Several of us have linked together and, today, our letter to President Obama was posted on Valerie Strauss' The Answer Sheet (a Washington Post education blog). If you agree with its sentiments you can send your own message to the President by going to the online form at http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact.
This letter is a follow-up to a one we sent in May about Obama's Blueprint for Reform, (re the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, ESEA) which you can find here. As you may or may not know, the decision about keeping, altering, or scrapping the current version of ESEA, aka NCLB, was supposed to be done in 2007, but Congress never attended to the task. So, as a result, this despised and damaging law was rolled over and has now been enforced for at least three years beyond its natural lifespan.
In late 2006, Washington insiders predicted a delay with reauthorization, but wrongly imagined it might be as late as 2009. Boy, oh boy, were they wrong!
Several weeks ago, we wrote to you about our concern that your proposed “Blueprint for Reform” did not acknowledge the critical role parents must play in any meaningful school improvement process. We also expressed our serious reservations about some of the Blueprint's strategies.
Our goal is simple – to ensure that our children receive the best possible education. As parents, we are the first to see the positive effects of good programs, and the first line of defense when our children's well-being is threatened. Our input is unique and essential.
Recently, Secretary Duncan announced that he would require districts that receive federal school improvement grants (SIG) to involve parents and the community in planning for schools identified for intervention. We appreciate this response as a first step; however, more needs to be done.
First, leadership must come from the top. We would like to see meaningful, broad-based parent participation not just in our local districts, but at the U.S. Department of Education, where critical decisions are being made about our children's education.
Second, we need more than rhetoric to feel confident that only educationally sound strategies will be used in our children's schools. The current emphasis on more charter schools, high-stakes testing, and privatization is simply not supported by research.
Disagreement on these matters is not a result of parents clinging to the “status quo,” as you have recently asserted. No one has more at stake in better schools than we do – but we disagree with you and Secretary Duncan about how to get them.
We need effective, proven, common-sense practices that will strengthen our existing schools, rather than undermine them. These include parent input into teacher evaluation systems, fairly-funded schools, smaller class sizes and experienced teachers who are respected as professionals, not seen as interchangeable cogs in a machine. We want our children to be treated as individuals, not data points. And we want a real, substantial role in all decisions that affect our children’s schools.
More specifically, and urgently, we insist on being active partners in the formulation of federal school improvement policies. The models proposed by the U.S. Department of Education are rigid and punitive, involving either closure, conversion to charters, or the firing of large portions of the teaching staff. All of these strategies disrupt children’s education and destabilize communities; none adequately addresses the challenges these schools face.
We also insist on being active partners in reforms at the school level, with the power to devise our own local solutions, using research-based methods, after a collaborative needs assessment at each individual school.
Our voices must count. If you listen, you will make real changes in your School Improvement Grant proposals as well as your “Blueprint” for education reform.
We look forward to your response and a brighter future for our children and our nation.
Sincerely, Parents Across America (signatories attached)
Natalie Beyer, Durham Allies for Responsive Education (DARE), NC
Caroline Grannan, San Francisco public school parent, volunteer and advocate, CA
Pamela Grundy, Mecklenburg Area Coming Together for Schools, NC
Leonie Haimson, Class Size Matters, New York, NY
Sharon Higgins, public school parent, Oakland, CA
Susan Magers, Parent Advocate, FL
Mark Mishler, active public school parent, former president, Albany City PTA*, NY
Bill Ring, TransParent®, Los Angeles, CA
Lisa Schiff, San Francisco public school parent, board member of Parents for Public Schools*, member of Parents for Public Schools of San Francisco*, "School Beat" columnist for BeyondChron, CA
Rita M. Solnet, President, CDS, Inc.; Director, Testing is Not Teaching, FL
Dora Taylor, Parent and co-editor of Seattle Education 2010, WA
Julie Woestehoff, Parents United for Responsible Education, Chicago, IL
[Guest post by Caroline Grannan, plus a video of George Carlin explaining things to us. – P.P.]
President Obama is wrong to slough off the growing concern and outrage and pigheadedly defend Race to the Top. If he can't come up with a better case than he made in his July 29 speech to the National Urban League, it's impossible to see how he can keep on speaking up for it.
