Bill Gates, the nation's school superintendent

I rarely agree with Diane Ravitch, a charter/voucher/privatization supporter whose opinions frequently contradict themselves and/or her own actions*. But I think her concern about the Gates influence is well-founded.

Los Angeles Times op-ed

Bill Gates, the Nation's Superintendent of Schools
His foundation has big clout in American education. How will it wield its power?

By Diane Ravitch
DIANE RAVITCH is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and a professor of education at New York University.

July 30, 2006

WARREN Buffett's gift of $31 billion to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will double the foundation's assets, bringing it to more than $60 billion, and will increase its annual giving to nearly $3 billion.

Never before has an individual given such a large amount of money to someone else's foundation. Never before has a private foundation had assets of this dimension. Never before has any individual or foundation had so much power to direct the course of American education, which is one of the primary interests of the Gates Foundation. Educators are waiting with bated breath to see which direction this multibillion-dollar behemoth will take.

When judged by their influence on education, foundations have a decidedly mixed record. The most successful American philanthropists by far were Andrew Carnegie and Julius Rosenwald. Carnegie, the steel magnate, used his foundation to build 2,500 free public libraries in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, most of which are in the United States, and his name became a blessing to readers across the nation.

Rosenwald, who headed Sears, Roebuck & Co. in the early 1900s, directed his foundation to underwrite the construction of more than 5,000 schools in poor, rural, mainly African American districts in 15 Southern states, as well as to endow Tuskegee, Howard, Fisk, Atlanta and Dillard universities, which were (and are) predominantly black. Rosenwald's munificence saved a generation of black students.

At the other extreme, the most spectacular blunder by a foundation was the intervention of the Ford Foundation in the politics of New York City's public schools in the late 1960s. In a struggle for control of the school system between minority activists and the teachers union, the foundation funded the activists. Ford-sponsored community groups ousted union teachers from their schools, and the union responded by striking and closing down the schools for two months in the fall of 1968.

The ugly confrontation, accompanied by charges and countercharges of racism and anti-Semitism, poisoned black-Jewish relations in New York City for three decades. The Legislature defused the crisis by decentralizing the 1-million-pupil school district into 32 community districts, an arrangement that satisfied few people but remained in place until 2002, when the Legislature gave control of the school system to Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

How will the Gates Foundation do? Thus far, it has invested $1 billion to persuade school districts to break up large high schools into small schools of 500 or fewer students. About 1,500 small high schools have been created with the foundation's largesse. Last year, Bill Gates told the National Governors Assn. that "America's high schools are obsolete." Our high schools, he said, "cannot teach our kids what they need to know today," especially the advanced skills in math, science and technology required in the modern workplace.

It is certainly true that many American high schools are too large, especially in urban areas, where some enroll more than 2,000 adolescents and many students get lost in the crowd.

However, the Gates Foundation's plan to promote small high schools has also run into unexpected obstacles.

The foundation aims to promote higher standards and closer relationships between students and teachers, and indeed, according to the foundation's own evaluations, students in the new mini-schools have better relationships with teachers, do somewhat better in English and have better graduation rates than those in large schools.

However, the same evaluations also show that students in the small schools are learning significantly less math than their peers in the big schools.

Some districts that took Gates' money to downsize their schools are now backtracking. The Denver school district, a pioneer recipient of Gates funding, got $1 million to convert its 1,100-student Manual High School into three mini-schools in 2001. As a consequence, electives were cut back, as were advanced placement courses, foreign language courses, choir, debate and athletic teams. As college-bound students, athletes and other disgruntled pupils transferred out, enrollments at the Manual mini-schools plunged by nearly 50%, along with student achievement and the graduation rate. Denver closed the small schools this year, and Manual High School is being reconsolidated.

In light of its experiences, the Gates Foundation seems chastened and apparently has recognized that curriculum (what students are taught) and instruction (the quality of teachers) may be no less important than school size. Perhaps, with its deep expertise in technology, the foundation will think about investing in the development of innovative, interactive software to transform the teaching of mathematics and science in the nation's classrooms, from kindergarten through grade 12. And, by establishing an endowment fund, the foundation could safeguard the future of urban Catholic schools, which have been a gateway to the middle class for so many poor and working-class children.

With the ability to hand out more than $1 billion or more every year to U.S. educators without any external review, the Gates Foundation looms larger in the eyes of school leaders than even the U.S. Department of Education, which, by comparison, has only about $20 million in truly discretionary funds. The department may have sticks, but the foundation has almost all the carrots.

In light of the size of the foundation's endowment, Bill Gates is now the nation's superintendent of schools. He can support whatever he wants, based on any theory or philosophy that appeals to him. We must all watch for signs and portents to decipher what lies in store for American education.

*As a Hoover Institution fellow, Ravitch herself is participating in a process in which massive private funding wields heavy influence on education policy, another example of her inconsistency. But she's still right about Gates.

— Caroline

Eliminating public schools a degree at a time

From EducationNews.org



Public Schools and Lobsters
Monday, July 24, 2006
By Marty Solomon

The American public school system is analogous to a lobster in a pot of water, where the heat is turned up very slowly, a click at a time. The rising heat is so gradual that the lobster does not realize that it is being boiled alive until the last moments, when it is too late.

No Child Left Behind initially put public schools in the pot. And while the path to boiling was clearly laid out in the legislation, school leaders, teachers and boards either did not read the ominous legislation or acted like ants in an ant farm, dutifully carrying out the precepts of the cook without objection because the water was still cool.

What should have been obvious to anyone is that the NCLB legislation started out by saying that whatever you are doing now is basically ok, but we want you to improve over time. What people did not seem to recognize is that, "improve over time," really meant that we will require that you make scholars out of all children in all
schools. In other words, we will demand the impossible.

And why would our Congress vote for such a sinister bill? That's easy. Because they have a well orchestrated plan in mind. Their plan is to eventually provide vouchers for all children in the United States and turn over the education of our children to the private sector. And since private schools will compete with each other, the types of accountability and oversight demanded of public schools will not be required because the planners will tell you that competition will take care of that. Click.

