Budget contrast

So true, and so tragic:

California values prisoners over students

During the budget debate, it became clear to me that something unthinkable has happened in California: Our fiscal meltdown has so distorted our legislative priorities that we are now a state that places a higher priority on prison than on higher education.

Obama to the NAACP - No excuses

Part three of a four segment compilation of Obama's excellent speech to the NAACP. We pick it up where he addresses education. Check it out.



Links to parts 1, 2, 4

"We Ain't Got the Do Re Mi"

Brilliant!

SFUSD Budget Workshop, June 17

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.

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

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!

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

(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]?

The myth of the powerful teachers' unions

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.

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

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

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.

Facing the facts

Out of the blue, here's an op-ed piece from St. Paul that offers some words of wisdom about urban superintendents, and the pitfalls of searching for silver-bullet fixes and charismatic leaders that rings pretty true here.

Ted Kolderie: Face the fact -- we don't know how to get all students to learn:

...Why else do you think superintendents move all the time? They know the promises they've made can't be realized. So they know not to stay in one place too long. They're like machine-gunners in combat, who know they have to move every 15 minutes so the mortars won't get them.

Our former superintendent gets a special mention as an example of one of these promise=and-move-on machine gunners.

But the point that I find more interesting comes when he describes what characteristics of an administrator that might work out better:

Find someone who is willing to free up the schools and their teachers — those closest to the students — so they can be continually adjusting the program of learning to meet the needs of the particular students, collectively and individually. Give them the chance to create new schools — different schools.

Carlos Garcia's "Beyond the Talk" strategic plan is starting to catch a little flack in some quarters. It offers many idealistic promises and plenty of nebulous, high-minded prose that some might say has a whiff of BS to it. I find some of the prose off-putting. Yet the crux of his vision sounds an awful lot like what this columnist describes. It challenges teachers and school sites to take stock of their specific challenges, their particular student needs, and gives them the challenge to craft their own approaches and innovations. Instead of top-down prescriptive solutions it opens the door for a site-driven diversity of approaches.

Will Garcia's approach bear fruit? Or will he join the ranks of itinerant urban superintendents? Stay tuned.

Bill Gates: Are teachers a plague?

...Bill Gates provided a copy of Work Hard. Be Nice to all attendees at his recent TED talk, which focused on four of the world’s most pressing problems: malaria, AIDS, pneumonia, and teachers.

A comment from education commentator/professor/blogger Jim Horn's review of Work Hard. Be Nice: How Two Inspired Teachers Created the Most Promising Schools in America, Jay Mathews' new book on KIPP schools.

Gates provoked more comment at the TED (Technology/Education/Design) conference last week by releasing a swarm of mosquitos during his talk.

Public versus private? small classes versus better teaching?

Check out this interesting research result:

Public Schools Outperform Private Schools in Math Instruction

In another “Freakonomics”-style study that turns conventional wisdom about public- versus private-school education on its head, a team of University of Illinois education professors has found that public-school students outperform their private-school classmates on standardized math tests, thanks to two key factors: certified math teachers, and a modern, reform-oriented math curriculum.

Further into the article, they discuss the impact of class size school size:

Of the five factors, school size and parental involvement “didn’t seem to matter all that much,” Lubienski said, citing a weak correlation between the two factors as “mixed or marginally significant predictors” of student achievement.

Why is this research being reported here? Serendipity, I suppose.

Today I noticed an interesting post on SF K Files citing a recent Times article about class size: Does class size matter? In the comments I weighed in that the real question is not if class size matters, but is it really as important as other factors. Then, thanks to my ever growing pile of RSS feeds, I noticed an article on the Mandarin Immersion Parents Council blog citing this research. Which just happens to bolster my point. Correction: the article discusses school size and makes only passing mention of class size in a way that contradicts my position. Oops. Thanks for the watchful eyes here! That does not discount other research that questions the relative value of reduced class size.

This academic debate could become very political here very soon. For now, Califonia policy is to subsidize reduced class size in the K-3 grades, and most districts including SFUSD take advantage of the subsidies. It is a very popular program among parents. But with the budget crunch upon us, will these subsidies survive? Should they? Or should we pay more attention to other things like teacher development and retention?

Like I say, this topic could become a very hot political debate in the near future.

Education stimulus spending

Following up yesterday's post with another stimulus post. This one zeroes in on the education spending, and it is based on the bill itself rather than a bunch of mayors' wishlists. The data comes from Pro Publica's The Stimulus Plan: A Detailed List of Spending. Here we isolate the education spending line items and sort them by their total funding amount.

Education	$48,420,000,000
Pell grants for higher education	$15,840,000,000
Special education funding under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act	$12,200,000,000
Education for the disadvantaged - elementary and secondary education	$10,000,000,000
Education for the disadvantaged - school improvement grants	$3,000,000,000
Dislocated worker job training	$1,250,000,000
State grants for youth job training and summer employment opportunities	$1,200,000,000
Early Head Start program expansion	$1,100,000,000
Head Start programs	$1,000,000,000
School improvement programs	$650,000,000
State grants for adult job training	$500,000,000
Job training in the renewable energy field	$500,000,000
Job training in emerging industries	$250,000,000
Institute of Education data systems	$245,000,000
Innovation and improvement of elementary and secondary schools	$200,000,000
Dislocated worker assistance national reserve	$200,000,000
Education impact aid	$100,000,000
School improvement grants awarded based on the number of homeless students identified in a state	$70,000,000
Student aid administrative costs	$60,000,000
YouthBuild program for high school dropouts who re-enroll in other schools	$50,000,000
Institute of Education state data coordinators	$5,000,000

That's a lotta money.

And as one who does not favor an expanded federal role in education, I'm actually heartened to see that much of the spending is targetted at preschool, higher education, and job training programs. Arne will have a few billion to toss around towards reform efforts, but most of the money will not expand the federal role in public K-12 education as much as might be feared.

