Who is really hindering student achievement?

So Superintendent of Education John White tells Advocate reporter Will Sentell that teacher unions, including the Louisiana Federation of Teachers, are hindering student progress. That’s because we opposed in court – successfully thus far – Governor Jindal’s scheme to siphon public education funds away from public schools and into the pockets of private schools, religious schools and the vampire capitalists who can’t wait to get their fangs into the state’s cash artery.

Never mind that the governor’s plan was patently, obviously unconstitutional, or that it was ramrodded through the legislature with all the subtlety of a Maoist Great Leap Forward, or that most lawmakers didn’t have the slightest idea what they were being directed to approve.

Progress, according to Superintendent White, is being hindered because we are the ones who pointed out the emperor’s lack of clothes.

In truth, the superintendent’s tantrum simply mirrors the frustration of a governor who has been told by a state court that he must play by the rules. And that tends to bridle the governor’s political ambitions, which are propelling his education agenda much more forcefully than a passion to improve student achievement.

The fact is that the governor’s privatization schemes are a much greater threat to student achievement than actions by teacher unions. Paying for students to attend schools that abhor science will not produce the next Einstein. Diverting school funds to online course providers will not create the educated work force that our future demands.

To find a real hindrance to student achievement, look to Governor Jindal’s budget priorities. It was he who slashed over $76 million from after school tutorial programs, classroom technology, reading and math initiatives and stipends for nationally certified teachers. 

It was Gov. Jindal who rejected, on purely political grounds, a $60 million federal grant for pre-kindergarten education.

The difference between these programs and Gov. Jindal’s schemes is that they are all proven to enhance student achievement. Another distinction is that they all have the solid support of the Louisiana Federation of Teachers – the union that Supt. White says is hindering student achievement.

Louisiana’s most improved public school shuts its doors

Louisiana’s perfect storm - an ill-conceived school reform experiment coupled with drastic budget reductions - has claimed another victim. The most improved public school in the state has been shuttered by the East Baton Rouge Parish school Board.

As reported here by Charles Lussiere of The Advocate, EBR Lab Academy was closed because the state seized control of the facility in which it was housed, and the school board’s budget could not bear the cost of a school that gave intensive assistance to kids who needed it.

As Lussiere writes, “EBR Lab shared a campus with Istrouma High and both were run by the East Baton Rouge Parish school system, but the demise of those two schools was set in motion by RSD.”

A struggling Istrouma High School was taken over by the Recovery School District. EBR Lab could not remain at Istrouma, which was no longer part of the Baton Rouge school system, and board members saw a chance to save $1 million by simply closing the successful experimental school. Like most other school districts, Baton Rouge is suffering because of Governor Bobby Jindal’s refusal to raise education spending along with the cost of inflation.

And so more than 200 kids who were achieving their goals have been scattered, and their faculty has moved on to other jobs in other schools, and a successful public school is gone.

A message from LFT President Steve Monaghan: Elections have consequences

“Elections have consequences.”

Type that sentence into your search engine, and you’re likely to get more than 32 million hits.

What has happened to public education in the past few weeks has taught me (and I am quite sure many others) new respect for the “consequences” statement. Never have we seen an election that has had such dire consequences.

Attacks on the professionals who dedicate their lives to our children have never been so vicious. The destruction of our public schools has never been so imminent.

In January, Gov. Jindal launched his “bold education reform” in a speech to the Louisiana Association of Business and Industry. In it, he compared teachers to drug dealers and batterers.

This month, the legislature passed one law that will dismantle our schools and divert billions of public dollars to private, religious and corporate schools, and another law that bases virtually all personnel decisions on the controversial new ‘Value Added Model” of teacher evaluation. The proverbial train is on the tracks.

Education was first in the crosshairs, but we’re not the only target. Governor Jindal and his allies are ruthlessly pursuing the most radical deconstruction of public services ever seen in Louisiana. State employees, public safety and health care will be next on the chopping block.

To read more, please click here.

LFT leader to League: Listen to educators!