This section of his speech calls for a sharp response.
"...there's a concern that Race to the Top doesn't do enough for minority kids..." No, that's not the concern. The concern is that Race to the Top will aggressively harm minority kids. "...because the argument is, well, if there's a competition, then somehow some states or some school districts will get more help than others...." Yes, that is the argument, or a watered-down version of it. More to the point, that a "competition" by definition has winners and losers. Which kids are we going to brand "losers" and give up on altogether? And while Obama states the argument with reasonable accuracy, he doesn't even attempt to rebut it. Instead, he insults us by veering off into irrelevancies. And insulting his listeners and his critics is nothing compared with shrugging off the damage RTTT will do to the "losers." " Let me tell you, what's not working for black kids and Hispanic kids and Native American kids across this country is the status quo. That's what's not working." And does that justify a "let's give whatever we can think of a shot, no matter what damage it may cause" attitude? Because that is what RTTT is. For a lawyer and a smart, eloquent man, Obama makes a pathetic case for his signature program. It's increasingly obvious that he's defending the indefensible.
From George Carlin’s “Life is Worth Losing,” broadcast live on HBO on November 5, 2005.
The word “backlash” is actually being used about a so-called school reform maneuver so shortsighted and coldblooded that almost no one is speaking up in support of it – almost no one but President Obama.
Last month, all 93 members of the faculty, administration and support staff of Central Falls High school in Central Falls, R.I., were told that they’re fired as of the end of this school year.
Then, on Monday, President Obama spoke up, according to the New York Times. “Mr. Obama said he supported the school board’s decision to dismiss the faculty and staff members. ‘Our kids get only one chance at an education and we need to get it right,’ he said.”
(Obama’s lightweight, resume-faking Secretary of Education praised the move too, but he’s not really worth devoting blogosphere bandwidth to.)
Despite the current climate in which blaming, bashing and demonizing teachers has become a comfortable and popular theme in all kinds of commentary, Obama’s remark actually seems to have provoked dismay and outrage. In the most current news article showing online as I write this, the Providence Journal uses the term “wildfire.”
“The wildfire of national debate over the mass firings at Central Falls High School spread further Tuesday, when the executive council of the AFL-CIO unanimously condemned the removal of all 93 teachers, support staff and administrators at the city’s only high school.
The executive council said its members were “appalled” that President Obama and U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan had endorsed the terminations in recent comments, and said the firings will not help the 800 students at the high school, which is one of the poorest and lowest-performing schools in Rhode Island.”
Well, I have a proposal. Those 93 teachers, support staff and administrators should get together, pull the necessary strings (which are in their reach right now while the story is hot), and request a meeting with the president – all 93 of them. If Obama could have a beer with Henry Louis Gates and that cop whose name I’ve now forgotten, surely he’s willing to spend a little time hearing the viewpoint of 93 people whom he has essentially attacked sight unseen. While it would be hospitable for him to invite them to the White House, it would be a lot classier for him to have a soothing spot of tea catered in at Central Falls High School. (And he desperately needs to show a little class right now; his supply is perilously low.) I’m sure the cafeteria has enough room to seat the Central Falls 93, Obama and his entourage.
Two years ago, it would have been impossible for me to imagine saying this, but I also propose that President Obama emulate something San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom has been doing. I’m not normally Newsom’s biggest fan, with the exception of back in February 2004 when his then-revolutionary gay marriages were spreading joy through San Francisco. But lately, my city's mayor has been doing something admirable after being challenged by Patricia Gray, the longtime rock-star principal of San Francisco’s Balboa High School. Newsom has been spending Saturdays calling the homes of students who are chronically truant from their San Francisco public schools. The San Francisco Chronicle’s Matier and Ross political insider column wrote about this in a Jan. 31 column (not available online.)
“It has been a real eye-opener,” Newsom told the Chronicle. “In just about every case,” Matier and Ross wrote, “the family is in crisis.” In other words, truancy isn’t all the fault of inept teachers and uncaring schools after all, Newsom is learning.
At last week’s overflowing Town Hall meeting called by San Francisco parents to address the current budget crisis, Newsom brought up his calls (and visits) to the homes of truants, and reiterated that point quite emphatically. The truants are almost always living in households battered by the worst life can dump on them, and it’s unrealistic to expect educators to magically cure it all, and to blame them for not working miracles.