It is also nice to see the feds put a lot more money in the Special Education pot, since they mandated the programs and have previously failed to fund them. Its about time.

Arne Duncan quotes

Here are some excerpts from a recent US News & World Report article that give an interesting taste of Arne Duncan.

What Arne Duncan Thinks of No Child Left Behind

"I think we are lying to children and families when we tell children that they are meeting standards and, in fact, they are woefully unprepared to be successful in high school and have almost no chance of going to a good university and being successful."

On a federal stimulus for schools:
Duncan says a large chunk of the $140 billion destined for education will help states maintain and create jobs. "My concern is that hundreds of thousands of good teachers, not just bad teachers, are going to go, and that would be devastating," he says. "It is to no one's advantage if class size skyrockets or librarians get eliminated or school counselors disappear."

On fixing No Child Left Behind:
[...]Duncan also wants states to adopt academic standards that are more rigorous and aligned with those of other leading nations. "The idea of 50 states doing their own thing doesn't make sense," Duncan says, referring to the current patchwork of standards and tests. "I worry about the pressure because of NCLB to dummy those standards down."

Duncan says he is concerned about overtesting but he thinks states could solve the problem by developing better tests. He also wants to help them develop better data management systems that help teachers track individual student progress. "If you have great assessments and real-time data for teachers and parents that say these are [the student's] strengths and weaknesses, that's a real healthy thing," he says.

Sounds the sensible words of a pretty pragmatic guy to me.

Throwing schools out the window

Nicholas Kristof expresses some righteous indignation at the news that education funding may be cut from the stimulus package in:

Throwing schools out the window:

Come on, senators, education is the best way to fight poverty, the best way to break the cycle of the underclass, the best way to ensure a broader distribution of opportunity in America, the best way to preserve our country’s economic competitiveness. And it’s just as good for stimulus purposes as repaving a road — and you still want to throw those school children out the window?

And its not just education spending that's on the block, but NSF funding too. Screwing science and education. Sounds like a winner for the Republicans, eh? (Didn't we just through these idiots out?)

Two Battles joined in the School Food Wars

The Chron gives us two notable op-ed pieces about school lunch programs that take on different fronts in the battle for student health. First up we hear from state Superintended Jack O'Connell about increased demand and dwindling state money for subsidized school lunches:

$19.5 million needed for school lunch program

Even in our nation's darkest hours, we have worked to make sure every child has enough to eat. That's why during the Great Depression visionaries instituted the school meal program that has helped to feed our neediest children, generation after generation.

But today, as more and more hungry children turn to the school lunch program for their only meal of the day, California's program is in danger of collapse. We must act quickly.

Where O'Connell is on the front line of the battle, fighting for money now, Kathleen Rodgers, president of Earth Day Network, writes a call to arms for the coming battle to reform the school lunch program:

Better nutrition for better learning

Next year, the Child Nutrition and WIC Reauthorization Act of 2004, which includes school lunches, will expire and the renewal battle will begin. We must dramatically improve the federal nutrition requirements that guide this program, weaken the ties between the school lunch program and the commodities markets, revolutionize the quality of food in our schools, label the salt, fat and sugar content of each meal served, and educate school officials, regulators and the American public about the program and its potentially disastrous implications for our children's health.

Significant progress can and must be made in overhauling school lunches. It will take millions of voices to bring about this change. The cost to the next generation is too high for this battle to be lost.

SFUSD has done groundbreaking work to improve school nutrition in spite of the obstacles built into the school lunch subsidies. But there is no doubt that real improvements are desperately needed when this program is reauthorized.

An easy way to protest school funding cuts

The California state PTA has created a website to enable easy advocacy and outreach to protect education funding:

PTA's Economic Recovery Plan: Invest in Children

Five Minutes of Arne Duncan

Here'san interesting first taste of Arne Duncan, via Change.gov's social networking meets policy mashup Citizebn's Briefing Book:

The mix of questions is pretty interesting, and not what I would have expected. The questions rising to the top reflect a definite geek bent. As Steve Johnson observes on Boing Boing,

Right now, the top three most popular proposals are: 1) Ending Marijuana Prohibition, 2) Bullet Trains and Light Rail, and 3) An End To Government Sponsored School Abstinence Programs. In other words, what the people want are stoned kids having sex on bullet trains. Sounds about right to me!

In Arne's case he provides crisp answers to netizens who want to become teachers without going to school for it, and want a bail out for their student loans. Sounds about right to me too.

School Beat rings in the new year

Once again, Lisa Schiff gives an excellent overview of what lies ahead for SFUSD in School Beat: What to Watch Out For in 2009:

2009 will keep public education supporters on their toes with lots of new challenges and opportunities to keep track of, plus a few ongoing spots of trouble just to keep things familiar.

A new BOE, a need for follow through on Garcia's initiatives, enrollment overhaul, NCLB futures, and of course massive money troubles. Never a dull moment.

SFUSD could certainly benefit from this Obama intiative

This excerpt from Obama's weekly address has SFUSD's name written all over it:

Third, my economic recovery plan will launch the most sweeping effort to modernize and upgrade school buildings that this country has ever seen. We will repair broken schools, make them energy-efficient, and put new computers in our classrooms. Because to help our children compete in a 21st century economy, we need to send them to 21st century schools.

We have significant facilities needs. We have an up to date plans for addressing many of them. Many are already in process using bond funds, but many more have been deferred for lack of funds. How quickly could these turn into job-generating construction sites?

Let's get to work.

Lunch money blues

Not only are food costs going up, but more kids are qualifying for Free and Reduced Lunch just when the state funds for it are drying up.

$700B for the likes of AIG, but hungry kids get none of that...

