Response to "End K-12 Teacher Tenure" by the Detroit / Mackinac News on November 23. 2009.
Listed Source: Tom Watkins, former State Superintendent of Public Instruction, 2001-05, and Mackinac Center for Public Policy.
How many pubic school teachers would the Detroit News have Michigan school boards fire if the Tenure Act were removed?
Coincidental with the sharp, unfounded criticisms the News has directed toward the right of Michigan's public school teachers to have tenure ("End K-12 Teacher Tenure", Detroit News, Nov. 23, 2009) has been the introduction of State Sen. Patricia Birkholz's bill to alter or strip the Act of protective provisions for teaching professionals. The anti-tenure argument always runs with the mantra, "tenure shields incompetence." In times when things are economically very difficult such legislation arises on a predicable and regular basis. Obviously one way to save money is to remove teachers, especially those most experienced and highest paid. This attack is always framed as some form of "reform."
The News and Sen. Birkholz mistakenly believe that such sweeping action is necessary to "get rid of" certain under-performing teachers. How short sighted and punitive!
Repeal of the Tenure Act or undertake a radical stripping of its provisions that will affect all teachers.
Good teachers will suffer-the high performing and stellar mentors as well as those targeted by the News and perennial public school critics. Consider the times, there are those rancorous individuals, whom some have called "busybodies," who have any number of private complaints and religious agendas with which they regularly besiege the local school board meetings.
Just who advised Patricia Birkholz, herself a former public schools employee, to take such action at this time? How many fine teachers will be made vulnerable by her drastic action and will be subsequently exposed to a field day of capricious accusations and charges-which many ultimately lead to administrative harassment, burn-out or out right dismissal? No one can predict. What is completely predictable was the legislature attacking organized teachers utilizing the budget crisis as a cover or excuse.
In the current tense and highly negative atmosphere surrounding the state's historic budget crunch, this kind of "claw back" and "push back" against the Michigan Education Association for its ardent and vigorous defense and support of excellence in education for our children is both deplorably predictable and a repeat of earlier attacks under the malicious John M. Engler.
Suggesting a radical change in tenure is always used as a "shot-over-the-bow" indicating the legislature is resentful and wearied by MEA's skills, logic, and success in conducting legislative negotiations which support and sustain the local communities, school districts, and our children--so much impacted by the draconian cuts which the national economy has dealt the state's finances. In the recent past, such notables as former House Speaker Paul Hillegonds and previous governor Engler had used this tactic to intimidate the MEA.
Surely the Detroit News, the Mackinac Center, or Sen. Birkholz herself have some solid, substantive and well-documented study or report which gives an indication of the actual number or a percentage of teachers thought by them to be replaceable or unproductive. Or is this push just another attempt to settle a long standing political score with MEA?
How many teacher's political or religious beliefs will form the basis of trumped-up charges under Birkholz's stripped Tenure Act? Exposed without statewide, objective protections under the Tenure Act, a provision which has a governance board, procedures for dismissal, and an appeal mechanism, what specific lifestyles and voice in public affairs will be permitted for continuing teachers without reprisals?
There are editorial arguments, which have cropped up over the years and in the past several weeks, which ride on certain conditions such as under FTA in Detroit schools (where existing abuses are possible under due to iron-clad provisions of the Federation's contract with Detroit schools) or some other carefully chosen cases.
It is useful to anti-tenure forces to focus on the extreme or exceptional cases decided in favor of the teacher, often rest on technical merits. The press has honed certain of the more bizarre of these cases to support their editorial anti-tenure positions. These "showcase" legal incidents, that are inflammatory in character, do arise and cause the general public to misunderstand or distrust the tenure procedures-given the known facts found at the level of a publicly printed, sensationalized or purposefully slanted press news story.
Recent polling of administrators shows that they have a high level of discomfort with the tenure process, kinds of evidential documentation, and the procedures they must follow to "prove the case" for dismissal or discipline of a tenured teacher. However hard it is, in some cases, to discipline or fire a teacher that you yourself may have hired, it must be done if proper cause is there.
Dismissing a Teacher is Necessarily Serious Business
Good administrators must do their jobs well and effectively when dealing with teachers who merit dismissal or demerits. That is part of their work and responsibility. When carried out within the current law, incompetence and malfeasance are dealt with in an effective, fair, and appropriate manner. When administrators attempt dismissals or discipline on insubstantial, flawed evidence and/or procedure, the outcomes reflect that deficiency.
Teachers, themselves, neither hire or fire, that is the sole realm of administration, pleasant or unpleasant, in terms of public scrutiny and press coverage, as their work may be.
Iris Salters, president of the MEA has been quoted as being very clear on the topic of criminal, unworthy or under-productive teachers. This week Salters is quoted as saying: "Let me make one thing completely clear, MEA does not have any interest in protecting bad teachers."
MEA is responsible for seeing to it that teacher rights are observed and upheld under the law (representation). When administration fails to do the proper job of dismissal or discipline, or when the filed complaints are false or inflated, the association does help with the defense of the teacher-if the teacher merits and asks for such assistance.
The persistent anti-public school teacher stance of the Detroit News (in and of itself) does not justify calling for the summative elimination of professional tenure for all of Michigan's well-over 110,000 teachers. This get tough attitude is all too characteristic of the "right of right" reactionaries who have come to occupy the Michigan Republican Party for too long. Some of these ideologues don't want the public, neighborhood schools to survive and will use every tool in their tool box to work toward that end.
Other elements are at work also in undermining the security of tenured public school teachers. In their galaxies wholesale dismissals would be a great way to reduce costs. The News, in joining in their hue-and-cry, has allowed itself to become a useful tool in this thinly veiled attempt to break the teacher associations.
Break the teacher unions!
Now there is a goal long sought by certain business interests. But for now they will content themselves with hyping Birkholz's changes in the Tenure law as a method to streamline dismissal of "deadwood."
Teachers are so numerous. They are found in every community large or small. Some fall short of professional standards, but what profession can you think of that doesn't have its persistent minority of under-productive? Almost everyone has heard of a dentist or attorney that others have strongly recommended we should avoid seeking their services.
Why is it so hard for critics to accept the teacher's right to associate with other teachers in a professional organization?
It is ludicrous to believe that teachers, to be credible, have to stand by themselves, alone.
We don't expect that of doctors, attorneys, Realtors or Chamber of Commerce members. Albeit, opposition to teacher associations continues to be a contentious bone to chew, the idea being that teachers, when they band together, are a great threat to society.
Turn on teachers and teacher tenure and then watch the "best and the brightest" lose all interest in a teaching career!
Original Post.
Sunday, December 20, 2009
Friday, December 18, 2009
Cato’s Not So Clever Charter School Contortions (ala Andrew J. Coulson)
Response to "Charters hold key to saving state big education dollars" by Andrew J. Coulson in the Detroit News on December 17. 2009.
Cato says: "Charters hold key to saving state big education dollars"
This presentation by the Libertarian Cato Institute is very revealing, both for its content, its timing, and its distortions.
The assumption that Charter schools are the answer to the problems of achievement in academics is both wish-full thinking and deceptive. But the fact that the thrust of this appeal to the public and to the legislature appears in the News at the 11th hour the 59th minute, in the middle of this present "crisis," is very eye-opening and gives great insight as to the thinking of the local brand of radicalism that sees taxes in such a dim light. This piece lights up the dark corner of a class of ideologues who would eliminate the "burden of taxation" for the education of any child in a "public school."
The essential attitude of Cato is akin to the thought that is behind the choice over the use of a public toilet faculty. If an individual had a choice between a "public faculty" and a "private" one, the choice would always be for the private loo.
Let's look at what Cato's Andrew J. Coulson has revealed unto us.
1.) Cato: (I)f Michigan converted all its conventional public schools into charters (also known as public school academies), that tsunami would explode into a refreshing mist -- complete with fiscal surplus rainbow.
RESPONSE: Charters are operating in many areas where fine public schools exist. In fact many private schools simply converted to fit the "charter" designation in the early days of Michigan's charter school experiment. Many of those operations, even given public tax dollars have not survived. Charters exploit the atmosphere of created by the "manufactured crisis" over public schools encouraged and promoted by the Heartland Institute, the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, WalMart heirs, and the radicalized national Republican Party. The GOP, over the years since Reagan and still today, has promoted and festered anti-public school sentiment as a special "wedge issue" headed up by such rogues as Newt Gingrich and Grover Norquist. Religiously the GOP argument against public schooling has come from James Dobson and Jerry Falwell, both ardent foes and strong supporters of parents "pulling their children from public schools." The alternative for education monies, of course, is parochiaid a long sought and strongly defeated effort. Ask the Amway DeVos' about how easy it is to get a state like Utah to vote the voucher. Their well-funded effort there went down like it did in 2000 in Michigan by a whopping 2 to 1 margin. Does that tell you how the voter thinks?
2.) Cato: Based on the latest (2006-07) figures, the average charter school in Michigan spends $2,000 less in state and local tax dollars per pupil than the average district school. So the savings from a district-to-charter student exodus would add up to $3.5 billion annually.
RESPONSE: This overly simplistic assertion is only the tip of a dirty, acidic iceberg. Those savings are based in many ways on the fact that "truly public" neighborhood schools exist and continue to serve the charters as a safety net. The charters love to have a "full house" of coupon bearing children enrolled on head count day, after that they can eject the "bad apples" back into the public system.
Like cowbirds they don't see any problem in letting the other birds utilize their funding and facilities to educate their "rejects." The lower costs are built on the backs of many young teachers looking for any place to obtain a teaching job even if it doesn't pay well or provide adequate benefits, and even if it shorts their possibilities of a "public school retirement" down the years ahead.
The recent news from the News has actually pointed out that charters can be tiny "kingdoms," "fiefdoms" where operators and the proprietary interests hire and fire at-will, practice simony and placement of family members and fellow travelers in positions paid by tax dollars which have been siphoned off from the local, neighborhood school. Charter schools don't have to pack into the "foundation grant" the various mandates of Michigan law such as busing, including busing for private schools within their districts.
Charters also avoid wherever possible the high costs of physically and otherwise handicapped children (including blind children) and other students with special needs. Cherry picking for charters is a year around educating-for-profit activity.
3.) Cato: "...Michigan's charter schools not only spend 20 percent less than district schools, they also have 20 percent fewer pupils per teacher.
RESPONSE: One of the "boutique" draws of charters is the system's ability to cut personnel costs, other costs associated with a public school employee's benefits and retirement, the costs of a building built to a higher standard by far for a "public school" than the special zoning and building codes sought and obtained by the chartering industry, which has allowed them to build OSB, balloon trussed, and vinyl clad polebarns (akin to pig farm buildings) for their operations. God forbid one ever becomes engulfed in fire!
Get the facts: The faux public charter school owners have bragged in national media about making up to 12 percent profit from educating children in their privately operated and privately governed proprietary facilities. This means that chartering involves a middleman level of costs and control that must come from cutting something else in the operation and faculties of these completive experiments. So smaller classes, not always the standard, becomes a draw for parents.