Well, if Newsom – who I never would have thought could hold a candle to Obama in depth and thoughtfulness – can accept Patricia Gray’s challenge and gain such new understanding, where’s the president?
I hope to read about that meeting in the Central Falls High School cafeteria soon.
For more on the Central Falls firings, here’s a snippet of commentary by veteran Washington Post education writer Valerie Strauss (now apparently writing as a freelancer, speaking of employment turmoil):
“…93 names were called for firing -- 74 classroom teachers, plus reading specialists, guidance counselors, physical education teachers, the school psychologist, the principal and three assistant principals, according to the Providence Journal. Not one was good enough to stay.
Some of the teachers at the city's only high school cried, but the committee held firm.
It's no wonder that Education Secretary Arne Duncan applauded the move, saying the committee members were "showing courage and doing the right thing for kids."
Courage, indeed.
Now, all they have to do is find 93 excellent professionals to take their places. Recruiting the best educators should be easy, especially when you can offer them life in a very poor town and a job with no security."
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The Perimeter Primate adds:
Sign this petition in support of the teachers and staff of Central Falls High School in Rhode Island.
Notice that when politicians and business leaders talk about education woes, you’ll rarely, if ever, hear them utter a word about the well-known, perpetual, and unbreakable connection between average academic achievement and social class – a connection which exists in every society on this earth, and always has, and always will. It is only when we start to convert our economy and government to a form which reduces our vast social class differences will we see a reduction in the achievement gap.
In the meantime, people who have attained higher status are simply not going to voluntarily switch their spot on the social ladder (or sacrifice their offspring's spot) with someone who is on a lower rung of that ladder. We happen to be primates who can't help but function according to a social hierarchy.
You will hear politicians and business leaders calling our public schools “failures” and “dropout factories” – only referring, of course, to the urban schools which happen to contain a lot of poor kids. It has become commonplace for our leaders to describe the teachers who work in those schools as “lazy” and “selfish." Declarations are made that the teachers are more interested in meeting their adult needs rather than those of the children. As I watched a public school teacher acquaintance grade his students' papers into the evening hours last night as he waited for his daughter to complete her after school lessons, I did not think of the adjectives "lazy" and "selfish."
If you pay attention, you’ll find that the people who spout this type of rhetoric haven’t ever personally experienced the types of schools they are denigrating. So, I ask, why do we listen to people who could not possibly understand what the urban school environment is like, nor have any idea about what the teachers who work in those schools do, or do not do – hour after hour, day after day, and year after year? It's as if the nasty feelings these outsiders express are some sort of psychological transference of the guardedness and overall contempt they have for the poor, co-mingled with a sense of patronization and superiority over those who are actually willing to have daily contact with poor kids.
Is not it obvious that at the heart of this broad, negative labeling of a whole group of people – such as the huge attack that President Obama lobbed at the Central Falls High School teachers – is simply propaganda using stereotyping and scapegoating to build up more negative public sentiment and mistrust?
And what you won’t hear is our top leaders and managers addressing any awareness of the fact that the U.S. has the highest childhood poverty rate of the industrialized countries. In the Central Falls school district, the poverty rate is 90 percent.
Consider the degree to which public opinion has been manipulated over time so that our public schools are now largely viewed as the singular entity to be held accountable for producing the cure for our nation’s poverty and extreme social class differences (by closing the achievement gap), not to mention to correct the side effects caused by the disintegration of our once-much-stronger social institutions, such as the family and neighborhood communities.
Diane Ravitch’s new book, “The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education,”contains a chapter entitled “The “Billionaire Boys’ Club” which reveals the role of the CEO billionaire trio of Gates, Broad, and the Walton family who are funding the movement of school reform based on ruthless free market principals such as eliminating any labor force which is not perfectly compliant with what top management unilaterally dictates.
