Submitted by Elaine Magliaro, Guest Blogger
In a recent New York Times article titled At Charter Schools, Short Careers by Choice, Mitoko Rich wrote of how charter schools seem to be developing something of a “youth cult” in their teaching ranks. She reported that in the charter network “teaching for two to five years is seen as acceptable and, at times, even desirable.”
Teachers in the thirteen YES Prep Schools, which are located throughout Greater Houston, have a reported average of two and a half years of experience. The teachers who work for Achievement First—which has 25 schools in Connecticut, Brooklyn, and Providence, R.I.— “spend an average of 2.3 years in the classroom.” And the individuals who teach in the KIPP schools and the Success Academy Charter Schools stay in the classroom for an average of four years. This youth culture—or culture in which most classroom practitioners have little teaching experience— differs from that of our country’s traditional public schools where teachers average nearly fourteen years of experience…and where public school leaders have made it “a priority to reduce teacher turnover.”
In the NYT article, Jennifer Hines, senior vice president of people and programs at YES Prep, was quoted as saying, “We have this highly motivated, highly driven work force who are now wondering, ‘O.K., I’ve got this, what’s the next thing?’ There is a certain comfort level that we have with people who are perhaps going to come into YES Prep and not stay forever.” (Note: New teachers at the YES Prep schools receive just two and a half weeks of training over the summer before arriving in the classroom.)
Rich says it was Teach for America (TFA) that was mostly responsible for introducing the idea of a “foreshortened teaching career.” TFA is an organization that recruits “high-achieving” college graduates and places them in some of our neediest schools. In a piece for Policymic, Benjamin Cosman wrote about TFA recruits. He said that after just five weeks of training, “Teach for America participants lead a classroom for two years, slap it on their resume, and leave the school with a bevy of opportunities.”
Wendy Kopp, the founder of Teach for America, contends that “strong schools can withstand the turnover of their teachers. The strongest schools develop their teachers tremendously so they become great in the classroom even in their first and second years.” (Question for Wendy Kopp: Are you sending your teaching recruits into the “strongest” schools?)
Mark Naison, a professor of African American Studies and History at Fordham University and a man who once viewed Teach for America as a positive program, has a difference of opinion regarding teacher turnover. He has been disappointed that TFA doesn’t instill a commitment to teaching in its program participants. In fact, Naison no longer allows TFA to recruit his college students.
Naison said the following about Kopp’s organization:
Until Teach For America becomes committed to training lifetime educators and raises the length of service to five years rather than two, I will not allow TFA to recruit in my classes. The idea of sending talented students into schools in impoverished areas, and then after two years encouraging them to pursue careers in finance, law, and business in the hope that they will then advocate for educational equity really rubs me the wrong way.
He added:
Never, in its recruiting literature, has Teach For America described teaching as the most valuable professional choice that an idealistic, socially conscious person can make. Nor do they encourage the brightest students to make teaching their permanent career; indeed, the organization goes out of its way to make joining TFA seem a like a great pathway to success in other, higher-paying professions.
Several years ago, a TFA recruiter plastered the Fordham campus with flyers that said “Learn how joining TFA can help you gain admission to Stanford Business School.” The message of that flyer was: “use teaching in high-poverty areas as a stepping stone to a career in business.” It was not only disrespectful to every person who chooses to commit their life to the teaching profession, it effectively advocated using students in high-poverty areas as guinea pigs for an experiment in “resume-padding” for ambitious young people.
After reading Rich’s article about the high turnover rate of teachers in charter schools, Catherine M. Ionata responded in a letter to the editor. She wrote:
The charter school representatives in your article defend the rapid turnover of teachers. Wendy Kopp, founder of Teach for America, even says that teachers can become great in one or two years! Would we expand this idea to other professions? Do we think the best lawyers are those fresh out of law school? Should we choose a rookie physician for complex surgery, because this surgeon is more “enthusiastic” than veteran surgeons?
Ronald Thorpe, president of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, said, “To become a master plumber you have to work for five years. Shouldn’t we have some kind of analog to that with the people we are entrusting our children to?”
Education expert Diane Ravitch also weighed in on the subject after reading Rich’s article:
Can you imagine that a “teacher” who graduated college in June is already “a great teacher” by September?