Last year, Congress approved a widespread voucher plan for Washington, D.C. This was a warm-up to acclimate the public to the voucher concept. Who could object to that? Click. This year, Congress is proposing a relatively small, relatively unobtrusive $100 million voucher plan for about 28,000 children "trapped" in failing schools,
whether the children themselves are doing poorly or not or whether some small subgroup of children performed poorly. All of the children in the school will be eligible. Who could object to the growing criterion for vouchers? Click.

Each year, between now and 2014, about 5% more students in all of the 14 or more subgroups in each school must become excellent students. This will result in a growing number of schools labeled failing. Click. Then, Congress will demonstrate that a larger number of vouchers will be required because of the growing number of failing schools. Thus, the voucher money will also grow. And this will be a
justification to reduce the funding for public schools, because private schools will be taking on a larger proportion of the load.Click. By now the pot is really heating up.

By 2012, over 60% of all schools in the United States will probably reach failing levels and by 2014 that percentage will likely grow to 95%.

Will the last one out of the public schools please turn out the lights? Click.

Just the facts: U.S. grad rate at its highest ever

Education opponents have been winning large amounts of newsprint and airtime with a supposed “graduation crisis” that is simply bogus. It’s time to set the record straight.

Economists Lawrence Mishel and Joydeep Roy analyze historical graduation rates in their Economic Policy Institute book “Rethinking Graduation Rates and Trends.”

Their findings show that U.S. high school graduation rates have never been higher. To restate, a higher percentage of students graduate from high school than at any other time in our history. The false notion that there is a dropout crisis is a weapon being used by the privatization/voucher/charter forces who intend to eliminate public education.

Yes, it would be ideal if still more students graduated from high school, and if there were no racial/ethnic gap in graduation rates. But again: Our public-school system is doing better than ever before at graduating students from high school and reducing the racial/ethnic gap in graduation rates.

According to Nicholas Lemann’s book “The Big Test,” it was only about World War II that graduation rates hit 50%. In the recent past, and to some degree in the present, depending on culture and demographic, it was not considered the norm or even desirable in many families for their kids to graduate from high school.

To illustrate, my own grandmother — born in 1899 and raised in Appalachian Maryland and West Virginia — dropped out of school after eighth grade to go to Columbus and get a job in a factory that made gloves. That was the norm and the expectation in her family, and it would have been an unthinkable act of defiance and disloyalty for her to try to insist on staying in school.

When I’ve mentioned this in conversation, I’ve sometimes gotten the response that education was so much more stellar then that graduating from eighth grade in 1914 was like graduating from high school today. Well, not really. My beloved grandmother was quite literate and wrote many letters. However, in one of them she wrote to tell me that men have one fewer rib than women on one side, proving that Genesis was literally true. Grandma, by the way, was an autoworker in Detroit for much of her working life, including through the Depression, and then became a hairdresser. Her resume reflects the economic opportunity available to a non-high school graduate in the past.

Back to Mishel and Roy. Here are quotes and summaries from their book.

“Some of the discussions of recent high school completion and dropout rates claim a newly discovered crisis of low completion. Remarkably, these recent discussions have paid very little attention to the trends in high school completion over the last 40 years. In fact, historically there has been remarkable progress in raising both high school completion rates and in closing racial/ethnic gaps in high school completion.”

Mishel and Roy explain that data are available only back to the 1960s. They adjust those data to control for two significant (and controversial) societal changes that impact the hard data:

“…one must adjust, as we do, for the increased incarceration among black men in the 1990s and for the increased immigration population among Hispanics (which we can only do for data starting in 1994).”

Compensating for those changes requires breaking the trend into three time segments: 1962-80, 1979-94 and 1994-2004. Here are their summaries for those time periods:

“Over the 1962-80 period, the high school completion rate improved remarkably among both blacks (up from 41.6% to 76.6%) and whites (up from 69.2% to 86.9%) and the black-white gap in completion decreased from 27.6 percentage points in 1962 to 10.3 percentage points in 1980.”

Mishel and Roy then report the trend for non-Hispanic whites and non-Hispanic blacks from 1979-2004. “We do not report the trends for Hispanics in this time period because we can not exclude the recent immigrants in the data before 1994,” they explain. Here are the statistics:

“High school completion among non-Hispanic blacks, ages 25-29, rose from around 76-78% in the 1979-81 period to around 88% in 2004, a rise of about 11.0 percentage points. Non-Hispanic white rates of high school completion rose by 3.8 percentage points to about 93.0% by 2004. Thus, the black-white gap in completion (by diploma or GED) narrowed about 5.0 percentage points in 2004.“

In the trends from 1994-2004, Mishel and Roy exclude recent immigrants because their “educational attainment does not reflect the performance of U.S. schools. This is especially important for tracking trends among Hispanics – half of Hispanics ages 25-29 were not in (this) country 15 years earlier.”

Here are their findings for that period: “Rates of high school completion rose for every race/ethnic/gender category. There was especially large progress in raising the Hispanic completion rates, up 4.2 and 5.6 percentage points among men and women, respectively. There were increases in high school completion among both non-Hispanic whites and blacks.”

(The mathematically impaired, such as myself, need to be reminded that “percentage points” and “percent” are not the same thing.)

Mishel and Roy go on to note that the graduation rate for African-American men in that last period rose only a tiny bit, but that there are complexities because of the surge in incarceration for that demographic. That’s a tragic sociological issue for a different set of experts and a different discussion.

In any case, their findings conclusively put to rest the notion that there’s a new crisis in dropouts, discussion of which (as it’s a political weapon) is never presented in historical context. Mishel and Roy find it remarkable that the historical context is invariably left out of these discussions, but they’re economists, not politicians. It’s not remarkable; it’s a political strategy.

— Caroline

Mr. Rogers Melts A Heart

For those of us who fondly remember the 1970s PBS show, "Mr Roger's Neighborhood," this seven-minute YouTube clip brings back a lot of memories. Fred Rogers created a gentle and welcoming neighborhood for preschoolers, demystifying things like haircuts, bathtub drains and doctor visits in a sweet, calm and direct way that seems quaint by today's standards.
This clip is from 1969, when then-President Nixon was trying to cut back the proposed $20 million subsidy to the newly-created PBS. Watch Mr. Rogers melt the heart of Sen. Joseph Pastore, his prickly Congressional questioner, with his genuine and heartfelt appeal.