It also helps that the parents are "coerced" into "contributing" hours of their labor and efforts into supplementing and off-loading the expenses of the charter's operations. No compliance with mandatory service, no "free" taxpayer-funded charter schooling for your child.
4.) Cato: Thus far, the governor and state Legislature seem unaware of the vast savings to be had from universal charter schooling. But they have shown their willingness to promote charters in response to a far smaller financial inducement.
RESPONSE: The use of the charter movement based on the segregation academies of the south has been a pet project of a cornucopia of private and parochial interests. The heavy push from the Catholic hierarchy to achieve the voucher has been a major ingredient in this movement, privatizing for profit as Jonathan Kozol pointed out in Harpers Magazine is the "giant enchilada" for venture capitalists-so eager to break into the public schools lockbox.
The mantra, education is the sole responsibility of parents, has in it the thought that if you have a child the expense of educating that child is totally on you. That concept is specious, but it motivates a strong undercurrent in the anti-public school ranks. Right thinking citizens see a much larger and more important reason for excellence in public schools, for all children: the survival of our democracy.
One of the significant sources of the perennial "stink tank attacks" on public schools stems from the fact that all our children, from all our ethnic and racial groups, didn't sit in the same classrooms until into the 1970's. The residual fear and resentment over that occurrence has spawned a plethora of academies and private elitist religious school.
Just go the local library and look under the Yellow Pages for the listings of such schools in a city like Charlotte, North Carolina, there peruse the scores of such educational operations listings, the list will astound you.
5.) Cato: If legislators are willing to promote charter schools modestly in response to that modest and transitory incentive, they should be willing to promote charter schools much more intensively for a recurring annual savings that is eight times larger.
RESPONSE: The cost savings in a charter operation would be different if the playing field were level and identical with the local, neighborhood school. We have seen over 40 charters bite the dust this year alone. More will follow. Who gets the buildings, the computers, the equipment? The taxpaying public? Call your representative and ask. The answers will be weak and unrewarding. And then you have to ask yourself why is the Bay Mills Tribe in the tax-funded charter school business? Wouldn't it be more profitable and sensible for them to operate more casinos?
6.) Cato: (S)ignificant though it would be, charterizing the state's education system is not the best that Michiganians could do for their children. Opening the state's educational marketplace completely would be a better option. Some parents, for instance, prefer a religious education for their children, and religious (particularly Catholic) schools have repeatedly been found to be among the most effective and least expensive to operate.
RESPONSE: If a religious institution, say the branch run by Louis Farakahan, wants to run a "private" religious institution; what's the harm in throwing some of the "surplus" Michigan tax monies to them for that purpose? If private sources like the Amway clan, WalMart, the Knights of Columbus, or the Michigan Militia want a "government free" academy let them fund it and operate it as they see fit. To ask the taxpayer to fund indoctrination and sectarian religious training is one bridge too far. Already we have seen a charter run as a Muslim school teaching Arabic and having over a 90 percent Muslim student population.
Let's see now, what other kinds of secular or religious groups should we endow with public tax dollars to educate to their own beliefs and standards?
Incidentally, Catholic schools are not schools-on average-that have just Catholic students or individuals with religious orders as instructors anymore. They are very diverse and eclectic.
During the 1960's Catholic schools slipped in their achievement and desirability, being a Catholic school has not always automatically proven to be a school of excellence, and how they are run; not democratic either. Problems with sexual abuse and physical abuse of students in Catholic schools is a topic worth exploring, but in another venue.
7.) Cato:(P)roviding free charter schools without providing easier access to private school options reduces families' access to both religious and secular private alternatives. The closure of many Michigan private schools during the past decade resoundingly attests to the fact that it's hard to compete with free or heavily subsidized public schools.
RESPONSE: Not every elitist or religious desire for one's children should be the responsibility of the public and the tax dollar. No group should be more certain of this than the Libertarians and their Cato Institute. Did Andrew J. Coulson simply skip-rock this essay across the water or did he get approval from the Cato high council?
8.) Cato: Michigan's Constitution bans giving all families an easy choice between district, charter and private schools. As a result, it is impossible for Michigan parents to give their children the best possible educational options and permanently rein in out-of-control school district spending.
RESPONSE: It all comes down to Cato and fellow travelers finding a way to breach the levees of separation of church and state. On one hand they want freedom, and lots of it. Libertarians want freedom for drug use.
They want to get out of taxes they don't like. Then they want a "government" endowment for religious and private education. How can these ardent proponents of "freedom" be so bifurcated and blind? Perhaps they need to check with Michigan Republicans in the legislature to see how they carry on in their dark night of anti-public school radicalism.
Original Post.
Cato says: "Charters hold key to saving state big education dollars"
This presentation by the Libertarian Cato Institute is very revealing, both for its content, its timing, and its distortions.
The assumption that Charter schools are the answer to the problems of achievement in academics is both wish-full thinking and deceptive. But the fact that the thrust of this appeal to the public and to the legislature appears in the News at the 11th hour the 59th minute, in the middle of this present "crisis," is very eye-opening and gives great insight as to the thinking of the local brand of radicalism that sees taxes in such a dim light. This piece lights up the dark corner of a class of ideologues who would eliminate the "burden of taxation" for the education of any child in a "public school."
The essential attitude of Cato is akin to the thought that is behind the choice over the use of a public toilet faculty. If an individual had a choice between a "public faculty" and a "private" one, the choice would always be for the private loo.
Let's look at what Cato's Andrew J. Coulson has revealed unto us.
1.) Cato: (I)f Michigan converted all its conventional public schools into charters (also known as public school academies), that tsunami would explode into a refreshing mist -- complete with fiscal surplus rainbow.
RESPONSE: Charters are operating in many areas where fine public schools exist. In fact many private schools simply converted to fit the "charter" designation in the early days of Michigan's charter school experiment. Many of those operations, even given public tax dollars have not survived. Charters exploit the atmosphere of created by the "manufactured crisis" over public schools encouraged and promoted by the Heartland Institute, the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, WalMart heirs, and the radicalized national Republican Party. The GOP, over the years since Reagan and still today, has promoted and festered anti-public school sentiment as a special "wedge issue" headed up by such rogues as Newt Gingrich and Grover Norquist. Religiously the GOP argument against public schooling has come from James Dobson and Jerry Falwell, both ardent foes and strong supporters of parents "pulling their children from public schools." The alternative for education monies, of course, is parochiaid a long sought and strongly defeated effort. Ask the Amway DeVos' about how easy it is to get a state like Utah to vote the voucher. Their well-funded effort there went down like it did in 2000 in Michigan by a whopping 2 to 1 margin. Does that tell you how the voter thinks?
2.) Cato: Based on the latest (2006-07) figures, the average charter school in Michigan spends $2,000 less in state and local tax dollars per pupil than the average district school. So the savings from a district-to-charter student exodus would add up to $3.5 billion annually.
RESPONSE: This overly simplistic assertion is only the tip of a dirty, acidic iceberg. Those savings are based in many ways on the fact that "truly public" neighborhood schools exist and continue to serve the charters as a safety net. The charters love to have a "full house" of coupon bearing children enrolled on head count day, after that they can eject the "bad apples" back into the public system.
Like cowbirds they don't see any problem in letting the other birds utilize their funding and facilities to educate their "rejects." The lower costs are built on the backs of many young teachers looking for any place to obtain a teaching job even if it doesn't pay well or provide adequate benefits, and even if it shorts their possibilities of a "public school retirement" down the years ahead.
The recent news from the News has actually pointed out that charters can be tiny "kingdoms," "fiefdoms" where operators and the proprietary interests hire and fire at-will, practice simony and placement of family members and fellow travelers in positions paid by tax dollars which have been siphoned off from the local, neighborhood school. Charter schools don't have to pack into the "foundation grant" the various mandates of Michigan law such as busing, including busing for private schools within their districts.
Charters also avoid wherever possible the high costs of physically and otherwise handicapped children (including blind children) and other students with special needs. Cherry picking for charters is a year around educating-for-profit activity.
3.) Cato: "...Michigan's charter schools not only spend 20 percent less than district schools, they also have 20 percent fewer pupils per teacher.
RESPONSE: One of the "boutique" draws of charters is the system's ability to cut personnel costs, other costs associated with a public school employee's benefits and retirement, the costs of a building built to a higher standard by far for a "public school" than the special zoning and building codes sought and obtained by the chartering industry, which has allowed them to build OSB, balloon trussed, and vinyl clad polebarns (akin to pig farm buildings) for their operations. God forbid one ever becomes engulfed in fire!
Get the facts: The faux public charter school owners have bragged in national media about making up to 12 percent profit from educating children in their privately operated and privately governed proprietary facilities. This means that chartering involves a middleman level of costs and control that must come from cutting something else in the operation and faculties of these completive experiments. So smaller classes, not always the standard, becomes a draw for parents.
It also helps that the parents are "coerced" into "contributing" hours of their labor and efforts into supplementing and off-loading the expenses of the charter's operations. No compliance with mandatory service, no "free" taxpayer-funded charter schooling for your child.
4.) Cato: Thus far, the governor and state Legislature seem unaware of the vast savings to be had from universal charter schooling. But they have shown their willingness to promote charters in response to a far smaller financial inducement.
RESPONSE: The use of the charter movement based on the segregation academies of the south has been a pet project of a cornucopia of private and parochial interests. The heavy push from the Catholic hierarchy to achieve the voucher has been a major ingredient in this movement, privatizing for profit as Jonathan Kozol pointed out in Harpers Magazine is the "giant enchilada" for venture capitalists-so eager to break into the public schools lockbox.
The mantra, education is the sole responsibility of parents, has in it the thought that if you have a child the expense of educating that child is totally on you. That concept is specious, but it motivates a strong undercurrent in the anti-public school ranks. Right thinking citizens see a much larger and more important reason for excellence in public schools, for all children: the survival of our democracy.
One of the significant sources of the perennial "stink tank attacks" on public schools stems from the fact that all our children, from all our ethnic and racial groups, didn't sit in the same classrooms until into the 1970's. The residual fear and resentment over that occurrence has spawned a plethora of academies and private elitist religious school.
Just go the local library and look under the Yellow Pages for the listings of such schools in a city like Charlotte, North Carolina, there peruse the scores of such educational operations listings, the list will astound you.
5.) Cato: If legislators are willing to promote charter schools modestly in response to that modest and transitory incentive, they should be willing to promote charter schools much more intensively for a recurring annual savings that is eight times larger.
RESPONSE: The cost savings in a charter operation would be different if the playing field were level and identical with the local, neighborhood school. We have seen over 40 charters bite the dust this year alone. More will follow. Who gets the buildings, the computers, the equipment? The taxpaying public? Call your representative and ask. The answers will be weak and unrewarding. And then you have to ask yourself why is the Bay Mills Tribe in the tax-funded charter school business? Wouldn't it be more profitable and sensible for them to operate more casinos?
6.) Cato: (S)ignificant though it would be, charterizing the state's education system is not the best that Michiganians could do for their children. Opening the state's educational marketplace completely would be a better option. Some parents, for instance, prefer a religious education for their children, and religious (particularly Catholic) schools have repeatedly been found to be among the most effective and least expensive to operate.