United Teachers of New Orleans President Larry Carter

United Teachers of New Orleans President Larry Carter delivered an important message to the League of Women Voters of Baton Rouge this week: include teachers and school employees when making policy for public education.

The message was a timely one, as lawmakers are preparing to vote on some radical overhauls of public education when the legislative session begins on March 12.

Gov. Bobby Jindal has announced that he will push for changes that could destroy the teacher salary schedule, endanger tenure and due process rights, radically expand vouchers for private and religious schools and impose even more state control over local school districts.

What’s missing in the governor’s agenda, Carter said, is the voice of professional educators.
“We must never lose sight of the fact that educators are the experts in the classroom,” Carter told the League. “The voice of teachers should be at the center of the dialog.”

Carter reminded the audience that “teaching conditions are learning conditions,” and said that in all too many circumstances, schools lack textbooks, learning materials an even properly certified teachers. Teachers should not be blamed for circumstances they cannot control, he said, and ought to be consulted about the best ways to improve our schools.

Tell lawmakers: Don't commit to an education agenda that hasn't even been written yet!

Please click here to send a message!

The legislative session won't begin for another month, but Gov. Bobby Jindal is already pressuring lawmakers to unquestioningly support his agenda for public education.

The governor is asking for commitments to his plan even though legislators have not seen the bills he intends to introduce.

Judging from his speeches, the governor’s education plan will

• Destroy the teacher salary schedule


• Endanger tenure and due process rights


• Radically expand vouchers for private and religious schools


• Impose even more state control of local school districts

Please send a message to your senator and representative. Our message simply asks lawmakers not to commit to the governor’s agenda until each of his plans has a chance to be debated openly, transparently and on its merits.

After all, that’s the reason we have a legislative session. If all of the real decisions are made under pressure and behind closed doors, our leaders have failed us.

Please click here to send a message!

How is LFT responding to Superintendent of Education John White’s request for waivers of No Child Left Behind Act waivers?

With the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (No Child Left Behind) stalled in Congress, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced last fall that his department will offer waivers of some provisions of the Act. In exchange for flexibility, states are required to implement education reforms. Thus far, 10 states have applied for and received waivers of NCLB requirements.

This week, Superintendent of Education John White unveiled a PowerPoint presentation that broadly outlines the Louisiana Department of Education’s wish list. His department is already asking stakeholders to sign statements of support for the request.

But White has not released the state’s official application for waivers, even though the deadline for public comments on the document is February 16.

Based on the scant information in the PowerPoint presentation, LFT has concerns about the direction White wants to take in asking for waivers of federal education requirements.

For starters, the presentation calls for “merit-based certification, compensation, tenure and retention.” That sounds good, but what does it mean? In conversation, White has questioned even the value of a college major in a subject area for teachers.

His presentation, which features the liberal use of the word “empower,” calls for parental choice including “early childhood, traditional public, charter, private, virtual, industry, university.” Is the superintendent asking the U.S. Department of Education to approve a voucher scheme? The details have yet to be released.

The slide show also asks for “Freedom from retrograde labor rules and burdensome funding restrictions,” without defining retrograde labor rules or identifying burdensome funding restrictions.

The superintendent says he wants to “eliminate school and district improvement plans,” but favors “enhancing accountability.” These are broad strokes that beg for explanation.

White says that he would like to strip School Performance Score criteria down to bare bones. Kindergarten through eighth grade schools would be judged solely on iLEAP and LEAP scores; high school scores would be based on ACT performance (50%) and the cohort graduation rate (50%).

Are these criteria supported by research and data? Who will pay for all the ACT tests that must be administered? Isn’t there room for multiple indicators of school performance, such as disciplinary actions, attendance levels and other elements of a Learning Environment Index?

The presentation raises many questions about issues such as redefining subgroups, rewards and interventions, classifying schools based on performance, etc.

Based on the information available, Superintendent White’s plan is not ready for prime time, and time is growing short. Public comment on the as-yet unpublished draft is expected by February 16.

