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Teachers are under assault from union-busting Republicans on the right and wealthy liberals on the left.
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2011 Mar 25, 3:47pm 2,593 views 7 comments
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Clarence 13X
2011 Apr 1, 5:31pm
installing one of his own that his enemies say aims to remove veteran teachers from the classroom
In other words, getting rid of the dead weight. I remember having this high school algebra teacher point blank tell us he didn’t give a damn about us…that he had only a few years left until retirement and that ‘they couldn’t touch him’. We didn’t learn much from him. So when I think of all the deadweight teachers with seniority being protected of unions, I think explicitly of him. They should all be fired with no pensions if it were up to me.
Right on!....the penalty for poor performance should be mandatory loss of tenure.
Vicente
2011 Apr 3, 3:47pm
Methinks Michelle "Erasuregate" Rhee never heard of Campbell's Law:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell%27s_law
I love watching people get hoist by their own petard, and the numbers-driven "success" measure can give exactly that.
Charter schools end up leading towards defacto re-segregation. Demographics of existing charter schools are REMARKABLY racially homogenous.
marcus
2011 Apr 5, 1:03pm
Nice canard to hide the fact that they outperform regular public schools big time
If Shirk says it, it must be true.
This is from Dianne Ravitch, who used to advocate testing and merit pay, when she worked in the Bush admin.
Some fact-checking is in order, and the place to start is with the film’s quiet acknowledgment that only one in five charter schools is able to get the “amazing results†that it celebrates. Nothing more is said about this astonishing statistic. It is drawn from a national study of charter schools by Stanford economist Margaret Raymond (the wife of Hanushek). Known as the CREDO study, it evaluated student progress on math tests in half the nation’s five thousand charter schools and concluded that 17 percent were superior to a matched traditional public school; 37 percent were worse than the public school; and the remaining 46 percent had academic gains no different from that of a similar public school. The proportion of charters that get amazing results is far smaller than 17 percent.Why did Davis Guggenheim pay no attention to the charter schools that are run by incompetent leaders or corporations mainly concerned to make money? Why propound to an unknowing public the myth that charter schools are the answer to our educational woes, when the filmmaker knows that there are twice as many failing charters as there are successful ones? Why not give an honest accounting?
The propagandistic nature of Waiting for “Superman†is revealed by Guggenheim’s complete indifference to the wide variation among charter schools. There are excellent charter schools, just as there are excellent public schools. Why did he not also inquire into the charter chains that are mired in unsavory real estate deals, or take his camera to the charters where most students are getting lower scores than those in the neighborhood public schools? Why did he not report on the charter principals who have been indicted for embezzlement, or the charters that blur the line between church and state? Why did he not look into the charter schools whose leaders are paid $300,000–$400,000 a year to oversee small numbers of schools and students?
marcus
2011 Apr 5, 1:12pm
More from Ravitch on "Waiting for Superman:"
Guggenheim didn’t bother to take a close look at the heroes of his documentary. Geoffrey Canada is justly celebrated for the creation of the Harlem Children’s Zone, which not only runs two charter schools but surrounds children and their families with a broad array of social and medical services. Canada has a board of wealthy philanthropists and a very successful fund-raising apparatus. With assets of more than $200 million, his organization has no shortage of funds. Canada himself is currently paid $400,000 annually. For Guggenheim to praise Canada while also claiming that public schools don’t need any more money is bizarre. Canada’s charter schools get better results than nearby public schools serving impoverished students. If all inner-city schools had the same resources as his, they might get the same good results.
But contrary to the myth that Guggenheim propounds about “amazing results,†even Geoffrey Canada’s schools have many students who are not proficient. On the 2010 state tests, 60 percent of the fourth-grade students in one of his charter schools were not proficient in reading, nor were 50 percent in the other. It should be noted—and Guggenheim didn’t note it—that Canada kicked out his entire first class of middle school students when they didn’t get good enough test scores to satisfy his board of trustees. This sad event was documented by Paul Tough in his laudatory account of Canada’s Harlem Children’s Zone, Whatever It Takes (2009). Contrary to Guggenheim’s mythology, even the best-funded charters, with the finest services, can’t completely negate the effects of poverty.
Clarence 13X
2011 Apr 5, 6:29pm
But contrary to the myth that Guggenheim propounds about “amazing results,†even Geoffrey Canada’s schools have many students who are not proficient. On the 2010 state tests, 60 percent of the fourth-grade students in one of his charter schools were not proficient in reading, nor were 50 percent in the other. It should be noted—and Guggenheim didn’t note it—that Canada kicked out his entire first class of middle school students when they didn’t get good enough test scores to satisfy his board of trustees. This sad event was documented by Paul Tough in his laudatory account of Canada’s Harlem Children’s Zone, Whatever It Takes (2009). Contrary to Guggenheim’s mythology, even the best-funded charters, with the finest services, can’t completely negate the effects of poverty.
Now that is sad. Instead of working with the students to improve their proficiency apparently Canada proposes we just kick them out of school.
marcus
2011 Apr 5, 11:01pm
Now that is sad. Instead of working with the students to improve their proficiency apparently Canada proposes we just kick them out of school.
That's a common practice in charters. Every year at my school we get a bunch of kids that are transfered from charter schools to our school right before the state tests in May. Those Charter people will do anything to make their stats look good. They also in most cases don't have the same kind of number of English language learners and special ed students.
And yet even with the rampant cheating that charter schools do, on average their performance is no better than public schools.