More funds urged for California's school meal program:

The poor economy is hitting the bellies of 3.1 million California school children.

State Superintendent of Public Schools Jack O'Connell warned Tuesday that, because of increased demand, state funding for the Free and Reduced-Price Meal program could run dry before the end of the school year. He urged lawmakers to increase state funding for the hot meal service by $31 million.

Schools statewide served 28 million more meals in 2007-08 than the year before, a record 770.6 million, and a 4.5 percent increase.

Nearly 51 percent of California's public school children are enrolled in the free or reduced-price program – some 3.1 million students.

The program, which provides breakfast, lunch and afternoon snacks to low-income children, is primarily funded with federal dollars; however, the state kicks in a significant portion as well.

The Integration Report features SFUSD

The Integration Report is a blog/publication produced by the Initiative on School Integration, under the auspices of The Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles at UCLA. This month they shine a spotlight on SFUSD's struggle with school diversity. The article gives a useful account of the history of desegregation efforts in the district.

Here's an extended quote from the conculsion of the report: The Integration Report, issue 13:

SFUSD appears to be approaching a crossroads in the history of its school desegregation efforts. A district decision to prioritize neighborhood schools, in the face of strong evidence of resegregation and widening achievement gaps presented in numerous monitoring team reports, would destabilize its long-standing commitment to integration and academic achievement. On the other hand, adding race or geography into the assignment process may help to combat the rise of segregated schools in SFUSD.

Lessons Learned

The approaching discussions are critically important for the district, but also have broader implications for school districts in other parts of the country. SFUSD pioneered a consent decree that emphasized twin goals of desegregation and academic achievement. Evidence from years of monitoring team reports suggests a strong link between the two, underscoring the need for continued dedication to healthy integrated schools in the system. Compared to the worsening achievement gaps in resegregating schools, learning environments with stable, integrated student bodies were most likely to report test scores demonstrating a closing of those same gaps. Promises of targeted assistance and more resources for low-performing SFUSD schools will not alter the documented patterns of lowered academic achievement for black and Latino students in resegregated schools. As districts continue to make important policy decisions in the aftermath of the Seattle/Louisville ruling, SFUSD’s experience provides insight into the longer-term consequences of removing race as a factor in the student assignment process.

Education budget heralds hard times ahead

The still unsigned state budget appears to be a disaster for school districts around the state. Not only will districts get less than they were expecting this year, but they will face uncertainty and revenue shortfalls as far as the eye can see. The difficult and painful school budgeting process we saw all around the state this year figures to be much worse next year.

The 2008 BOE candidates should be pressed for details on how they plan to address this disaster.

Education leaders blast proposed state budget plan - San Jose Mercury News:

Education leaders this week echoed each other in criticizing the plan, saying it doesn't do enough to help local school districts pay for the rising costs of just about everything. State Superintendent of Instruction Jack O'Connell called the plan a 'gimmick,' while California Teachers Association President David Sanchez and California PTA President Pam Brady each urged Schwarzenegger to use his veto power to leverage a more education-friendly budget.

'The proposed budget includes a reduction of the cost-of-living adjustment that will further tighten the vise on local school budgets as districts across the state face increased costs for supplies, food, transportation and employee health care costs,' O'Connell said in a statement. 'These reductions are a disservice to California's 6 million school children and the thousands of educators across the state.'

Wasn't the whole point of the Republican coup against Davis supposed to be about solving the structural deficits in the state budget? Have they done anything constructive on that front at all? Seems to me they have used their minority perch in the legislature to obstruct any and all possible solutions while Schwarzenegger twiddles his thumbs and tries to stay above the messy fray. Truly gutless and disgusting.

School boards and gut-wrenching choices

At a candidates’ forum a couple of weeks ago, a candidate for San Francisco school board declared that board members need to be able to make the tough decisions.

There’s nothing unusual about that remark, and it doesn't routinely pique much interest. But I can imagine a current board member's inward reaction: “Dude, you have no idea….”

Think about it. An effective school board member needs the grit for some gut-wrenching decisions, most of which are guaranteed to make a lot of people really, really angry. Some decisions hurt people. This is no job for someone who wants to be universally liked and wants to please everyone. And a conscientious school board member can't base a decision on which choice gets you yelled at the least, either.

I thought about some of the tough decisions I’ve seen over the years. Here are just a few random examples:

Balancing the budget and thus avoiding bankruptcy and receivership for the district (as has happened to a number of nearby districts)	vs:	meaningful raises for teachers (and sometimes any raises for teachers) avoiding closing child development centers a seventh period for all the middle schools and many, many other essentials and/or popular programs
Raises for hardworking cafeteria workers	vs.	higher-quality food for the children
Closing a school when enrollment drops	vs.	avoiding outrage, anguish and disrupted lives by avoiding closing schools, even though it costs the district extra money to run unneeded schools
When a school must be closed, choosing a low-performing, underenrolled school to close	vs.	trying to spread the pain by not closing schools only in low-income neighborhoods — and thus closing a high-performing, popular school instead. (In general, low-performing and underenrolled schools are mostly clustered in low-income neighborhoods.)
Directing extra resources to schools that serve many low-income, disadvantaged, high-need students	vs.	appeasing middle-class parents who complain that their kids are being “punished for success” when they get fewer resources.
Eliminating the JROTC program based on principle (or ideology, depending on how you want to make this sound)	vs.	Accommodating the students, parents and school communities who are calling for keeping JROTC.
Costing the district $1 million by cutting JROTC immediately, as a matter of principle/ideology	vs.	compromising your principles/ideology to let the JROTC program run till the end of the school year so that $1 million is not wasted. (See this Chronicle story for explanation)
Supporting job security for teachers	vs.	allowing problem teachers to stay in classrooms
Accommodating families who live near popular schools by supporting neighborhood school assignment	vs.	accommodating those who call for districtwide choice
Adequate funding for special education	vs.	more for the general fund
Spending millions on buses for kids in low-income neighborhoods so they have access to schools districtwide	vs.	saving those millions by eliminating the busing even though that means school options for families in low-income neighborhoods will be limited to nearby schools, which are likely to be more troubled
Providing arts and other enrichments to all students in all schools	vs.	redirecting the resources into remedial reading and math for low-achieving students in underperforming schools.