What Was Maureen Faibish Thinking?

The SF Chronicle reports that the trial of Maureen Faibish begins today. For the uninitiated, Ms. Faibish's 12-year-old son Nicholas was fatally mauled in June 2005 by the family's two pit bulls after she left him alone with the dogs - a female in heat and a pheromone-crazed male.
Today's article offers new details I hadn't read before: Nicholas was a special education student with severe learning disabilities, he was known to demonstrate oppositional behavior and have difficulty following directions, and his mother clearly knew the dogs were dangerous because she admitted to warning Nicholas repeatedly about being anywhere near them while the female was in heat.
Apparently, when Nicholas refused to go on a family outing, his mother left him in a dank basement with a non-working bathroom and told him to stay there until she returned several hours later. Um . . . the kid gets locked in the basement while the dogs get free run of the house?
Leaving a child alone with two menacing dogs is reckless in any case, and especially egregious if the child is unable to grasp the danger the dogs represent. Ms. Faibish was initially quoted as saying she didn't believe she'd done anything wrong, and that the attack was her son's fault for not following her directions. We have no way of knowing if she now understands just how irresponsible her actions were, but her previous attitude represents, unfortunately, a common misperception of kids with learning difficulties--that they are lazy and disobedient, rather than people whose brains are just wired very differently than most.

Tarik Aldalali's progress

In June I posted a brief note about the terrible accident suffered by Gallileo student wrestler Tarik Aldalali. Today I received an update on his condition from Coach Kane, which I'm sharing with you with the family's permission:

Thank you kindly for posting the article on Tarik. Your posting generated letters and cards which I know Tarik and his family very much appreciate.

On Tarik, he has survived! After he was airlifted to Stanford, for about a two-week period, Tarik had a series—almost daily—of surgeries to save him. Unfortunately, during this period, he lost more of his arm and leg.

As I had mentioned in my original email, he had very serious internal injuries, which required a number of additional surgeries. For a while, he had major infections, fluid in his lungs, and high fever. With massive antibiotics, the infections and fever have been reduced.

Today, he is conscious and can write messages. However, he is still on a respirator, can not talk yet and is being fed through a tube. His pelvis is crushed and requires more surgery but they have some metal "stabilizer" keeping his pelvis in place.

Thank you again for your kind messages and prayers.

Coach

Update: I just talked to his mom—they now have taken off the respirator.

Obviously it is good news that he has survived and is making progress. But what a terrible tragedy and what a painful, long struggle lies ahead for Tarik. Our thoughts and prayers continue to go out to him and his family.

Donations to help with medical expenses may be sent to the Tarik Aldalali Medical Fund, c/o Larry Kane, 405 Howard St., San Francisco, CA 94105.

AlterNet: two articles on autism

Alternet has published a pair of articles about autism that are good for those of us—like me—who don't really have any direct experience with autistic kids. It helped me grasp both the dimensions of the phenomenon of the rise of autism and what it is like to care for and educate an autistic child.

The first article Autism: the Art of Compassionate Living does a good job of raising awareness. Commenting about the making of a documentary on autism:

As Thierry and her husband, Jim, watched the raw footage, one thing became clear. "The commonalities are striking," Jim said. "These women seem to finish each other's sentences." Their stories blend together: having to quit careers, having to borrow insane amounts of money, having to let go of dreams for their children -- little league, trips, dating, having strangers demand they control their kids, having to quit friendships with people who don't understand. The film's opening chilling montage shows the children screaming and struggling to communicate.

The article ends with a quote that sounds very much like a post a mother of a child with autism wrote to the sfschools list:

"I would like people to second guess themselves when they look at me and think: (a) I can't control my child or (b) I'm abusing him because he's screaming. Have a little bit more compassion and show that to your child as well."

The second article also aims to raise awareness of the condition, with more of an emphasis on the educational needs of autistic kids: Autism: A Hidden Epidemic:

'The system is not prepared for these kids,' she says. 'But they are here.'

The relationship between parents and their school districts can be complicated and sometimes hostile. Eric Burkholder, an autism educator who has worked for 11 years in California public and nonpublic schools, explains that children in California are guaranteed a 'free and appropriate education.'

As an outsider I have no idea how representative these case studies are, or if the schools that are mentioned, and the therapies highlighted in the article are in any way controversial or not. But the author does a good job of conveying the immense challenges of living with autism. Highly recommended.

Boston Update

Boston's superintendent search is in full disarray now. Deborah Sims removed her name from consideration, leaving only one of the five shortlisted candidates in the running. Now the Globe is reporting, Hub may not have school chief till Jan.

School officials had previously hoped to have a superintendent in place by June. Now, the search committee expects to come up with a new list of finalists by the end of the summer and bring them to the city for public interviews in September.

The delay is setting off concern among some observers of the school system, who say that efforts to improve city schools are losing momentum. Others are beginning to ask aloud: Is there something undesirable about working in Boston?

My impression is the problem is not Boston, but the process they are using to find candidates. Public leaks and public scrutiny are most likely the real culprits here, even if the candidates deny they were turned off by it. After all, who would admit that they did not want to meet with public scrutiny? Who would admit that they did not want to risk the negative judgement of participating in the public reviews only to fail to get the job? The assortment of lame excuses cited by candidates in the Globe article just reinforces my conjecture.

SFUSD should pay close attention to this debacle. It's too easy to imagine us replicating this train wreck.

You vill open this charter school

The L.A. Daily News story pasted below announces that the charter-school chain Green Dot may get the authority to open charter schools anywhere in California without authorization from local school boards.

I asked Jill Wynns, veteran San Francisco Unified School District Board of Education commissioner, to comment on that proposal on the record.

Wynns views the ability to open a school in a district without approval from the local board of education as "outrageous and undemocratic." She adds: "One of the most important local decisions that people elect their school boards to make is the decision about how many schools a community needs." Under current law, "Somebody else can tell you that you're going to have these charter schools and then you're forced to provide facilities for them."