Why do we expect entrants to every other profession to spend years honing their craft but a brand-new teacher, with no experience, can be considered “great” in only one or two years, then leave to do something else?
This is a recipe to destroy the teaching profession.
How can anyone say they are education “reformers” if their goal is to destroy the profession?
What other nation is doing this?
This is not innovative. In fact, it returns us to the early nineteenth century, when the general belief was that “anyone can teach, no training needed.” Teaching then was a job for itinerants, widow ladies, young girls without a high school degree, and anyone who couldn’t do anything else. It took over a century to create a teaching profession, with qualifications and credentials needed before one could be certified to stand in front of a classroom of young children. We are rapidly going backwards.
Henry Seton, a humanities teacher at Community Charter School of Cambridge in Massachusetts, was another educator who responded to Rich’s article. He wrote:
The high teacher turnover at charter schools leaves these institutions fragile and ill equipped to support their most vulnerable students. It takes far more than a year or two in the classroom to develop that elusive set of skills needed to serve our nation’s neediest cohorts of students — young men of color, English language learners and so on. And I have seen some of the most well-regarded charters here in Massachusetts left reeling and in danger of closing after extensive teacher departures.
Benjamin Cosman (Policymic) wrote that young teachers in charter schools “are supposed to save education in the United States.” He thinks, however, that there is a “very real danger in valuing inexperience in the teaching field…” He believes this “supposed remedy” may possibly be hastening the “demise of public education.”
In his article titled It’s Harder for Charter Schools to Keep Teachers, Francisco Vara-Orta wrote about information provided in data collected by the Texas Education Agency. The data, taken from 47 local school districts from 2006 to 2011, showed that the “average teacher turnover rate for charter school districts was 46 percent, compared with 13 percent for traditional school districts.” Vara-Orta wrote that analysis of the data showed that teachers leave charter schools in Bexar County nearly three times more often than teachers in traditional public schools, “which generally pay more and perform better academically.” He continued, “Of the 10 districts rated academically unacceptable by the state in Bexar County last year, all were charters, with turnover ranging from 38 percent to 65 percent…”
Researchers from Vanderbilt University found that the teacher turnover rate in charter schools was nearly twice as high as that of traditional public schools. In addition, the researchers found that teachers in charter schools were also more likely to leave the profession.
Excerpt from the Vanderbilt report titled Teacher Turnover in Charter Schools:
Our analysis confirms that much of the explanation of this “turnover gap” lies in the differences in the types of teachers that charter schools and traditional public schools hire. The data lend minimal support to the claim that turnover is higher in charter schools because they are leveraging their flexibility in personnel policies to get rid of underperforming teachers. Rather, we found most of the turnover in charter schools is voluntary and dysfunctional as compared to that of traditional public schools.
A second reason is that attrition is highest among teachers that are new to the profession. Past research found teachers make important gains in effectiveness in their first three years and smaller gains over the next few years (McCaffrey, Koretz, Lockwood, and Hamilton, 2003; Hanushek, Kain, & Rivkin, 2005). Given that almost 50% of teachers leave the profession within their first five years (Ingersoll & Smith, 2003), many teachers are leaving the classroom before they have developed into optimally effective practitioners. Moreover, exiting new teachers are often replaced by similarly inexperienced teachers and consequently students in schools with high turnover may rarely be exposed to experienced teachers.
Third, turnover affects many of the organizational conditions important to effective schooling, such as instructional cohesion and staff trust. Effective schools hold shared beliefs in similar instructional goals and practices (Fuller & Izu, 1986; Bryk & Driscoll, 1988). Schools with high turnover are challenged to develop a shared commitment towards the same goals, pedagogy, and curriculum. The constant churning of teaching staff makes it difficult to collaborate, develop standard norms of practice, and maintain progress towards common goals. This can lead to fragmented instructional programs and professional development plans that must be adapted each year to meet the needs of a teaching staff in constant flux (Guin, 2004). High turnover also makes it difficult for teachers to build relational trust, which is critical towards productive collaboration in schools (Bryk & Schneider, 2002; Guin, 2004).
Critics of charter schools argue that students and schools need stability. “When you stay in a school or community, you build relationships,” said Andrea Giunta, a senior policy analyst for teacher recruitment, retention and diversity at the National Education Association.
As might be expected, studies have shown that teacher turnover often “diminishes student achievement” and has a negative impact on “the overall school environment because it creates instability and a loss of institutional knowledge.”