This list could go on and on and on. It makes you wonder how anyone remains on the school board without making a lot of enemies (or rather makes you realize why people who are on the school board do make a lot of enemies).

I hope the candidates have thought this through and know what they’re in for.

Barack Obama: Education speech

Hat tip to EdWize for posting a link to this major O'Bama speesh on his education policy give on September 9th in Dayton OH:
I looked for a McCain video to contrast with this one. The only relevant hit I got was nearly a year old. So instead, here is a link to his education policy page. The abbreviated version: vouchers and teacher union bashing, without every mentioning those words.

Now is time to fight for better school food

Dana Woldow teams up with Berkeley's Ann Cooper to continue their battle for better school food for our kids in this Chronicle opinion piece

Now is time to fight for better school food

This has been a summer of headlines about soaring prices for food and fuel. With students returning to school, those cost increases threaten to force school cafeterias to rely more on cheap processed food and cut back on pricier fresh food. With obesity, diabetes and heart disease on the increase among children, "fast, cheap and easy" is the last thing we want our kids to be.

[...]It's great that Berkeley and San Francisco have helped subsidize better cafeteria food, but all over the country, cash-strapped schools struggle with having to take money away from students' academic needs to help meet their nutritional needs. School meal programs are overseen by the USDA and funded by Congress, and that is where the money should come from to pay for them - from Congress, not from our classrooms.

The article is a call to arms to mobilize everyone—meaning you—to get involved, contact your Congressional reps and help in the fight to reform the Child Nutrition Act that governs the federal subsidies that every district relies upon. You can make your voice heard by the USDA regulators here, and read more about the program here (PDF).

Update: For more information on the issue, visit the PASA information page or jump directly to this page with sample letters that you can use for inspiration.

Strategic planning

As a new school year begin, its a good time to take stock of the district's "2008 - 2012 Strategic Plan" which was released back in June. The report slipped below my radar back in June, and was mostly noted as Tony Smith's first major act as the "deputy superintendent for instruction, innovation and social justice." Now that I've had a chance to review it, there is some substance burried in 60 pages of often grandiose puffery. But you wouldn't know it from the opening pages:

BEYOND THE TALK: TAKING ACTION
to EDUCATE EVERY CHILD NOW

SFUSD MISSION

The mission of the San Francisco Unified School District is to provide each student with an equal opportunity to succeed by promoting intellectual growth, creativity, self-discipline, cultural and linguistic sensitivity, democratic responsibility, economic competence, and physical and mental health so that each student can achieve his or her maximum potential.

SFUSD GOALS

• Access and Equity Make social justice a reality.
• Student Achievement Engage high achieving and joyful learners.
• Accountability Keep our promises to students and families.

OK, so they have some wonderfully lofty goals, that might even include educating kids. I'm feeling a bit queazy by now from the assault of touchy-feely platitudes, but the document starts to get interesting in the next few pages:

For seven consecutive years San Francisco public schools have delivered a greater percentage of students to academic proficiency levels than any other large urban district in California. At the same time, the district’s achievement gap, the discrepancy between the academic proficiency of students by race, ethnicity, class and language, has continued to widen. For far too long demographics, specifically the socio-economic, linguistic and racial backgrounds of our children, have often closely correlated to their success in school. We refer to this historical trend as the “predictive power of demographics.”

Closing this unacceptable achievement gap will require significant changes in our capacity to teach culturally and linguistically diverse students effectively. These changes demand that we relinquish pretense and embrace the simple truth that we all have to learn how to do this work better: from the Board Room to the classroom. The actions described in our plan require each one of us in the SFUSD to recognize our strengths, identify our areas of growth, and take full responsibility for diminishing the predictive power of demographics on academic and social outcomes.

They've clearly identified their target. And I think they've done a pretty good job of framing the problem and describing the challenges involved in addressing it.

It is also interesting to me to see how they have framed this plan as a response to the Student Enrollment, Recruitment and Retention Plan report that came out last spring. That report was a laudable effort to find out what families want and need from their schools and it yielded a number of interesting, practical results. And a lot less flowery prose than we find in this strategic plan.

So have they really laid out a strategic plan that will address the SERR requirements and take on the achievement gap and overcome the demographic trends?

Time will tell.

Are more kids dropping out of school these days?

As anyone who follows education news knows, the California Department of Education has come up with a new way to keep track of high school dropouts, an efficient new system replacing what seems to have been a hodgepodge of seat-of-the-pants methods and on-the-fly guesswork.

But even the world’s most efficient system can’t give us the full picture. The Los Angeles Times article reporting the new process included a line that made me nod my head sadly:

What is inescapable, ultimately, is that the effort to statistically capture the complications of teen life does not lend itself to the simple analysis that a dropout rate suggests.

And if you weren’t paying close attention, it would be easy to be misled into believing that the dropout rate has risen over the years, or taken a jump recently. But of course that isn’t true in the big picture.

It used to be the norm for many working-class kids and almost all poor kids to drop out of high school -- if they started high school at all. Finishing high school was a luxury for the privileged.

According to Nicholas Lemann’s book “The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy,” a history of the SAT and higher education in this country, the high school graduation rate only hit 50 percent around World War II.

