In Sam Dillon’s interesting New York Times column on Diane Ravitch and the controversy created by her new book, Checker Finn declares that Ravitch is a “conservative,” while he is a “radical.”

“Diane says, ‘Let’s return to the old public school system,’ ” he said. “I say let’s blow it up.”

As a stalwart, if somewhat superficial, critic of all things post-modern, Finn must know that words have meaning, and the way in which we use and misuse them has an impact on the real world. It is remarkable that someone who has dedicated a lifetime to opposing the Sixties in all of its dimensions, good and bad, would indulge himself in the very same sort of rhetorical excess and rhetorical violence that defined the dark side of that decade.

When one reads the rhetoric of a Finn on schools, it brings to mind the “revolutionary” assaults on the family which were prevalent during the Sixties. Without question, the patriarchal family needed to change, with the rule of the father giving way to an order of gender equality. But the notion that the family itself needed to be abolished was a profoundly mistaken and destructive one: children need the stable and secure families to grow and develop.

The same is true of schools. There is much in our public schools that needs to change, as we move from a factory model system to one aligned with a knowledge economy. But the notion that schools should be “blown up” and destroyed rather than changed is a mindless and destructive concept, one that ignores the consequences of such “revolutionary” ideas on the young people who attend those schools. Young people need stable and secure schools to grow and develop intellectually.

The full statement can be read here.

We are appalled at recent comments from President Obama and Education Secretary Duncan condoning the mass firing of the Central Falls High School teachers.  These comments are unacceptable, do not reflect the reality on the ground and completely ignore the teachers’ significant commitment to working with others to transform this school.

The comments are particularly disappointing in light of the recent state report, which found that the high school’s reading and writing proficiency have gone up 22 percent and 14 percent respectively over the past two years.  None of these facts is reflected in the comments from the Obama administration.

The affiliated unions of the AFL-CIO condemn the actions of the Central Falls superintendent in unjustly terminating the employment of the dedicated teaching faculty of Central Falls High School.  We stand in support of the Central Falls Teachers Union in its fight to improve the teaching and learning in Central Falls schools, preserve the rights of its members and keep the teachers where they belong—in the school, working with the students and making progress on academics.

You can find it here.

And you can read about all the details of what is happening here.

Here’s a report of the exchange on the NPR News Blog.

From the AFT statement:

President Obama’s comments today condoning the mass firing of the Central Falls High School teachers do not reflect the reality on the ground and completely ignore the teachers’ significant commitment to working with others to transform this school. We know it is tempting for people in Washington to score political points by scapegoating teachers, but it does nothing to give our students and teachers the tools they need to succeed.

What’s even sadder is that the firings and the President’s comments come in spite of a state report written last April that focused on the high school’s reading and writing proficiency, which have gone up 22 percent and 14 percent respectively over the past two years. Nowhere in the report is there any criticism of teachers’ efforts, skills or dedication to their job or their students. The report does, however, point to problems with constantly changing programs and the instability of school leadership. The report reinforces the fact that, today, teachers are being blamed unfairly for the schools’ problems.

“Because so many programs have been abruptly terminated, many teachers desire a formal program evaluation system to ensure that the strengths and weaknesses of programs are properly examined in the future before changes are made or new programs are implemented. Students share this concern,” the report said.

As for next steps, the report said, “Take the time to celebrate as a learning community the accomplishments, successes and positive changes that have taken place over the past few years.”

Diane Ravitch’s The Death and Life of the Great American School System is a tour de force. We will not recount the book’s argument here, although a couple of thoughts inspired by the book will follow in a separate post. Readers of Edwize need to read the book for themselves, as one can only fully appreciate the power of the argument in its original form. You can purchase the book from a unionized and employee friendly bookstore here.

Diane has agreed to do a virtual book tour appearance here at Edwize, in which she will answer questions inspired by the book from our readers. Send your questions to QuestionsForDiane@uft.org.

Al Gore in the New York Times on environmental issues:

The decisive victory of democratic capitalism over communism in the 1990s led to… a hubristic “bubble” of market fundamentalism that encouraged opponents of regulatory constraints to mount an aggressive effort to shift the internal boundary between the democracy sphere and the market sphere.

That is an observation perhaps even more applicable to the last two decades of education policy.

Funding equity is an important issue in education for one simple reason: it is a matter of educational justice for students. Unfortunately, in the world of educational politics, it is easy to lose sight of that bottom line. The politics of division that Chancellor Klein has pursued on the charter school front has claimed as part of its collateral damage rational, fact-based evaluation of charter school funding: as of late, there has been a great deal more heat than light in such discussions.

