San Francisco Schools

Progress on truancy

2009-06-26T09:12:00.000-07:00

The Chron recently published an article, Pressuring parents helps S.F. slash truancy 23% and an editorial, Fighting truancy yields big dividends with news of progress of efforts to combat truancy at SFUSD. From the editorial:

Nearly three years into her battle against school truancy, District Attorney Kamala Harris has something to celebrate: There was a 23 percent drop in the number of elementary school truants at San Francisco schools this year. On the simplest level, that drop means more money for the city: The school district received an additional $372,862 in funds tied to attendance. Any additional money for education is something to be celebrated in these tough times. And on the grandest level, everyone in the city benefits when children go to school.

We've been following this story from the begining so it is nice to see this follow up and to note the successes. As the reporting makes clear, progress has so far been limited to the lower grades. A nice start, but the harder problem of truancy in the upper grades, remains more or less unchanged. Hopefully the sustained attention on the problem will help officials find new answers. Prosecuting parents is not likely to work for older kids. Garcia speaks of making school "more joyful" for these truants, which may be noble, but in the context of reaching the dropouts most at risk here, the increasingly hackneyed "joyful learning" term comes off as risible. The success so far comes more from sticks than carrots. Garcia is probably right that the district needs to find ways to engage those older truants that are on the dropout path, programs like the Center for Academic Re-entry and Empowerment, (CARE) that we've noted before. But the success of those programs also relies on enforcement — paying attention to the problem, intervening, and letting these kids know that they can't just slip through the cracks.

Also, note that there are question marks surrounding some of the data provided by the district to back up this story. Caroline takes a look at some of the anomolies over on her Examiner blog in: SF schools' supposed truancy numbers make no sense. What's going on? Hopefully we'll get answers from the district, and improved data and reporting from the schools.

News From the School Lunch Campaign Trail

2009-06-26T09:05:00.000-07:00

I recently discovered a great blog devoted to the school nutrition issues that are near and dear to our heart, School Lunch Talk. The blog "dishes out the latest on public school food, from chicken nuggets and chocolate milk to legislation and regulations." Ann Cooper, a noted school nutrition leaders, is one of the editors of the site.

They provide a consice update on the progress on the legislative effort to update federal nutrition policy in this post: News From the School Lunch Campaign Trail:

The current Child Nutrition Act expires September 30, 2009, meaning it’s up for reauthorization, and in that process we have a chance to really improve on how food for our smallest citizens is funded, sourced, defined, and prioritized. Remember in 1981, how under Reaganomics ketchup was classified as a vegetable and 2 million children were dropped from the National School Lunch Program? The Act has far-reaching impact, beyond school lunch, to the WIC, Child and Adult Care Food, and Summer Food Service programs, and others.

Follow the link and read the whole story to find out how you can raise your voice at this critical juncture.

Chaos in class, and who gets punished?

2009-06-24T09:06:00.000-07:00

No, this is not what you want happening in your kid's Algebra class. And no, this is not how you want your kid's school to respond. Pretty sickening:

Bay Area girl suspended for videotaping unruly class

An end to the taco war?

2009-06-06T01:00:00.000-07:00

Because we just can't get enough of this issue... Breaking news from Mission Loc@l: El Tonayense Taco Truck’s New View ?:

Abandoned lime wedges near the parking lot of John O’Connell High School show that the popular El Tonayense taco truck can still be found operating behind the school.

But the owner of the truck, Benjamin Santana told Mission Loc@l that by next week his taco patrons will have to walk north a block to place their orders of tacos de carne asada. “We are still negotiating the details but it looks like we will have to move the truck between 20 - 40 feet towards the 2300 block of Harrison,” he said.

Sounds like a good compromise. The truck will not be on the school boundary, visible from the yard. Its new location is visible from the old one, so few are likely to be confused by the move. Cool. Hopefully.

Good news from Mission High

2009-06-04T23:18:00.000-07:00

Here is some genuinely good news reported out of Mission High. These are inspiring stories of struggle and accomplishment against the odds. Congratulations to all.

The Mommy Files : College bound: Mission High School students beat the odds

Through all of this Mission High School was the only constant in Spencer's life. He enrolled at this school of some 900 students on Dolores Avenue in the second semester of ninth grade after he first moved to San Francisco. He commuted by Bart when he was living in the East Bay. At Mission, Spencer found the support he needed.

"It's my family," Spencer says. "It's like my home. People actually want to see me here. If I need someone to talk to, there's always someone there. I can go to Mr. Guthertz the principal or Mr. Javitch my adviser or Mr. Albano the J.V. football coach. These people helped me get through the tough times."

Another snippet from one of many great personal stories:

Braki enrolled in Mission in the 10th grade. Due to her home life it's no surprise that she went through periods when she was truant and didn't care about getting a high school diploma or a college education. She developed a close relationship with Linda Martley-Jordan, who monitors attendance at Mission. Martley-Jordan, who lives in Oakland and has worked at the school since 2006, contacts parents and guardians of students that are not attending school on a daily basis. As she crosses the Bay Bridge every morning to get to work, she calls dozens of kids to tell them to get out of bed and get to school.

"Cindy was one of those students who always came into my office just to talk," Martley-Jordan says. "She needed someone to talk to."

When Braki didn't come to school for several days in the 11th grade, the attendance liaison became concerned and picked up the phone. [...]

read the whole story, very inspiring. Glad to hear good things happening for the kids of Mission High.