My own grandmother, born in 1899 in Cumberland, Md., and raised in various spots in the Appalachians along the B&O Railroad line, was emblematic. She quit school after eighth grade to go to work in a glove factory in Columbus, Ohio. This was the norm for her culture, fully in accordance with her family’s expectations. It would have been an act of defiance and disloyalty for her to try to insist on continuing on to high school, let alone attempting to graduate – I’m sure it would have been futile for her even to try.

(I have mentioned that to people who have chimed in with the view that eighth grade was far more advanced than it is now. They’re wrong. While Grandma – who worked on auto assembly lines for much of her adult life and later became a hairdresser – was quite literate and loved to write letters, she also totally believed that men have one fewer rib on one side than women do, for example.)

There are still many families and many communities with the same expectation for their kids my great-grandparents had for Grandma: Your earning power is far more valuable than a piece of paper saying you finished high school. And of course there are families and communities struggling with many deeper issues too.

Today’s Chronicle story on the dropout issue quotes a community worker who gives a good view of the problem: “A lot of kids are dealing with issues far beyond their control.,” says Andre Aikins of San Francisco’s Omega Boys Club. But I have to disagree with Aikins’ implication that it’s the responsibility of -- or within the realm of possibility for – educators to remedy the situation. Educators’ role is to teach our children academics. The entire community – the entire society – must share responsibility to work to help low-income, at-risk students and families engage and focus in school. Here’s the section quoting Aikins.

At the Omega Boys Club in San Francisco, which has worked with school districts for years and earned a reputation for keeping boys and girls from dropping out and getting them into college, operations manager Andre Aikins says schools need to go beyond academics.

"A lot of kids are dealing with issues far beyond their control - Mom's on drugs, Pop's in the penitentiary, and now the grandparents are on drugs," he said. "A lot of kids have very little parenting going on."

Youngsters come to school like a full balloon, he said: They're so filled with troubles that "it's hard to add anything else, or they'll burst."

Schools are poorly equipped to help students with their emotional troubles, he said. But if they could find a way to do it, he said, the dropout rate would decline. San Francisco's dropout rate is 21 percent, according to the new state estimate.

"They have to change the mind-set of students to value education," Aikins said. "Right now, the way the system is designed - how can I say it - the kids don't see the value and relevancy of what schools are in place to do for them."

Meanwhile, everyone is poring over those dropout rate breakouts, school by school and district by district. They presumably fall in line with demographics – all the numbers show high dropout rates for African-American and Latino students. But as the Los Angeles Times line emphasizes, there are so many complexities that I’m not really convinced those numbers are clear indicators that one school is doing so much better than another.

Prop. 13: the You're On Your Own culture

Cross-post from www.examiner.com:

I was pondering where to start on a 30th-anniversary commentary about 1978’s tax-cutting Prop. 13 and its impact on public education – and on the rest of our society – when an excellent Sacramento Bee column by veteran journalist Peter Schrag landed in my inbox. Schrag has been critiquing Prop. 13 for many years.

Proposition 13 did not cause every public service calamity of the last 30 years, much less the Northridge earthquake or the San Diego County wildfires.

But in the years since Proposition 13's passage, it has compounded California's governmental and fiscal mess something awful. California's per pupil school spending, which was among the top 10 states in the 1960s, is now among the bottom 10. Proposition 13 alone is not responsible, but along with two major court decisions that preceded it, it helped decouple school funding from the local tax base and thus undercut voter incentives to fund education generously, as it had been in the generation after World War II. Our roads, once a national model, are an embarrassment. …

California once had a communitarian ethic. That's been turned into a market ethic. It once did serious planning for the future. For now, that's a nearly forgotten hope.

(Read the whole column here.)

It goes almost without saying that Prop. 13 devastated California schools. It knocked them from the top in the nation to near the bottom not only in funding, but also (this is more complex) in achievement. (Our schools face more challenges in other ways than many other states’, including a very large number of limited-English newcomers and the impact of our high cost of living.)

As Schrag and others note - there are, of course, many pro-Prop. 13 commentaries floating around too - Prop. 13 was a social/cultural movement that went beyond just slashing homeowners’ tax rates as their property values soared. (The increases accompanying California’s newly skyrocketing real estate prices were what ignited the furor.) It was all about sticking it to those crooks and bums in Sacramento and, by extension, D.C.. "Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem,” Ronald Reagan declared in his first inaugural address, 2 1/2 years after Prop. 13 passed.

It’s ironic, because Prop. 13 was a movement of my parents’ and grandparents’ generations – born roughly 1895-1930. And those generations, which suffered hugely through the Depression and one or both World Wars – also benefited hugely from government leadership and spending. The New Deal helped pull many of them out of desperation during the Depression, and the G.I. Bill transformed the fortunes of the entire World War II generation. There seems to have been a massive disconnect when so many of them turned hostile to government and tax spending after having benefited so greatly from both.

We saw a similar disconnect displayed in a quote in an unrelated Chronicle article a few months ago, about the question of charging tolls to use Doyle Drive at the south end of the Golden Gate Bridge, to cover needed safety work. "Doyle Drive needs to be taken care of by the city, not the taxpayers,” declared a San Francisco driver. If the reporter asked him where he thinks “the city” gets money, the answer wasn’t included in the article.

In my opinion this boils down to the fact that too many people don’t grasp that taxes are the price we pay for the services that keep our society civilized. You don’t hear many people proclaim their willingness to give up public services – that San Francisco driver wasn’t opposing making the repairs on Doyle Drive.

A new Field Poll says that 57% of Californians would vote for Prop. 13 today, while 23% would oppose it. But do all those Californians understand that taxes pay for services they are likely to need someday, or are they all soulmates of the guy who thinks “the city” should pay for those services instead of “the taxpayers”?