BESE board approval of the “revised accountability concepts and policies” is expected to be complete by next summer, with final approval by August, with full implementation scheduled for the 2012-13 academic year.
___________________________________________________________________________
Here is what the U.S. Department of Education has to say about applying for waivers:

To get flexibility from NCLB, states must adopt and have a plan to
implement college and career-ready standards. They must also create
comprehensive systems of teacher and principal development, evaluation and
support that include factors beyond test scores, such as principal observation,
peer review, student work, or parent and student feedback.

States receiving waivers no longer have to meet 2014 targets set by
NCLB but they must set new performance targets for improving student achievement
and closing achievement gaps.
They also must have accountability systems that
recognize and reward high-performing schools and those that are making
significant gains, while targeting rigorous and comprehensive interventions for
the lowest-performing schools.

Bobby Jindal: The man behind the curtain

The little fake magician pulling levers in The Wizard of Oz told his audience to "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain" when the secret of his trickery was revealed.

He'd been practicing what professional magicians call misdirection. Smoke, mirrors and noise distract the audience from the shabby reality of the trick. Keep your eye on the fluttering handkerchief in this hand while the other palms a quarter.

In today's Advocate, columnist James Minton pulls away the curtain concealing the facts behind Gov. Bobby Jindal's so-called education "reform agenda."

Minton writes that two of the state's highest performing school systems are starving because the governor has refused to increase school spending for the past three years. It is a story that is repeating itself in systems across Louisiana. Schools of excellence and challenged schools alike are struggling.

Teachers are being furloughed. Important programs that actually improve student achievement have been slashed by Jindal. Those include after school tutorials, reading and math initiatives, technology investments and stipends for nationally certified teachers.

The governor's spin machine is busily churning out misdirection, blaming teachers and school boards for his failure to adequately fund public education.

The fluttering handkerchief says "we can't keep spending a billion dollars a year on failing schools," while the hidden truth is that good schools and good teachers are facing disaster.

The secret behind the curtain is this: the governor and his allies are more interested in a radical destruction of public services than in improving schools. Like anti-tax hobgoblin Grover Norquist, they want to "shrink government small enough to drown it in a bath tub." What little is left, they'd like to divert to Wall Street corporations.

That is why the governor and company want a voucher scheme that could send some 380,000 children to unregulated private and religious schools. It's why they want to privatize prisons, pensions and health care. It's why the governor opposed even the extension of a cigarette tax aimed at treating cancer.

The real action is behind the curtain. It's there if we'd only bother to look.

Letter writer gets it right

Looks like the word is getting out on Gov. Jindal's sham "education reform" scheme. It all sounded good when the governor was a candidate last fall, and made only vague references to a bold reform agenda.

Now that details are emerging, it doesn't look so good. Voters might be starting to question the essence of a plan that relies so heavily on publicly funded vouchers for private and religious schools, radically expanding charter schools without sufficient accountability, and attacking teachers.

This letter to the editor of The Advocate hits a nerve:

The purpose of reforming education is to lower education inequity by
providing every student the same, high quality, and affordable education. Gov.
Bobby Jindal has
worked to do the exact opposite by freezing per-student aid to public schools
for three years. Now his “education reform” plan will pretty much further hurt
the public school system by offering vouchers for private schools.

Newspaper: Jindal provoking "mother of all legislative battles"

The Lafayette Advertiser correctly identified the fight that Gov. Jindal has picked with his 30-some-odd point education "reform" agenda.

How will lawmakers react when they discover that the governor would like to pay for nearly 400,000 Louisiana students to attend private and religious schools?

As The Advertiser puts it,

Exactly how many slots in private schools would have to be opened to
accommodate so many eligible students? If new private schools are rushed toward
opening to meet the new demand, who ensures that they're of adequate quality?
How do school systems provide transportation? Or should they? Should disabled
students be eligible for more valuable vouchers because their needs cost more to
meet? If not, will they get left behind? What if choice results in a
re-segregation of publicly financed education in violation of consent decrees
developed painstakingly over decades?

Post-holiday catch up edition

Important things happened while teachers and school employees were on holiday for Christmas and New Year's. Here are a few items that you may have missed during the celebrations.

Education reform defined: Gannett reporter Mike Hasten wrote this column, in which he asked an important question about the meaning of "education reform."