"We Ain't Got the Do Re Mi"

2009-06-04T22:50:00.000-07:00

Brilliant!

SFUSD Budget Workshop, June 17

2009-06-04T11:45:00.000-07:00

Once again, the district will be conducting a workshop on the district budget. I highly recommend this to anyone interested in the district of educational politics in genera. Here is the notice from PPS_SF:

There will be a Community Meeting held on Wednesday, June 17, from 6:30 to 8pm at James Lick Middle School to discuss the SFUSD budget for the upcoming year. To be covered:
Raise awareness of the state's budget and its implications for SFUSD
Share information about SFUSD's budget outlook, including o the impact of federal stimulus funds, Prop A parcel tax, Prop H, and rainy day funds o outlook for school budgets
Gather feedback (overall impressions and specific ideas) from participants about what SFUSD should consider in difficult budgetary planning
Let SFUSD community members know what they can do to advocate on behalf of San Francisco's schools
KidsWatch for ages 3 and up sponsored by PPS-SF Interpretation in Spanish and Chinese available. Contact 241-6081.

For more information, please contact budget@sfusd.edu

This event is sponsored by SFUSD, Parents for Public Schools-SF and Coleman Advocates

The one time I was able to attend one of these workshops I learned more than I had from all other sources. The presentations were informative and in-depth and there was ample time for Q&A. Hopefully Myong Leigh will be participating as he is one of a handful of people who have a detailed understanding of both SFUSD finances and CA school finances and budgeting. This is a topic that should not be so abstruse. But it is. Here is your chance to bone up on the myriad details.

College admissions report and confessional

2009-06-02T13:31:00.000-07:00

I had big plans to blog my way through my oldest child’s college admissions process, and co-blogger/technical guru KC Jones set up a blogspot, Taming the College Admissions Beast, for that to happen. Well, here’s why that fizzled during the most intense parts of the process:

1. I discovered that when your kid is a teen, you can’t pour out your soul about what’s going on with him the way you can when you have an incoming kindergartner. Au contraire.

2. So I moved away from that concept and started trying to aggregate the most useful information I could find for other parents about college admissions. But then it became clear that parents who are paying attention are inundated with an overwhelming barrage of information – far more than we can process – and the parents who aren’t paying attention aren’t going to read this blog either.

But with my son graduating from high school next week and the college search behind us, here are some key things I learned from the process.

We Class of 2009 families were told it would be extra-tough for our kids – this high school graduating class, and reportedly the ones immediately before and after it (2008 and 2010), are the largest ever, in U.S. history.

And we were told that our kids had to be not just superstars but veritable gods and goddesses to get into the most sought-after schools; that the competition would be crushing.

I’m happy to say it wasn’t that bad. For example, short of the Harvard-Stanford pantheon, UCLA is often presented as the holy grail of the 21st-century college search. Here’s the anecdotal information: Quite a few of my son’s friends got into UCLA without a sweat – all wonderful, amazing, talented kids, but within the range of normal; not necessarily jaw-droppingly perfect in every way. Others are going across the bay to now-prized UC Berkeley – also great kids, but still normal mortals.

What about Harvard (pictured) and Stanford? One of my son’s classmates is going to Stanford, and she is indeed an impressive, accomplished achiever. I know that a couple of his more-ambitious classmates applied to Harvard, though not with wild eagerness, and didn’t get in. The one kid we know this year who did is a talented musician from a very high-end Bay Area suburb – and who is going without enthusiasm, to please his parents.

Here’s a random and partial list of colleges that accepted kids this year in my son’s SFUSD world: Berklee College of Music, Cooper Union, Curtis Institute of Music, Juilliard, Manhattan School of Music, McGill, New York University, Oberlin, Pace University, the Peabody Institute at Johns Hopkins University, Stanford, UC Berkeley, UCLA, UC Santa Barbara, UC Santa Cruz, University of Indiana, University of Michigan, University of Southern California, George Washington University, University of Washington, plus many other UCs and CSUs.

And here’s my son’s story: He’ll go to Oberlin Conservatory (a venerable private liberal-arts college outside Cleveland) to study jazz trumpet. He was very specific about what he wanted during his college search – unusually focused, I would say – and applied to a limited number of colleges, with Oberlin the most ambitious. He was accepted to all of them, most being CSUs. As an applicant, he was a distinct package: a jazz trumpeter with a long music resume, high test scores and an indifferent grade point average (it slid as his list of music activities grew every year).

Obviously, a BFA in jazz trumpet is not the most marketable of degrees, but it’s unstoppable. (I keep meeting college journalism majors who seem utterly unaware that there is no paid future whatsoever in their field, unless they re-create the entire industry on their own; at least my son is in touch with reality.) Oberlin has both a stand-alone conservatory and a traditional college and does offer a dual-degree program, which my son is considering moving into, possibly to pursue his passions for history and/or politics.

Here are a couple of other lessons learned.

• By now I’ve seen many, many students who were accepted to fine colleges that they could not, in the end, afford financially. (We were lucky; pricey Oberlin is offering us sufficient financial aid.) Many settled for a second or third choice because that’s what they could afford. Since I’ve listened to so many parents of young children trying to assess schools based on what colleges their graduates ultimately attend, this is a really important point to understand – you’re largely looking at family income, not academic outcome. This is especially true of many students attending many CSUs, and even more so with San Francisco State, City College, and suburban Bay Area community colleges like Skyline, Laney and College of Marin. (And those schools are providing excellent educations, too.)

