” devised by corporate myopics. It says something about the legitimacy of such “reforms” when the president has to have his education secretary threaten states with ultimatums rather than winning community support.

That was the Bush/Cheney way of doing things. Didn’t American voters just vote to end all that?

Horatio Guernica is the pen name of a West Coast writer.