For many years, the only serious scholarly study of the subject was a 2004 paper, Charter School Funding in New York, authored by Jonathan Gyurko, now of the UFT, and Robin Jacobowitz of NYU. The websites of the New York City Charter School Center and the New York Charter School Association linked to this detailed evaluation of the complicated funding formula, and Charter School Center CEO Merriman commended it in a New York Times interview. Last year, during the bitter debates that accompanied the funding freezes of district and charter schools, Gyurko updated that analysison Edwize  here and here. He concluded that “with the recent shift of ‘categorical funds’ into state ‘foundation aid’ and the placement of many City charter schools in Board of Education facilities,” the “modest funding gaps” that existed in 2004 had been considerably reduced, leaving “little to no operating disparities.” More »

It’s all in the Joel Klein-Eva Moskowitz emails, courtesy of Juan Gonzalez who tells the story in his Daily News column. More »

The federal Education Department’s What Works Clearinghouse just released a review of the city’s Leadership Academy, the principal training program that Joel Klein brought in with the help of “Neutron” Jack Welch, the former General Electric chairman.

Apparently it doesn’t work. More »

Shortly after the start of the new year, a group of elected officials joined the UFT to propose a package of legislative reforms designed to ensure that charter schools would be true public schools, educating all students.

At that time, Thomas Carroll, prolific charter advocate and long time champion of the far right in state politics, took to the pages of New York City tabloids to condemn our proposal. The idea that charter schools should educate all students, including those with the greatest need, was a poison pill, Carroll declared. It would force charters to adopt terrible admissions quotas. It was the work of Michael Mulgrew, our new UFT president, who is “a bare-knuckled trench-fighter” in Carroll’s book. More »

If you want to grasp the levels of “know nothingism” that is now in vogue on the American right, consider this post, which finds evidence of a communist conspiracy in the White House library books selected by Michelle Obama. [Hattip: Yglesias.]

The irony here is that if the author of this post knew something about the subject or even skimmed the books in question,  it would quickly become apparent that Nathan Glazer’s The Social Basis of American Communism is a rather well-known scholarly analysis from an anti-Communist perspective.

That brings to mind an urban legend regarding a leading American politician who inquired of his staff whether Olof Palme, the then Social Democratic Prime Minister of Sweden, was a Communist. “No, sir, he is an anti-Communist,” the reply came, drawing this retort: “I don’t care what kind of Communist he is.”

In the age of Sarah Palin, urban legends are transformed into real life.

how come the record of the New York City Department of Education under Chancellor Klein has been so poor on issues of diversity and equity?

Klein is a outspoken advocate of the current fashion that schools should not be judged by their inputs, or what they put into the education of their students. Talk about the need for lower class size, and he will quickly counter that it is only outputs that matter. Outputs are hard data, such as student standardized test scores.

So what does the hard data show about the diversity and equity performance of the NYC Department of Education under Klein? More »

Matt Yglesias has an interesting take on Schools and Competition. In reaction to the classic Milton Friedmanite celebration of unfettered laissez-faire markerts, he endorses a key point in the analysis of W. Bentley MacLeod and Miguel Urquiola:

if schools cannot select students based upon their ability, then a free market is indeed efficient and encourages entry by high productivity schools. However, if schools are allowed to select on ability, then competition leads to stratification by parental income, increased transmission of income inequality, and reduced student effort—in some cases lowering the accumulation of skill.

Yglesias then lauds charter school lotteries as an example of a student selection process which is not founded on student ability, and so yields a representative student population. Yet this supposition is not borne by the available evidence: the recent Separate and Unequal report of the UFT found, for example, that New York City charter school lotteries are drawing many fewer free lunch students living in poverty, English Language Learners and students with special needs than the district schools serving the same community. More »

The Obama administration recently announced proposed changes in the No Child Left Behind law. The “jury is out” on whether it would be an improvement. Much depends on the extent that there is enlightened collaboration between education professionals and political forces. In either case, it may be revelatory to reflect on where some of the contributing “reformers” have been intellectually “coming from” lately.

Mike Johnston, a member of the Commission on No Child Left Behind, who is also a Colorado state senator and former principal, bunted some softball pitches lobbed at him late last year by interviewer Michael F. Shaughnessy of Eastern New Mexico University. Many of the observations were minor league.

By virtue of Johnston’s having been at some point and for some time an actual principal, he is “uniquely qualified to lead this committee,” according to Shaughnessy.

Johnston seeks to “build on the commission’s previous work by developing updated federal policy to improve teacher and principal effectiveness.”  The focus on teachers and principals as joint problem-solvers is commendable in theory. It’s more than a good idea; it’s indispensable to success. More »

"You didn't ask WHICH goals."

In the world of Tweed’s top-down directives, issued by apparatchiks who view time spent in real schools with Kurtz’s “the horror, the horror,” more than one good idea has been transformed into its opposite.

In this regard, exhibit number one is the school quality review. In its original conception, the school quality review was founded on the premise that the most important information about a school’s performance came not from decontextualized statistics, but from observations by professional educators. A team of accomplished educator reviewers has a rich knowledge of good teaching and learning practices, so they can recognize in a school the presence — and the absence — of such practices. Just as importantly, they can provide useful feedback to a school on how a school can develop good teaching and learning practices.

But put that idea in the hands of Tweed, and it becomes a virtually unrecognizable caricature of the real thing. More »