• I watched as some kids handled the whole process themselves, without parental involvement, compared to others in which the parents were on top of things the whole time. We were in the latter camp except for the fact that my son did the research, quite doggedly, and chose the schools to apply to. He insists that the outcome would have been the same if we’d left him to do it all himself. But my observation – strictly anecdotal – is that while there are indeed many students who work the entire process themselves, with great success (a demographic in which this is especially true is the children of Chinese immigrant parents), there are others who I think would have had a more shining outcome if there’d been some parental involvement and guidance. That’s not to say that those kids won’t be happy and successful at college – or that those who were steered to prestige, big-name schools by pushy parents will be better off.

I still think there’s a need for a particular kind of blog; actually, KC has been doing this part of the College Admissions Beast blog already. What busy applicants and their parents do need is ongoing reminders landing in their inbox of dates, deadlines and obligations throughout the process, plus opportunities such as local college fairs, SAT prep options and such. It needs to be steadily maintained and relentlessly localized. Another huge need is one that some benefactor should be providing for SFUSD – high-level college application counseling and guidance at all SFUSD high schools, as opposed to the uneven, catch-as-catch-can resources that are provided now.

Congratulations to the Class of 2009! You're the future leaders, peacemakers, artists, innovators who will bring us a better world. We're so proud of you.

Bike to School Day: Volunteers Needed

2009-05-19T11:39:00.000-07:00

From the SF Bike Coalition newsletter:

Next Thursday, May 28th, is Bike to School Day! For the first time ever, Schools throughout San Francisco will be encouraging students and staff to ride their bikes to school for Bike to School Day! If you are a parent or staff member (or you know someone who is), we are in need of volunteers to make sure this day is a smashing success! We'll need parents to lead Commuter Convoys, park bikes at schools, hand out goodie bags and help with Bike Rode-eo's and more! If you can help on May 28, email bike2schoolday@gmail.com and for more information see:
www.biketoschoolday.org!

JROTC Reader

2009-05-14T13:06:00.000-07:00

For those who just can't get enough of the JROTC issue, here are some links to related articles.

SF Weekly: JROTC Is Saved. Its Instructors Are Not.
Chron City Insider: JROTC program saved; instructors still get pink slips
Tim Redmond at the Bay Guardian writes: JROTC: Now, the lawyers
Mission Loc@l: JROTC Wins Battle with the District

One thing is clear, this issue is not resolved. Will the instructors be laid off? Will PE credits be restored? Will JROTC enrollment rebound? Will there be an alternate service program offered? Stay tuned because this will continue to roil the district.

Mark Sanchez gets a pass in the revolving door

2009-05-14T10:41:00.000-07:00

This is interesting: S.F. school board hires Sanchez as principal

We have occassionally been critical of Mark during his tenure on the BOE. But I'm happy to see him return to the district as an educator. Lets not forget that he had to give up his teaching job to take on the thankless task of serving on the BOE. I see little or no ethical problems with letting him return to the district without delay.

There can be no doubt that he has been devoted throughout his carreer to the cause of social justice and the need to address the achievement gap in this district. This should be a good opportunity for Mark to make a difference at Horace Mann and to help Superintendent Garcia advance his strategic plan.

Rachel: Board votes 4-3 to reinstate JROTC

2009-05-13T09:40:00.000-07:00

No better place to get the scoop on last night's BOE vote than from Rachel Norton: Board votes 4-3 to reinstate JROTC:

Shorthand: Resolution passed 4-3 with the following amendments:
give schools with enrollment of 50 students or fewer the option of dropping the program;
ask JROTC students and instructors to work to oppose Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.

Votes in favor: Mendoza, Norton, Wynns, Yee. Votes opposed: Kim, Fewer, Maufas.

Still to come: a battle over P.E. credit.

The issue that will never go away. The cast of characters on the BOE changes, but this issue outlasts just about all of them.

NCLB tutoring under the microscope

2009-04-28T17:59:00.000-07:00

Mission Loc@l reporter Allison Davis takes a close look at a rarely examined aspect of NCLB in No Faith in No Child Left Behind Tutoring:

Once again students in San Francisco’s public schools are sitting down this week to statewide tests. As in others years, many in low-performing schools have been tutored since January by one of more than a dozen companies that earn $1,442 per student.

Teachers and administrators in the Mission District schools, however, said the tutoring is unlikely to make a difference in test scores.

The reporter focuses on Mission district schools, but they are a good case study for a larger problem. I'd like to learn more about what the district is doing to better align this tutoring with the school's curriculum. Its not clear from the story if the inefficacy is built into the program or just a missed opportunity for effective coordination.

Public-school bashing is up; the dropout rate isn't

2009-04-27T21:46:00.001-07:00

A poster on the sfschools listserve commented on an article that said more students than ever are graduating from high school. He wanted to know how this jibed with recent reports that gave him the impression that the dropout rate is rising.

Since this tied in with issues I've followed, I responded to clarify, and then decided to post my response here too:

The classes of 2008 and 2009 are the largest high school graduating classes ever, in history, according to many sources. I've read this in numerous articles and guides on college enrollment. This information struck fear into the hearts of many parents of future college applicants in those graduating classes &— will SF State become as elite and selective as Harvard? (Actually, my Class-of-'09 son's classmates overall have done really well getting into colleges they're excited and happy about.)