Wynns also questions the legitimacy of the proposal, which would make Green Dot a "state benefit charter." According to Wynns, the charter operator is supposed to prove that it couldn't get a local charter and that it would benefit the entire state. Yet Green Dot already has some local charters, as does the High Tech High chain, which already has the state benefit status.

Los Angeles Daily News 7/11/2006
Charter operator may get own say
By Naush Boghossian, Staff Writer

Inspired by a brother who dropped out of high school and died young of a drug overdose, Steve Barr devoted himself to creating schools that educate teens in a nurturing environment.

Now the founder of the successful Green Dot Public Schools is on the verge of a major breakthrough that could make him the king of Los Angeles charter schools.

On Wednesday, the state Board of Education is poised to vote on giving Green Dot the authority to create independent charter schools without having to first get approval from local school districts.

It would mark the first time a charter operator in Los Angeles won that power, and only the second time in California.

continue reading...

"It's just insurance. We will exhaust all efforts to work with the district but just in case we have this in our hip pocket to use," Barr said Monday.

"We're really trying to figure out how to take research and development (at charters), couple it with political will and create systematic improvement. We're not going to create a district with 1,000 charter schools.

"The goal is for all LAUSD schools to have the basic tenets we know work and eliminate the need for charters."

Without having to fight his way through the bureaucratic and political obstacles of Los Angeles Unified, Barr hopes to demonstrate what works in public schools and spark citywide school reform.

Despite having approved more than 100 charters — more than any school district in the nation — Los Angeles Unified and officials with its teachers union have become increasingly vocal about controlling the growth of charters, even looking into legislation that would allow them to limit the number of charters.

Charter schools get their money directly from the state, effectively reducing the amount of money the district gets.

Currently, a California school district can reject a charter application only if it feels the plan lacks fiscal viability or the operators show an inability to carry it out.

Obstacles

But obstacles can be put in the way of charter operators. Barr appealed a rejection by the Inglewood Unified School District, only to ultimately receive approval.

Ben Golombek, a spokesman for Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, said charters are an important element in school-reform efforts.

"The mayor believes charters have been proven incubators for results and innovation in some of our city's most economically depressed neighborhoods."

School board member Jon Lauritzen, who unsuccessfully proposed in March a one-year moratorium on charter applications, said Green Dot has a proven record of achievement in the LAUSD and the district would not be diminished by the authority, if it were granted.

"The biggest problem we would have is they could locate them virtually anywhere, but they pretty much have that authority now," Lauritzen said. "The question is whether they would work with us on where they're located."

But Barr's success in organizing parents to turn troubled Jefferson High into a cluster of charters — despite resistance from the district and teachers union - established him as a force to be reckoned with.

"(United Teachers Los Angeles) fought with everything they had and the parents rose up," Barr said. "I think that'll happen all across the city and when we get the middle class to move in this direction, I think it'll move this thing a lot faster.

"It will be a further threat to LAUSD's power so hopefully one day in the future we're collaborating not only in failing schools but middle-class ones as well."

UTLA President A.J. Duffy said the move by the state would be a "bad mistake." Green Dot teachers are unionized, but are not members of UTLA.

Citing a recent Rand Corp. report, Duffy maintains that charters keep pace academically with traditional schools. The answer is to fund public schools at a higher level.

"I think it's time for a cap on the number of charters and the amount of money that go to charters because it will continue to drain money from the public coffers," Duffy said.

If the state should grant Barr's group chartering authority, it would be a significant move, but would likely not lead to an explosion of charter operators seeking this type of authority, said Caprice Young, a former LAUSD board member who now heads the California Charter Schools Association.

Set the bar high

The state board has set a very high bar for granting the authority, she explained, and there aren't many groups with that capacity.

"Getting a statewide charter is a statement by the state that what you are doing is outstanding and merits replication. They're telling everyone in the education community that Green Dot schools ought to be replicated and are models for the public school community," Young said.

"They're serving the inner city and showing that every single kid can go to college and can achieve."

Barr said his formula is just common sense: keeping campuses under 500 students, getting parents involved, having high expectations, paying teachers more and giving parents, principals and teachers control over budget and curriculum at the school-site level.

Those are the same goals his newly formed Los Angeles Parents Union will demand from the Los Angeles Unified School District.

"There's a culture in big schools that's really rough," he said, recalling his brother Michael's experience.

`Mean places'

Public high schools are mean places and I wanted to create the alternative to that - high schools where we find what's special in each kid. The biggest thing we offer is we believe in them, and we offer schools small enough to get to know each kid individually, and when they walk in, we give them the tools they need.

"The problem at L.A. Unified is these kids go to the ninth grade, the bar is lifted higher and they're humiliated on a daily basis and they drop out."

If the state Board of Education gives Barr authority to open charters, it could spark a dialogue on creating multiple authorizers and giving those who want to open charters more options in seeking approvals, said Penny Wohlstetter, a professor at the University of Southern California and a co-director of its Center on Educational Governance.

"Maybe this is getting us one step closer on a serious discussion of multiple authorizers, since in other states there are more opportunities for creators of charters to seek out opportunities."

For example, in states such as Michigan, state colleges and universities are also authorized to approve charter applications, giving those who want to open the schools more alternatives.

Barr's goal is not just to focus on inner-city schools, but campuses that serve middle-class neighborhoods such as in the San Fernando Valley.

"These kids are going to come back to Los Angeles with their diplomas and start businesses, be political leaders, make changes and infuse a lot of money in their communities," he said. "That's better than waiting for gentrification or liberals like myself to change our neighborhoods."

— Caroline

TMAO's school's remarkable rebound

One of our favorite blogs is TMAO's Teaching in the 408. We've cited it often (here, here, and here for instance) and always look forward to his posts. Well, his last post of the school year was a rare chance to soak in some well-deserved praise from the SJ Merc, which wrote this editorial about his school: A school's remarkable rebound:

Others can learn from transformation of Alum Rock's Lee Mathson Middle School
Mercury News Editorial

Lee Mathson Middle School in East San Jose is proof that an ordinary public school can transform itself radically and rapidly. Its experience refutes the fatalistic notion that demographics -- poverty, ethnicity -- are destiny.