Matthew Ronfeldt, an assistant professor of educational studies at the University of Michigan—along with colleagues Susanna Loeb and James Wyckoff—conducted a study on teacher turnover. Their report was titled How Teacher Turnover Harms Student Achievement. Loeb, a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, said that the problem of teacher turnover had been well-documented. She noted, “One in three teachers leaves the profession within five years.” In their study, the three researchers sought to find out if students “do worse in the year after there is high turnover.” They discovered that high teacher turnover hurt student achievement in English and math—and that the negative impact was as “significant as the effect of free lunch eligibility (a standard measure of poverty) on test scores.” They also found the negative impact to be strongest “among schools with more low-performing and black students. “
In a Texas Tribune article dated January 27, 2010, Brian Temple wrote that at some charter schools in the state “it’s the teachers who can’t wait to clear out at the end of the school year.”
Temple reported that according to data that had been released at the time, 79 percent of the faculty of Accelerated Intermediate Academy in Houston turned over before the 2008-09 school year. At Peak Preparatory in Dallas, 71 percent of teachers did not return…and at Harmony Science Academy in College Station, “69 percent of teachers split.”
Temple continued:
In all, more than 40 of nearly 200 charter operators the state tracked — some which oversee multiple schools — had to replace more than half their teaching staffs before the last school year. Even more established and successful operators, including KIPP and YES Prep in Houston, lose nearly a third of their teachers annually. In contrast, just six of more than 1,000 non-charter school districts statewide had more than half their teachers leave, and none of the 20 largest school districts had a turnover rate higher than 16 percent.
The financial cost of teacher turnover is high. According to a study conducted by the National Commission on Teaching & America’s Future, teacher attrition costs approximately $7.3 billion per year. Since teacher attrition is so costly and has been shown to have a negative effect on student performance, Benjamin Cosman wonders why TFA and charter organizations like the Yes Prep schools encourage teachers to have a “get out while you can” mentality.
Cosman argued:
We should be cultivating teachers who are in it for the long haul, who build steady careers based on longevity, who become the wizened old stalwarts who’ve been around the block a few times. Yes, there are problems with tenure and bad teachers sticking around too long, and those issues need to be addressed. But the exact opposite — getting teachers in and out as fast as we can — is certainly not the solution.
Excerpt from Teacher Attrition: A Costly Loss to the Nation and to the States, an issue brief released by the National Commission on Teaching & America’s Future (NCTAF) in August 2005:
There is a growing consensus among researchers and educators that the single most important factor in determining student performance is the quality of his or her teachers. Therefore, if the national goal of providing an equitable education to children across the nation is to be met, it is critical that efforts be concentrated on developing and retaining high-quality teachers in every community and at every grade level…
According to the National Center for Education Statistics’ 1999–2000 “Public School Teacher Survey,” 47 percent of public school teachers worked with a mentor teacher in the same subject area.12 Sixty-six percent of teachers who were formally mentored by another teacher reported that it “improved their classroom teaching a lot.”13
Mentors are an important factor in providing support for new teachers as they enter the real world of the classroom, but mentoring alone is not enough. Comprehensive induction proves most effective at keeping good teachers in the classroom. Studies demonstrate that new teacher turnover rates can be cut in half through comprehensive induction—a combination of high-quality mentoring, professional development and support, scheduled interaction with other teachers in the school and in the larger community, and formal assessments for new teachers during at least their first two years of teaching.14
I can speak from experience. Mentor teachers can prove invaluable in helping young and inexperienced teachers by providing them with advice, insight, educational ideas and materials that have proved successful in the classroom, and by being a sounding board for them when they feel a need to express their frustrations, insecurities, and fears. Experienced teachers helped me when I was a teaching “ingénue.” Later, when I was a seasoned professional, I helped guide and advise young teachers. I shared books and teaching materials with them. I also listened to their new ideas. Other experienced educators at my school and I found that mentoring new teachers helped us to bond with them and to become a close-knit educational community.
Older teachers provide wisdom. Young teachers bring in a “breath of fresh air.” I think the healthiest school communities have teachers with different perspectives and levels of classroom experience—new teachers, teachers in mid career, and the old sages who have been around the block more than a few times.