Here's the takeaway from the column:

But one man's view of reform is another's view of harming public schools and another's view of harming
teachers.
If reform is just creating more charter schools and getting rid of
teacher tenure, it's not going to have the backing of those that have to
implement it — public school systems across the state.
It's got to be much
more than that.

Governor meets with teachers (but offers no clues): Governor Bobby Jindal finally had his first meeting with teacher unions during the holidays. The governor listened politely, but did not say what will be in his education agenda, which he plans to announce later in January.

Also in the room were an assortment of politicians and, most notably, a handful of parents whose children attend religious schools in New Orleans, with tuition paid by state vouchers.

That led LFT President Steve Monaghan to wonder if the governor plans to include expanded vouchers in his plan.

“The major concern is that, in a tight financial construct, which we know we are going to be in, the dollars that will be siphoned away from those schools left behind will be significant,” Monaghan told Advocate reporter Will Sentell for this article.

Voucher concerns confirmed: Worries that vouchers for private and religious schools will play a major part in the governor's agenda were confirmed by Times-Picayune reporter Andrew Vanacore in this article.

Citing unnamed administration sources, Vanacore wrote, "Gov. Bobby Jindal and his allies on education reform are considering an unprecedented, statewide expansion of private school vouchers..."

Tenure also on the line: Also high on the governor's agenda for "education reform" is the protection offered to public school teachers by the state's tenure law.

Board of Elementary and Secondary Education President Penny Dastuge told Advocate reporter Will Sentell that tenure "is the subject that comes up in every conversation" for this story.

As Sentell put it, "Dastugue, a Jindal appointee, said legislation could address anything from how long teachers with unsatisfactory ratings should have before they face formal job reviews, to new tenure policies for future teachers.

Coalition leader hits "reforms": With a consensus growing that the Jindal administration plans to make vouchers and expanded charters big pieces of his education agenda, St. Tammany Parish school Board President Jack Loup is pushing back.

Loup, who recently accepted LFT's Friend of Education Award, told WWL-TV in New Orleans that the governor's emphasis on charter schools is misplaced.

Noting that charter schools can be much more choosy about their students than traditional public schools, Loup said, "Our Constitution says, we take all, we teach all. OK, well we're doing that in the public school system. We're not doing that in the charter schools."

Supremes to hear school waiver case: The case of Gov. Jindal's signature legislation from 2010, the phony-baloney Red Tape Reducation and Local Empowerment Act - will be heard by the Louisiana Supreme Court on January 23.

Advocate reporter Joe Gyan, Jr. writes here that the state will ask the high court to reverse a ruling by District Court Judge Mike Caldwell that the Red Tape Act violates the constitution.

The act gave Board of Elementary and Secondary Education the authority to waive state education laws if requested by local school districts. LFT successfully argued in district court that the act is unconstitutional because the legislature does not have the right to hand off its legislative responsibilities to other bodies.

Is Jindal's BESE dominance enough?

How much did Gov. Bobby Jindal and his allies spend to stack the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education with members simpatico with his idea of eduction reform? We won't know for sure until the next round of election finance reports is released, but it will be a big number, well into the millions.

What they will get for their investment is the subject of this column by Associated Press reporter Melinda Deslatte.

The gist of it is this: Despite the governor's near-total control of BESE, a "sweeping overhaul" of public education is not necessarily a "done deal."

The governor's faction will have their way in matters of policy, including his choice for superintendent of education, Deslatte concedes: "Jindal's got three appointees to the board, and most of the eight elected members espouse his support of vouchers, charter school expansion, school takeovers and teacher evaluations tied at least partly to student test scores."

But while policy is under the jurisdiction of BESE, law is another matter, and that is in the purview of the legislature.

"The new and re-elected BESE members can't just sweep in at the start of the January term and make all those changes on which they campaigned," writes Deslatte. "They can elect a superintendent who agrees with them. Then, they'll have to lobby lawmakers and keep their fingers crossed."