So, it is no accident that the incident in Rhode Island was generated by a 2008 Broad Superintendents Academy graduate, State Education Commissioner Deborah A. Gist. The April 2009 press release announcing her appointment as the new R.I. Commissioner of Elementary and Secondary Education stated, “We are thrilled that Rhode Island is the first state to attract a Broad Fellow as not only the superintendent of its largest schools system, with Tom Brady in Providence, but also a Broad Fellow as a State Commissioner who can partner in addressing the challenges of transforming the state's educational systems to a position of international leadership."
Yes, the first time a state has placed a Broad Superintendents Academy Fellow in such a position happens to be the first education department to take the lead to fire every person on the staff of an entire school. It is unprecedented, and reminiscent of when Reagan fired all the air traffic controllers.
What Commissioner Gist just engineered in Rhode Island, with the blessing of President Obama, is the type of measure expected and required of the CEO business model "educators" who follow billionaire public-school-manipulator Eli Broad’s vision of urban public school “transformation."
I guess we now know the type of change we were expected to believe in.
More background reading:
Read why the elite crowd just doesn’t sufficiently understand the dynamics in urban public schools. It turns out they have a social disability.
This is the second piece I've posted by Steve Miller, a longtime Oakland public school teacher.—P.P.
A High School Teacher Responds to Obama’s Speech to Students
Obama’s Back-to-School speech deserves commentary on many points. Here I am going to simply mention some telling assumptions that are laced through the presentation.
The President, of course, gets some points for talking about how students must accept responsibility for their own achievement. Though fundamental, this is hardly new. The elephant in the room is – achievement… for what? What is the real purpose of an education – a public education – in America 2009?
1) Obama talks about getting a good job as a major goal of going to school: “You want to be a doctor, or a teacher, or a police officer? You want to be a nurse or an architect, a lawyer or a member of our military? You are going to need a good education for every single one of those careers”.
The idea that America today is full of good jobs, waiting for each year’s crop of graduates has been exploded many times. Here’s one from Gerald Bracey, for years a harsh critic of the notion that America’s schools are failing:
I have not the expertise to address the merits of President Obama’s speech to Congress on the issues of the economy. I do claim some expertise on education. He blew it.
He accepted the same garbage that the propagandists, fear mongers such as Lou Gerstner, Bill Gates, Roy Romer, Bob Wise, Craig Barrett and many others—God help us, Arne Duncan?--have been spewing for years.
Obama said, ”Right now, three quarters of the fastest-growing occupations require more than a high school diploma, and yet just over half of our citizens have that level of education. Scary, huh? Not really. This statistic was a favorite of ex secretary of education of education Margaret Spellings, about whom we can all express a sigh of relief that the operative word is, “ex.”
If you look at the Bureau of Labor Statistics stats on job projections, it is almost true (but not really) that what Obama said is right. But there are two hugely compromising factors that make this statistic much less fearsome that it first appears:
1. The definition of “more than a high school diploma” is a weasel phrase, an incredibly slippery statistic. It does not mean a B. A., an Associates Degree, nor even a year of on-the-job training. The BLS projects that the overwhelming majority of jobs to be created between now and 2016 will require “short term on the job training.” That’s one week to three months.
2. The “fastest-growing occupations” account for very few jobs. For every systems engineer, we need about 15 sales people on the floor at Wal-Mart (and we have three newly minted scientists and engineers for every new job in those fields). The huge job numbers in this country are accounted for by retail sales, janitors, maids, food workers, waiters, truck drivers, home care assistants (low paid folk who come to take care those of us who are getting up in years), and similar low-trained, low-paid occupations. Note that I did not say these people are “low-skilled.” As Barbara Ehrenreich showed after she spent two years working in “low-skilled” jobs, there really is no such thing (see her Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America).
The reality, that every President knows full well, is that computer-driven automation is polarizing the labor market and eliminating most high paying jobs. Hi-tech robotic production is labor-replacing technology that requires a tiny few highly skilled engineering-level jobs on one hand, while “creating” jobs that require little sophistication for those who can actually get them.
No one who looks seriously at the labor market makes any projections about enough new jobs to put America back to work.
2) In the next paragraph Obama states, “What you make of your education will decide nothing less than the future of this country”. Then in the next paragraph, he says, “You’ll need the creativity and ingenuity you develop in all your classes to build new companies that will create new jobs and boost our economy.”