One has to wonder how difficult it must be for young and inexperienced teachers to find mentors in their schools if most of the classroom practitioners have little more experience than they. One has to wonder how schools where teachers stay for just two or three years can develop their own culture and institutional memory—as well as a sense of stability and community. One has to wonder how children feel when their teachers come and go so frequently and rarely show evidence of a commitment to their schools and the student population.
It saddens me to think that there are “school reformers” in our country who encourage “foreshortened careers” in education…who think that youth trumps experience…who don’t instill a commitment to education in the young people they recruit for their teaching programs.
SOURCES
At Charter Schools, Short Careers by Choice (New York Times)
The High Turnover at Charter Schools (New York Times)
Charter schools are developing teachers with short tenure (Examiner)
Teacher Attrition in Charter vs. District Schools (CRPE–Center on Reinventing Public Education)
High teacher turnover in charters: Does student achievement suffer? (Atlanta Journal-Constitution)
A Revolving Door (Chicago Alliance of Charter Teachers and Staff)
Teacher Turnover in Charter Schools (Vanderbilt University)
It’s harder for charter schools to keep teachers (My San Antonio)
Teacher Attrition in Charter Schools 2007 (NEPC–National Education Policy Center)
Professor: Why Teach For America can’t recruit in my classroom (Washington Post)
Teacher Turnover Negatively Impacts Student Achievement in Math and English (The Journal)
Teacher turnover harms student learning (University of Michigan)
Teacher turnover affects all students’ achievement, study indicates (Stanford University)
Churn, Churn, Churn, Is Not Good for Kids or the Teaching Profession (Diane Ravitch)
LA students more true to their charter schools than teachers, studies say (UC Berkeley)
Charter Schools Battle High Teacher Turnover (Texas Tribune)
Teach For America: Let’s Stop Encouraging Teachers to Leave After Two Years, Maybe? (Policymic)
Guest Post: Teacher turnover – who stays and who leaves (Stanford University)
High Teacher Turnover Rates are a Big Problem for America’s Public Schools (Forbes)
Teacher Attrition: A Costly Loss to the Nation and to the States (NCTAF-National Commission on Teaching & America’s Future)
NCTAF Study: Teacher Attrition Costs U.S. Over $7 Billion Annually (American Association of Colleges for Teacher education)
AY,
As usual, Nick stops by to leave a comment that adds nothing to the topic we’ve been discussing. Same old same old.
Well Elaine I know I can be very disruptive myself at time… But, I generally like you and mike…. No questions about it… I appreciate the effort that you folks put into your posts…. Thank you all again….
My children go to public schools even though they could be sent to private…. That’s where the rub is…. The mother of the children went to private school as well…. But she is steadfast in her commitment to public…
Now I do have a daughter that’s inquiring about a catholic university….has been accepted….so the decision rests with her…..
Nick,
Since you’re here isn’t it obvious…..
I don’t know if this is Cuckoo’s Nest or Groundhog’s Day. Maybe a hybrid.
Mike,
Maybe not quite as skilled as LJM thought he/she was. I was really surprised when I read the last paragraph of Kohn’s essay, which agrees with points that I’ve been making about “school reform” in this country.
“I was really surprised when I read the last paragraph of Kohn’s essay, which agrees with points that I’ve been making about “school reform” in this country.”
Elaine,
Since he didn’t bother to do anything more than a superficial reading of what you presented, we can assume that he feels everyone operates in that manner. I thought him “skilled” because he tried to present himself as just an honest soul searching for truth, when in fact he came in with a particular agenda to disrupt the thread.
LJM 1, September 11, 2013 at 2:56 pm
Elaine, Gene,
I’d really like to hear your opinions on this essay.
http://www.alfiekohn.org/teaching/duh.htm
Excerpt:
The field of education bubbles over with controversies. It’s not unusual for intelligent people of good will to disagree passionately about what should happen in schools. But there are certain precepts that aren’t debatable, that just about anyone would have to acknowledge are true.
While many such statements are banal, some are worth noticing because in our school practices and policies we tend to ignore the implications that follow from them. It’s both intellectually interesting and practically important to explore such contradictions: If we all agree that a given principle is true, then why in the world do our schools still function as if it weren’t?