Three years ago, Mathson hit rock bottom in Alum Rock. Test scores were abysmal; staff morale was terrible; parents were concerned enough about safety in school that the district shipped sixth-graders back to the feeder elementary schools, leaving Mathson with only two grades.

Since then, Mathson has been a textbook case of change. With a 198-point rise in its Academic Performance Index, the state's primary test score, Mathson went from worst to first among the district's six neighborhood middle schools. (KIPP Heartwood, a charter middle school, and Renaissance Academy, a small school, actually had higher scores.)

Mathson twice earned the ``Mayor's Progress to Excellence'' award. After-school clubs, a sign that kids want to be on campus, are flourishing. Fights fell from dozens a year to two. In a district still hampered by high turnover, next year every Mathson teacher will be back. And in September, in a mark of confidence that the changes will last, the sixth grade will return.

A combination of factors led to Mathson's progress: extensive use of data to place students and monitor their progress, a constant effort by teachers to perfect methods of instruction, an extended school day, and high expectations. Then there was the leadership of Glenn Vander Zee, the San Jose Silicon Valley Chamber of Commerce's Principal of the Year and the driving force behind the changes.

The first step was to counter the myth that low-income students of immigrant parents cannot or do not want to learn. One strategy was enforcing rule

Congratulations to TMAO and all the educators, students, and families that are working so hard to turn that school around. Truly inspirational.

Of course, they are also caught on the horns of one of the nastier flaws of our ed funding machine:

Funding is an issue. As a low-performing school with a high proportion of children in poverty, Mathson was eligible for extra federal funds and special grants that paid for the extra academic periods. But it's a paradox of education that governments fund failure, not success. Now that Mathson has raised its scores, Vander Zee is scrambling for money to continue the programs. Under a better pay system, teachers would be getting big merit raises, too.

It is unconscionable that a school that has achieved so much, that has overcome so much should have to grovel to maintain funding and maintain programs. They should be getting a raise, not facing a penalty. This is nuts.

Schools Matter: How Can Schools Be Accountable?

Schools Matter is a prolific and provocative Ed blog that espouses views similar to ours on many school issues such as high stakes testing, charters, vouchers, privatization, and public school abolitionism. Check it out. I'm undoubtedly more moderate on most issues than they are, but I read the log and applaud his efforts.

Including this recent post, "How Can Schools Be Accountable?" which counters the "schools are failing" chorus with this nugget:

Indeed, you've heard policy-makers of all stripes, conservative and liberal, say something like what Moe argues: huge amounts of money have been invested in school, more than has ever been invested -- literally mountains and mountains of cash -- and we have nothing to show.

But we actually have LOTS to show.

• more students than ever before are attending public schools, hitting new record enrollment levels in the mid-1990s
• more students than ever before are graduating from schools
• more students than ever before are taking advanced classes (in 1982, 11 percent of high school graduates completed courses like trigonometry, pre-calculus and calculus. By 1998, 27 percent had completed that type of advanced coursework. Over the same period, the percentage taking advanced science courses rose from 31 percent to 60 percent.)
• schools are performing more services for students than ever before

The post makes another point that we've hammered on here and on the sfschools list, that schools are being overloaded with all manner of extraneous mandates and social service functions that distract and dilute their core responsibility —to educate our students. Check it out.

Time to add this blog (and Edspresso) to our blogroll.

Two Angry Moms

Another volley in the healthy food battle, Two Angry Moms web site leads with this teaser:

Are you sick and tired of making your kids a brown bag lunch everyday because lunch at their school is unfit for human consumption? Do you feel guilty when your children “buy” instead of “bring”? Are you annoyed that the healthy school lunch you pack your kid is undermined by a barrage of birthday cupcakes, candy rewards, holiday treats and vending machine cuisine?

I think we know pretty well how much power two angry moms can wield. Good luck to them!

Envision charter's financial woes hit the press

Here's an interesting story on Envision Schools — operator of SFUSD's City Arts & Tech and Metro Arts & Tech — from Hayward, future home of another Envision school.

Envision's Marin School of Arts and Technology only became high-performing this last testing year. Before that it was way below Novato's two high schools (both API and similar schools) — despite getting $800 more per student per year from the district than the other two schools did, as mandated by law favoring charter
schools. Novato put MSAT on notice for its low achievement and its scores soared miraculously this last year.

In addition, note the parent's comment that Envision Schools has "raised amazing amounts of money" — yet is STILL having financial problems — which jibes with the observation of a parent who toured CAT and told me, "They have so much more!" Yet the charter-school folks are always crying about how supposedly underfunded they are.

And one more point, regarding the comment that CAT was "honored as an exemplary charter": This was based on nothing, as CAT had no test scores yet at the time that "honor" was bestowed. Now it does have test scores — a so-so API of 658 (with 800 being excellent) and an API ranking of 4 on a scale of 10. No Similar Schools ranking is listed (which is probably a relief to Envision).

Mixed record dogs schools group
Envision's first charter high excels academically, lags financially
By Katy Murphy, STAFF WRITER
Hayward Daily Review 7/7/06

HAYWARD — Shortly before the Hayward school board agreed to allow Envision Schools to open an arts and technology-focused charter high school in the city, Envision's CEO presented the educational philosophy of his charter organization: rigor, relevance, relationships and results.

Missing from the presentation, however, was any reference to the recent struggles Envision had experienced with the first school it opened, the Marin School of Arts and Technology in Novato.

continue reading...

Envision Schools, a San Francisco-based nonprofit organization, has started three public, independently run high schools since 2003, with another to open this fall in Oakland. The Arts and Technology High School of Hayward is set to open in 2007 with ninth- and 10th-grade classes of about 125 students in each grade level.

But this spring, the Novato Unified school board considered closing Envision's first charter school despite its high test scores. The Marin School of Arts and Technology was running a $300,000 deficit and lacked the financial reserves required by its charter, according to reports by the Marin Independent Journal.

A two-year fiscal plan developed by parents and staff bought more time to boost enrollment and improve the school's financial situation.

"I had not been aware of that," said Myrna Truehill, one of the four Hayward school board members who voted last week to approve the Envision charter. While that information wouldn't necessarily have caused her to vote differently, she said, "I certainly would have asked the question: How do we make sure that they don't go belly-up?"

