2007 May | Edwize

May 30, 2007

The National Spelling Bee - Liveblogged

Filed under: Education by Kombiz Lavasany @ 3:18 pm

“Throwing things,” is currently liveblogging the national spelling bee. It’s a really an enthralling read, if for no other reason than they have a former national finalist among their cohort of live bloggers (Shonda Rhimes -creator of Grey’s Anatomy), as well as a bunch of finalists and possibly a former winner commenting on the site. It may be the only blog on the planet where you can read sentences like:

The spelling wheat has been separated from this year’s chaff, and Round 3 has begun, with 286 spellers now reduced to 107 . . . ding!, 106, as the fear of poisons, TAHKS-uh-FO-bee-uh, has infected one of the spellers.

and

FIRST THING WE DO, LET’S KILL ALL THE LAWYERS: If there is a villain in this first two-thirds of the second round of the Bee, it is the evil lawyer. Contestants have been dismissed, summarily adjudged, vacated, and remanded to the crying room with such every-day lawyer parlance as “privilege,” “notarize,” “concede,” “debtor,” and “felony,” each of which I have used in a brief in the last six months

and Sports Center doesn’t can’t top this type of commentary

I’m glad this round isn’t on TV, because it makes the kids empty vessels into which we can hypothesize a personality and backstory to match their geography, sponsorship, and the words with which they will forever be associated. Did Theo Terry of Victoria, BC, slip out of the prelims transposing vowels in distracted, sweaty-palmed, palpitating infatuation with Hailey Ungar of Vancouver, BC — a girl who lives but a ferry ride and a world away. Wait for him, Hailey — spelling can be your bridge across the Straits of Georgia and Haro. And what potent concoction of boldness, understanding, and precocious (or precocial) mustacio was it that crowned subcontinental Prateek Kohli as king of the Long Island Jewish World? When will Dr. Bailly finally inform Kate Weir of Wellington, New Zealand, that while she is a speller par excellence, she stinks at geography, because this is the national spelling bee and New Zealand is neither a territory of the US nor a suburb (unlike the provinces)?

Yet, the education wars haven’t receded for the competition either. A friend who works nearby the site of the National Spelling Bee emails to say:

Interestingly, The contest has drawn a good sized crowd of protesters who are demanding an increase in the number of words that are spelled phonetically. I kid you not.

Congratulations to all the kids as well as their parents and their teachers for making it this far.

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May 29, 2007

Philadelphia Follies Continue, As Vallas Prepares To Take His Show On The Road

Filed under: Privatization by Leo Casey @ 10:36 pm

What’s absolutely stunning about the continuing fascination with “multiple provider” models of outsourcing public schools to private management is the obliviousness of its leading adherents to the disastrous results in the two major urban school districts — New Orleans and Philadelphia — where the model has been tried. In the past, Edwize has pointed out major studies highlighting the failures of both experiments, here and here.

This week’s news brings to light yet another exposé of the failures in Philadelphia — this time an internal district study that Philadelphia school district head Paul Vallas had done his best to deep six, as it had concluded that the district should pull the plug on the contracts with every one of the six private EMOs. The intrepid Philadelphia Public School Notebook published the report on its website, and the Philadelphia Inquirer reported on its details. The AFT’s NCLBlog reports on it here.

Vallas is now triumphantly heading off to New Orleans, as if he was a conquering hero. He seems to have become the Sanjaya Malakar of American education — you watch his performance, and you’re damned if you can figure out what people see in him. Where is Simon Cowell now that we need him?

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Here And There

Filed under: NCLB Testing by Leo Casey @ 2:06 pm

The Sunday Magazine of the New York Times has an interesting essay, “Standardizing the Standards,” which discusses the problems in acquiring meaningful data on student learning from the high stakes tests used by various states under NCLB. If the state standardized tests are to be believed, 71% of Florida schools and 4% of Wisconsin schools are failing to make the No Child Left Behind Annual Yearly Progress [AYP] benchmarks. In the face of such incredulous results, author Ann Hulbert invokes Campbell’s Law to explain the manipulations, deliberate and otherwise, of performance data. Campbell, a social psychologist, posited in 1975 that “the more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.” Hulbert notes that making NAEP into a national high stakes test could eliminate the incredulous differences in reports of student proficiency among the states, but insofar as it too would be subject to Campbell’s law, distortions and corruptions currently absent from that exam would appear. One of the reasons why NAEP data is one of the more accurate measures of learning now available, for example, is that there is no ‘test preparation’ for it, and that would change overnight if it were to become a hig stakes exam.