Here are 10 examples…
*****
I was working on my response to LJM when I read that he/she said he/she probably wouldn’t be returning. Still, I’d like to point out the final paragraph of Alfie Kohn’s essay:
“In fact, the corporate-style version of “school reform” that’s uncritically endorsed these days by politicians, journalists, and billionaires consists of a series of debatable tactics — many of them amounting to bribes and threats to force educators to jack up test scores. Just as worrisome, though, is that these reformers often overlook, or simply violate, a number of propositions that aren’t debatable, including many of those listed here.”
I guess Alfie looks at “school reform” the same way I do.
*****
What I had already prepared for LJM:
KOHN:
Much of the material students are required to memorize is soon forgotten.
“Knowledge is less likely to be retained if it has been acquired so that one will perform well on a test, as opposed to learning in the context of pursuing projects and solving problems that are personally meaningful.”
My Response: I agree—and that is one of the reasons that I have a problem with the school reform movement. It ushered in the current era of high stakes testing. Teachers are now being pressured to spend an inordinate amount of class time prepping kids for these mostly multiple choice tests. At the present time, public school educators have less time to work on creative projects that extend learning, inspire students, and get them excited about going to school—all thanks to school reform. I know that firsthand from my own experience.
***
Kohn: Just knowing a lot of facts doesn’t mean you’re smart.
My Response: I agree. That said, we all need to have a knowledge base in order to understand how things work, in order to be able to make comparisons between the past and the present so as not to repeat the same mistakes, in order to make informed decisions, etc.
***
Kohn: Students are more likely to learn what they find interesting.
My Response: Once more, I agree. Still, there are things that we need to learn how to do that may not seem too interesting or exciting to us—such as learning how to add, subtract, etc., and learning how to write cogently.
Note: I once had a very bright and knowledgeable student whom I taught in both second and third grades. One day, he argued with me that he didn’t NEED to learn how to write because he was going to be a scientist when he grew up. He was quite insistent—even to the point of stomping his feet on the floor. That’s when I explained to him that it was of great import that he learn how to express himself in writing so he could pass on his scientific knowledge/research findings to others. He was not the easiest child to deal with—but we had a meeting of the minds and managed to get along well for two years.
At the end of third grade, he and his mother presented me with a beautiful picture book edition of Robert Frost’s poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” In the book, his mother wrote the following note to me:
“Thank you for your patience and humor, for making poetry a delight, for teaching Matthew that promises must be kept and that when responsibilities seem dark and deep, fulfilling them is lovely.”
Matthew wrote: “These years would have been gloomy without you.”
I think that children don’t always know when they are seven or ten or fourteen what things they may need to have in their “learning toolbox” in order to get along/succeed in the future.
***
Kohn: Students are less interested in whatever they’re forced to do and more enthusiastic when they have some say.
My Response: I agree. Good teachers can be adept at getting children to do things in school more willingly by giving them choices—such as letting them select the subject of a biography they are assigned or allowing them to pick out the topic of a report or research paper that is a class requirement. I’d add that having students do creative projects related to required assignments can often help to make them more enthusiastic.
Elaine,
The late, unlamented LJM had a habit of giving links that actually didn’t support his premises. He was indeed a propaganda troll, but as Gene expressed a very skilled one.
Getting rich off of schoolchildren
Stop pretending wealthy CEOs pushing for charter schools are altruistic “reformers.” They’re raking in billions
By David Sirota
3/11/13
http://www.salon.com/2013/03/11/getting_rich_off_of_schoolchildren/
Excerpt:
Last week, Los Angeles provided yet another example of a cadre of anti-public-school millionaires swooping in to try (and in this case, fail) to buy a big-city school-board election. And once again, that sparked a round of Orwellian newspeak that distorts what’s really happening in education politics.
You know how it goes: The pervasive media mythology tells us that the fight over the schoolhouse is supposedly a battle between greedy self-interested teachers who don’t care about children and benevolent billionaire “reformers” whose political activism is solely focused on the welfare of kids. Epitomizing the media narrative, the Wall Street Journal casts the latter in sanitized terms, reimagining the billionaires as philanthropic altruists “pushing for big changes they say will improve public schools.”
The first reason to scoff at this mythology should be obvious: It simply strains credulity to insist that pedagogues who get paid middling wages but nonetheless devote their lives to educating kids care less about those kids than do the Wall Street hedge funders and billionaire CEOs who finance the so-called reform movement. Indeed, to state that pervasive assumption out loud is to reveal how utterly idiotic it really is, and yet it is baked into almost all of today’s coverage of education politics.