Novato school district officials also raised concerns last summer about Envision's student discipline and special education policies, and the charter organization has since revised its procedures accordingly. According to news accounts, one student had been expelled without a hearing, and some district officials questioned whether
special education students were being assessed properly or receiving the services they needed.

Daniel McLaughlin, Envision's CEO, said he did tell Hayward staff and some board members of the organization's challenges in Novato.

"We were very up front about it," he said.

Envision's two high schools in San Francisco are financially solid, he said, and the Marin School of Arts and Technology will have 30 more students this fall than earlier expected.

While the Novato school has had its financial pitfalls, it ranks a nine out of 10 in the statewide Academic Performance Index rankings, which are based on standardized test scores, and 10 out of 10 when compared with a pool of 99 demographically "similar schools." According to records maintained by the California Department of
Education, 65 percent of the students tested at the school were white; four out of 156 were economically disadvantaged.

Janet Coates, a Marin School of Arts and Technology parent, said she never sensed a crisis, nor did she fear the school would be forced to close. "Envision Schools is a professional organization, and they've raised amazing amounts of money," Coates said. "These are not fly-by-nighters."

A better measure of the organization's success, Coates said, is the fact that her son wanted to go to school every day.

Grant Peterson, president of the Hayward Board of Education, said he was impressed with the environment and the level of classroom instruction that he saw during a visit to Envision's City Arts and Technology High School in San Francisco, which was honored as an exemplary charter by the United States Department of Education.

Peterson said he had been informed by Envision staff about the problems at the Marin School, but that he doubted such issues would crop up in Hayward.

Even if they did, he said, "I guess it's 'Bye-bye, Envision,' which doesn't really hurt the district."

— Caroline

Charters' latest: sham 'parents' union'

Charter-school mogul announces sham "parents' union" (L.A. Daily News, 7/7/06):

It's amusing that the supposed parents' list of tenets includes higher pay for teachers, given that a primary goal of the charter movement is to bust teachers' unions. Also, nobody who has spent any time around a cross-section of kids could really believe that college-prep curriculum is appropriate for all students. See further comments after the story.

Parents union enters LAUSD reform debate
BY NAUSH BOGHOSSIAN, Staff Writer
LA Daily News
Stepping into the battle to reform Los Angeles Unified, the founder of Green Dot charter schools announced Thursday he's launched a parents union that will demand small, safe and high-achieving public schools based on the model he created.

The nonprofit Los Angeles Parents Union, founded by Steve Barr, also will actively lobby for proposed legislation that would give Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa greater authority over the school district and the teachers union more control at local schools.

But the main goal of the Parents Union will be to advocate and promote Barr's vision for the LAUSD by implementing the six tenets he used when he created Green Dot campuses. And Villaraigosa, Barr said, has promised to go along with his plan.

"If we're successful, we'll create the best public school system in the country and change the dynamics of the community," Barr said at a downtown news conference.

Barr said he became convinced of the need to organize parents after traveling to Sacramento last month to testify in favor of the Los Angeles Unified School District reform bill. He was baffled, he said, when he saw 50 parents who had been bused to the state capital by the LAUSD claiming to represent the views of all district parents.

"I thought, that's a sham being pulled off. Nobody's organized parents in a real way. When I saw the parents, they were not the parents I knew.

"And I don't know what they do," he said. "They seem to speak for I don't know who and I don't know what for. They seemingly speak in unison with those who protect the status quo, like the teachers union and the LAUSD bureaucracy."

Newly elected to her second term as president of the LAUSD board, Marlene Canter expressed concern that the Parents Union was created solely to organize support for the reform legislation.

"I feel that it's very, very important for parents to be organized, to have a voice. There are many parent groups and organizations that are independent and work on what's in the best interest for parents and families.

"I'm fearful that a parents union that is attached to supporting the legislation is really a politically driven movement."

Barr, who broke up Jefferson High into six charter schools after organizing its parents, said he already has hundreds of members and will enlist more at organizational meetings to be held throughout the LAUSD.

Parent Ignacio Garcia, whose three children attended Jefferson High, said the Parents Union will ensure that Los Angeles Unified looks out for the best interests of the students.

"I think it's time for parents to say `Enough,' for us to be united, to claim our rights and our benefits," said Garcia, who lives in South Los Angeles.

Parent David Wyles of Playa Del Rey said while he's not sure he supports Barr's new group, he does believe in increasing parental involvement.

"Unless the parents are included, children will not make progress," he said at the news conference, attended by about 70 other parents.

"Big bureaucracies like LAUSD don't respond to individual parents. They respond to collaborations of parents."

But starting up such parent organizations has its challenges, said Bill Ring, chairman of the Parent Collaborative at the LAUSD, who tried to start a parents union four years ago.

His group's 101 elected parents and community members represent 750,000 students and their parents in the LAUSD.

"One of the things that was so challenging getting a union started years ago was the funding — it's important to know where your money is coming from," said Ring, who's working on creating an independent association of parents of his own.

Barr said he has not yet accepted any donations, and will be selective about the sources of funding to maintain the group's independence.

PARENTAL DEMANDS

Here are the six tenets the Los Angeles Parents Union wants to implement in the LAUSD:

• Cap enrollment at 500 students per campus.
• Mandate college prep curriculum for all students.
• Delegate control over budgets, curriculum and hiring to administrators
• and teachers at each school.
• Allocate more money to the classroom and increase teacher pay.
• Increase parental participation.
• Keep campuses open later for community.

Fellow blogger Nestwife has added a critique of her own, which I'm pasting here.

Just for starters, a couple of things jump out of the "parents' union" list of demands.

• Cap enrollment at 500 students per campus.
• Mandate college prep curriculum for all students.
• Delegate control over budgets, curriculum and hiring to administrators
• and teachers at each school.
• Allocate more money to the classroom and increase teacher pay.
• Increase parental participation.
• Keep campuses open later for community.