Isn’t it a little disingenuous to conflate “this country” with “new companies”? Is it only corporations who can offer us a decent future? They aren’t doing a very good job on handling the present these days.
Furthermore, the lack of jobs, especially quality jobs in the US is a direct result of corporate policy to move jobs out of this country into regions where workers can be paid pennies an hour. Corporate interests, by law, must always be antithetical to the interests of the public, since corporations are required to place maximum profit above any other concern.
The Bail-Out of Wall Street is up to $13 trillion dollars to corporations, all paid for by working people (since corporations now pay a small and ever-decreasing share of taxes). For this price, don’t we deserve someone in leadership who can separate the public of “this country” from organizations that increasingly proclaim their right to privatize our public schools?
For $13 trillion, the Bail-Out could have paid off the mortgage of every household in the country. That money would have gone into the banks that went bust for speculating with other peoples’ money, then the public and corporations would have been solvent. But… that didn’t happen. And Wall Street isn’t even required to tell the public what it is doing with our money!
3) Eight paragraphs later, the President states one of the great, unchallenged platitudes, “No one’s written your destiny for you. Here in America, you write your own destiny. You make your own future.”
How true is this, really?
– Did the millions of families who will be evicted because they were suckered by predatory mortgages write their own destiny?
– How about the thousands of people who will be denied health care by corporations because they had “pre-existing conditions”?
– How about the California state workers who have been forced to work 4 day weeks and lose close to 20% of their income, while less than 50% of the profitable corporations in the state pay zero income taxes?
The list of people who were worked really hard but were screwed by a system that glorifies it’s right to make a profit off of human misery would fill Wikipedia. This idea that America offers success for all who work hard has been a crock since it was first propagated by Horatio Alger. But it is the flip side that is so dangerous today.
It is not so strange that a country that was obsessed with slavery for three centuries can think of nothing but working hard. The corollary to the “Your Own Bootstraps” myth is another false idea that is preached across our country everyday: “It’s your fault that you are poor. You didn’t work hard enough. Everyone else can do it, but you chose not too. Now you want a free ride.”
What else can the President be saying? “You make your own future”. So if you are poor that is the future you made. Tell it to the hundreds of thousands of good high school students without papers who are not allowed to go to college unless they can pay cash. Tell it to the thousands of Detroit auto workers who were denied – by Obama – any kind of Bail-Out and whose pensions and health care are virtually day-to-day.
It’s this corporate vision of what education is that needs to be changed. For over a hundred years, corporations have used their vast power to guarantee that public education should be is tied to a job. Well, since they aren’t providing too many of those these days, maybe we can develop a more transformative vision.
This has been well stated by The Charter for Public Education, developed by the teachers of British Columbia [It has nothing to to with charter schools!]. This charter says:*
Public Education is a Sacred Trust.
As a community we promise to prepare learners for a socially responsible life in a free and democratic society, to participate in a world which each generation will shape and build. We promise a public education system which provides learners with knowledge and wisdom, protects and nurtures their natural joy of learning, encourages them to become persons of character, strength and integrity, infuses them with hope and with spirit, and guides them to resolute and thoughtful action.
Everyone has the right to a free, quality public education.
Each first nation has the right to be recognized and respected by those within the educational institutions located in their traditional territory.
We promise:
To recognize that the learner is at the center of public education. To offer learners a broad-based education which includes aesthetic, artistic, cultural, emotional, social, intellectual, academic, physical and vocational development in order that they can find and follow their hopes, dreams and passions.
To nurture and value critical thinking so that learners are equipped to be reflective and analytical global citizens.
To respect, encourage and foster the learner's role as a full participant, together with others in the educational community, in developing their own goals, learning activities and curricula.
To create an environment in which each learner can reach their greatest potential, each learning style is affirmed, and the achievements of each learner are measured and assessed accordingly.
To provide a safe and respectful environment for life-long learning which celebrates diversity, embraces the physical, spiritual, emotinal and intellectual integrity of each individual, recognizes and acknowledges differences and prevents discrimination in all of its forms.
We expect:
Government to be responsible for fully funding all aspects of a quality education.
Steven Miller
Oakland, Ca
8 September 2009
*One official definition of charter: A document outlining the principles, functions, and organization of a corporate body; a constitution.