That, of course, is not all that shocking; after all, plenty of inane narratives are regularly depicted as assumed fact in the political press. What’s shocking is that the other reason to scoff at the Greedy Teachers versus Altruistic Billionaire tale is also ignored. It is ignored even though it involves the most hard-to-ignore facts of all — the ones involving vested financial interests.
Yes, though it is rarely mentioned, the truth is that the largest funders of the “reform” movement are the opposite of disinterested altruists. They are cutthroat businesspeople making shrewd financial investments in a movement that is less about educating children than about helping “reform” funders hit paydirt. In that sense, they are the equivalent of any industry leaders funding a front group in hopes of achieving profitable political ends (think: defense contractors funding a front group that advocates for a bigger defense budget). The only difference is that when it comes to education “reform,” most of the political press doesn’t mention the potential financial motives of the funders in question.
While I’ve written about this reality before, recent news perfectly exemplifies how the “reform” movement is really just a sophisticated business strategy.
First, there was the Washington state ballot initiative expanding publicly subsidized, privately run charter schools. As the Seattle P-I reported at the time, the initiative was effectively underwritten by Amazon and Microsoft. This was part of the latter’s larger education “reform” push through the massive foundation of company founder Bill Gates.
Yet, in most of the coverage of that ballot measure, just like in most of the coverage of Gates’ foundation work, there is no mention of the fact that both Amazon and Microsoft just so happen to be technology companies — that is, for-profit entities with their eyes on lucrative education technology contracts.
Those contracts are much easier to land in privately run charter schools because such schools are often uninhibited by public schools’ procurement rules and standards requiring a demonstrable educational need for technology. That reality, no doubt, is part of why charter schools often spend so much more on “administration” and “business services” than do their public school counterparts. Though it is rarely mentioned in the political coverage of education, that spending promises to benefit tech companies like Amazon and Microsoft. (Ready for proposals to give every kid an Amazon Kindle or Windows laptop, paid for by public money?)
Then, as mentioned before, there was last week’s high-profile Los Angeles school board race. The anti-public-school “reform” slate was bolstered by a $1 million contribution from billionaire Michael Bloomberg, who has been making similar contributions to other education “reform” campaigns across the country. As he pours money into buying these local elections, he is loyally portrayed in the press as a high-minded humanitarian using his perch as New York mayor to earnestly raise issues. Somehow, few bother to mention that he is the founder of a massive information technology company that seems well positioned to break into the burgeoning education business and profit off “reformers”‘ technology triumphalism (seriously, does anyone think we won’t soon see a Bloomberg School Terminal sometime soon?).
In that same Los Angeles race, the Los Angeles Times reported that News America Inc. donated $250,000 to the “reform” slate. That’s the same News America that is the for-profit education technology arm of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. It is the same News America that was recently trumpeted in the New York Times for rolling out an expensive “tablet (that) will be targeted at middle-school children” — that is, if the company can convince the school board candidates it underwrites to divert money away from hiring teachers and into News America’s coffers.
National Public Radio was one of the few media outlets to even mention this profit motive as driving education politics. Setting an example for how education journalism should be conducted (but largely isn’t), it reported that Murdoch’s education technology push is about delivering “future revenues from his educational branch to help shore up the finances of his newspaper and publishing division.”
Of course, if the tech industry’s attempts to make money by technologizing the classroom was also a proven way to improve education, then the education “reform” movement’s for-profit scheme might seem a bit less odious. It might seem like an example of a laudable public-private partnership whereby an industry does well for itself by doing right for the greater good.
But that’s not the case in education so far. As the New York Times exhaustively documented, “reformers” have convinced schools to spend “billions on technology, even as they cut budgets and lay off teachers, with little proof that this approach is improving basic learning.” As just one glaring example of that lack of proof, the Times points out that “a division of the Education Department that rates classroom curriculums has found that much educational software is not an improvement over textbooks” (this why Idahoans recently voted overwhelmingly to reject a plan in the Legislature that would have diverted money for teachers into classroom computers).
LJM,
I checked with my source and the charter schools and/or voucher schools are not part of the public school system in Michigan…. The charter schools are exactly that part of a university or community college….. Voucher schools are private corporations that are not accountable to the tax payers…. They do not have to disclose what, why and how these funds are disbursed….