With Campbell’s Law in mind, we thought that it might be time to fashion a new law — the Education CEO law — to describe what happens when non-educators take over the management of schools and school districts, a phenomenon which is unfortunately on the wax and not the wane. The less actual classroom and school experience a person in school management has, we have learned, the less likely they are to see a need for such experience and the more apt they are to disregard the advice of experienced educators in making policy decisions. The most bone-headed mistakes we have seen invariably come from those with the least educational experience — and no desire to listen to those who do possess such experience.

In the “give credit where credit is due” department, it was refreshing to see Checker Finn relate the virtues of experience working with real teachers in real schools. “It’s been healthy to emerge from the ivory tower,” Finn wrote in his weekly Gadfly on his Fordham Institute’s experience as a charter authorizer in Ohio, “to work closely with real educators trying to do right by real children — almost all of them poor, minority, and ill-served by traditional schools — in real places.” In a piece worth reading, Finn relates a number of things that experience have taught them, including that

It’s far harder than theorists thought to actually close a mediocre (or even bad) school. I plead guilty to having helped to propagate a naïve doctrine here. Unless its students face imminent danger or someone has fled to Bermuda with the payroll, shuttering a school is a tricky business. Parents and kids usually like their school, no matter its low test scores and torpid curriculum, and don’t want it closed any more than do the clients of a surplus district school.

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May 24, 2007

From Green Dot To Teacher Union Strategy

Filed under: Charter School by Leo Casey @ 3:35 pm

There is an interesting exchange on Fred Klonsky’s blog, as a discussion of the Green Dot charters becomes an occasion for discussing what’s ‘public’ and what’s ‘private’ in education, and teacher union stratagies and approaches to charter schools and small schools. Fred is the president of an Illinois NEA local. [You have to read the comments to really appreciate the dialogue.]

Having taken a ‘blood oath’ that we would respond only to substantive discussions of the ‘Green Dot tenure’ issue, it was a welcome development that today Eduwonk’s Andy Rotherham addressed the question of whether the term ‘tenure’ was a useful point of departure for a discussion. There are some not insignificant points of agreement between us: the real question is whether Green Dot teachers have due process rights against arbitrary and unreasonable discipline and dismissal, whatever term is used to describe it. Where we still disagree is that Andy seems to think that Green Dot’s ‘just cause’ standard and a grievance process that culminates with a hearing before an impartial arbitrator is a level of protection less than tenure. We don’t see that, and we have yet to see anyone even try to explain how that is the case. If anything, the Green Dot contract offers greater protection, since it covers all employees, where tenure protections do not cover probationary employees in their first years of service. Quite frankly, the public discourse around tenure and the actual real world of tenure rights are two very different things, in no small part because those who seek ‘at will’ standards of employment have a vested interest in promoting the idea that ‘tenure’ keeps school districts from dismissing teachers who are not doing their work.

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May 23, 2007

The Civil War In Four Minutes

Filed under: Teaching by Leo Casey @ 11:33 am

You Tube as an educational tool?

This You Tube video — the Civil War in four minutes — provides an interesting lens for the visual learner. Histories of the Civil War, especially for the high school student, tend to lose the forest of the war in the trees of particular campaigns and battles; this little video provides a context for all of those details. One can see how the first years of the war were largely a bloody stalemate, look at how the war in the West and Gettysburg broke that stalemate, understand how Sherman’s March to the Sea broke the back of the Confederacy and grasp the strategic logic of campaigns designed to split the South and the North.

Hat tip to Cliopatria, an academic history blog.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e06jNDhYo2I[/youtube]

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May 22, 2007

Consultation, Consensus and Sign-Offs: What Should Be the Role of Chapters in School Decisions?

Filed under: Education NYC DOE by Peter Goodman @ 2:34 pm

Every principal has now selected a School Support Organization: either one of the four theme-based organizations headed by current regional superintendents, Empowerment or one of the Partnership Support Organizations (PSO). None of these organizations will rate/evaluate/hire or fire supervisors - that will be the role of the newly selected thirty-two community superintendents and the nine high school superintendents. Many are currently local instructional superintendents with close ties to their districts.