"I expect there to be a robust debate, but in the end, I expect in the House and in the Senate to get these proposals through," Deslatte quotes the governor as saying. Jindal has not revealed just what those proposals will be.

Deslatte notes that most members of the legislature were not elected on platforms of education reform that mirror Jindal's. They will be hearing from others who want to improve education, but may not believe the governor's path is the right one.

Deslatte concludes that the governor will "still have to get majority support in both chambers and overcome the opposition of the unions, school board leaders and other traditional public school supporters to win final passage of his bills."

You're not paranoid - they really are coming to get you

Teachers, school employees, parents and supporters of public education have a lot to worry about. Not to sound paranoid, but they really are coming to get us.

In today's Advocate, reporter Will Sentell has a story about the speech that Lane Grigsby gave to Volunteers in Public Schools yesterday. Grigsby is the moneybag tycoon behind the Alliance for Better Classrooms. That's the group that poured tons of money into BESE and legislative races, demanding in return a pledge to oppose teacher tenure.

Grigsby's group is working closely with the Louisiana Association of Public Charter Schools, the Associated Professional Educators of Louisiana and others to take the "public" out of public education. As the article puts it, "ABC favors a wide range of steps in the name of school choice, including tax credits and major changes in how public schools are funded."

Grigsby's isn't the only deep-pocketed, corporate-aligned organization to paint a target on the backs of public educators, however. On December 12, the Pelican Institute for Public Policy will hold its "policy orientation" for the Louisiana legislature.

Featured speakers at the conference will be Sen. David Vitter and Americans for Tax Reform President Grover Norquist, who says he'd like to shrink government small enough to drown it in a bathtub.

Panelists on the agenda include a laundry list of right-wing activists and legislators who are pushing a radical "reform" agenda aimed at privatizing, voucherizing and charterizing our schools.

The upshot of it all is this: Louisiana is now squarely in the middle of a national fight over public policy, with an emphasis on public education. After Saturday's general election, it promises to be a long and perhaps bloody four years.

Governor playing reform close to vest

What's next? Gov. Jindal was handily re-elected, but is reticent to announce his plans for the future, other than to say "education reform" looms large on his agenda.

As Advocate reporter Michelle Millhollon writes here, details are lacking. The governor's supporters apparently expect to have their own ideas of reform implemented. Those include abolishing teacher tenure, expanding vouchers for private and religious schools, scaling back on local authority and handing much more control of schools over to the state department of education.

The governor himself is mostly silent, leaving LFT President Steve Monaghan to comment, “To me, it’s almost like you have a gift box and inside you have another gift box. When do you get to what it is?”

Man bites dog story: Forbes article supports teacher unions

Malcolm Forbes named his yacht "Capitalist Tool," so the last place you'd expect to find an article supporting teacher unions and questioning the validity of market-based "education reform" is the Web site that bears his name.

Yet here it is. Writer E.D. Cain opens with this riff on conventional right wing wisdom: "Teachers' unions are often portrayed by their opponents as standing in the way of efforts to reform our schools. Maybe this isn't such a bad thing."

Cain acknowledges that attacks on teacher unions and support for privatized reform come from both the left and right wings of the ideological spectrum. Both sides, he says, have fallen for a neoliberal scheme to disempower teachers and their unions while funneling vast amounts of public money into private coffers.

About reforms, he says "Vouchers have been met not only with public disappointment, but with few if any real benefits. Most charters haven't fared much better. And for-profit schools come packaged with all sorts of other troubling implications for our public - or should I say "public" - education system."

About the horde of non-educator experts who devise schemes like high-stakes testing "which seeks....to boil down education to learning by rote," he writes, "When technocrats and businessmen take over the hard work of designing a system of education is it surprising that the result of a complex labyrinth of testing schemes aimed at only those subjects that can be measured, quantified and pasted into spreadsheets? Is it any winder that professionals who care about education might see this as a threat?"

And about the unions which defend professional educators, he writes, "I support teachers' unions because they are the best chance this country has to improve and strengthen public education for the long haul. No other organization will step in to protect teachers from political blowback and the reform-trend-of-the-moment."

It's a good read, with important ideas, from an unexpected source.