I realize other states are different…..
Disruptive kids or kids that commit civil or criminal infractions are alternatives ed in a school district…. In a charter or voucher they are given the choice to move along or face expulsion….. So most move along….being mainstreamed in public schools…..
Neither Charter or voucher schools are required to have programs for the educationally disadvantaged….. Hmmmm….. After count day… They get booted ….. Hmmmm…. Wonder why…..
RobinH,
Only two links can be placed in a single comment or you will either be shunted into the spam box or moderation. If you have more than two links, you need to break the comment up.
LJM,
“. . . learning or education as a concept.”
What a concept!
My mind reels at the very concept of such a bold proposal.
I’ll beg out now, carry on.
LJM,
“None of my quotes where [sic] against learning or education as a concept.”
My brain hurts now.
Your few words have exposed the very reasons why education is so important.
Good luck.
LJM,
“Also, Frederick Douglass never went to school.
He was briefly taught reading and writing [because teaching a slave to read or write could lead to the death of both the teacher and student],
but when that stopped [I wonder why],
he decided to teach himself and his fellow slaves [at extreme personal risk for all involved].
I didn’t learn that in school, either.”
How proud you must be.
The bait and switch of school “reform”
Behind the new corporate agenda for education lurks the old politics of profit and self-interest
BY DAVID SIROTA
SEP 12, 2011
http://www.salon.com/2011/09/12/reformmoney/
Excerpt:
In recent weeks the debate over the future of public education in America has flared up again, this time with the publication of the new book “Class Warfare,” by Steven Brill, the founder of American Lawyer magazine. Brill’s advocacy of “reform” has sparked different strands of criticism from the New York Times, New York University’s Diane Ravitch and the Nation’s Dana Goldstein.
But behind the high-profile back and forth over specific policies and prescriptions lies a story that has less to do with ideas than with money, less to do with facts than with an ideological subtext that has been quietly baked into the very terms of the national education discussion.
Like most education reporters today, Brill frames the issue in simplistic, binary terms. On one side are self-interested teachers unions who supposedly oppose fundamental changes to schools, not because they care about students, but because they fear for their own job security and wages, irrespective of kids. In this mythology, they are pitted against an alliance of extraordinarily wealthy corporate elites who, unlike the allegedly greedy unions, are said to act solely out of the goodness of their hearts. We are told that this “reform” alliance of everyone from Rupert Murdoch to the Walton family to leading hedge funders spends huge amounts of money pushing for radical changes to public schools because they suddenly decided that they care about destitute children, and now want to see all kids get a great education.
The dominant narrative, in other words, explains the fight for the future of education as a battle between the evil forces of myopic selfishness (teachers) and the altruistic benevolence of noblesse oblige (Wall Street). Such subjective framing has resulted in reporters, pundits and politicians typically casting the “reformers’” arguments as free of self-interest, and therefore more objective and credible than teachers’ counterarguments.
Well said RobinH45.
Great song Gene!
I will have to say it was mildly entertaining to have a professional for a change as opposed to the amateur hour talent of some of the trolls as of late. While it is my proclivity to distrust (and expose) those who would willfully deceive, I do admire when someone takes pride in their work.
Mike S
Yep, just another debunked and exhausted troll.
“[The Republican-dominated] Texas State Board of Education . . . filtered conservative ideology into many lessons, downplaying the importance of the civil rights movement while touting Newt Gingrich’s ‘Contract With America’; citing the “conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s”; recognizing the roles played by Phyllis Schlafly, The Heritage Foundation, Moral Majority and the National Rifle Association; requiring students to read the speeches of Confederate President Jefferson Davis along with those of Abraham Lincoln; and recognizing country music as a significant cultural movement . . .”
Miguel Perez, “Texas politicizing education,” Creators Syndicate, 7/20/2010
The federal No Child Left Behind law (NCLB), which went into effect in 2002, was the cabal’s strategy to reduce learning to mere memorization of inert content in books published by cabal fellow travelers such as Neil Bush. NCLB allows ignoramuses pretending to be teachers and scholars to create spurious content and evaluation instruments that indoctrinate students in reactionary principles. The pretence is that this policy makes schools “accountable.” What this actually means is focusing most of the teachers’ and students’ attention on state standardized testing and results: memorization.