RESPONSE: If a religious institution, say the branch run by Louis Farakahan, wants to run a "private" religious institution; what's the harm in throwing some of the "surplus" Michigan tax monies to them for that purpose? If private sources like the Amway clan, WalMart, the Knights of Columbus, or the Michigan Militia want a "government free" academy let them fund it and operate it as they see fit. To ask the taxpayer to fund indoctrination and sectarian religious training is one bridge too far. Already we have seen a charter run as a Muslim school teaching Arabic and having over a 90 percent Muslim student population.
Let's see now, what other kinds of secular or religious groups should we endow with public tax dollars to educate to their own beliefs and standards?
Incidentally, Catholic schools are not schools-on average-that have just Catholic students or individuals with religious orders as instructors anymore. They are very diverse and eclectic.
During the 1960's Catholic schools slipped in their achievement and desirability, being a Catholic school has not always automatically proven to be a school of excellence, and how they are run; not democratic either. Problems with sexual abuse and physical abuse of students in Catholic schools is a topic worth exploring, but in another venue.
7.) Cato:(P)roviding free charter schools without providing easier access to private school options reduces families' access to both religious and secular private alternatives. The closure of many Michigan private schools during the past decade resoundingly attests to the fact that it's hard to compete with free or heavily subsidized public schools.
RESPONSE: Not every elitist or religious desire for one's children should be the responsibility of the public and the tax dollar. No group should be more certain of this than the Libertarians and their Cato Institute. Did Andrew J. Coulson simply skip-rock this essay across the water or did he get approval from the Cato high council?
8.) Cato: Michigan's Constitution bans giving all families an easy choice between district, charter and private schools. As a result, it is impossible for Michigan parents to give their children the best possible educational options and permanently rein in out-of-control school district spending.
RESPONSE: It all comes down to Cato and fellow travelers finding a way to breach the levees of separation of church and state. On one hand they want freedom, and lots of it. Libertarians want freedom for drug use.
They want to get out of taxes they don't like. Then they want a "government" endowment for religious and private education. How can these ardent proponents of "freedom" be so bifurcated and blind? Perhaps they need to check with Michigan Republicans in the legislature to see how they carry on in their dark night of anti-public school radicalism.
Original Post.
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
NEWS BULLETIN: Detroit News Endorses Obama's Federal "Socialist Take-over" or Michigan's Public Schools
Response to Detroit News Editorial ""Michigan must pass education bills or fall behind other states" on December 15, 2009.
Can we assume that this News sponsored crap shoot-a chance at federal dollars that "might" become available "if" Michigan can qualify for the federal dole from the Obama Administration-is worth the cost of towing under to "government coercion?"
If the changes insisted upon by the News are passed into law what do we get in return? We just get a chance to be "eligible to compete for the (Feds) money." Nothing more.
The Detroit News is asking the good citizens to lower the standards the vast majority of Michigan public schools hold high and achieve, just to qualify to take a chance/a long shot on a "federal grant/bribe" ? And if we get a portion of the dangled money, we get a boatload of new and much maligned "government red tape,” mandates, and paperwork, more bureaucracy.
"Without schools that work, the state is doomed to endless decline," wrote the editorial board of the News at the end of its impassioned pitch for the Obama plan.
Are we to assume the News is so deranged as to be dissatisfied with the achievement of the vast majority of Michigan's local neighborhood schools? Disaggregated from the majority of districts are those schools which have just been singled out by the News for the heaviest of condemnation and criticism.
Let's directly address that issue.
We know where the failing schools are and we know a good deal about why they fail.
We also know that we are at a loss to find a way to punish failing schools into excellence, Leave No Child Behind didn't do it. The last few decades are full of such punitive measures and executive take-overs.
There Must Be a Better Way
The dictates of Chicagoan Erne Duncan's new "magic" scheme are not the answer. The ingredients of The Race to the Top contain very negative and counter intuitive edicts that are designed to "reform" the most desperate of underachieving schools in the most recalcitrant and difficult socio-economic environments, but do nothing for the schools that do the job well. R2T will actually reverse and undermine the proven progress and standards of all those other healthy and highly achieving local public schools across this state, achieving districts will be undercut by many the many negatives in R2T.
The News Takes An Unbelievable Reversal of It's Own "Conservative" Ideology
The very fact that the Detroit News-always closely aligned with the News' cathouse "think tank" cohorts such as Cato, the Heritage Foundation, Hillsdale College, the Mackinac Center and a whole host of national tax-hating cranks and would beg both Republicans and Democrats in the statehouse-to fall in line with the "socialist" Obama U.S. Department of Education on the their latest-and-greatest federal program-Race to the Top and push hard to pass it-defies almost every published tome and "conservative" principle the News has stood for in the last 30 years.
This national economic crisis and the failure of manufacturing in Michigan has created some strange bedfellows and this "marriage of convenience" to achieve, by way of the back door, certain long sought anti-MEA goals of the News has produced a lollapalooza of a nuptial arrangement.
Let's Get Down to Brass Tacks
All those teacher preparation courses and student teaching requirements practiced by Michigan's colleges and universities are a total failure and need to be wiped out.
Back in 2001 an article appeared entitled "The Teachers We Need and How to Get More of Them" postulated the following:
Every additional requirement for prospective teachers -- every additional pedagogical course, every new hoop or hurdle -- will have a predictable and inexorable effect: it will limit the potential supply of teachers by narrowing the pipeline while having no bearing whatever on the quality or effectiveness of those in the pipeline. The regulatory approach is also bound, over time, to undermine the standards-and-accountability strategy for improving schools and raising student achievement. The News:
"A better solution to the teacher quality problem is to simplify the entry and hiring process. Get rid of most hoops and hurdles. Instead of requiring a long list of courses and degrees, test future teachers for their knowledge and skills. Allow principals to hire the teachers they need. Focus relentlessly on results, on whether students are learning. This strategy, we are confident, will produce a larger supply of able teachers and will tie judgments about their fitness and performance to success in the classroom, not to process or impression."
Let's go for outcomes, not state credentials or legislated high standards.
In simple English, teacher certification requirements and the huge cost of candidates qualifying for accreditation and a credential is a total waste of money, if we follow the logic of R2T's non-certified instructor plan.
In fact, let's just let any person a specific principal likes, with a degree, come in and attempt to prove that she/he has the ability to effectively apply their knowledge in the public school class room, without certification or special training and an extended supervised internship (a total of 5 years of preparation).
Let's let un-certified individuals turn the pupils into "experimental education guinea pigs" as a novel way to solve, go for the quick-fix, or satisfy our objections about and critic's problems with organized teachers and all those "heads-in-the-clouds" academics in the state's premiere teacher training programs. It's cheaper and it'll be a super smack down for teacher unions.
The Road to Real Outcomes: Systemic Reform of School Administration and Governance
Systemic reform has not occurred in the state of Michigan and won't until the legislature begins a sweeping investigation and overhaul of how Michigan's public schools are administered.
The Republicans' dirty little secret concerning school reform is they refuse to confront the real core problem in public school performance and operations: School Administration and Administrative Practices. The reason is simple and outdated, Republicans invariably take a management position on such issues.
The Michigan GOP would have the public believe that the problems which are connected with the community schools are created by the teachers. It's the teachers who resist change, who fail to give a full effort and who are lax on discipline, Republicans are fond of complaining.
A reality check would reveal that teachers don't hire, evaluate, or fire other teachers. They don't set policy, they don't allocate and spend funds, they don't approve the curriculum. These are the dominion of school administration.
Oddly enough, because the GOP has a steadfast, fixed management viewpoint and bias, after many years of trumpeting school reform, demonstrative "systemic reform" has not occurred in the state of Michigan and won't until the Republicans begin a sweeping investigation and overhaul of how the public schools are administered.
Blamespeaking and bad mouthing the teachers by scapegoating is a cruel blow to our children's mentors.
Blame distances the teacher from the parent and child, demeans the profession in the eyes of the public and worsens the situations and conditions, created, compounded, and enforced by administration and their top-down industrial management strategies (largely unchanged since the 19th century).
But because the teacher cares enough to get involved in the public policy realm and financially supports politicians who most closely pursue the policies and practices which help children and families get an excellent education, they are feared and maligned by the bottomline: spreadsheet thinking of the mindless radicals now in control of the Michigan Republican party and a host of think tanks (state and national) chipping for some direct economic or political advantage from this present crisis.
If we want to see meaningful change in the outcomes for our children we are going to have to demand a meaningful change in public school administrative accountability and practices in Michigan.
Original Post.
Can we assume that this News sponsored crap shoot-a chance at federal dollars that "might" become available "if" Michigan can qualify for the federal dole from the Obama Administration-is worth the cost of towing under to "government coercion?"
If the changes insisted upon by the News are passed into law what do we get in return? We just get a chance to be "eligible to compete for the (Feds) money." Nothing more.
The Detroit News is asking the good citizens to lower the standards the vast majority of Michigan public schools hold high and achieve, just to qualify to take a chance/a long shot on a "federal grant/bribe" ? And if we get a portion of the dangled money, we get a boatload of new and much maligned "government red tape,” mandates, and paperwork, more bureaucracy.
"Without schools that work, the state is doomed to endless decline," wrote the editorial board of the News at the end of its impassioned pitch for the Obama plan.
Are we to assume the News is so deranged as to be dissatisfied with the achievement of the vast majority of Michigan's local neighborhood schools? Disaggregated from the majority of districts are those schools which have just been singled out by the News for the heaviest of condemnation and criticism.
Let's directly address that issue.
We know where the failing schools are and we know a good deal about why they fail.
We also know that we are at a loss to find a way to punish failing schools into excellence, Leave No Child Behind didn't do it. The last few decades are full of such punitive measures and executive take-overs.
There Must Be a Better Way
The dictates of Chicagoan Erne Duncan's new "magic" scheme are not the answer. The ingredients of The Race to the Top contain very negative and counter intuitive edicts that are designed to "reform" the most desperate of underachieving schools in the most recalcitrant and difficult socio-economic environments, but do nothing for the schools that do the job well. R2T will actually reverse and undermine the proven progress and standards of all those other healthy and highly achieving local public schools across this state, achieving districts will be undercut by many the many negatives in R2T.
The News Takes An Unbelievable Reversal of It's Own "Conservative" Ideology
The very fact that the Detroit News-always closely aligned with the News' cathouse "think tank" cohorts such as Cato, the Heritage Foundation, Hillsdale College, the Mackinac Center and a whole host of national tax-hating cranks and would beg both Republicans and Democrats in the statehouse-to fall in line with the "socialist" Obama U.S. Department of Education on the their latest-and-greatest federal program-Race to the Top and push hard to pass it-defies almost every published tome and "conservative" principle the News has stood for in the last 30 years.
This national economic crisis and the failure of manufacturing in Michigan has created some strange bedfellows and this "marriage of convenience" to achieve, by way of the back door, certain long sought anti-MEA goals of the News has produced a lollapalooza of a nuptial arrangement.