So-called education "reform" is a failure and scam

If the proper goals of education reform are the privatization of public schools, the enrichment of education corporations and the de-professionalization of teaching, then Louisiana's effort to remake public education is a screaming success.

But if the goals are to educate children and create a more knowledgeable citizenry, then not so much.

That is the conclusion drawn by Diane Ravitch in this Reuters blog entry. "The reformers," she writes, "believe that the way to 'fix' our schools is to fire more teachers, based on the test scores of their students; to open more privately-managed charter schools; to reduce the qualifications for becoming a teacher; and to remove job protections for senior teachers."

Those are the wrong prescriptions for what ails education in America. The single best way to improve education in our nation is to reduce poverty.

The so-called reformers scoff at that, saying that public education supporters are simply trying to shift the blame onto society at large.

But the facts do not support that viewpoint. In the most recent international comparisons, Ravitch writes, "low-poverty U.S. schools (where fewer than 10% of the students were poor) had scores that were higher than those of the top nations in the world. In schools where as many as 25% of the students were poor, the scores were equal to those of Finland, Japan and Korea. As the poverty rate of the schools rose, the schools’ performance declined."

Citing research with unquestionable pedigrees, Ravitch demonstrates that the nostrums prescribed by the current crop of reformers don't work. Charter schools do not perform any better than their fully public counterparts. Family life plays a greater role in student achievement than even the best teachers.

"Typically," Ravitch writes, "economists estimate that teachers account for 10-15% of student performance; non-school factors influence about 60%."

Her conclusion, and her sad prediction for the current wave of reform, is here:

If we are serious about improving education, we would work to improve both
schools and society. We would invest in the recruitment and preparation of
career teachers and make sure that every child has a curriculum that includes
the arts, history, civics, foreign languages and other subjects. We would also
invest in prenatal care so that every child is born healthy and invest in
high-quality early childhood education, so that children arrive in school ready
to learn. We would stop the budget cutting that is now increasing class sizes
and reducing needed services to children.

Unfortunately, such research-based strategies are not part of today’s
reform movement, which is why it will most assuredly end up in the dustbin of
history, like so many others.

AFT President Randi Weingarten talks reform

Even though she's wedged between a conservative moderator from the Fordham Institute and an even more conservative spokesman for the American Enterprise Institute, AFT President Randi Weingarten more than holds her own in this You Tube discussion.

Articles reveal rich and powerful forces behind "reform"

When the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education revoked the charter of the Abramson Science and Technology Charter School in New Orleans, it started a nationwide chain reaction of news coverage, mostly focused on the shadowy Gulen movement that inspires charter schools across the country.

The Washington Independent, for one, published this story about the Pelican Foundation, which operated Abramson and still holds charter for Kenilworth Science and Technology Charter School in Baton Rouge. The foundation has, the story notes, "been hit hard with allegations of inappropriate use of school space for religious processions, concealing student-on-student sexual harassment and intimidating teachers."

On the heels of that story came this one by USA Today education reporter Greg Toppo, who connected the Pelican Institute schools to more than 100 other charter schools "established over the past decade by a loosely affiliated group of Turkish-American educators," all said to have ties to Turkish nationalist Fethullah Gulen.

Toppo says that Gulen, who fled Turkey and gained political asylum in the United States, is "Described by turns as a moderate Turkish nationalist, a peacemaker and 'contemporary Islam's Billy Graham.' Fethullah Gülen has long pushed for Islam to occupy a more central role in Turkish society."

On this Web site, Parents Across America charge that "Gulen schools constitute the nation’s largest network of charter schools."

A founding member of PAA says, "Our primary concern is not the national origin or religion of the group running the schools but the facts that they operate in secrecy, are not accountable to the public, and are not open about the nature or extent of the movement behind the charter schools in which unsuspecting parents are enrolling their children.”

All of which tends to call into question the process by which the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education approves charters.

And it's not just the Gulen movement that we should be concerned about. In this article from the Louisiana School Boards Association journal, Don Whittinghill documented the intrusion of free-market profiteers into the charter school movement.