In the online registration process the principal “certifies” that s/he consulted with the School Leadership Team. At the May 9th Delegate Assembly a delegate asked “Who has the final decision?” The DOE rep answered “The principal,” and some in the audience jeered.

The creation of School Leadership Teams required that the Chapter Leader serve on the Team, however, while the Chapter Leader, and other teacher members may participate in discussions the “last word” is that of the Principal.

The C-30 process has always been a charade. Teachers participated in the process but ultimately the decision was that of the principal or the superintendent. Does participating in the selection of your boss tie you to the decision? In reality, schools with close relationships with Parent Associations have substantial impact on the process. Mirroring on the local level what the union is achieving on the City level.

In Europe it is commonplace for unions to have positions on corporate Boards of Directors - the system is called codetermination.

The entire question of consultation, consensus, and shared decision making are significant issues.

One of the key characteristics of effective schools is collaboration: between the principal and the staff and among staff members. In some schools the principals and the teachers are a team — interaction and collaboration are core premises. In too many schools all decisions are made in isolation by the principal. These schools are “factory model” schools, and, frequently, the product is less than the sum of the parts.

Would a “co-detemination” model work on the central School Board or local School Boards? Can you mandate consensus? Are Chapter sign offs empowering or obstructing?

As the current Mayoral control legislation moves towards sunset the question of what should replace it is both complex and crucial.

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May 21, 2007

The coming changes

Filed under: New Teacher Diaries by MsB @ 3:40 pm

MsB is the pseudonym for a second-year high school English teacher in Brooklyn.

The thought of next year scares me. All we talk about are the changes that are going to be made. Naturally, there is always room for improvement. The current educational system isn’t exactly flawless. The more experienced teachers shrug off the worries about next year. They’ve seen a million changes in the education system. It’s all the same to them. For me, a newer teacher, I am shaking in my newly pressed teacher pants. No superintendent? No one above our principal? What will this do to our school?

Again, people don’t seem alarmed. No teacher believes that it will affect their teaching at all. How can this be? The thought of other companies giving us curriculum and deciding what we will teach isn’t scary? Will the changes in administration trickle down and affect our teaching?

There are many options that each school can take. Right now, my school is leaning towards Empowerment. Sounds like a good thing. The language these politicians use always amuses me. Empowerment. They are dangling the thought of freedom over our heads, but really there is nothing empowering about it. If we fail with this newfound freedom, which many schools will, there is the threat of being closed down like so many of our neighboring schools. Our principal assumes if we form a network with similar schools, we can band together and change the world. Our principal wants us to join the best schools in my borough. My thoughts are that they won’t want us in their network. We are by far not one of the best schools in Brooklyn. We will surely only hold them down. And once we have a network, then what? See who in our network has the largest suspension center? Compare broken-down classrooms? Share our one working overhead projector?

As far as individual teachers are concerned, there is talk about how each teacher will be graded. There are plenty of rumors going around about how the schools have to account for the progress of every single student. Each student will have their own barcode (we all knew this was only a matter of time), and they will measure how much they progress and how much they learned. If your students don’t seem to have improved, then that teacher gets a bad grade. I have 170 students that I teach on a daily basis. Can I improve all of their ability to think? Maybe, but that’s not what I’m being graded on. Can I get them all to pass a test? Maybe not, but that is what matters in the end.

Is it wrong that all I want to do is teach? These tests get in the way of that. Teaching towards a test does not actually involve teaching. When you are preparing for a state exam, it’s explaining a formula to the kids. If you do A, B and C, you will pass. Instead, we should be focusing on thinking. We should be wondering how we can get our students to think critically about the world. There is already too much on our plates. We have to teach Regents prep, novels, poems, stories, writing, vocabulary, spelling, grammar, PSAT prep and more Regents prep. Therefore, we must be creative in our teaching methods.

I hate to be so negative, but in all of the conversations about the changes, no one ever seems to be thinking about what is best for the children. I understand that there needs to be some standard by which we can assess our children, but aren’t there other ways of doing this?

In my two years of teaching, I never once thought my job was in jeopardy. But soon, I fear, tenure will be a thing of the past, no one will be safe, and the youth that are the future of our country will grow up to be great robots that can fill out a bubble sheet with their eyes closed and one hand behind their backs.

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May 18, 2007

Steve Barr, Welcome To Our World [Updated]

Filed under: Charter School by Leo Casey @ 2:32 pm

Barr, founder and director of the unionized Green Dot Charter Schools in Los Angeles, is meeting with UFT President Randi Weingarten later today, and so he has been drawn into the evidence free vortex that surrounds discussion of teacher unions in certain quarters of the blogosphere.

From the “make up whatever facts fit today’s rant” school of thought, there is the assertion that Barr has thrown tenure out the window. Ed Sector boss Andy Rotherham adds his two cents, that throwing out tenure is a good thing.

Someone might take the trouble to read the Green Dot contract, and compare it what is done in non-union charter schools, including those which Rotherham faithfully promotes in his capacity as a board member of the union-busting New York Charter School Association.

The management of anti-union charter schools insist that the only acceptable standard of employment is “at-will employment,” under which an employee can be dismissed at any time for any reason whatsoever – good, bad or indifferent. Such a standard comes in handy when anti-union charter school managements want to fire teachers for such high crimes and misdemeanors as sharing with their colleagues information on salaries in district public schools and supporting their student’s desire to read a poem about Emmett Till during Black History Month.

[At-will employment was a common law creation of American state courts at the end of the 19^th century when the economic doctrine of laissez-faire capitalism was being read into the Constitution and law, with courts striking down child labor laws, minimum wage laws and laws restricting the length of the work day and week as violations of the 5^th and 14^th amendment rights to property.]

In unionized schools, the prevailing standard is just cause – there must be a good reason, such as the malfeasance in the performance of one’s job, for an employee to be dismissed. This is the general standard used in workplaces with union representation and in the civil service. Under the just cause standard, there are due process appeals for employees who believe that they have been dismissed without a good reason.

Tenure is the right to due process, under a just cause standard and before an impartial hearing body, when one is dismissed; it is granted after a period of probation during which the bearer of the right has demonstrated a mastery of the job. Since tenure is a protection of academic freedom which pre-dates collective bargaining in public education, it is generally written into education law.

Charter laws and education laws vary from state to state, but most jurisdictions [such as California and New York] do not include charter school teachers in the legal protections of the right of tenure. Consequently, unionized charter schools have to establish their own parallel system of due process for the protection of educator rights.

The Green Dot contract does precisely that. Article XVIII of the Green Dot contract reads: “No unit member shall be disciplined, non-renewed, dismissed, reduce in rank or compensation without just cause.” Article XIV lays out a procedure for complaints and grievances that culminates in a hearing before an independent arbitrator with the power to make decisions binding on the school management.

But why let the facts get in the way of a good rant?

UPDATE:

Over at the AFT’s NCLBlog, Ed Muir muses on the notorious case of that ~~teacher~~ Paul Whatshisname who couldn’t be fired because of that ~~tenure clause in the union contract~~… He left his last job in disgrace, and he barely lasted a few months before leaving this one, so why couldn’t he be fired? In any case, since he resigned rather than being fired, this must be further proof that the system can’t fire ~~teachers with union protection~~… or World Bank Presidents working under an “at will” contract.

UPDATE II:

Regarding Comment One, this case is an object lesson on why it is a good idea to actually read documents like contracts before one attacks them on one’s blog.

California charter school teachers start outside of the legal protections of tenure. The California Teachers Association local in the Green Dot Charter Schools negotiated a contract with the two essential elements of a tenure system: [a] a just cause standard, and [b] due process before an impartial arbitrator.

So what exactly don’t they have in terms of protection, in substantive terms, other than the law — which is not something you negotiate over a bargaining table?

It appears that the worst that can be said about their agreement, and their willingness to call it by a name other than tenure, is that it leaves them open to uninformed attacks in the blogosphere.

For educators who are under state tenure laws, the law — and thus the name — are important, because the law provides protection beyond the collective bargaining agreement. But for those who are not, it would seem rather straightforward that what they would want and need in their collective bargaining agreements would be a just cause standard and due process before an impartial arbitrator.

BTW, this is hardly unprecedented. Educators in most private post-secondary institutions have tenure of this very type, and in many cases, without it ever being memorialized in a collective bargaining agreement.

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May 17, 2007