Let's Get Down to Brass Tacks
All those teacher preparation courses and student teaching requirements practiced by Michigan's colleges and universities are a total failure and need to be wiped out.
Back in 2001 an article appeared entitled "The Teachers We Need and How to Get More of Them" postulated the following:
"We conclude that the regulatory strategy being pursued today to boost teacher quality is seriously flawed. "
Every additional requirement for prospective teachers -- every additional pedagogical course, every new hoop or hurdle -- will have a predictable and inexorable effect: it will limit the potential supply of teachers by narrowing the pipeline while having no bearing whatever on the quality or effectiveness of those in the pipeline. The regulatory approach is also bound, over time, to undermine the standards-and-accountability strategy for improving schools and raising student achievement. The News:
"A better solution to the teacher quality problem is to simplify the entry and hiring process. Get rid of most hoops and hurdles. Instead of requiring a long list of courses and degrees, test future teachers for their knowledge and skills. Allow principals to hire the teachers they need. Focus relentlessly on results, on whether students are learning. This strategy, we are confident, will produce a larger supply of able teachers and will tie judgments about their fitness and performance to success in the classroom, not to process or impression."
Let's go for outcomes, not state credentials or legislated high standards.
In simple English, teacher certification requirements and the huge cost of candidates qualifying for accreditation and a credential is a total waste of money, if we follow the logic of R2T's non-certified instructor plan.
In fact, let's just let any person a specific principal likes, with a degree, come in and attempt to prove that she/he has the ability to effectively apply their knowledge in the public school class room, without certification or special training and an extended supervised internship (a total of 5 years of preparation).
Let's let un-certified individuals turn the pupils into "experimental education guinea pigs" as a novel way to solve, go for the quick-fix, or satisfy our objections about and critic's problems with organized teachers and all those "heads-in-the-clouds" academics in the state's premiere teacher training programs. It's cheaper and it'll be a super smack down for teacher unions.
The Road to Real Outcomes: Systemic Reform of School Administration and Governance
Systemic reform has not occurred in the state of Michigan and won't until the legislature begins a sweeping investigation and overhaul of how Michigan's public schools are administered.
The Republicans' dirty little secret concerning school reform is they refuse to confront the real core problem in public school performance and operations: School Administration and Administrative Practices. The reason is simple and outdated, Republicans invariably take a management position on such issues.
The Michigan GOP would have the public believe that the problems which are connected with the community schools are created by the teachers. It's the teachers who resist change, who fail to give a full effort and who are lax on discipline, Republicans are fond of complaining.
A reality check would reveal that teachers don't hire, evaluate, or fire other teachers. They don't set policy, they don't allocate and spend funds, they don't approve the curriculum. These are the dominion of school administration.
Oddly enough, because the GOP has a steadfast, fixed management viewpoint and bias, after many years of trumpeting school reform, demonstrative "systemic reform" has not occurred in the state of Michigan and won't until the Republicans begin a sweeping investigation and overhaul of how the public schools are administered.
Blamespeaking and bad mouthing the teachers by scapegoating is a cruel blow to our children's mentors.
Blame distances the teacher from the parent and child, demeans the profession in the eyes of the public and worsens the situations and conditions, created, compounded, and enforced by administration and their top-down industrial management strategies (largely unchanged since the 19th century).
But because the teacher cares enough to get involved in the public policy realm and financially supports politicians who most closely pursue the policies and practices which help children and families get an excellent education, they are feared and maligned by the bottomline: spreadsheet thinking of the mindless radicals now in control of the Michigan Republican party and a host of think tanks (state and national) chipping for some direct economic or political advantage from this present crisis.
If we want to see meaningful change in the outcomes for our children we are going to have to demand a meaningful change in public school administrative accountability and practices in Michigan.
Original Post.
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
Don't Damage the Sacred Relationship Between Parent, Child and Teacher
Essay and commentary on Amber Arellano's piece entitled "Detroit Charter Schools: new accountability movement targets low-performing charter academies" in the Detroit News on December 15, 2009.
Public school critics have a moral obligation to refrain from broad-brush pejorative bashing of teachers.
Sen. Mike Bishop and his foot soldiers must remain statesmanlike carrying forth toward a studies based, systemic reform of education. Teachers' roles may be thoroughly examined, but also the administrator's role must be intensely scrutinized. Engler once promised "real" education reform and now his neophytes must deliver.
The magic device Engler et. al. promoted was competitive charter schools under the guise of school improvement. Over a dozen years have flown by and now we see that there is a major flaw, "charter school corruption," rampant abuse of public tax funding and all the stale abuses of schools so long associated with powerless teachers and heavy-handed administration e.g. "a charter system that...is as corrupt and troubled as the Detroit Public Schools." They are faux public schools, private endeavors funded with scarce tax dollars, where, it turns out, in terms of record low math scores, "Charter schools performed just as poorly as traditional public schools in the city."
Amber Arellano reports:
A public show of willingness is needed on the part of the Republican Senate and Bishop's people to act in the highest public interest. They must be willing to fully discuss, and commit to the state's resources and support necessary to make basic improvements which are the very genuine "reforms" that are sorely needed.
Playing the critic and dictating the changes, top-down, will not succeed. If there are genuine issues about the teacher's professional organizations which trouble recalcitrant Republicans, they must place them openly and above board on the table and enter a progressive give and take dialogue.
Bishop must be willing to honestly and completely discuss his objections or difficulties so that education for our children can move forward freed of the long GOP history of obstruction of our children's best interests, based on political gamesmanship-going back directly to that old foe, John Engler, and the Mackinac Center rogues.
Michigan Republicans ought to resist the temptation to blamespeak and become embittered cynics. They must discipline themselves to remain committed to the public square and open about their intentions and agendas; no hidden agendas and harsh reprisals. If their use of politics is to gain votes and power at the expense of public education, let them be warned, they play a dangerous and destructive game. Right now we see the terrible outcome for students of what was mapped out by the Michigan GOP 13 years ago.
To trade away our community public schools by inviting the public to hold them in contempt-based upon false or disinformational materials or studies prepared by hostile hard right sources such as Hillsdale College or the D.C. Heritage Foundation, which promote parochial vouchers and for-profit charters for the chosen few-is a civic evil.
Private entitlements are a divisive and specious activity. Those Republicans, who would sell the public school children into the realm of commercialization and profiteering, doing so, will be scorned for years to come.
Republicans may temporarily win the game of power, but lose the esteem of the public. They lose out by denigrating the sacred role of the teacher in the eyes of the parents, children and public, however in the end, the public will decide for itself whose institution is worthy of support and respect.
After now 30 years of relentless criticism of public schooling across the country, the public still holds fast to its love and respect for the "real" work that public schools are doing. Perfect? Absolutely not, but to be abandoned for privatization and profit-making? Never.
Politics is politics, but teaching is spiritual and enduring. Those who berate teachers by scapegoating societal problems unto them, in the end, are undeserving of public confidence or public office.
In the end the public school and the public school teacher will win out.
So let's scrap the puffery and get down to the business at hand in a truly cooperative fashion, drawing in parents, community, business, eager children, and, yes, bi-partisan politics.
As Disraeli so aptly said, "Individuals may form communities, but it is institutions alone that make great a nation."
Original Post.
Public school critics have a moral obligation to refrain from broad-brush pejorative bashing of teachers.
Sen. Mike Bishop and his foot soldiers must remain statesmanlike carrying forth toward a studies based, systemic reform of education. Teachers' roles may be thoroughly examined, but also the administrator's role must be intensely scrutinized. Engler once promised "real" education reform and now his neophytes must deliver.
The magic device Engler et. al. promoted was competitive charter schools under the guise of school improvement. Over a dozen years have flown by and now we see that there is a major flaw, "charter school corruption," rampant abuse of public tax funding and all the stale abuses of schools so long associated with powerless teachers and heavy-handed administration e.g. "a charter system that...is as corrupt and troubled as the Detroit Public Schools." They are faux public schools, private endeavors funded with scarce tax dollars, where, it turns out, in terms of record low math scores, "Charter schools performed just as poorly as traditional public schools in the city."
Amber Arellano reports:
"I often hear Lansing lawmakers say we should close down the Detroit Public Schools,"(Michigan State University's) Shakrani says. "They are mistaken. The charter schools are also troubled. The quality problem in Detroit education is across the board."Amber focused on a serious state government oversight and accountability failure:
"While a few charter schools in the city are academically strong and financially well-managed, such as Detroit Edison Preparatory Academy, city leaders and activists cite a common concern about charter school corruption. (Chris) White speaks for many when he says the same culture in the Detroit Public Schools is at work in charters. Some charter school developers see these academies as an opportunity to create jobs for their friends and families."What is needed in genuine school reform and what has not occurred is open debate prior to now.
"State charter leaders and authorizers also have expressed how difficult it is sometimes to close low-performing charter schools, especially when the schools' leaders use the issues of race and ethnicity to prevent shutdowns."
A public show of willingness is needed on the part of the Republican Senate and Bishop's people to act in the highest public interest. They must be willing to fully discuss, and commit to the state's resources and support necessary to make basic improvements which are the very genuine "reforms" that are sorely needed.
Playing the critic and dictating the changes, top-down, will not succeed. If there are genuine issues about the teacher's professional organizations which trouble recalcitrant Republicans, they must place them openly and above board on the table and enter a progressive give and take dialogue.
Bishop must be willing to honestly and completely discuss his objections or difficulties so that education for our children can move forward freed of the long GOP history of obstruction of our children's best interests, based on political gamesmanship-going back directly to that old foe, John Engler, and the Mackinac Center rogues.
Michigan Republicans ought to resist the temptation to blamespeak and become embittered cynics. They must discipline themselves to remain committed to the public square and open about their intentions and agendas; no hidden agendas and harsh reprisals. If their use of politics is to gain votes and power at the expense of public education, let them be warned, they play a dangerous and destructive game. Right now we see the terrible outcome for students of what was mapped out by the Michigan GOP 13 years ago.
To trade away our community public schools by inviting the public to hold them in contempt-based upon false or disinformational materials or studies prepared by hostile hard right sources such as Hillsdale College or the D.C. Heritage Foundation, which promote parochial vouchers and for-profit charters for the chosen few-is a civic evil.
Private entitlements are a divisive and specious activity. Those Republicans, who would sell the public school children into the realm of commercialization and profiteering, doing so, will be scorned for years to come.
Republicans may temporarily win the game of power, but lose the esteem of the public. They lose out by denigrating the sacred role of the teacher in the eyes of the parents, children and public, however in the end, the public will decide for itself whose institution is worthy of support and respect.
After now 30 years of relentless criticism of public schooling across the country, the public still holds fast to its love and respect for the "real" work that public schools are doing. Perfect? Absolutely not, but to be abandoned for privatization and profit-making? Never.
Politics is politics, but teaching is spiritual and enduring. Those who berate teachers by scapegoating societal problems unto them, in the end, are undeserving of public confidence or public office.
In the end the public school and the public school teacher will win out.
So let's scrap the puffery and get down to the business at hand in a truly cooperative fashion, drawing in parents, community, business, eager children, and, yes, bi-partisan politics.