As Whittinghill wrote, "Free-market zealots (with riches) realized that over $600 billion is spent in the U.S. on public schools. A whole new frontier leading to stable profits was recognized. Everyone knows 'it takes money to make money,' and the faces behind the voucher/charter 'reform' movement are not bashful in stepping up to the bar."

The LSBA journal names some of the mega-rich corporate types who fund anti-public education "reforms" and back the political candidates who implement them.

AFT President Randi Weingarten talks reform

In this interview with American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, Truthout blogger Amy Dean gets the union leader to talk about a back-to-school season in which teachers "are preparing to meet a new wave of attacks on public education and on themselves personally."

Dean begins the interview with the observation that across the country, teachers and their unions are under assault by politicians whose number one goal is the privatization of public education.

"Little would you know, from this assault," Dean writes, "that some of the states with the best public schools in the country are those with the strongest teachers' unions. "

Weingarten's passionate defense of teachers and the teaching profession is bracing.

"Teachers and kids are totally and completely interconnected," says Weingarten. "Teachers advocate for things that they need that are in the interest of kids and vice versa. Trying to divide teachers from kids is only a way of hurting what parents and students need to create
opportunity in this country."

When the subject of teacher accountability comes up, Weingarten notes that AFT "has worked to introduce a system of evaluation and professional development that goes beyond superficial 'snapshot' evaluations of teachers and that also allows them to engage curriculum more substantive than mere rote teaching for a standardized test."

The union, she says, developed "a framework for a comprehensive and meaningful evaluation system that...measured teachers' performance in multiple ways that included teacher practice as well as student learning."

Around the nation, Weingarten says, over 150 school districts are using all or part of the AFT model for evaluating teachers.

The full interview is worth a read. Check it out here.

Join the Save Our Schools March on July 30

Please join people from all across America as they gather to participate in the Save Our Schools March on Saturday, July 30 in Washington, D.C.

The Save Our Schools March is being held in response to recent destructive “reform” efforts which have undermined our public educational system, demoralized teachers, and reduced the education of too many of our children to nothing more than test preparation.

Something must be done – and it must be done now!

The Save Our Schools March and National Call to Action is calling on Americans everywhere to demand:

• Equitable funding for all public school communities



• An end to high stakes testing for student, teacher, and school evaluation



• Curriculum developed for and by local school communities



• Teacher and community leadership in forming public education policies

Click here to visit the Save Our Schools March home page!

If "reform" seems so good to be true, it probably is!

Thank God for Diane Ravitch! In this op-ed for the New York Times, the prickly professor punctures the bubble of so-called "reform," convincingly demonstrating that many success stories "are the result of statistical legerdemain. "

Ravitch takes aim at the No Child Left behind mandate that all children must be proficient in either reading or math by 2014. Teachers understand that to be an impossible goal, she writes, because of the "enormous variation among students and the impact of family income on academic performance."

Even so, she writes, many politicians and the snake-oil salesmen who've hijacked the education agenda claim "that the right combination of incentives and punishments will produce dramatic improvement. Anyone who objects to this utopian mandate, they maintain, is just making an excuse for low expectations and bad teachers."

With assistance from former LSU professor and Baton Rouge School Board member Noel Hammatt, Ravitch proceeds to demolish extravagant claims for success in some reconstituted schools.

Taking particular aim at two schools mentioned by President Barack Obama in his State of the Union address, Ravitch says "the only miracle at these schools was a triumph of public relations."

One of those claimed a high graduation rate, but its published ACT scores were far below the state average. Another, which Obama said had "skyrocketed" since firing the principal and half the faculty, actually ranks 430th out of 469 high schools in math.

In conclusion, Ravitch urges the public to meet inflated claims of educational improvement with skepticism - a lesson yet to be learned in Louisiana, where credulous news media uncritically report bogus gains in the State Recovery School District.

The answer simply is not as easy as firing teachers or reconstituting schools because, as Ravitch puts it,

If every child arrived in school well-nourished, healthy and ready to
learn, from a family with a stable home and a steady income, many of our
educational problems would be solved. And that would be a miracle.