The law requires all schools to test students in grades 2-12 in reading, math and science. Each state chooses its own test and standards of proficiency. Schools that don’t show that students are making “adequate yearly progress” toward achieving proficiency are subject to federal sanctions, including loss of federal funds, providing free tutoring, allowing students to transfer to another school, and if all else fails, a complete restructuring of the school.
Evaluation of teachers and students must be based on a clear understanding of what genuine education is:
Radical change in a teacher’s and a student’s thought and behavior
Ability in critical thinking: thinking for oneself based on understanding of evidence as opposed to mere authoritarian assertion 2
Self-awareness: cognizance of one’s beliefs, strengths, and weaknesses
Critical consciousness: awareness of the world
“Teachers, their unions under attack, are becoming as replaceable as minimum-wage employees at Burger King. We spurn real teachers–those with the capacity to inspire children to think, those who help the young discover their gifts and potential–and replace them with instructors who teach to narrow, standardized tests. These instructors obey. They teach children to obey. And that is the point.”
Chris Hedges, Why the United States Is Destroying Its Education System, truthdig.org, 4/10/2011
The College Scam and the Student Loan Scam
Republican supporters of the voucher hide the fact from the public that the crisis in the schools is largely the product of decades of federal, state and local spending cuts, tax breaks to big business and attacks on teachers’ and other school employees’ wages and working conditions.
Privately-run schools will continue to screen applicants and reject any student they deem unacceptable. While the language of most voucher programs prohibits discrimination based on race or national origin, these schools can reject students based on gender, sexual orientation, religion, language, ability to pay, behavioral issues or academic or physical ability. They would be under no financial pressure to provide help for students with special needs, since it is more costly to provide care for special education children, and most private schools are not staffed to handle them.
The newly-sanctioned voucher system will intensify class and social distinctions. The top schools will be reserved for the wealthiest layers of society who can pay to send their children to elite private schools and academies. Next below on the totem pole will be the private and for-profit schools for middle-class and working class children, whose parents will have to work longer hours and go further into debt to scrape together thousands of dollars to pay tuition costs. At the very bottom will be the public schools, left for the poorest and most disadvantaged working class students. Unable to do little to help working class youth develop learning skills, the role of these schools will be little more than training lower-class students for low-paying jobs.
Beginning at the time of the American revolution, part of the genius of the nation has been the right to public education, based on the idea that all children, regardless of economic or social status, race, religion or ethnic background, be guaranteed government-paid, quality education. Founding fathers such as Jefferson favored the establishment of government-funded “free schools” in opposition to the aristocratic system in Europe, where education was limited to the wealthiest layers of society and largely overseen by the Church.
Horace Mann In the nineteenth century these democratic principles were advanced by such reformers as Horace Mann, who wrote in 1848:
“If one class possesses all the wealth and the education, while the residue of society is ignorant and poor, it matters not by what name the relation between them may be called; the latter, in fact and in truth, will be the servile dependents and subjects of the former.”
LJM,
“Because you, for some reason, said, ‘Oh, sorry, this is the white exceptional list.’ And I didn’t know what race had to do with it.”
Look at your list. This is why I mentioned Frederick Douglass. Which you took as an opportunity to inform me that Douglass didn’t go to school, which brings us around, again, as to my querying why he’s not on your list.
Your faulty assumption is that a for-profit model would bring better results faster when (as Elaine – again – so copiously points out) there is no evidence to support the notion that model yields better results. Indeed, the evidence is contrary at worst and mixed at best, LJM.
As for talking points? Don’t rely on them for your arguments and I won’t point them out. Talking points don’t make for substantive argument. They’re a wonderful propaganda tool, but useless as a stick in a gunfight when brought to an argument.
You really wouldn’t like arguing with me in person either.
I’ve made grown lawyers cry.
But I am usually smiling when I do it.
Poor LJM,
When one spouts propaganda they don’t expect to have it so thoroughly exposed and debunked. Gene is correct it was not an honest argument being put forth by LJM, If you look at my comment from 10:18am, it provides a link to an article that shows how the pushers of “educational reform” couch their rhetoric in civil rights language, which you will note was the methodology used by LJM. Methinks he is a troll with a strong financial interest and found the pickings here slim. So it goes.