As Disraeli so aptly said, "Individuals may form communities, but it is institutions alone that make great a nation."
Original Post.
Friday, December 11, 2009
Detroit is Beautiful from Afar...
Detroit Is Beautiful From Afar, Just Don’t Live There - according to some pundits and nay-Sayers
A casual observer sitting on a riverfront bench in Windsor looking across to the skyline of Detroit, unaware of conditions on the ground there, would marvel at the visual appeal and the apparent delight of its location.
How long do you think we can go on ignorantly and stubbornly believing that the implosion of this major U.S. city is not taking place?
In answering this question, it really doesn't matter, conservative or liberal, how you view your ideals or harbor your political prejudices. In Detroit, the American dream has dimmed and may go out altogether. Of course, there have been efforts to reverse the downward trend but they appear to be off-set by such factors as: white flight, the business departures, the departure of the Catholic church from over two dozen parishes, the indifference of the state government, and the systemic corruption and spoils involved in Detroit city governance.
Detroit is not Chicago, with its Magic Mile and its elite condos and row houses in the heart of the that great city.
Walk the deserted streets of the core business district of Detroit at after close of business and pervasively sense for yourself the personal danger you are surrounded by. No one on the streets. The Motor City is not the Windy City.
In recent and very open and honest public comments to columnists and to editorials, a careful reader is finding the ground level noise about what is actually going on in the troubled Detroit core city and in its schools and it isn't pretty.
The angst and despair expressed by Daniel Howes in this column is bone-cutting. Verbally graphic, and long over due.
What About Level of Educational Progress in DPS?
It's altogether possible that there is a pervasive and street savvy sub-culture running through the city's youths. In a place so seemingly hopeless, with so little to cause a child to dream or aspire, there has developed a youth counter-culture that hates what it sees a life confined this wrenched poverty and black-on-black crime, and flatly refuses to play the game other Americans better placed embrace.
When we learn that students in the DPS have a habit of bringing down student achievers and hurling distain and hatred toward those who study and perform well in the classroom (calling them Uncle Tom's and other derisive names, even assaulting them when they get "A's") there's a grievous, oppressive condition afoot. Such a pulling down of students, one of the other, is apparently widely accepted by active student counter-culture. Outcast student populations come to rule the young social lives of younger students, driven by peer pressure, and cause kids to undermine any desire to make better achievement.
It is said that Detroit students did as poorly, or more poorly, on the math testing than if they were guessing. Yes, what if the students purposefully did not properly take the test and simply guessed? That has to be a partial possibility.
Detroit's General Degradation & Its Corrupted Infrastructure Pollutes the Whole
Hopelessness. If money corrupts, then complete hopelessness and endless poverty goes money one further into total despair and eventually open rebellion...Many of the higher values of our nation are build around the American Dream become thusly spurned and ridiculed, believed unattainable from these streets.
What is future the work place prepared for an all "B" DPS student, McDonalds? And beyond that what? Good jobs have left the city. Students are keenly aware of the depressing number of good jobs and limited possibilities for college or trade school remain available to them. Where will the money for tuition, for an ITT institute come from?
When there is no respect for the authority of the teacher, the law enforcement officer, the fireman, the principal or any adult with contact with these youths, then swearing, obscenity, and great verbal and physical disrespect become rampant the situation is out of control.
The disrespect for authority is not limited to "lost" youths, it pervades the comments of so many contributors to these opinion blogs also. It's a cynicism that has no positive bearing on attempting to resolve the multitude of problems at street level. Simply turning on teachers, police, and public officials will not suffice.
The News and the Legislature Believe in Fairy Tales: e.g. Alternative Teaching Credentials
Tell me how a man with great math ability (Let' say one recently cut out of the General Motors Comptrollers Office), a mind like a Einstein or a brain like Hawkins, is going to find suitable conditions and success when he steps in (under Erne Duncan's R2T) to take up a desk and attempt to teach a class of 34 sophomores right in the middle of this kind of blackboard jungle?
There may be cultural differences and solid reasons why the classroom has become this kind of zoo, but no educational program will succeed until the troublemakers are removed, order and respect are completely restored, and attendance is strictly enforced.
Shocking Results of Detroit's NAEP Scores
We are told he school personnel "wept" a the results of the standardized testing for math. What were they weeping about?
Were they weeping over the fact that they had failed to try to do their best to instruct the pupils who got the failing grades?
Were they weeping that the proper materials necessary to achieve the scores by targeted curriculum were not available?
"They were weeping out of creeping despair: 'These results are a signal of a complete failure of the adults in this city to educate its children,' said Michael Casserly, executive director of the Council of Great City Schools, a coalition of big city school systems that usually defends its members," as we read in Amber Arellano's recent column "Detroit hits educational bottom" in the Detroit News on December 08, 2009.
The school personnel are right to be weeping over those "externalities" which the harsh critics of public education have been red tagging Detroit teachers with for decades. The critics mantra, "You teachers can not blame the total environment the students come from for these poor results" you, the teachers, have failed. Don't whine to us about the home conditions and the degradation of the core city. We pay you for a job done. Objections we do not accept.
As Amber points out, "Then there is the usual defeatist Detroit mentality: 'We're different than other cities.'" It is possible that is a true fact? Where does the impetus for that feeling come from, today's street level conditions?
Michigan's Blacks Are Not Achieving Regardless of Location Detroit or Outstate
Actually, it's about black kids all around Michigan. In a real sense African American children's underachievement is a Michigan problem according to Amber's column: "Detroit is not the only poor performer in the state. NAEP scores released earlier this fall showed Michigan's African-American students are essentially the lowest-performing black students in the country after falling for years."
Playing Pin the Blame
There will be a rush to find a way to pin blame. However, there is a real anomaly here. Some of the low scores were from schools labeled "high-performing" NAEP officials ensured test takers "included some of Detroit's highest-performing schools."
The most common response is that there are teachers who do not perform to standards, lots of them. Mind you, we are thinking about teaching elementary school students where the staff is often at least 60 percent women. Do critics mean to say that there are large numbers of women, who have undertaken to teach in Detroit's schools (with all their associated problems and social/economic situations, including treats of assault), who are, of their own violation, not doing the job put before them.
Adults in Detroit Have Failed the Children
Actually, Allando's column doesn't go that far. The critic says, "These results are a signal of a complete failure of the adults in this city to educate its children." The operative phrase here is "the adults in this city." That's very inclusive and does not wrongfully saddle the teacher with the total blame. Even though the old blamespeaking is there, as Michael Casserly, Council of Great City Schools opines, ""If you can't make it as a teacher, you're out."
Note that the under-performing schools included Detroit's much promoted charter schools. Putting a teacher out on the street is simple: At a charter, just find the teacher a box and then find them the door. So let's see the charter's conduct wholesale dismissals in response to the demands of R2T.
Race to the Top is the Super Solution?
We are told that the Race to the Top has the answers. O.K. lets see, we are going to sack a sizable number of teachers and replace them with people with an academic degree. Walk-ins who want to enter these dangerous and unruly failing schools and assume an equal responsibility with professional teachers, to be thrown out the door if they can't get immediate results (R2T's alternative certification) and that's the answer. NO SO.
Again, there's a rush to find a "quick fix" to move the problem off the political stage, off the front page. It is obvious that the stonehearted won't look into the deterioration and neglect, the political frauds, financial scandals, and the "territorial fiefdoms" imbedded in Detroit's present governance and social structure.
There is a reason Detroit's math scores are at the bottom. It's life in inner city Detroit. . No other single factor so strong, so important as the home and the parent(s) along with the spirit of the community in forming the mindset, determining the well-being, the welfare and academic achievement of Detroit's children. Where is the hope for a normal, happy and useful life?
We Know the Profile of the Underachieving in Detroit:
*They are the poor.
*They are homeless or have been foreclosed upon.
*They are on public assistance/welfare or their caregivers are unemployed without sufficient work and income.
*They live largely in urban ghettos.
*They live in high crime areas.
*They are exposed to constant gun violence.
*They are children in homes rife with abuse and neglect.
*They are hungry and go day-to-day without proper nourishment, staggering numbers qualify for free or reduced meals.
*They are the children of children, frequently the off spring of promiscuous mothers, often the mothers were children themselves when they gave birth.
*They live in rundown, dangerous, or condemned housing.
*They go cold in the winter in their own places of abode and often they go to school without proper outerwear.
*They are exposed everyday to the drug culture.
*They are harassed, threatened, and controlled, herded about by gangs. They live in constant despair, terrorized by street crime and shots in the night.
*They are those who have been neglected or abandoned by the houses of worship.
*They grow up in a jobless environment and have no real hope for an adequately paying occupation or a living wage.
*They are in large numbers, teenage boys of color who dropout of school.
*They are unhealthy, too many die as infants, get few vaccinations, little or no pre-natal or insufficient post-natal care.
*They are culturally deprived: living in areas with few good public libraries or free or affordable cultural activities.
*They have very limited access to banner stores such as abound in the suburbs.
*They are often in foster care.
*They have little opportunity to investigate the natural beauty or the beauty and wonders of the out state areas of Michigan, many have never left their neighborhoods, have never seen the open countryside, the dunes, or the Mackinaw Bridge.
*They have juvenile criminal records, often numerous misdemeanors.
*They are truant, or frequently fail to come to school.
*They have few books or educational stimuli in the home.
*They often lack the basic social skills, at age five cannot perform such simple tasks as tying their own shoes, may eat. lap out of bowls without utensils. .
*They are outside the profile sought by the "marketplace entrepreneurials," with the exception of drug pushers.
*They have not received the proper diets as infants, in the early critically formative years of mental development, and may have therefore diminished capacities to learn.
*They cannot move or play freely in their neighborhoods without fear and anxiety.
*They are victims of various kinds of political shams, blamespeaking, and disparaging debates, the flotsam and jetsom of Lansing debate and enduring cynicism.
My God the Children
We aren't getting our minds around these kinds of pervasive problems, because frankly, they appear to be beyond our comprehension and our concern. We have done so little to assuage the decline, we may not be able to reverse the trend.
Detroit is at the bottom and may stay there. That's a sobering thought.
The kinds of efforts and inspiration it takes to overcome the creeping despair could start just as simply as immediately hiring workers to take down the some 80,000 abandoned homes and bringing back paying jobs to the city by commercial investment with a mind to stay the course. Jobs in the city! What a novel thought, in a city where so many individuals don't have cars or means to take them to the far away, outer suburbs where the few jobs there are, are located.
Give the kids something tangible to work toward and a visible goal to achieve "give them hope".
Original Post.
A casual observer sitting on a riverfront bench in Windsor looking across to the skyline of Detroit, unaware of conditions on the ground there, would marvel at the visual appeal and the apparent delight of its location.
How long do you think we can go on ignorantly and stubbornly believing that the implosion of this major U.S. city is not taking place?
In answering this question, it really doesn't matter, conservative or liberal, how you view your ideals or harbor your political prejudices. In Detroit, the American dream has dimmed and may go out altogether. Of course, there have been efforts to reverse the downward trend but they appear to be off-set by such factors as: white flight, the business departures, the departure of the Catholic church from over two dozen parishes, the indifference of the state government, and the systemic corruption and spoils involved in Detroit city governance.