First, if campus enrollment is capped at 500, I wonder what effect that would have on the ability of the schools to offer a full range of extracurriculars, like sports teams and band/orchestra. What we have found here is that the smaller high schools either forego these amenities entirely, or they have to choose just a couple of sports (say, baseball, basketball and volleyball, but no football, or swimming, or fencing, or badminton, or soccer, or softball, etc), or band but no orchestra, or no music at all.

Same thing with languages — a population of 500 is not enough to support a choice of foreign languages, which is why 2600-student Lowell (High School, San Francisco Unified School District) has about 9 languages to choose from, and Gateway (SFUSD charter high school), with about 400 kids, has Spanish For All.

Then there is the issue of AP classes. A population of 500 kids is not enough to support more than a handful of AP — and yet they are demanding a "college prep" curriculum? Well, having ALL AP classes, as some schools for the gifted do, would accomplish that, but then the schools would have to be sorting their kids by ability, and lumping the gifted kids together. That doesn't seem to be part of the demands, so I assume that these schools will not be doing that.

Schools of 500 which serve a full range of abilites will not be able to offer more than a couple of AP courses. Is that an improvement over the current setup?

Next, the delegating of control over the curriculum, hiring and budget to the administration and teachers seems to be at odds with the demand for more parental involvement. The Ed Code requires school site councils, which must at the high school level be composed of 25% parents/guardians, and 25% students. Turning such decisions over to each school's site council would accomplish what seems to be the goal (getting these decsisions out of the hands of central office and into the hands of those closest to the students) while including parents in these important decisions too. As it stands, it sounds like this so-called "parents' union" is demanding that parents be involved, but excluding them from the most important decision making at the school. I guess this charter school guy believes that parental involvement should be limited to things like running fund raisers and going on field trips. Oh, and of course, going to sacramento to lobby for more schools like the ones he has created.

Suddenly I am reminded of the time Edison Schools was paid $3 million to write a report on how to fix the Philadelphia school system. When the report came out, guess what it said? Yes, the only way to fix that school district was, according to Edison, to turn management of the whole district over to ... Edison!

&mdash Caroline

Feds to California: give parents choices

The recent NPR report, California Schools Could Lose Aid over 'No Child' Law, looks into the way that students attending failing schools are not being offered alternate enrollment choices that are mandated by NCLB. This has been a long-simmering problem nationally, and one critical part of NCLB that has been largely ignored. Secretary Spellings and the federal DOE are now taking action against California in an apparent attempt to spur compliance and force the state to act. NPR has also published the letter from the feds to the California DOE here.

The question is why now? Why California? What changes are expected?

The best analysis that I've seen is found on the edspresso blog, Why Spellings's sudden change of heart? They report some interesting poll results that give a sense of the problem in LA:

• 86% do not know their children are in a failing school
• 2% report to have received a letter from their school informing them of the school’s failing designation
• Of the 46 parents who knew their child’s school was failing, only 9 of them (19%) had received written notification from the school
• 54% were not aware that their child is eligible to transfer to another school
• 63% would transfer their children if money was not an issue
• 82% would transfer their children in they were eligible to exercise the “parent choice” provision of NCLB
• 73% are likely to transfer their child knowing that the child qualifies to transfer to a different or better school at no cost

Clearly, there is a problem in LA. Parents are not being notified. Choices are not being offered. So what, exactly, have the feds demanded from California?

The DOE letter is a scant three page memo that doesn't really amount to much. They demand that the state issue a report. If the report doesn't satisfy the feds, then they threaten to request more info, or maybe give notice of possible sanctions:

California must finalize its policies for rewards and sanctions so that state and Federal policies are aligned. This condition must be resolved by September 30, 2006 by either providing evidence that the policies are final, or providing a timeline describing when this will occur. If this condition is not resolved in a timely manner, the Department may request further information, revise this special condition to require further action, or provide notice of its intent to take further administrative action.

Pardon me, but if I were Jack O'Connell, I wouldn't be trembling in my boots. Basically the state has been asked to give the feds a report on how bad the problem is and what they intend to do about it. NPR's claim that the feds "threatened to withhold millions of dollars in federal school aid from California" seems way overblown.

I hope we get to see the report from the California DOE. They are supposed to report on the top 20 most populous districts, so it would have to cover SFUSD. Obviously, SFUSD offers all families enrollment choices. That will not be the issue here. But does the district notify families of students that are attending "failing" schools that their child has the right to transfer?

It will be interesting to track this story in the future.

EdWize attacks WSF

Edwize, a blog I have praised in the past, stakes out an unnecessarily combative and skeptical position on the Weighted Student Formula idea in the article A Trojan Horse whinnies. Maybe I'm being naive, and the "100% solution" initiative that they take aim at really is a sinister wolf in sheep's clothing or an end run towards vouchers and union busting. Assuming it really is another name for WSF, then I think we here in San Francisco can take a less paranoid view of the the idea entails.

In its most paranoid extreme, the article allege that the %100'ers want to "challenge teacher assignments and seniority", though they neglect to cite any specifics. They follow this conjecture with the wild-eyed conclusion:

In other words, paying the negotiated salaries of the teachers in the school, at whatever step they are on, should be scrapped in favor of giving principals a pot of dough and letting them hire teachers they can afford.

They should take a deep breath and review the proposal and review how WSF has been implemented in the real world. Here it entails nothing like this. In San Francisco, WSF fully respects union pay scales, and does it nothing weaken union work rules. That does not mean that the %100'ers are proposing adopting the San Francisco model, but it does prove that WSF and unionism can coexist. The two are hardly antithetical.

In SFUSD, the WSF site budgeting pays for teacher salaries using an average salary and not the actual salary. This protects the seniority system, perhaps too much so. The SF policy also preserves union hiring and seniority rules too. These are really difficult and important problems for any policy to address. I'm not saying that SFUSD's policies hit the right balance between site based autonomy and teacher unionism. But again, WSF is not inherently at odds with existing teacher pay scales and worker rights.

I'm sorry that EdWize would rush to a snap judgement on the idea of WSF budgeting. They might learn a lot by studying districts like SFUSD that have implemented it before they leap to conclusions. I too am wary of the sudden spotlight on WSF, the so-called %100 solution, and the odd bedfellows these initiatives are attracting. I hope to investigate these proposals in more depth here in the future. But the Weighted Student Formula concept has merit. I firmly believe that it has played an important role in improving schools here. It really does promote site based autonomy, which does — in my Libertarian Democrat view — improve school governance, enhance accountability for school performance, and inform parental choices.