It's a combination of a birthrate spike (more students, in hard numbers) and the fact that in the big picture, the percentage of students who graduate from high school has actually risen steadily over the years.

A hundred years ago, only elites graduated from high school. It was the norm for working-class kids to drop out and go to work, let alone poor kids. The high school graduation rate reached 50% only around World War II, according to Nicholas Lemann's book "The Big Test," about the development of the SAT and its intention of creating a meritocracy.

In my high school time and place, it was still common for working-class and poor kids to drop out to work or have babies, and nobody in power took any notice or gave a rat's ***. The notion that everyone should be encouraged to graduate is very new.

In a recent speech on education, President Obama bought into the "our public schools are horrible and getting worse" propaganda put out by the free-market privatizers, and Factcheck.org called him out on some (not all) of the erroneous statements. Here's what Factcheck.org said about the graduation rate:

The high school dropout rate hasn't "tripled in the past 30 years," as Obama claimed. According to the Department of Education, it has actually declined by a third.

(Also, my fellow "resistance" education bloggers are doing some interesting commentary about the study addressed in the San Francisco Examiner article, noting that it was conducted by an outfit called McKinsey that worked closely with Enron and helped create Enron's fabulous accounting practices. Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker: "The one Enron partner that has escaped largely unscathed is McKinsey, which is odd, given that it essentially created the blueprint for the Enron culture." But I digress.)

I'm not saying the graduation rate is high enough or that everything is roses, but the claim that it's dropping is false, and it's right-wing privatizaters' anti-public-education propaganda, so let's be clear about that.

(For the record, here are the other corrections Factcheck.org made in Obama's speech:)

Eighth-grade math scores haven't "fallen" to ninth place compared with other countries. U.S. scores have climbed to that ranking from as low as 28th place in 1995.
Obama also set a goal "of having the highest proportion of college graduates in the world" by 2020. But in terms of bachelor's degrees, we're nearly there. The U.S. is already second only to Norway in the percentage of adults age 25 to 64 with a four-year degree, and trails by just 1 percentage point.

Become a Burning Mom today!

2009-04-27T19:57:00.001-07:00

Commentator/journalist Sandra Tsing Loh — the keynote speaker at the April 25 Parents for Public Schools-San Francisco 10-year anniversary event — is the funniest Burning Mom ever to stand up for unsung urban public schools against the onslaught of pity, fear and genteel disdain aimed at them by the enlightened-parent set.

Loh, who lives in the shabby-without-the-chic San Fernando Valley suburb of Van Nuys, wound up a public school parent after a school application journey so insane it makes the SFUSD situation look like a game of Candyland. You can read her story in articles, blog posts and her 2008 book Mother on Fire: A True Motherf%#$ @ Story About Parenting!

The short version: Like every enlightened parent she knew in her Southland world, Loh assumed her child was headed for private school.

“In my Los Angeles,” she wrote in the Atlantic Monthly, “everyone agrees that public education is a bombed-out shell, nonnegotiable, impoverished, unaccountable, run in Spanish.”

But the enriched and creative private educational haven her friends were swooning over wouldn’t even let her in the door for a tour. Then disaster struck: She lost her spot on a local public radio show after accidentally blurting out the F-word on the air. Life was bleak – until the whiplash moment when she became a free-speech cause celebre for getting fired.

Suddenly the Shangri-La private school was offering Loh a spot – but for a price, and it wasn’t a price that Loh and her musician husband could fit into the household budget. Meanwhile, the low-status — but at least it’s private! — religious school they thought they could afford rejected their daughter. Eventually the tortuous road led Loh to the unglamorous but tidy public school in her neighborhood. What it lacked in cachet it made up in potential, and the family took the leap.

Here’s what they found (from the same Atlantic article):

“While aesthetically uninspiring on the outside, inside it was a plethora of books, computers, LeapFrog pads, and the like. Title I schools, such as ours (those with a substantial portion of low-income students), are eligible for hundreds of thousands of federal dollars that affluent schools are not. Our library was stocked, litter was picked up, graffiti erased."

And as described in Salon last August, Loh had “found her real cause: rescuing our urban public schools. Yes, yes, she can hear you yawning.

‘This public education thing is so huge, yet … it's so unsexy,’ she says. ‘I would go to parties and people would back away. 'Oh, there's Sandra. She was fired last year for obscenity. Now she's into public school. Good luck with that.' “

Undeterred, Loh set out last year to organize a Million Mom March on the state Capitol to protest that year’s round of brutal education budget cuts. It would be a massive children’s crusade that would bring our overbearing governor to his muscled knees.

Well, she wound up with a nice little rally. At the PPS event, she showed an amusing video that was both a call to further action and a self-deprecating confessional of her deflated expectations.

But Loh and her Burning Moms are just starting to blaze. This year’s California Children’s Rally is set for Tuesday, June 23, in Sacramento. Chatting with parents at the PPS event, she may have established a “hands across the Tehachapis/Central Valley/Altamont Pass” connection that will eventually expand the reach statewide. I’ve already cleared June 23, and PPSSF is likely to charter a bus.

For more info: Learn more about the California Children's Rally here. Become a Burning Mom (you don't have to be an actual mom, an actual female or actually aflame) here.