Done!
2011 Apr 5, 11:56pm
Well you can't have a Political party ruling in the voting public's stead, Ramming legislation no one ever read, while telling the public they are to dim to understand it anyway.
Whilst Liberal journalists chide their constituents, calling them Stupid.
"OH the problem must be the teachers."
If the Democrats were the defacto Railroad conductors, then there would be a war against the Railroad unions.
Just like the Liberal went after the Oil industry when Bush was in office.
This is modern politics, CHRIST! it's what you people wanted, don't gripe now. Tell me when any of you ever once considered issues at hand, for one damn minute in the last 6 years? No you all jump in line for the Republican rat shoot down at the junk yard, to shoot holes in the conservative cheese.
Had you guys Voted Nader than we'd be discussing meaningful things right now. But I just can't seem to muster up any sympathy for a group of people that thinks I'm just too damn stupid to have my Vote or my view in policy even matter for one second.
The traditional, patronizing view of teachers, that they are to be treated like saints and paid as if they’d taken a vow of poverty, has lately gone through a schizophrenic inversion. Open the newspaper most any day and you’ll read about “bad teachers†who are holding children back and, through their unions, conspiring to remain well compensated. In a remarkably short time, this view has become popular across partisan lines. Each political party filters it through its own core beliefs: Republicans fixate on the stresses that greedy unions are placing on budgets through their pay, pensions, and benefits; Democrats argue that putting better teachers in troubled schools is a matter of social justice. But they are using much the same language—and rallying around a radical change in how this country thinks about public education.
On Thursday, March 10, Wisconsin’s Republican governor, Scott Walker, published an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal justifying the bill his party had rammed through the State Senate the night before. He wrote that he wanted to do away with a “union-controlled hiring and firing process,†installing one of his own that his enemies say aims to remove veteran teachers from the classroom. The same morning, in New York, the Daily News published a column repeating many of Walker’s arguments—this one under the byline of Newark mayor Cory Booker, a Democrat. Some teachers “aren’t measuring up,†Booker wrote, “and ought to find another line of work.â€
Such ruthlessness toward a profession that has been idealized for generations might seem an unlikely basis for a popular movement, but Education Secretary Arne Duncan is onboard, as is President Obama, who in this year’s State of the Union address said, “We want to reward good teachers and stop making excuses for bad ones.†So is Rupert Murdoch, who wrote a Journal op-ed of his own last fall suggesting that teachers are held to lesser standards than American Idol contestants. A few weeks ago in Providence, a Democratic mayor fired his city’s entire workforce of teachers, saying they will have to reapply so he can choose the most skilled. Legislators in Tennessee and Indiana are considering bills modeled after Wisconsin’s. Chris Christie has made himself into a New Jersey folk hero by attacking teachers as welfare queens. Florida governor Rick Scott is preparing to sign a bill abolishing tenure. Here in New York, Mayor Bloomberg is battling Governor Cuomo over the proposed repeal of a law mandating that layoffs be conducted by seniority, the “last in, first out†policy.
Though all modern presidents like to think of themselves as leading the national education debate, they rarely are; most important decisions are made at the state, mayoral, or school-board level. But if this decentralized uprising can be said to have a leader, it is the youthful, tough-talking, and telegenic Michelle Rhee. Four years ago, Rhee was chosen to run Washington, D.C.’s troubled school district by a young Democratic mayor, Adrian Fenty. She resigned just as abruptly this past fall, after Fenty was thrown out of office. But while Rhee’s head-cracking, heresy-spouting attempt to revamp the school system was a major contributor to Fenty’s electoral defeat, she left in a blaze of martyrdom, reveling in the extravagant admiration of national Âopinion-makers, as well as her commanding role in the polemical pro-charter-school documentary Waiting for “Superman.â€
Over the past few months, rather than taking another municipal gig, Rhee has been campaigning through flash-point states, like a sort of wonky Che Guevara, lending celebrity, credibility, and covering fire to political leaders who endorse her vision of school reform. Last week, she was touring Ohio, as Governor John Kasich, a big fan of Waiting for “Superman,†promised “more choice, more accountability, more dollars in the classroom instead of bureaucracy.†The week prior, she was in Tennessee and Michigan; before that, she testified on Scott’s behalf before the Florida Legislature, where she was hailed as a “movie star.†At each stop, Rhee promotes her platform: expanding charter schools; connecting teacher pay to performance; revamping a pension-and-benefit system that “ends up excessively rewarding longevityâ€; ending tenure and seniority-based layoffs.
Considered alone, each of these proposals would be controversial, and anathema to the teachers unions; taken together, they amount to a staggering assault. For too long, Rhee says, the system—and her party, the Democrats—has languished in the grip of do-nothing bureaucrats and cynical labor leaders, a protean inertial force that she sometimes calls “the blob.†To fund her cause, Rhee announced in December that she would create a counterbalancing interest group called StudentsFirst, modeled on the NRA, for which she is hoping to raise $1 billion. Rhee frequently says she launched StudentsFirst because “there is no big organized interest group that defends and promotes the interests of children,†a line that, like a lot of things she says, is both highly debatable and maddening to her many critics, since it suggests that any disagreement is tantamount to child neglect. But Rhee sees no room to play nicely with others. “We’ve been doing a disservice to kids for many years,†she said in a recent speech at the Manhattan Institute. “So let’s get comfortable with a little fighting.â€
Read more at: http://nymag.com/news/features/michelle-rhee-2011-3/
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