Summer of Love Challenge Spotlight: Marshall's Discovery Park in Coloma

SfSchools Summer of Love Challenge is alive and kicking. We don't have that far to go to reach our goal, but frankly I'm hoping we can surpass it.

Today I'd like to shine a light on one of our projects: Getting Excited about the California Gold Rush

I am an elementary teacher at a school where most students are identified as socially economically disadvantaged. I want to organize this field trip so my students will be motivated to learn.

As an elementary teacher, I teach all subjects. The subject that seems to get the least priority is Social Studies. Students at my school are not learning the history of California adequately; therefore, I would like to arrange a memorable trip to Marshall's Discovery Park in Coloma, CA for my students. On this trip, students will get to visit the place that ignited the California Gold Rush. Students will visit Sutter's Mill and pan for gold, just like the miners.

The resources we need for this proposal are composition books, clipboards, Gold Rush novel, and funding for the transportation from Sheridan E.S. in San Francisco to Marshalls Discovery Park in Coloma, CA. We would use the composition books and novels prior to the trip. The novel would give students knowledge about this time period in CA. The composition books and clipboards would be used during the trip. They will use them to take notes and observations of what they see during the field trip.

Both my kids were lucky enough to attend the three-day program at the Coloma Outdoor Discovery School which featured visits to Marshall's Discovery Park. I was lucky enough to be a parent voluteer for one of those field trips. It is an excellent program that the kids loved. They looked forward to it all year, and remember it fondly even now.

This project is a bit more expensive than the other projects selected for this challenge. But I know from experience how valuable this will be for the kids at Sheridan. A two-day stay at the school would be even better, but at $130/student the cost would be prohibitive. Still, a day trip to this historic park at the culmination of their Gold Rush studies would be a wonderful gift to give these students. Please consider donating to this project, and please consider doing so via our challenge.

The perils of a public superintendent search

Boston's search for a new superintendent is turning into a cautionary tale about the perils of public scrutiny in the search process. SFUSD would be wise to pay close attention as we rev up our own recruiting process.

To recap, Boston's popular, successful superintendent, Thomas Payzant, retired after more than a decade of service. His plans have been known for more than a year, allowing plenty of time to recruit his replacement. I'm not fully versed on the structure of the Boston school district, but I belive the superintendent and the BOE are appointed by the mayor. This should make the hiring process easy to plan and execute — or at least easier than it will be here where BOE electoral politics figures prominently into the equation. Boston's search committee allegedly produced a short list of final candidates that was leaked to the press. These final candidates were then expected to face a public review process. And that's when things have apparently fallen apart.

We've noted that Arlene Ackerman was on the leaked short list. She quickly withdrew her name from consideration. Turns out she is not alone. The list of five candidates is now down to two. The Globe reports:

Both Reilinger [co chairwoman of the search committee] and Mayor Thomas M. Menino pointed yesterday to two factors in the withdrawals: the public disclosure of the candidates for the post and a reluctance among candidates to take part in a public interview process long promised to parents and community groups.

The thinking is that top-flight candidates would not want to suffer the embarrassment of being rejected after such a public process. In the case of Superintendent Manuel J. Rivera of Rochester, N.Y. , whom many considered the front-runner, that could also have meant returning to his present system after openly flirting with another job.

Compounding the mess for Boston is the fact that any additional candidates that might be added to the search will be tainted—not to mention snubbed—for having not made the original short list. It is a mess, and all because of the public involvement in the process—both the unintended leak and the planned public interviews.

It's hard to imagine that SFUSD will A) be allowed to conduct a discreet, private search process, and B) be able to shield the most desirable candidates from these pitfalls of public scrutiny. Perhaps the district can learn from Boston's situation and devise a way for diverse community voices to participate in a discreet, closed-door recruiting process that protects the privacy of the candidates. Maybe. But I'm doubtful.

From where I sit, Superintendent Chan is looking better and better. She has proven herself under difficult circumstances in her first year. Before embarking on a treacherous search process we ought to take stock of Gwen Chan and ask if we really think we can do better. This district is faced with many immediate, critical needs. Gwen Chan knows the players, knows the issues, knows the district, and has demonstrated tact and leadership. Can we expect to find anyone better and more qualified? Can we afford to wait and to risk the near term uncertainty?

Business Week profiles Gates Foundation

Interesting article about the Gates Foundation's experience with small school reform over on BusinessWeek online: Bill Gates Gets Schooled

Visits to 22 Gates-funded schools around the country show that while the Microsoft couple indisputably merit praise for calling national attention to the dropout crisis and funding the creation of some promising schools, they deserve no better than a C when it comes to improving academic performance. Researchers paid by their foundation reported back last year that they have found only slightly improved English and reading achievement in Gates schools and substantially worse results in math. There has been more promising news on graduation rates. Many of the 1,000 small schools the Gateses have funded are still new, however, and it's too soon to project what percentage of their students will finish school and enter college, also a foundation goal. The collapse of Manual High [Denver case study from article] is an extreme case, but one that points to a clear lesson: Creating small schools may work sometimes, but it's no panacea.

The couple says the setbacks don't mean they have squandered the $1 billion the foundation has spent so far. Instead, they view their crash course as research and development for educators nationally who are trying to sort out what works and what doesn't. The Gates record shows that besides creating a more personalized setting, it's vital to hire motivated and qualified teachers and institute tougher academic standards.

This article takes a slightly different tack from the other articles I've read about the recent changes in Gates Foundation funding. In other articles it sounded like they were taking the focus off of small schools led by dynamic individual and focusing on other more data-driven and scalable types of reforms. Here it sounds like they are still committed to the small school idea, but realize that it is more difficult to make it work than just putting kids in a small school setting. Without the academic rigor and institutional support to develop a viable school community, the best efforts of the most dynamic, idealistic individuals can go for naught.

Let's hope the people charged with revisiting San Francisco's small schools effort are paying close attention.