Billionaire titans take aim at urban school systems

2009-04-18T19:41:00.000-07:00

(This is a version of a commentary I posted on www.change.org recently.)

There’s a growing chorus protesting the takeover of public school districts by what blogger Jim Horn calls “vulture philanthropists” — the billionaire, non-educator business titans who are bent on imposing their vision for the education of low-income inner-city minorities. That often means obliterating existing schools and replacing them with charter schools run by managers from outside the community.

One of the most sincere, and surprising, of the voices of protest belongs to Diane Ravitch, longtime education commentator who is a fellow at the Hoover Institution (the heart and soul of anti-public-education “reform” advocacy) and former Assistant Secretary of Education in the George H.W. Bush administration. I previously posted about Ravitch here.

Writing from New York, where she has become a sharp critic of Michael Bloomberg’s mayoral takeover of the city’s school system, Ravitch declares: “It appears that the Big Money has placed its bets on dismantling public education.”

Today’s highest-profile venture philanthropists are Bill Gates, who needs no introduction; real estate development king Eli Broad; the Walton family of Wal-Mart fame; and San Francisco's own Don Fisher, founder of the Gap. “The Billionaire Boys Club,” Ravitch observes, “know what needs to be done, and they don't see the point of listening to such unenlightened types as parents and teachers.”

From the outside it would seem to make sense to just move in and shutter a struggling school and start anew with a different model. On the ground, it may be another story, as school communities are fragmented — some scattered among the new schools, with the most challenged and highest-risk students winding up at the most marginalized of the existing schools.

"Model programs tend to skim off those kids who are already better positioned (thanks to better home environments, greater natural gifts, savvier or better-educated parents, etc.)," writes Sara Mosle in Slate. "Regular public schools are left with a more distilled population of struggling students."

Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, this is falling most heavily on Oakland. My own city, San Francisco, has a fairly high-functioning urban public school system – largely because the city’s astronomical housing prices are pushing the lowest-income (and thus often most-challenged) families out of the city. San Francisco is also a mecca for Asian immigrants, who (overall, on average) tend to be high academic achievers, which strengthens our schools. So while the school district where I live is of little interest to those forces, our neighbors across the bay in Oakland bear the brunt. The Oakland-based Perimeter Primate blog has become a valuable source of information and research on the billionaires’ experiments with the beleaguered school district.

A new research paper, "The Politics of Venture Philanthropy in Charter School Policy and Advocacy," by University of California, Berkeley Associate Prof. Janelle Scott, examines the history and impact of such projects.

“[T]here is in fact a long history of wealthy, mostly White philanthropists funding and shaping the education of African-Americans and other communities of color in the United States – sometimes in ways that opened their access to education and often in ways that restricted it,” Scott writes. She describes schools and other projects created by the Julius Rosenwald Fund: “Although there is no question that these institutions provided opportunities for students that otherwise might not have existed, the schools were also originally organized around specific notions of what African-Americans’ social status should be, usually aligned with training students for industrial and service work.”

The backlash against the 21st-century version of venture philanthropy reveals itself in this account in the Michigan Citizen of “[t]he alliance to completely dismantle the Detroit Public School system, and in this video clip of a fiery New York City Councilman Charles Barron denouncing the push to impose charter schools throughout New York City.
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“At some point,” concludes Diane Ravitch, “the music and the upheaval will stop. But when it does, will there still be a public school system? Or will the schools all be run by hedge fund managers, dilettantes, and EMOs [Education Management Organizations]?

What's not to like about charter schools?

2009-04-18T11:33:00.000-07:00

At a community meeting at my kids’ high school last week, a parent asked the principal about the possibility of becoming a charter school. The principal’s answer was respectful and noncommittal.

I was sitting next to a friend who’s well aware of my skepticism about charter schools — not that she necessarily shares it — and whispered semi-jokingly that I’d have to transfer my daughter out if that happened. Another mom commented to me that she’s uninformed about what charter schools are and why they might be controversial, and in that setting, all I could say was, “It’s a long story.” Here's a summary of the long story.

As to finding out what charter schools are, that’s pretty easy, since they are being pushed by the nation’s most powerful and bountifully funded forces and get reams of glowing PR (at the expense of non-charter public schools). Much of the mainstream press (or what remains of it in this country) is also big on promoting charter schools — sometimes due to close connections with those same powerful forces and sometimes due to, in my opinion, naivete, insufficient research and excessive susceptibility to that glowing PR.

The Wikipedia entry on charter schools is undoubtedly groomed regularly by the many people paid by the well-funded charter forces, and there is no corresponding paid force taking the skeptical view.

From the skeptics’ view, Clay Burrell recently posted a thoughtful commentary on www.change.org.

As to why charter schools, which sound so fantastic in concept, would provoke any objection or controversy, I’m going to quote another source to sum things up. In my view, charter schools are something like Communism — they sound really good in theory, but human nature corrupts the concept and causes the good intentions to go awry.

The following excerpts are from the introduction to the March 2008 book Keeping the Promise? The debate over charter schools, a collection of essays published by Rethinking Schools in collaboration with the Center for Community Change. These are the points that raise concerns from my own philosophical/political perspective; someone who believes that the free market and privatization are the solution for our schools would not have the same reaction.

The introduction was written by education researcher/commentators Leigh Dingerson, Barbara Miner, Bob Peterson and Stephanie Walters.