In some ways I see it as a conflict between those who want a “You’re On Your Own” (YOYO) society – social Darwinist, dog eat dog, every man for himself – and those who prefer to believe that “We’re In This Together” (WITT). But there needs to be a third category for the disconnected, the descendants of those who thrived under the G.I. Bill and somehow failed to grasp that it was tax-funded government programs that benefited them, their families and their communities.

There’s no doubt that homeowners needed relief back in the ‘70s, when their taxes soared along with their home values. (Let’s not forget, however, that these folks were getting enormously land-rich due to sheer lucky timing.) Legislators could have worked out ways to meet that need without starving government, and they blew it. Says Schrag:

Sacramento diddled in its futile effort to provide relief. But it's inconceivable that … Gov. Jerry Brown and the Legislature wouldn't have gotten the message in the 1978 general election and offered a more workable solution, even if it had taken legions of geezers with pitchforks to deliver it.

I worry that the generations behind mine (I was 24 when Prop. 13 passed) find it too deeply inconceivable that a society would actually be willing to provide for its members’ needs; that they’re too numbed to fight the YOYO mentality. We need a “Never Forget!” movement for a more optimistic, more determined spirit. It seems un-American to shrug “oh well” and give up on building a better society.

Rally for schools (with Sandra Tsing Loh) June 17!

A cross-post: This rally being promoted by the deliciously witty commentator/performance artist/public school advocate Sandra Tsing Loh is obviously the place to be this summer if you want to speak up for children and schools! (Those Grateful Dads — that’s my husband, a classroom regular with his guitar, banjo and harmonica.)

FIRST-EVER "CALIFORNIA CHILDREN’S RALLY"
Tuesday, June 17, 2008 at the Sacramento Capitol (front)

SACRAMENTO — 2008 marks both the 30th anniversary of the passage of Howard Jarvis’ Proposition 13 (June) and the 160th anniversary of California public schools. On Tuesday, June 17, parental frustration over perennial public education budget cuts (California currently ranks 46th in the U.S.) will be transformed into a rally celebrating a group who has no lobbyists, California’s future, and the most important "special interest" in the world — our children. Also celebrated will be some extraordinary heroes of California public school culture whose hearts, despite many odds, beat strong.

WHO: A grassroots group of California public school families, and friends

WHAT: The California Children’s Rally - Working Schedule (subject to change):

10 a.m.-11 a.m. Children visit their legislators, invite them to lunch

11 a.m.-12 noon Kid’s cafeteria-style lunch provided for all, building begins of

"ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM"* led by Trash for Teaching, also
"Mission Impossible!" ("Are You Smarter than A Fourth Grader?
Can you build a mission out of clean recyclables?")
Music: The Kids of Widney High, Grateful Dads (w/ Foremen)
Children sing "California Public School Songbook"
California Autoharp Gathering - Fresno Migrant Scholars

12 noon-12:40 "Barndance!" with Evo Bluestein and company
(Learn to squaredance on the Capitol Steps!)

12:40-12:55 The Angry Tired Teachers of Hayward (with special guest "performance art troupe" The Burning Moms) in "Low Budget High School Musical!"

12:55-1:00 p.m. "This Land is Your Land" group singalong w/ "Guitar Army"
(legislators invited to bring instruments and jam!)

WHEN: Tuesday, June 17, 10 a.m.-1 p.m.

WHERE: Capitol Steps on L Street at 11th

* "THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM" will be a giant group-built elephant sculpture (created by Beth Elliott) upon which participants can sit and pose for a photo. Democrat, Republican, Independent — everyone has a different "elephant in the room" re: public education funding. The Elephant (non-partisan, chosen only for structural stability) welcomes all — as in the barndance, all comers are invited to take a whirl.

PARTICIPATING GROUPS:

* The Angry Tired Teachers Band (Hayward, CA): This group of public school teachers from Hayward Unified (lowest paid teachers in the Bay) have plowed the slings and arrows of their superintendent, school board, administrators and even students into their rock ‘n’ roll music. A fun--yet pointed--dance party for anyone who feels, like Rodney Dangerfield, that they "don’t get no respect."
* The Burning Moms (Everywhere, CA): The Burning Moms are underpaid, overstressed public school moms tired of gluing their California public schools’ funding together by baking endless pans of Snickerdoodles. They join the Angry Tired Teachers as back-up dancers, doing the swim and the pony in their own special way, working in such theatrical mediums as sugary desserts and cash.
* The California Autoharp Gathering (Mendota, CA): The CAG was founded in 2003 at the Mendota Unified School District, enabling students to take classes in autoharp, folkloric dancing and more. An inspiring example of the synergies possible, Fresno Unified, the Fresno Folklore Society and the Fresno migrant scholars program all work together to bring traditional American arts to a new generation of California public school students.
* Evo Bluestein (Clovis, CA): Evo Bluestein is a legendary fiddler, as well as music and dance educator in Central Californian public schools. His "barn dances" timeless, fun, and uplifting. Bluestein’s Four "C’s" of squaredancing include Courtesy (politeness — the ability to dance with anyone in the room with a good attitude), Cooperation (willingness to try new things), Concentration (staying on the beat), and ... Community!
* The Grateful Dads (Everywhere, CA): In California public schools where music programs have been cut and teachers are frantically busy teaching Open Court for standardized testing, who sometimes steps into the musical void is a brave volunteer dad with a guitar. (Or a piano.) While this is no substitute for the real music programs other states have, we still love our balladeer dads (and moms!) who teach our kids to sing.
* The Kids of Widney High (Los Angeles): The Kids of Widney High are a group of students from Widney High School, a special education high school in Los Angeles, who write and perform original songs. The group started in 1988 as a song writing class and changes as the students come and go from Widney. These incredible "Kids" record, gig and have their own you tube channel, to the delight of enthusiastic audiences.
* Trash for Teaching (Los Angeles): TFT collects clean and safe cast-off materials from manufacturing (that would otherwise become trash) and repurposes them to provide comprehensive arts education programs. TFT’s Treasure Trucks bridge the gap between the excess of waste created in manufacturing processes and the lack of materials in public education. TFT’s Motto: "Education and environmentalism through creative reuse."