Detroit is not Chicago, with its Magic Mile and its elite condos and row houses in the heart of the that great city.
Walk the deserted streets of the core business district of Detroit at after close of business and pervasively sense for yourself the personal danger you are surrounded by. No one on the streets. The Motor City is not the Windy City.
In recent and very open and honest public comments to columnists and to editorials, a careful reader is finding the ground level noise about what is actually going on in the troubled Detroit core city and in its schools and it isn't pretty.
The angst and despair expressed by Daniel Howes in this column is bone-cutting. Verbally graphic, and long over due.
What About Level of Educational Progress in DPS?
It's altogether possible that there is a pervasive and street savvy sub-culture running through the city's youths. In a place so seemingly hopeless, with so little to cause a child to dream or aspire, there has developed a youth counter-culture that hates what it sees a life confined this wrenched poverty and black-on-black crime, and flatly refuses to play the game other Americans better placed embrace.
When we learn that students in the DPS have a habit of bringing down student achievers and hurling distain and hatred toward those who study and perform well in the classroom (calling them Uncle Tom's and other derisive names, even assaulting them when they get "A's") there's a grievous, oppressive condition afoot. Such a pulling down of students, one of the other, is apparently widely accepted by active student counter-culture. Outcast student populations come to rule the young social lives of younger students, driven by peer pressure, and cause kids to undermine any desire to make better achievement.
It is said that Detroit students did as poorly, or more poorly, on the math testing than if they were guessing. Yes, what if the students purposefully did not properly take the test and simply guessed? That has to be a partial possibility.
Detroit's General Degradation & Its Corrupted Infrastructure Pollutes the Whole
Hopelessness. If money corrupts, then complete hopelessness and endless poverty goes money one further into total despair and eventually open rebellion...Many of the higher values of our nation are build around the American Dream become thusly spurned and ridiculed, believed unattainable from these streets.
What is future the work place prepared for an all "B" DPS student, McDonalds? And beyond that what? Good jobs have left the city. Students are keenly aware of the depressing number of good jobs and limited possibilities for college or trade school remain available to them. Where will the money for tuition, for an ITT institute come from?
When there is no respect for the authority of the teacher, the law enforcement officer, the fireman, the principal or any adult with contact with these youths, then swearing, obscenity, and great verbal and physical disrespect become rampant the situation is out of control.
The disrespect for authority is not limited to "lost" youths, it pervades the comments of so many contributors to these opinion blogs also. It's a cynicism that has no positive bearing on attempting to resolve the multitude of problems at street level. Simply turning on teachers, police, and public officials will not suffice.
The News and the Legislature Believe in Fairy Tales: e.g. Alternative Teaching Credentials
Tell me how a man with great math ability (Let' say one recently cut out of the General Motors Comptrollers Office), a mind like a Einstein or a brain like Hawkins, is going to find suitable conditions and success when he steps in (under Erne Duncan's R2T) to take up a desk and attempt to teach a class of 34 sophomores right in the middle of this kind of blackboard jungle?
There may be cultural differences and solid reasons why the classroom has become this kind of zoo, but no educational program will succeed until the troublemakers are removed, order and respect are completely restored, and attendance is strictly enforced.
Shocking Results of Detroit's NAEP Scores
We are told he school personnel "wept" a the results of the standardized testing for math. What were they weeping about?
Were they weeping over the fact that they had failed to try to do their best to instruct the pupils who got the failing grades?
Were they weeping that the proper materials necessary to achieve the scores by targeted curriculum were not available?
"They were weeping out of creeping despair: 'These results are a signal of a complete failure of the adults in this city to educate its children,' said Michael Casserly, executive director of the Council of Great City Schools, a coalition of big city school systems that usually defends its members," as we read in Amber Arellano's recent column "Detroit hits educational bottom" in the Detroit News on December 08, 2009.
The school personnel are right to be weeping over those "externalities" which the harsh critics of public education have been red tagging Detroit teachers with for decades. The critics mantra, "You teachers can not blame the total environment the students come from for these poor results" you, the teachers, have failed. Don't whine to us about the home conditions and the degradation of the core city. We pay you for a job done. Objections we do not accept.
As Amber points out, "Then there is the usual defeatist Detroit mentality: 'We're different than other cities.'" It is possible that is a true fact? Where does the impetus for that feeling come from, today's street level conditions?
Michigan's Blacks Are Not Achieving Regardless of Location Detroit or Outstate
Actually, it's about black kids all around Michigan. In a real sense African American children's underachievement is a Michigan problem according to Amber's column: "Detroit is not the only poor performer in the state. NAEP scores released earlier this fall showed Michigan's African-American students are essentially the lowest-performing black students in the country after falling for years."
Playing Pin the Blame
There will be a rush to find a way to pin blame. However, there is a real anomaly here. Some of the low scores were from schools labeled "high-performing" NAEP officials ensured test takers "included some of Detroit's highest-performing schools."
The most common response is that there are teachers who do not perform to standards, lots of them. Mind you, we are thinking about teaching elementary school students where the staff is often at least 60 percent women. Do critics mean to say that there are large numbers of women, who have undertaken to teach in Detroit's schools (with all their associated problems and social/economic situations, including treats of assault), who are, of their own violation, not doing the job put before them.
Adults in Detroit Have Failed the Children
Actually, Allando's column doesn't go that far. The critic says, "These results are a signal of a complete failure of the adults in this city to educate its children." The operative phrase here is "the adults in this city." That's very inclusive and does not wrongfully saddle the teacher with the total blame. Even though the old blamespeaking is there, as Michael Casserly, Council of Great City Schools opines, ""If you can't make it as a teacher, you're out."
Note that the under-performing schools included Detroit's much promoted charter schools. Putting a teacher out on the street is simple: At a charter, just find the teacher a box and then find them the door. So let's see the charter's conduct wholesale dismissals in response to the demands of R2T.
Race to the Top is the Super Solution?
We are told that the Race to the Top has the answers. O.K. lets see, we are going to sack a sizable number of teachers and replace them with people with an academic degree. Walk-ins who want to enter these dangerous and unruly failing schools and assume an equal responsibility with professional teachers, to be thrown out the door if they can't get immediate results (R2T's alternative certification) and that's the answer. NO SO.
Again, there's a rush to find a "quick fix" to move the problem off the political stage, off the front page. It is obvious that the stonehearted won't look into the deterioration and neglect, the political frauds, financial scandals, and the "territorial fiefdoms" imbedded in Detroit's present governance and social structure.
There is a reason Detroit's math scores are at the bottom. It's life in inner city Detroit. . No other single factor so strong, so important as the home and the parent(s) along with the spirit of the community in forming the mindset, determining the well-being, the welfare and academic achievement of Detroit's children. Where is the hope for a normal, happy and useful life?
We Know the Profile of the Underachieving in Detroit:
*They are the poor.
*They are homeless or have been foreclosed upon.
*They are on public assistance/welfare or their caregivers are unemployed without sufficient work and income.
*They live largely in urban ghettos.
*They live in high crime areas.
*They are exposed to constant gun violence.
*They are children in homes rife with abuse and neglect.
*They are hungry and go day-to-day without proper nourishment, staggering numbers qualify for free or reduced meals.
*They are the children of children, frequently the off spring of promiscuous mothers, often the mothers were children themselves when they gave birth.
*They live in rundown, dangerous, or condemned housing.
*They go cold in the winter in their own places of abode and often they go to school without proper outerwear.
*They are exposed everyday to the drug culture.
*They are harassed, threatened, and controlled, herded about by gangs. They live in constant despair, terrorized by street crime and shots in the night.
*They are those who have been neglected or abandoned by the houses of worship.
*They grow up in a jobless environment and have no real hope for an adequately paying occupation or a living wage.
*They are in large numbers, teenage boys of color who dropout of school.
*They are unhealthy, too many die as infants, get few vaccinations, little or no pre-natal or insufficient post-natal care.
*They are culturally deprived: living in areas with few good public libraries or free or affordable cultural activities.
*They have very limited access to banner stores such as abound in the suburbs.
*They are often in foster care.
*They have little opportunity to investigate the natural beauty or the beauty and wonders of the out state areas of Michigan, many have never left their neighborhoods, have never seen the open countryside, the dunes, or the Mackinaw Bridge.
*They have juvenile criminal records, often numerous misdemeanors.
*They are truant, or frequently fail to come to school.
*They have few books or educational stimuli in the home.
*They often lack the basic social skills, at age five cannot perform such simple tasks as tying their own shoes, may eat. lap out of bowls without utensils. .
*They are outside the profile sought by the "marketplace entrepreneurials," with the exception of drug pushers.
*They have not received the proper diets as infants, in the early critically formative years of mental development, and may have therefore diminished capacities to learn.
*They cannot move or play freely in their neighborhoods without fear and anxiety.
*They are victims of various kinds of political shams, blamespeaking, and disparaging debates, the flotsam and jetsom of Lansing debate and enduring cynicism.
My God the Children
We aren't getting our minds around these kinds of pervasive problems, because frankly, they appear to be beyond our comprehension and our concern. We have done so little to assuage the decline, we may not be able to reverse the trend.
Detroit is at the bottom and may stay there. That's a sobering thought.
The kinds of efforts and inspiration it takes to overcome the creeping despair could start just as simply as immediately hiring workers to take down the some 80,000 abandoned homes and bringing back paying jobs to the city by commercial investment with a mind to stay the course. Jobs in the city! What a novel thought, in a city where so many individuals don't have cars or means to take them to the far away, outer suburbs where the few jobs there are, are located.
Give the kids something tangible to work toward and a visible goal to achieve "give them hope".
Original Post.
Thursday, December 10, 2009
Nolan Finley Rocks Local Detroit High School With His Decision to Teach English to Sophomores
Response to Nolan Finley in "Test scores should rock Detroit's soul" in the Detroit News on December 10, 2009.
In recent and very open comments to columnists and to editorials a careful reader is finding the ground level noise about what is actually going on in the troubled Detroit Public Schools (DPS) system.
It's altogether possible that there is a pervasive and street savvy sub-culture running through the city's youths. In a place so seemingly hopeless, with so little to cause a child to dream or aspire, there has developed a youth counter-culture that hates what it sees a life confined this wrenched poverty and black-on-black crime, and flatly refuses to play the game other Americans better placed embrace.
Hopelessness. If money corrupts, then complete hopelessness and endless poverty goes money one further into total despair and eventually open rebellion. Many of the higher values of our nation are build around the American Dream become thusly spurned and ridiculed, believed unattainable from these streets.
When we learn that students in the DPS have a habit of bringing down student achievers and hurling distain and hatred toward those who study and perform well in the classroom (calling them Uncle Tom's and other derisive or obscene names, even assaulting them when they get "A's") there's a grievous, oppressive condition afoot. Such a pulling down of students, one of the other, is apparently widely accepted by active student counter-culture. Outcast student populations come to rule the developing social lives of younger students, driven by peer pressure, and cause kids to undermine within themselves any desire to make better achievement.
It is said that Detroit students did as poorly, or more poorly, on the math testing than if they were guessing. Yes, what if the students purposefully did not properly take the test and simply guessed? That has to be a partial possibility.
What is the future work place prepared for an all "B" DPS student, McDonalds? And beyond that what? Good jobs have left the city. Students are keenly aware of the depressing number of good jobs and limited possibilities for college or trade school that remain available to them. Where will the money for tuition, for an ITT institute come from?
When there is no respect for the authority of the teacher, the law enforcement officer, the fireman, the principal or any adult with contact with these youths, then swearing, obscenity, and great verbal and physical disrespect become rampant the situation is out of control.
Tell me how a man with great math ability (let' say recently cut out of the General Motors Comptrollers Office), a mind like a Einstein or a brain like Hawkins, is going to find suitable conditions and success when he steps in (under Erne Duncan's R2T) to take up a desk and attempt to teach a class of 34 sophomores right in the middle of this kind of blackboard jungle?
There may be cultural differences and solid reasons why the classroom has become this kind of zoo, but no educational program will succeed until the troublemakers are removed, order and respect are completely restored, and attendance is strictly enforced.
Let's get Nolan Finley to take up the challenge. Let him get placed into one of "low achieving" high schools and let him teach English for an entire semester, then come out at the end of that time and report his significant, spectacular progress.
Original Post.
In recent and very open comments to columnists and to editorials a careful reader is finding the ground level noise about what is actually going on in the troubled Detroit Public Schools (DPS) system.
It's altogether possible that there is a pervasive and street savvy sub-culture running through the city's youths. In a place so seemingly hopeless, with so little to cause a child to dream or aspire, there has developed a youth counter-culture that hates what it sees a life confined this wrenched poverty and black-on-black crime, and flatly refuses to play the game other Americans better placed embrace.
Hopelessness. If money corrupts, then complete hopelessness and endless poverty goes money one further into total despair and eventually open rebellion. Many of the higher values of our nation are build around the American Dream become thusly spurned and ridiculed, believed unattainable from these streets.
When we learn that students in the DPS have a habit of bringing down student achievers and hurling distain and hatred toward those who study and perform well in the classroom (calling them Uncle Tom's and other derisive or obscene names, even assaulting them when they get "A's") there's a grievous, oppressive condition afoot. Such a pulling down of students, one of the other, is apparently widely accepted by active student counter-culture. Outcast student populations come to rule the developing social lives of younger students, driven by peer pressure, and cause kids to undermine within themselves any desire to make better achievement.
It is said that Detroit students did as poorly, or more poorly, on the math testing than if they were guessing. Yes, what if the students purposefully did not properly take the test and simply guessed? That has to be a partial possibility.
What is the future work place prepared for an all "B" DPS student, McDonalds? And beyond that what? Good jobs have left the city. Students are keenly aware of the depressing number of good jobs and limited possibilities for college or trade school that remain available to them. Where will the money for tuition, for an ITT institute come from?
When there is no respect for the authority of the teacher, the law enforcement officer, the fireman, the principal or any adult with contact with these youths, then swearing, obscenity, and great verbal and physical disrespect become rampant the situation is out of control.
Tell me how a man with great math ability (let' say recently cut out of the General Motors Comptrollers Office), a mind like a Einstein or a brain like Hawkins, is going to find suitable conditions and success when he steps in (under Erne Duncan's R2T) to take up a desk and attempt to teach a class of 34 sophomores right in the middle of this kind of blackboard jungle?
There may be cultural differences and solid reasons why the classroom has become this kind of zoo, but no educational program will succeed until the troublemakers are removed, order and respect are completely restored, and attendance is strictly enforced.
Let's get Nolan Finley to take up the challenge. Let him get placed into one of "low achieving" high schools and let him teach English for an entire semester, then come out at the end of that time and report his significant, spectacular progress.
Original Post.
Wednesday, December 9, 2009
The Governor Must Lean on the MEA to Accomplish the GOP Senate's Radical Goals
Response to Detroit News article "Detroit parents want DPS teachers, officials jailed over low test scores" on December 12, 2009 and Detroit News Editorial "Michigan lawmakers must adopt reforms to liberate schools" December 2, 2009.
The Detroit News hectors the legislature to "liberate" schools and taxpayers from the teachers
Hobnailed "Liberation ideology" strikes again. Been here, done this. It's the "Engler Revolution" all over again.
The very queer nature of this effort to strip the teachers of their abilities to perform their duties and protect the professional education standards of the State of Michigan are being challenged in an even stranger alliance: Radical conservative tax-haters and the so-called "socialist" and "gangster politics" of Obama.
To see the sea change in the attitude of the Detroit News toward anything Obama, including the Obama Administration's Race to the Top's-latest and greatest attempt to grab the headlines and effect changes brought to U.S. education, is astonishing. R2T is another heavy-handed, top-down gimmick, another underfunded edict from the feds in DC impacting the local school district financially, and not much more.
This News and Obama collaboration is indeed a wild spectacle.
Arne Duncan is transposing his elements of his Chicago methodology and practice upon the national scene and using the promise-"bribe" of federal education dollars as the carrot to accomplish his goal. In light of the deep economic crisis in the country, Duncan may succeed. Especially if he can pull down Michigan's higher standards and force change by means of money offered in this time of extreme budget crisis. Pushing alternative certification to bring in outsider practitioners of certain math or physics skills sounds attractive, if there are no real certified teachers available (that may be universally true in low performing or anti-union states like Texas, but not Michigan), to place "non-educational methods trained outsiders" in the elementary schools is bizarre and serves no enhancing benefit for the students, in fact it is insulting to trained teachers and our state's premier teacher training programs.
Other concepts cut-back across the list of high accomplishments achieved by Michigan Schools and endanger our ability to serve under the strained conditions which now exist in the state.
Knowledgeable business people and informed citizens understand the externalities of culture, economy, family life (or the lack thereof) and a myriad of other factors which bear directly on the acculturation and development of children as determines or molds their educational achievement and moral development. Even liberals are near the end of theory as to the workable solutions for the very poor, the urban bound and the under-classes of Michigan.
The only reason that the Detroit News is toadying up to Arne Duncan's newest scheme is that it fits, hand in grove, with a more sinister and long-term goal of the Mackinac Center/Detroit News cabal's most pressing goal, defeat of the MEA as a power in the state. A quote from Thomas Bray, Detroit News, lays it all on the line: If the MEA can be broken here in Michigan then more of the conservative agenda for education can be pushed in the entire country. There it is. MEA is a major target as a political enemy, all discussions of reform or educational funding aside.
Sen. Wayne Kuipers told Rick Pluta, Michigan Public Radio, that the R2T changes being crammed through the Senate and the House are accomplishing the very personal goals that he has worked so long an hard to accomplish during his tenure. Kuipers serves a very right wing religious constituency and an ethnic religious minority that has long been at odds with public school financing going back decades. Kuiper's dream is now near reality, with the help of Lansing Democrats,, and even Gov. Jennifer Granholm-hamstrung because of economic necessity and unable to withstand the pressure from Washington.
The school employees and teachers have become the holders of the "OVERDRAFT ACCOUNT" once again for Michigan. It is with impunity that the legislature has turned to the state's education community to fund their problems in funding our children's' education. And they say education and educators are our top priority?
In the early 1980's is they took money from the school employees retirement fund to bail out Chrysler when it was near the brink, before Proposition A, in the early days of the so-called "Engler led Revolution", Engler found his budget in deep trouble. In 1996 following a heated court battle the Free Press reported, "In a decision hailed as a 'big win' for the Engler Administration, the Michigan Supreme Court said Monday that it would not require the state to repay more than $400 MILLION taken from a teacher's retirement health care fund in the early 1990's."
Gov. Granholm has adopted a "go-it-alone" style and has not been able to collaborate or work effectively with the ambitious Democratic Leader of the Michigan House and her stand offishness toward the MEA, which has been a good base of support for her, has not served her well, not in the 2007 state shutdown nor in the current impasse. Granholm is locked into the moves by the Obama Education Department-out of mandatory party loyalty.
The welfare of Michigan education suffers, and suffers badly without its erstwhile "friends." Why otherwise would she agree to "alternative" methods of allowing individuals with little or no instructional or psychological training and methods to simply waltz into the role of teacher-in a school full of highly qualified teachers who are required to complete many more hours of training beyond certification.
The thought in Michigan was higher standards.
Gov. Granholm pushed for much higher graduation standards in subjects akin to college prep, why would she retreat on full certification and endorsements for all classroom instruction? Again, the News, Thomas Bray asks, "...And is everybody cut out for a core curriculum that is clearly aimed at college enrollment?" The obvious answer is "no."
The issue of "wildfire" charters comes up again.
This revival of the southern segregation academy is still the nocturnal dream of the hard right and the Christian Coalition. What we have seen in Michigan is the FAILURE OF OVER 40 CHARTER SCHOOLS funded with tax-payer dollars, schools closed and their publicly funded buildings and facilities in foreclosure. Where are the legislative attempts to salvage the lost tax moneys?
Charters run openly claiming to hire "only Christians" to promote their "national heritage" ideologies, charters self-segregated with over 90 percent of students the same race, a least one charter teaching in Islamic language and culture, these are the "love children" of those hard rightists and others who are purposefully attempting to dismantle our historic public school tradition and rich heritage. This kind of anti-neighborhood "revolt" is dangerous and offensive to our history of community and good citizenship. Again that old Detroit News sage, Thomas Bray: "...everybody "knows" that the entire GOP strategy depends on using "code words" as part of a "Southern strategy" to win elections." And "parental choice" and "charters" sounds better and sells better than "parochiaid" and "vouchers."
So hold your noises Lansing.
What you are doing is not a reform, it is not moving in a pro-active direction.
The things that need changing are going unchallenged, and teachers are being summarily locked out of the dialogue (there is none!). This kind of political shenanigans is bitter chocolate icing on a bar of political Decon.
The old bitterness and reprisals hatched by Engler are back and you, our communities representatives, are the lackluster lackeys to carry out the deadly deed.
Friday, December 4, 2009
Raw Revenge Raises Its Ugly Head
Response to series of articles and Op-Eds (mostly in the Detroit / Heritage / Mackinac News) railing against teachers and public schools, and Nolan Finley piece on December 4, 2009.
Growing up deep in the rugged hollows of Cumberland Co. Kentucky, Nolan Finley is very familiar with the real menace of a chicken-killing cur.
This present unvarnished, red-meat edict/opinion of the Detroit News is likewise on a total blood letting tear. What can be done with a chicken killing dog?
The not-so-thick gloves are off. The News and the Mackinac Center are now emblazoned to go in for the "kill." It's bone ugly. It's totally counter intuitive. It's pure naked reprisal with a "to-hell-with-MEA" angst that has been building violently for a very long time on the pages of this newspaper.
Engler's Part in Monumental Shortfalls
There is a national financial crisis, there is a major crisis in Michigan. The shortfall was created in part by John Engler whose $4 billion plus cuts in state revenues took effect just as he was leaving office, and on top of that Engler left Gov. Granholm and the state over a billion in debt.
Political Slap-downs
However, the current legislature has instituted moves against the MEA which have far less to do with economic specifics than they do with aggressive opportunistic take-backs from teachers, turning the clock back to the late 1950's.
Hardened foes are exacting a long-sought slap-down of the ability of the Association to protect and defend the entire education community: students, teachers, associated staff, and, yes, even the interests of principals, superintendents, school board members, associated businesses, and not least of all parents. No entity works for the public schools better legislatively or more effectively than MEA.
The Detroit News No Longer Attempts or Pretends to Be Civil or Polite
The News has become hectoring, overbearing and demanding. There's bitter tinge on the New's hamfisted edict, made loudly and without apology, the legislature must repeal a Republican governor's (George Romney) signature on the educators' right-to-bargain legislation-passed in back in 1965. If revision can be accomplished, it would literally move Michigan to the end of the line educationally-in a country with many low-achieving states far less accomplished and educationally advanced than Michigan, prior to now.
Fascistic Moves
The News' demand reflects a menacing, emerging Fascistic philosophy, partially hidden, yet so pervasive in the catacombs of the News, albeit seldom seen, but now revealed in all its bare tarbelly ugly for all to see in this moment.
Power-seeking, Greed and Control, Have Bust Out Into the Light of Day
It's very simple: When the demands of business and commerce must always trump, rule over, all other aspects of governance there is a fundamental democratic problem.
Look what happened in the State House yesterday. Tourism lobbyists vigorously blocked the very "reform" legislation that the News supports (even aligning themselves with the dread MEA momentarily) for one specific self-interest purpose. It was not the good of education the tourism industry were angling for. They fought to protect one more weekend for their business opportunities-delaying school openings until after the Labor Day Weekend. Forget the educational impact such a “business move” would have. Mind you, these are the “very same” individuals and groups that are fomenting their specific “education reforms” they say will “improve” Michigan education. Most of their reforms involve taxes or labor law thus providing a direct economic benefit for the “reformers” without tangible pro-active quality improvements for students or public education.
Government and business interests when they become as "one," totally united in goals and operations, encompassing even aggressive privatization of all public services, point to a condition where we have the basis for Fascism, or what we may call "friendly Fascism."
When it comes down to powerful business and corporate interests, which demand and receive full control over the institutions and governance of the state and communities (in full partnership with the legislature and the government), we find ourselves marched meekly into the dark night of a treacherous new era. Blind to history, we parade naively, ensnaring ourselves in divisive cultural war and calamity.
Outrageous Demands
There can be no good outcome in succumbing to the ill-driven powers behind the demands of the Detroit News and its radical right cabal demanding: Strip the teachers of their status, their salaries, their benefits, legislated security, and their voice in school affairs. After all we learn, everything educational belongs only to the all-powerful business/state government Lansing combine. Force the teachers take whatever "we" (the business/government cabal) decide to ladle out, without recourse.
Snarls the cur: Just shut up and teach.
Original Post.
Growing up deep in the rugged hollows of Cumberland Co. Kentucky, Nolan Finley is very familiar with the real menace of a chicken-killing cur.
This present unvarnished, red-meat edict/opinion of the Detroit News is likewise on a total blood letting tear. What can be done with a chicken killing dog?
The not-so-thick gloves are off. The News and the Mackinac Center are now emblazoned to go in for the "kill." It's bone ugly. It's totally counter intuitive. It's pure naked reprisal with a "to-hell-with-MEA" angst that has been building violently for a very long time on the pages of this newspaper.
Engler's Part in Monumental Shortfalls
There is a national financial crisis, there is a major crisis in Michigan. The shortfall was created in part by John Engler whose $4 billion plus cuts in state revenues took effect just as he was leaving office, and on top of that Engler left Gov. Granholm and the state over a billion in debt.
Political Slap-downs
However, the current legislature has instituted moves against the MEA which have far less to do with economic specifics than they do with aggressive opportunistic take-backs from teachers, turning the clock back to the late 1950's.
Hardened foes are exacting a long-sought slap-down of the ability of the Association to protect and defend the entire education community: students, teachers, associated staff, and, yes, even the interests of principals, superintendents, school board members, associated businesses, and not least of all parents. No entity works for the public schools better legislatively or more effectively than MEA.
The Detroit News No Longer Attempts or Pretends to Be Civil or Polite
The News has become hectoring, overbearing and demanding. There's bitter tinge on the New's hamfisted edict, made loudly and without apology, the legislature must repeal a Republican governor's (George Romney) signature on the educators' right-to-bargain legislation-passed in back in 1965. If revision can be accomplished, it would literally move Michigan to the end of the line educationally-in a country with many low-achieving states far less accomplished and educationally advanced than Michigan, prior to now.
Fascistic Moves
The News' demand reflects a menacing, emerging Fascistic philosophy, partially hidden, yet so pervasive in the catacombs of the News, albeit seldom seen, but now revealed in all its bare tarbelly ugly for all to see in this moment.
Power-seeking, Greed and Control, Have Bust Out Into the Light of Day
It's very simple: When the demands of business and commerce must always trump, rule over, all other aspects of governance there is a fundamental democratic problem.
Look what happened in the State House yesterday. Tourism lobbyists vigorously blocked the very "reform" legislation that the News supports (even aligning themselves with the dread MEA momentarily) for one specific self-interest purpose. It was not the good of education the tourism industry were angling for. They fought to protect one more weekend for their business opportunities-delaying school openings until after the Labor Day Weekend. Forget the educational impact such a “business move” would have. Mind you, these are the “very same” individuals and groups that are fomenting their specific “education reforms” they say will “improve” Michigan education. Most of their reforms involve taxes or labor law thus providing a direct economic benefit for the “reformers” without tangible pro-active quality improvements for students or public education.
Government and business interests when they become as "one," totally united in goals and operations, encompassing even aggressive privatization of all public services, point to a condition where we have the basis for Fascism, or what we may call "friendly Fascism."
When it comes down to powerful business and corporate interests, which demand and receive full control over the institutions and governance of the state and communities (in full partnership with the legislature and the government), we find ourselves marched meekly into the dark night of a treacherous new era. Blind to history, we parade naively, ensnaring ourselves in divisive cultural war and calamity.
Outrageous Demands
There can be no good outcome in succumbing to the ill-driven powers behind the demands of the Detroit News and its radical right cabal demanding: Strip the teachers of their status, their salaries, their benefits, legislated security, and their voice in school affairs. After all we learn, everything educational belongs only to the all-powerful business/state government Lansing combine. Force the teachers take whatever "we" (the business/government cabal) decide to ladle out, without recourse.
Snarls the cur: Just shut up and teach.
Original Post.
News Calls for Reopening Teacher Contracts - A Pop Quiz: Who Wrote This and When?
Response to Detroit News Editorial "Michigan school districts need to reopen teacher contracts" December 4, 2009.
Clip from the News:
Who wrote the following news account and when did he write it?
--------
Could it be that the naysayers and the cynics had this thing pegged all along?
They said it was entirely possible that the "historic" opportunity to turn Michigan into a laboratory of educational innovation would descend into yet another exercise in public relations and bragging rights.
Parents who yearned for something more out of the process for their kids might be hopelessly naïve, they said.
Little so far in the so-called debate over school reform suggests the cynics were wrong.
The great school debate at that time included discussion of such items as:
1.Should we make football players take gym?
2.Should teachers grade on the curve?
3.Should school boards pay Lansing lobbyists with money "sucked" out of classrooms?
To which one lobbyist in the House chamber's peanut gallery rejoined: "I don't suck it, I just sip it a bit."
Lamenting the 180-day school year, a house committee said, by golly, if everyone else in Michigan has to work 250 days a year for a full-time salary, teachers should work at least 210. To lessen the burden, lawmakers agreed to phase it in through the year "how's this for breathtaking reform?-2010.
"Now it's December and the emphasis is not so much on content as whether they are going to get it done by the holidays. Just what the process can yet produce is unclear."
"(There's a move toward school district funding equity statewide) ...but the move toward equity may not survive because (it's) too expensive. Like Christmas shoppers on a binge, lawmakers want to spend extra cash and pay the bill next year.
Add this all up and you've got to wonder: Where are all the concrete, necessary improvements in Michigan schools that will point the way for a nation jockeying for global economic position?
Don't be so naïve as to believe the Michigan Legislature is prepared to undertake such a task, it is beyond their abilities."
-------
The Answers:
1. The year was 1993.
2. The reporter - Peter Luke
Original Post.
Clip from the News:
"By now, school districts and their teachers should realize that the state money cut from their budgets by lawmakers and Gov. Jennifer Granholm is not coming back. Even if some of the money were restored, it would be gone next year.Now here's a pop quiz. Pass or Fail:
Lawmakers are clearly not inclined to raise taxes, despite the governor's attempts to rally angry parents to a tax hike. And neither they nor the governor appear willing to strip funds from other areas -- or to find savings through restructuring -- to shield schools from spending cuts.
Districts, then, are left with two choices: They can cut programs and services and lay off staff, or they can ask teachers to reopen labor contracts and seek savings through wage and benefit concessions.
So far, most districts -- with a few exceptions, including Saline in Washtenaw County -- seem to be choosing layoff notices over contract concessions.
That's a poor decision.
Districts should use this financial crisis as an opportunity to forge more reasonable contracts with their unions. In nearly every district in the state, the current level of pay, health care and retirement benefits is unsustainable."
Who wrote the following news account and when did he write it?
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Could it be that the naysayers and the cynics had this thing pegged all along?
They said it was entirely possible that the "historic" opportunity to turn Michigan into a laboratory of educational innovation would descend into yet another exercise in public relations and bragging rights.
Parents who yearned for something more out of the process for their kids might be hopelessly naïve, they said.
Little so far in the so-called debate over school reform suggests the cynics were wrong.
The great school debate at that time included discussion of such items as:
1.Should we make football players take gym?
2.Should teachers grade on the curve?
3.Should school boards pay Lansing lobbyists with money "sucked" out of classrooms?
To which one lobbyist in the House chamber's peanut gallery rejoined: "I don't suck it, I just sip it a bit."
Lamenting the 180-day school year, a house committee said, by golly, if everyone else in Michigan has to work 250 days a year for a full-time salary, teachers should work at least 210. To lessen the burden, lawmakers agreed to phase it in through the year "how's this for breathtaking reform?-2010.
"Now it's December and the emphasis is not so much on content as whether they are going to get it done by the holidays. Just what the process can yet produce is unclear."
"(There's a move toward school district funding equity statewide) ...but the move toward equity may not survive because (it's) too expensive. Like Christmas shoppers on a binge, lawmakers want to spend extra cash and pay the bill next year.
Add this all up and you've got to wonder: Where are all the concrete, necessary improvements in Michigan schools that will point the way for a nation jockeying for global economic position?
Don't be so naïve as to believe the Michigan Legislature is prepared to undertake such a task, it is beyond their abilities."
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The Answers:
1. The year was 1993.
2. The reporter - Peter Luke
Original Post.
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