‘The charter school movement has roots in a progressive agenda that, as educator Joe Nathan wrote in Rethinking Schools in 1996, viewed charters as “an important opportunity for educators to fulfill their dreams, to empower the powerless, and to help encourage a bureaucratic system to be more responsive and effective. …

Unfortunately, the charter concept also appealed to conservatives wedded to a free-market, privatization agenda. And it is they who, over the past decade, have taken advantage of the conservative domination of national politics to seize the upper hand in the charter school movement.

… Virtually all segments of the charter school movement have targeted urban areas. Some hope to counteract inequity, spur innovation and better meet the needs of marginalized students. Others, taking advantage of the frustration that inevitably follows when districts are allowed to deteriorate, seek fame and fortune. … [T]here are those who view charters as a way to get rid of public schools altogether.

The elixir of an individualized bailout from a struggling system has serious side effects, however. It can create a painful wedge in many communities, especially among African-Americans. It can weaken the political will for a collective solution to the problems in public education; and it can promote the deterioration of traditional schools. As highly motivated and engaged families pull their children from traditional public schools, urban districts have fewer resources — both financial and human — to address their many problems. The worse the schools get, the more appealing the escape to charters and private schools, all of which feeds into the conservative dream of replacing public education with a free-market system of everyone for themselves, the common good be damned.

[The text addresses the progressive intentions of charter schools.]

… At the same time, one cannot deny that the charter school concept, as a movement, has been hijacked by individuals, groups, and corporations who are guided by free-market principles, often with a hostility to unions, and who do not necessarily embrace core values of equity, access, public purpose, and public ownership.

This summary brings up some other issues:

Charter schools “too often … prefer, in practice if not in rhetoric, to educate “the deserving poor.” There is far less inclination to serve students whose parents are absent or uninvolved, or who have severe physical or emotional educational needs, or who have run afoul of the juvenile justice system, or who don’t speak English as their first language. Perhaps the most glaring example involves students with special education needs. Such students are increasingly overrepresented in traditional public schools.”

… Overall, studies have shown that charter schools perform either worse or just as well as comparable public schools.

… Even if it is shown that certain bureaucratic rules, union requirements, or state and federal mandates stifle innovation and suffocate higher achievement, shouldn’t they be thrown out or modified for all schools, not just charters?

[In reference to the fact that some charter schools, famously including the highly praised KIPP chain, require teachers to work crushingly long hours and, unsurprisingly, experience high teacher turnover:]

“Reforms are bound to fail if they rely on the voluntarism of idealistic, overworked teachers who burn out and leave the school once they decide to have a family or want any semblance of a meaningful personal life.”

It’s often noted that the late teachers’ union leader Al Shanker was one of the early proponents of charter schools. Education activist/blogger Mike Klonsky, reviewing “Tough Liberal,” Richard Kahlenberg's biography of Al Shanker, described Shanker’s vision:

In a speech to the National Press Club in 1988, he proposed the idea of teacher-led "charter schools" where rules could be bent if the great majority of teachers in a small school approved. He called on districts to "create joint school board-union panels that would review preliminary proposals and help find seed money for the teachers to develop final proposals."

Klonsky quotes from the book:

Shanker "watched with alarm as the concept he put forward began to move away from a public-school reform effort to look more like a private-school voucher plan..Shanker came to believe that the charter school movement was largely hijacked by conservatives who made many charter schools vulnerable to the same groups that made voucher schools so dangerous: for-profit corporations, racial separatists, the religious right, and anti-union activists...Shanker watched with dismay as 'those who had tremendous contempt for public education' jumped on to the charter school bandwagon."

Burrito Justice surveys the taco truck ban

2009-04-07T23:12:00.000-07:00

We interrupt this Spring Break with an update on the taco truck wars...

The recent hearing about the El Tonayese taco truck's unfortunate encounter with the SFUSD's Welness Policy garnerd this report on the Mission Loc@l blog: It’s a Draw: The Board of Appeals Opts for a Compromise. The bottom line for now is that the city punted. They'll hold their breath until June and hope the problem resolves itself. Who can blame them.

Meanwhile, blogger Burrito Justice contributes this interesting perspective on the taco truck controversy:

Behold, a map of the Mission. But what could the red circles represent? Outbreak of a horrible disease? Soviet Air Force bomber targets? Girafa sightings?

Alas, no. The red circles show a 1500′ radius around public junior high and high schools — the land where food trucks are forbidden.

I'm with the Burrito guy. And I helped him get his map right, because I think it makes a valid point well. The ordinance needs to be amended, and some compromise needs to be met that allows this business to carry on in its current location, without causing any harm to any students.

The myth of the powerful teachers' unions

2009-03-27T12:20:00.000-07:00

David Macaray, posting on CounterPunch, points out that non-unionized teachers get fired less frequently than unionized teachers do.

And famously un-unionized Mississippi has the lowest academic achievement of any state in the union. The facts don't seem to deter public school bashers -- including liberals -- from casting teachers as the forces of evil.

An excerpt from Macaray's commentary:

On Friday, March 13, comedian and uber-liberal Bill Maher joined the attack on his HBO show. In one of his signature tirades, Maher, a California resident, railed against the “powerful” California teachers’ union, accusing it of contributing to the crisis in public education by not allowing the school district to remove incompetent teachers.