***

An additional note, by the way: So as not to exaggerate the negative about San Francisco schools, I should point out that thanks to the determination of our district to keep at least some music programs alive all along — plus Prop. H funding from the generous voters of San Francisco that restored still more — our schools DO have music programs. The Grateful Dads still show up to supplement them and do that all-important male role modeling, though!

Proposed standard for charters hits bumps

I previously posted that the California Charter Schools Association had asked a Republican assemblywoman to sponsor a bill addressing conflict of interest on charter schools boards — and then opposed the bill after Bonnie Garcia (R-Cathedral City) followed through.

Now the San Diego Union-Tribune reports (embedded in a story about a troubled charter school) that Garcia has dropped the bill, and Bay Area Democrat Gene Mullin of South San Francisco is now sponsoring it. The bill, AB 2115, passed the Assembly on Wednesday and now goes to the Senate, according to the Union-Tribune.

...the state Legislature is debating a bill that would require charter schools to comply with the same conflict-of-interest laws that public school boards follow. State law forbids any employees of a school district to serve on that district's school board, among other restrictions.

“Charter schools are given more autonomy than public schools, (but) their governing boards have authority over public funds,” said Assemblyman Gene Mullin, a South San Francisco Democrat who resurrected the bill after its original sponsor withdrew it late last week.

Bonnie Garcia, a Republican Assemblywoman from Fountain Valley, said she wanted to reconsider how restrictive the bill should be for charter schools.

Yesterday, Mullin said he's clear on what he wants out of the bill.

“Charter school governing boards should be held to at least the same standards as school district boards,” he said.

Winners blast Newsweek high school rankings

I've blogged here previously about the bogus and ethically challenged Newsweek high school rankings. (This blog seems to have been the first public post of the letter from 38 district superintendents from five states vowing to boycott the rankings.)

This year's Newsweek rankings came out today, and my commentary is on the www.examiner.com site.

Examining San Francisco school issues

I'm working on a new project, a "don't-call-it-a-blog" resource on www.examiner.com.
They're doing what they simply call Examiners on different topics, and mine is — ta-da — San Francisco schools. It's been up and running for about three hours now.

My editor says this is all uncharted territory, and I can do things like post the same post here, there, anywhere else I want. For now I'll just note that there's one post on school violence (mostly quoting the Perimeter Primate blog) and one on the current status of the kindergarten enrollment process, and you can just click and read them.

Oakland's grand plan widens achievement gap

The Perimeter Primate blog crunched some numbers (how come it's the volunteers who do this?) and discovered that under the "Expect Success" grand reform plan in the Oakland Unified School District, the achievement gap has magnified. Read about it here. Since some of those fads are making their way into SFUSD, it's useful information for us.

SNS budget outlook worsens

Before this year's California budget crisis, efforts to reform SFUSD's food service were limited by low federal reimbursement rates and inadequate budgets. Now the SNS faces a double whammy with the overall district budget deficit forcing belt tightening everywhere coupled with dramatic increases in food prices. Expect to hear a lot more about this issue. This could be painful. From CNN:

School kids feel the bite of high food prices
Administrators are cutting corners and considering lay-offs to make up for the price spike in milk, eggs and flour.
By Aaron Smith, CNNMoney.com staff writer

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Rising food prices are making it harder for schools to cook up ways to give kids the nutrition they need.

Right now, they're taking shortcuts and shuffling ingredients to make up the difference, but that's only a short-term solution with long-term consequences on the horizon.[...]

Food-price pain is especially sharp in California, which has some of the nation's strictest nutrition rules. "With all the food requirements we have [here], it's doubly difficult this year. There isn't enough money to go around," said Lynnelle Grumbles, food service director at Visalia Unified School District in central California.

Balancing school lunch with possible lay-offs
"The parents expect more fresh vegetables, but we're having to make a choice not to," Grumbles said. The only other solutions would be to lay off workers, charge parents more per plate, or convince Congress to increase its annual reimbursement rate, she said.

"If the general public expects school programs to provide quality food for their kids, then the reimbursement rates need to increase," she said. "The increase over the next two years needs to double, in order to survive."

Federal reimbursement programs cover all or part of school districts' lunch tabs. Congress lifts reimbursement rates every year, but Gasiorowski said it hasn't been enough: "We need to be looking at an increase of 12% to 15%, instead of our usual annual increase of 2 or 3%."

SF Chronicle Strongly Supports Prop A!

The Chronicle published its endorsement of Proposition A this morning, and couldn't have been more positive. An excerpt:

Proposition A isn't an ordinary parcel tax; it's a well-crafted, sound investment. Instead of appealing to voters to just throw more money at "the schools," the school district developed a long-term strategy to improve school performance. It decided that focusing the parcel tax money on teacher retention and training would make the greatest amount of difference in students' education, a choice that is backed up by education experts and studies.

The money will boost salaries - making San Francisco more competitive with surrounding school districts - and offer additional bonuses to teachers who work in tough schools and teach much-needed subjects like math and science.

But that money won't come free or easy - teachers will also have to meet new accountability standards. Previously, a teacher could receive two annual unsatisfactory reviews before being nudged into professional development training. Now, SFUSD Superintendent Carlos Garcia insists that teachers will be pushed into development after just one unsatisfactory review - and that teachers who continue to fail at meeting standards will be encouraged to go into another line of work.

With four weeks to go, we need to find every YES vote to support our teachers and pass Proposition A.

FInally, talking about tax increase

We have not been devoting a whole lot of space here to budget news, partly on the theory that it has been premature to get too excited about it. Back in March we saw the storm clouds brewing and knew it was looking bad, but too early to really see in clear detail.