Maher came armed with statistics. He noted with dismay that the U.S. ranked 35th in the world in math, 29th in science, and that barely 50% of California’s public school pupils manage to graduate from high school. He blamed the teachers for this.

Although every teacher in the LAUSD (Los Angeles Unified School District), has a college degree and a teaching credential and managed to survive the scrutiny of a lengthy probationary period, Maher piously maintained that these teachers were unqualified to run a classroom.

Granted, Maher is a professional comic trolling for laughs, and not a “social scientist” dispensing wisdom, so we shouldn’t be looking to this man for enlightenment. ...

Maher made a huge deal of the fact that, because of the union’s protective shield, less than 1% of California’s tenured/post-probationary teachers get fired. Although this ratio clearly outraged him (he appeared visibly upset by it), had he taken five minutes to research the subject, he’d have realized that this figure represents the national average—with or without unions.

In Georgia, where 92.5% of the teachers are non-union, only 0.5% of tenured/post-probationary teachers get fired. In South Carolina, where 100% of the teachers are non-union, it’s 0.32%. And in North Carolina, where 97.7% are non-union, a miniscule .03% of tenured/post-probationary teachers get fired—the exact same percentage as California.

An even more startling comparison: In California, with its “powerful” teachers’ union, school administrators fire, on average, 6.91% of its probationary teachers. In non-union North Carolina, that figure is only 1.38%. California is actually tougher on prospective candidates.

So, despite Maher’s display of civic pride and self-righteous indignation (“We need to bust this union,” he declared), he was utterly mistaken. The statistics not only don’t support his argument, they contradict it.

Read the rest of Macaray's commentary.

Rachel's Round 1 Scoop

2009-03-20T15:55:00.000-07:00

Everything that could possibly be said about Round 1 has already been said, right? No, Rachel gives us an invaluable look at the big picture:

Virtually every seat in the district is full [...], this year could be the “game changer” for many schools that have been spurned by families in previous years.

A defense of U.S. schools from the privatization world

2009-03-20T09:35:00.000-07:00

President Obama was wrong to paint such a dismal picture of U.S. schools, a commentator declares on Forbes.com.

And the headline news is that the author of “Educating Obama: American Schools Are — in Many Ways — the Best in the World,” Matthew Kaminski, is a member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board.

The WSJ editorial board is the international high temple of the free-market right, and its op-ed pages have been Ground Zero for an incredible amount of anti-public education commentary, much of it based on flat-out misinformation (or, if you prefer the blunt term, also known as “lies”).

A falsehood-filled Wall Street Journal editorial attacking SFUSD on behalf of now-failing for-profit Edison Schools in early 2001 started me on my crusade to learn about the murky and often creepy world of the charter/voucher/privatization crowd.

Kaminski, who emigrated from Poland as a child and experienced both Polish and U.S. schools, sticks to the free-market crowd’s party line in bashing teachers’ unions – but other than that he is an unabashed cheerleader for U.S. public education. He didn’t debunk the numerous false and misleading pieces of information Obama used in his speech, but went to the heart of it to just plain praise our school system.

Wow.

Mrs. McKay's [third-grade class in Kent, Ohio] brought another sort of revelation. Teachers could be nice and encouraging; at my school in Warsaw, the clearest memory is of an old codger rapping my ears. Here, I got silver stars for doing well; there, we plotted our escapes. American school, in short, was fun. Get a Japanese crammer to make that admission.

… From primary school through America's unparalleled universities, our schools teach children to think critically better than almost any other. It lets them experiment and make their own mistakes. It doesn't lock anyone into a profession or academic track at 18, or earlier, as in Europe or Asia.

Something, after all, must account for the flexible and quick American mind that succeeds remarkably well in the world beyond, even if our reading scores lag Finland so badly. Without sounding overly corny, I think it goes back to the idea that school here is fun by comparison and admittedly often in retrospect. In one field, the nation runs a surplus: People who'd rather go to school here than somewhere else.

… the president should tone down the talk of American educational demise.

When responses to Obama’s misinformation-filled speech to the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce started popping up on blogs, I despaired of any idea that the President would ever get wind of the fact that he’d been so wrong. That’s given that I think he’s getting corrupt and distorted advising in a field that’s not his area of expertise — rather than on his own deliberately and maliciously spreading misinformation to attack and damage public education, as I believe many in the “school reform” crowd do.

But the backlash has been so increasingly visible and widespread that he has to recognize it. It would so fill us with joy if the President would be ethical enough to publicly acknowledge the errors and correct his misstatements.

No more Mr. Nice Guy for the state Board of Ed

2009-03-19T22:16:00.000-07:00

Gov. Schwarzenegger has outdone himself with his new pick for state Board of Education: Jorge Lopez, head of the prison-like but high-performing Oakland Charter Academy.

Lopez is a foul-mouthed tough guy whose fiercest detractors still acknowledge that he fixed a broken school. The East Bay Express profiled Lopez in December 2006, describing how he “took over the school three summers ago, ruthlessly eliminating its entire staff and remaking the place in his own image …”

You have to wonder how Lopez will get along with his colleagues on the state Board of Ed, since he told the East Bay Express in a December 2006 article, "One thing I know about boards is they're dumber than s***."

Lopez is a protégé of Ben Chavis, the flamboyantly antisocial former principal of Oakland’s similarly scary and similarly high-performing American Indian Public Charter School who left after (though not necessarily because of) reports about his bizarre behavior kept popping up. Chavis, as described in a June 2007 Oakland Tribune article , “refers to black, Latino and American Indian students as ‘darkies’ … will swear at anyone who doesn't follow his rules, and … scoffs at the idea of defending his decisions to an unhappy parent.” He notoriously horrified a group of visitors from Mills College with his behavior, including launching a torrent of abuse at a graduate student who arrived late for the visit.

Lopez hasn’t attracted quite that much attention, but he's cut from similar cloth. When I blogged about Lopez and the East Bay Express article in December 2006, titling my post “Oakland Charter Not for the Faint of Heart,” I quoted a Craiglist ad the school was running for a resource specialist, which emphasized:

“Multi-cultural specialists, self-esteem experts, liberal progressives or their 'klan' relatives need not apply.”

Lopez took over the school— Oakland’s first charter, which had originally been founded to celebrate bilingualism and Latino heritage and was achieving embarrassing test scores — and unceremoniously dumped the multiculturalism in favor of a hard-nosed, relentless focus on tests. And even his detractors can't deny that the test scores soared.

From the Express article:

Lopez believed he could produce high test scores and ambitious, college-bound students by emphasizing mandatory attendance with more classroom hours; zero tolerance for bad behavior; a homework-laden curriculum stripped of cultural, linguistic, or artistic coursework; and inspirational or menacing speeches as necessary. "I run this school with a hard hand," he explained recently. "I don't take a lot of s*** from parents. I don't take s*** from kids. I don't take s*** from teachers.”

And no wussy whining about kids in need for Lopez, either.

Even if the school had a cafeteria, Lopez says, he would not offer the free or reduced-price lunches for which 87 percent of his students qualify based on family income. "There's a misperception that there isn't enough food," he says. "That's bulls***. The biggest problem is obesity."

The article described Lopez’ first weeks at the school, when he was supposed to be working with his departing predecessor, Francisco Gutierrez, during a transition period.

Once aboard, Lopez quickly set about making Gutierrez's life miserable, insulting and demeaning him repeatedly and making a mockery of his staff meetings. Within a couple of weeks, Gutierrez was gone, vowing, he says, to "never, ever, ever again" agree to such a power-sharing arrangement. Next to go was the school's secretary, whom Lopez caught sympathizing with parents upset over the last-minute addition of a mandatory summer school for incoming sixth graders.

Then, at the school board meeting in late June, Lopez employed a tactic he had learned from a book recommended by Chavis. The book: Sun Tzu's The Art of War, a copy of which Lopez still keeps in his office. The tactic: to obscure his primary objectives.

At the meeting, Lopez cited a looming fiscal crisis due to sloppy bookkeeping, and called for a 15 percent reduction in the school's budget. To cut costs, he proposed reducing teaching staff by switching to "self-contained" classrooms, where students stay in the same room with one teacher throughout the day. The board went along, unwittingly paving the way for Lopez to end the school's long tradition of teaching Spanish. In addition, since only one teacher had the necessary credentials to teach a self-contained class, Lopez was able to force the others out. Within weeks, the new principal had curtailed parent involvement and gotten rid of volunteering and planning committees, which were school fixtures. It was no less than a coup d'état. "It became no longer a community-oriented school," says Estella Navarro, an OCA cofounder, parent, and board member bitterly opposed to Lopez' changes. "It became his school."

Lopez acknowledged to the Express that he doesn’t subject his own child to a drill-sergeant atmosphere. His son was in kindergarten at the private Rising Star Montessori School in Alameda.

According to the Rising Star literature, the school promotes "academic excellence in a warm, nurturing environment that celebrates diversity." "They're soft whiteys," Lopez acknowledged. ... "But he doesn't need the same s*** I needed.”

It remains to be seen whether Lopez’ concentration-camp approach is the secret to success for low-income Latino students in the long run – and whether he’ll play well with the others on a “dumber than s***” board.

Fruitify yourself!

2009-03-18T22:09:00.000-07:00

Filed under, it-takes-a-village:

Westside HS on a diet?

2009-03-16T22:35:00.000-07:00

As I've already noted in my initial post about Round 1, the demand for high schools jumped dramatically. And in particular the ratio of applications to open seats at Lincoln and Washington went way, way up. Sources tell me that demand is not the only explanation. Both of these schools (and Lowell too) have been terribly over-enrolled for years now. The overcrowding on these campuses has stymied efforts to reduce or eliminate bungalows and cope with other facilities issues. And who knows, are they skirting with fire code issues? Now it seems like the district is putting its foot down and trying to address the problem by limiting enrollment.

So what do you think? Is it about time that SFUSD act to alleviate overcrowding at Washington and Lincoln? Or are they igniting new fires of controversy by doing this in a year where demand is so dramatically increased? Are there other high schools out there, like Balboa in recent years, that stand to benefit from an influx of students?

Round 1: glass half empty? or half full?>

2009-03-16T22:13:00.000-07:00

So Round 1 results are known, The district has shared some stats with us. I took a look at the numbers can came away with the impression that this year was worse than last year and the lottery system seems on the brink of collapse.

Caroline kept her ear to the ground, reading through the hundreds of comments over on SF K Files, and heard much less gnashing of teeth, and concludes that this year was an improvement over last year, possibly with the aid of web communities like SF K files.

So what is it? Are people happier with the results this year? More open minded
about their assignments? Or is the lottery in crisis? Or both?