Well, now it is May. The budget gap is getting bigger. Layoff notices—which in most years never amount to much—are no joke. The gathering storm is breaking over our heads. The rainy day is here and it looks every bit as bad as predicted. Maybe worse.

Yet Sacramento continues to dither. Arnold and the legislature continue to play a game of chicken with our schools' future. Any fool can see the state needs to find more revenue, yet no one seems to be willing to be the first to stand up and propose the obvious—we need to raise taxes. So this LA Times article provides an interesting perspective:

Californians divided over new taxes for schools, poll finds:

Californians want their public schools protected from state budget cuts and are willing to tax the rich to make that happen. But despite the threat of schools taking a beating in next year's state budget, residents are sharply divided over whether they would support higher taxes for themselves, according to a statewide poll released late Wednesday.

Letting the axe fall on our kids' heads is not an option. Raising taxes will be difficult. It's time for the legislature and the governor to get serious about the hard work of hammering out this budget. Playing chicken is to no one's advantage.

A dirty secret about philanthropists

I'm reposting this commentary with permission from the Perimeter Primate blog, which focuses on Oakland schools. The trend of billionaire philanthropists dabbling in education reform as a hobby impacts schools nationwide.

Monday, April 28, 2008
A dirty secret about philanthropists

An article published by the New York Times on March 9, 2008 did a very good job of revealing some of what is going on in the minds of the millionaire and billionaire educational philanthropists today.¹

The article explained that the educational philanthropists donate their money because 1) they need a tax break and 2) educational issues are currently a popular cause. Unlike educational philanthropists of the old days like Carnegie and Rockefeller who were satisfied by providing supplemental help to the system, this new breed wants to see evidence that their money has produced specific types of output. To control this, they actively seek to have a strategic influence over the school districts which are the recipients of their largess. It is crystal clear that their gifts come with quite a few strings attached.

The first thing the educational philanthropists do is to deploy a “disruptive force.” Once the established school system is destroyed, they are poised to insert whatever model they think is better. Aren’t they nice?

For a number of years now, these philanthropists have been playing a huge role in changing school districts in many cities, including my own. Of course, they don’t send their kids to those public schools, nor live among the many members of those communities. They have no experience as educators of the masses, and certainly have not had significant personal contact with schools for the commoners, i.e. the public ones. But these qualifiers which would restrain the cockiness of a normal individual don't seem to carry weight for those arrogant and wealthy individuals with an urge to “fix" the problems, undoubtedly driven to do so for various personal reasons.

The educational philanthropists hunt for weak districts because they need a place to test their ideas. Oakland was one such district. Once it was cleanly obtained, with help from California’s Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell, the “disruptive force” was installed.

The force arrived as graduates from billionaire Eli Broad’s training ground, headed by the first State Administrator Randy Ward. They set up shop quickly and went to work creating their own special system for managing our large, urban school district. Some members have left, but others have replaced them. As an organized force from the outside, they have been applying their system for nearly five years now (the “Expect Success” program). The whole operation was paid for by the foundations of Gates, Broad, Rogers, and others. Oakland Unified still isn't “fixed” and with their approach it will never be.

Of course, assisting us with our fiscal recovery was never their primary goal.

This undertaking was quite easy to do because the conduit for public input had been completely eliminated. Information to the public about what was really going on was scant. It was sometimes alluded to in the promotional materials for “Expect Success.” Many experienced and savvy administrators who questioned features of this new program, or showed resistance, either gave up in disgust and left, or were pressured out.

With the return of our local control, the powers of the “disruptive force” will be diminished, or lost – but not if the educational philanthropists can get a toe-hold by becoming a part of the publicly elected power body. Currently, Brian Rogers is running for a School Board seat in Oakland's District One.²

¹ “How Many Billionaires Does It Take to Fix a School System” at http://tinyurl.com/5jxnv2

² “Family foundations maximize impact,” SF Business Times, October 13, 2006, http://www.cityfieldsfoundation.org/SFBusinessTimes101306.pdf

“Gary Rogers was the chief executive of Dreyer's Grand Ice Cream in June 2003 when the company signed a $2.8 billion deal with Nestle SA, giving the Swiss food giant majority control. Rogers had bought the Oakland company 26 years before with his business partner, William Cronk, taken it public in 1981 and grown it into a $1 5 billion business.

The deal created what those in philanthropic circles call an “economic event” in Rogers’ life. Rogers realized he could either fill the IRS coffers that year or pour the money into the community in which he had raised his family and take a tax break of roughly 40 percent.

‘It's not the only reason people set up a family foundation, but it's one of the benefits of doing it,’ said Brian Rogers, who is one of Gary's three sons and executive director of the Rogers Gary Rogers Family Foundation. ‘For us, there was a large transaction for my father's business and at that point, he decided to bring together all of his goals for philanthropic giving.’

The result was a $90 million contribution to the Bay Area. Divided between two organizations - the family foundation that Brian runs and a supporting organization through the East Bay Community Foundation - the funds are backing desperately needed projects, large and small, including Oakland's $43 million Expect Success program in its public schools.”

Help Wanted: No Pay Great Benefits

Check out this PPS sponsored YouTube video on the many reasons to volunteer at your childrens' school:

Obama's education policy in a quick video

The Obama campaign has done a great job of publishing clear, well-organized, pithy web pages and whitepapers that go into great depth about his positions on all the issues. Yesterday I spent some time admiring his disability policy. His education page is well worth visiting.

But who really has the time or inclination to digest all this material? Some of us, hoepfully. But for the rest, there's YouTube! Here's a nice, brief clip fresh from Obama's Pennsylvania campaign trail that covers the need for more art education, a less narrowly focused, reformed NCLB that is developed by educators. Check it out: