Protests in Philadelphia also:

Philadelphia Teachers, Students Protest ‘Doomsday’ Budget Cuts

By Jackie Zubrzycki on May 17, 2013 11:50 AM

UPDATED
Staff and students in Philadelphia are protesting a Draconian budget proposal that would leave many schools without arts or music, without secretaries or aides, and without libraries in the 2013-14 school year. Dozens of teachers gathered near a high school this morning to protest, according to NBC Philadelphia, and students in the 138,000-student district are planning a walkout for later today.

More than 1,000 students were expected to walk out of school at noon, said Beth Patel, a spokeswoman for the Philadelphia Student Union. Students plan to meet at the school district and walk to City Hall, where Philadelphia’s city council is hearing testimony on the impact of the proposed budget cuts, she said.

The student union supports but did not plan the walkout, Ms. Patel said. Students coordinated the event over social media and via word of mouth.

The city’s schools are bracing for the “catastrophic” budget laid out by Superintendent William R. Hite Jr. last month. The district is also planning to close more than 20 schools.

Philadelphia mayor Michael Nutter has proposed a tax increase on liquor and cigarettes in order to raise money for public schools, including charters, in the city, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer. The district is also hoping for more state funding to help close its $304 million budget gap.

Students in the district staged a different walkout earlier this month. NBC Philadelphia profiled a few of those student activists.

In other notable news from Philadelphia, the Philadelphia Public School Notebook reports that more than 50 of the district’s 218 schools will have new principals this year, due to a combination of hirings, firings, retirements, and charter conversions.

Philadelphia is not the only city that’s seen large student and teacher protests this year. In Chicago,students refused to take state tests in April in order to protest massive school closings. Last month, in Newark, students walked out of school to protest proposed budget cuts there. And earlier this month in Raleigh, students protested state funding proposals for public schools in North Carolina.

Update:
In Philadelphia, NBC is reporting that more than 2,000 students showed up to protest the budget. The Philadelphia Public School Notebook has a Storify about the protests.

Meanwhile, in Dallas, students at Madison High are protesting a new principal evaluation systemthat could lead to as many as 50 new principals in the district—and the layoffs of some much-loved school leaders, the Dallas News reports. My colleague Alyssa Morones reported on some of thepushback on the superintendent’s plan earlier this week.

Chicago Protests Continue for 3rd Day

From education week:

======================================

Chicago School Closure Protests Head Into Third Day

By Lesli A. Maxwell on May 20, 2013 7:45 AM

After two straight days of organized protests around Chicago, teachers, parents, and students are expected to continue marching today against the city school system’s plans to shutter up to 53 elementary schools at the end of the academic year.

The Chicago Teachers’ Union and other activists helped organize the three days of protests against the closures, which the city board of education is set to vote on this Wednesday. The union has been stridently against any of the slated closures, and last week it filed two federal lawsuits on behalf of parents alleging the district’s plan discriminates against black students and special education students.

That news came on the heels of recommendations from hearing officers—who were hired by the school district—that 13 of the schools on the closure list not be shut down because the receiving schools for those students are no better. Local polls have also found a majority of city residents oppose the plan—which would amount to the single largest shuttering of public schools in a major U.S. city.

And the school district took another big blow over the weekend in a Chicago Tribune story that revealed that district officials may have selectively used data to justify their closure decisions.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel has said that closing the schools is necessary to address a $1 billion deficit.

How to Earn Gigabucks Through Charter Schools

A very interesting article in Alternet on how hedge fund managers and other millionaires and billionaires are making enormously profitable investments in the charter-school bubble.

Here are two paragraphs from a long article:

…David Brain, head of large real-estate investment firm Entertainment Properties Trust, [...] appeared on CNBC in 2012 to tell audiences just how profitable charter school investment has become. He explained, “Well I think it’s a very stable business, very recession-resistant. It’s a very high-demand product.” Asked about the most profitable sector in real estate investment, Brain said, “Well, probably the charter school business. We said it’s our highest growth and most appealing sector right now of the portfolio. It’s the most high in demand, it’s the most recession-resistant. And a great opportunity set with 500 schools starting every year. It’s a two and a half billion dollar opportunity set in rough measure annually.”

Real-estate developers have a particularly interesting stake in the business of charter school development. Yes, they receive the standard huge tax breaks. But they can also help charter schools acquire properties in large cities like Philadelphia, Chicago or New York, where prices are high and there isn’t much room for new buildings. In places where acquiring space can involve fierce bidding wars and eminent domain conflicts, well-off real-estate developers profit from charter school growth since they will help new schools get established for a price. Eminent Properties Trust boasts, “Our investment portfolio of nearly $3 billion includes megaplex movie theatres and adjacent retail, public charter schools, and other destination recreational and specialty investments. This portfolio includes over 160 locations spread across 34 states with over 200 tenants.” When real estate developers acquire these charter school properties, they charge charter schools for rent payments, which are not price-capped.

Here is some more:

Even though most of the details remain hidden, we do know that privatization in education is a lucrative business. In January, a firm called Capital Roundtable – which touts itself as “America’s leading conference company for the middle-market private equity community” – held a Master Class called “Private Equity Investing in For-Profit Education Companies.” The conference website noted, “For-profit education is one of the largest U.S. investment markets, currently topping $1.3 trillion in value.” The event was hosted by Harold Levy, a former chancellor of the New York City Schools System who promoted charter proliferation during his tenure. Now he manages Connecticut investment company Palm Ventures. One of the major focuses of the firm involves funneling individual investments into for-profit charter-school related companies.  As a former finance lawyer for Citigroup, Kaplan and Saloman Brothers, Levy is quite the expert on getting rich this way.

A Hedge Fund Speculator Tells Politicians How to Fix Education

{tongue_in_cheek ON}

Ever hear of a tremendous classroom teacher, with great student teams and classroom activities to his credit, and who has lots of contributions in the field of excellent teaching techniques and strategies, named Whitney Tilson?

Who is so celebrated as a teacher that Tilson has won every teaching award and now gives seminars to teachers on how to have great, active, participatory activities in their classroom, at level X through Z in multiple subjects?

No?

You never heard of the excellent teacher Whitney Tilson, who is Nationally Board Certified in two different subjects, also the Connecticut, California and New York State Teacher of the Year three years running, and coach of the national champion state teams in It’s Academic, MathCounts, soccer and basketball?

No?

{/tongue_in_cheek OFF}

That’s because he’s never taught school, ever.

There is another Whitney Tilson. He’s a hedge fund billionaire or multi-millionaire, and he thinks he knows all about education and can tell politicians how to DEform the public education sector. He claims to have helped Wendy Kopp found Teach For Awhile, and “Democrats” for Education Deform.

With no actual grounding in any classroom, mind you. He has never taught. He has made a ton of money gambling with other people’s money in hedge funds and such.

But he “knows” that most of us teachers, particularly those who are members of unions, are a bunch of lazy, incompetent slobs that skip work and need to be fired. The cheating that goes on surrounding the NCLB testing? it’s only these incompetent teachers doing it, not administrators having erasure parties after the kids go home, according to him.

And he also knows exactly how to “fix” education.

He claims to know that DC public schools are way better off after having Michelle Rhee and Kaya Henderson in charge for 6 years now.

(If you want to see how much progress there has been on the NAEP in Washington DC since the advent of mayoral control and the educational DEformers, just use the search box on my blog, in the upper right-hand corner of this screen, and enter the words “NAEP gap”. You will see lots of data showing that there has been, in fact, NO miracle of the kind that their Excellencies, Whitney Tilson, Wendy Kopp, and Michelle Rhee promised.)

Tilson is a snake, and his creations, DFER and TFA, are dangerous.

Why One Boston Teacher Quit

Diane Ravitch posted a letter from a 15-year teaching veteran who just quit. The person wrote, among other things:

There is not a teacher in America who SUPPORTS this corporate reform. Individually, we all vehemently oppose it; our blood boils because of it; we know it’s toxic. Collectively, however, we DO support it. We support it each & every day, no matter how it contradicts our entire pedagogy. No matter how much it sucks to live life like that…going against the core of who we are, we obey the rules. WHY? WHY ARE WE CONTINUING TO BE EVER-SO-OBEDIENT?

I spent over 2 years desperately seeking that answer to that very question; only to become more & more unable to – & that’s why i resigned.

Mathematical Hubris, or Simply an Author Who Doesn’t Understand Statistics?

My brother, who works in urban planning, called and told me I should read the article “X And The City” in the current issue of Smithsonian Magazine.

I did, and was quite disappointed. Here are my thoughts:

———————-

Hi, <brother>,

Thanks for pointing out to me the article on urban math in the current, May 2013 Smithsonian.

.

I was fully expecting to be quite enlightened and entertained, as I am by most Smithsonian articles, but I have to report that I was quite disappointed by it, and thought that the author was being naive. A lot of the conclusions seemed to me to be contrived or invalid.

.

I felt strongly enough to write this letter to compose my thoughts carefully.

.

The author does write, correctly, that “Cities are particular: You would never mistake a favela in Rio for downtown LA” and that many large cities will be surrounded by what they call ‘slums’ and others call shantytowns — developments put up informally and outside of any bureaucratic or official network of laws or public services of any sort at all, and which often exhibit a lot of negative behaviors and outcomes for their residents as a result.

Some of those bad effects are lack of public schools, no safe drinking water, no urban sanitation system, no safe and corruption-free police system, no public health facilities of any sort, no safe and reliable and dependable transportation system, no reliable electrical or postal delivery system, no zoning or building safety regulations that mean anything, and no real defense of the private property or land-ownership rights for those who have only small amounts of them. (Defense of private property only goes to the very rich and powerful. Matthew, you know.)

.

As the article correctly notes, we have very little dependable data on most of those shanty-town dwellers: neither how many people nor how much they earn or spend in the underground economy. A recent article I read indicates that cash payments are quite common in the US as well; so much of what is written about GDP per capita, anywhere in the world, is guesswork at best.

.

You know the saying about computer systems: Garbage IN, Garbage OUT.

.

Maybe I missed something, but I don’t see anything in this article that would allow any individual or group to use any of this data to do anything that would concretely help anyone in any significant manner.

.

One specific quibble concerns building heights. “…the equation H=134+0.5G where H is the height of the tallest building in meters and G is the Gross Regional Product in billions of dollars”… but previously, the author says the relationship isn’t strong. Well, how strong is it? It’s not clear at all. This page shows very different metrics, and rather different conclusions.  When I look up the so-called ‘Zipf Law’ I find that a number of people think it’s a trivial and unimportant correlation that one will find in almost any distribution of random-sized objects.

.

I did amuse myself by making this log-log graph with standings of population sizes of cities in the US.

This reminds me very much of graphs I used to see at the Naval Research Lab’s gamma-ray astronomy section, where they would have the logs of the energy of various gamma=rays that hit the Compton gamma-ray telescope on the left hand side, and the count of how many such photons on the bottom axis. Only the graph of the line of best fit went up to the right, not down to the right.

.

And those gamma rays were just about random, coming from anywhere in the universe. Weaker ones were much more common than strong ones.

A couple of minutes of work on a table from Wikipedia giving the masses of the largest solar system bodies and I get this graph:

Also apparently works for usage of words in ordinary language. Some are used very very often (like “the”, “is”, “of” and so on) and others hardly ever (“disestablishment”, “cornucopia”, “prolix”). You get a power law distribution. Not so special with cities, then.

.

================

I like the part where one of the people interviewed said “it’s just a coincidence” about correlation angle of sunrise and street numbers….

.

Only 50-60 years ago, New York City had the world’s tallest buildings, and had the record for a long time. Until a few city promoters/corporate idiots in Dubai and Kuala Lumpur and Hong Kong decided they would blow a few billions of dollars in building essentially useless tallest-in-the-world status symbols.

.

That being said, the data on heartbeats of and life expectancies of mammals do apparently fit a nice logarithmic line. That’s real data that anyone can measure — but now that I think about it, animal life expectancies very much depend on conditions, and critters living in zoos or labs are quite different from those in the wild… so I wonder how good even this data is… And are those resting heartbeats, or what?

.

In another case discussed in the article on making a decision whether to drive or take the subway to a Yankees or Mets game in NYC, or just to go home and watch it on TV if the traffic is bad enough as measured by Twitter or GPS on cell phones — I am skeptical, though I know that our smartphones have traffic-reading capabilities that do a fair, but not perfect job of showing you why you are stuck in traffic.  Seems to me that the decision on whether to go to a major-league sporting event is only partly based on traffic, and a lot on other value judgements that are not even considered.

.

Anybody who lets the folks in charge of technology decide for you how to spend an afternoon and evening needs to think again.

John Merrow on the Rhee-Henderson-Caveon Whitewash

John Merrow has a hard-hitting article on the multiple lies uttered by Michelle Rhee and her best friend, Kaya Henderson, and the whitewash they hired Caveon to perform. Here is a quote:

……………….

At the April 18th hearing Chairman Catania alluded to what he called Caveon’s ‘positive’ role in helping expose the Atlanta cheating.  That is an overstatement, to put it mildly. Prior to its work for DCPS, Caveon had been hired by the (so-called) “Blue Ribbon Committee” established to look into allegations of cheating in Atlanta.  Caveon looked–and reported finding nothing wrong in what turned out to be the epicenter of cheating by adults on standardized tests. [8] Dr. Fremer told me that while he ‘knew’ there was widespread cheating going on, that was not mentioned in his final report. “We did not try to find out who was cheating,” he said.  “Our purpose was to rank order the schools beginning with those with the most obvious problems (of unbelievably dramatic score increases), in order to make the task of investigating more manageable.”   In other words, Caveon produced a list!

Dr. Fremer admitted that he knew some Atlanta teachers were lying to him, but he said his hands were tied because he didn’t have subpoena power.

Georgia’s investigators are contemptuous of Caveon’s efforts, labelling it a ‘so-called investigation.’  Richard Hyde, one of the three leaders of the investigation, told me that “either by coincidence or design, it was certain to fail.”  Mr. Hyde denied that Caveon needed subpoena power because its investigators were representing a governmental agency, and under Georgia law it is a felony to lie to someone representing the government.  What’s more, Mr. Hyde said, Caveon had a fundamental conflict of interest–it was investigating its employer, at least indirectly, because the “Blue Ribbon Commission” (which Mr. Hyde dismisses as “The Whitewash Commission”) included a deputy superintendent of schools.

Robert Wilson, another leader of the Georgia investigation, is even blunter. Of course Caveon didn’t find cheating because “Caveon couldn’t find its own ass with either hand,” he scoffed.  Why anyone would hire Caveon was, he said, beyond him–unless they didn’t want to find out anything.

……………

3. Just how weak was Mr. Willoughby’s effort?  As we reported on Frontline in January, the Inspector General’s investigation is remarkable for what it did not investigate. He chose not to investigate 2008, the year with the most erasures. He chose not to investigate Aiton, the school Dr. Sanford had singled out for special attention because of its high wrong to right erasures. He did not examine the test answer sheets or perform an electronic analysis. And he did not investigate J.O Wilson – a school with excessive WTR erasures in 100% of its classrooms – simply because Chancellor Henderson had assured him that it was a good school.

Although more than half of DC’s schools had been implicated, he focused only on Noyes Education Campus, the school that USA Today had made the centerpiece of its investigation. Over the course of the next 17 months, his team interviewed just 60 administrators, teachers, parents and teachers, all from Noyes Education Campus. (Atlanta investigators interviewed over 2,000 people and reviewed 800,000 documents). Rather than seek outside experts (as Atlanta investigators had), he relied heavily on information from Caveon, which had been, of course, in the employ of DCPS. He did not ask to perform erasure analysis but relied on interviews–sometimes conducted over the phone.

Without the power to put people under oath, he told City Council member McDuffie in February that he just asked them if they had cheated. If they said they hadn’t, that was the end of it, because, he explained, he “wasn’t conducting a fishing expedition.” Test monitors sent by the central office to patrol Noyes for the 2010 test told Mr. Willoughby that they had been barred from entering classrooms. School officials denied that charge–and Mr. Willoughby believed them, not the monitors.

Citations for last article, on history of educational insanity

See LAST CALL on the insane ‘perfect storm’ of misguided movements to ban alcoholic beverages, which was victorious in 1919 and quietly repealed in 1932.

See WAR AGAINST THE WEAK on the eugenics movement, and its connection to wealthy racist ‘philanthropists’; there are any number of examples where the foolish, racist rantings of Henry Ford would get translated into German and reprinted in the Nazi party propaganda rags, nearly verbatim, justifying Hitler’s vile thoughts and speeches.

Read Lerone Bennett and Ashley Montagu and Steven Jay Gould on the insanity that wedded early, racist, mathematicalistic testing advocates to those same benighted policies.

I’m not making this stuff up.

But it reminds me more than a little of the connections between ALEC, the Koch and Walton families, and how they have bought off, or already own, almost all of the media in the US, from the right-wing mouth-frothers at Faux News all the way to PBS and WaPo, and of course StudentsFirst and the rest of that bunch of astro-turf organizations fighting against pensions, labor rights, and who have in fact been making things worse in all of the cities where there agenda has come to power.

Billionaires, Public Insanity, and Racism: there is in fact a connection, going back over 100 years

It occurs to me that the current wave of supposedly “data-driven” educational leadership is very much reminiscent of Taylorism and the misuse and abuse of early IQ tests, both just about a century ago.
Taylor used to stand around factories, famously taking notes that he timed with his stopwatch (the only measurement tool he had, frankly) as he watched the workers. He would then write up a plan for management to speed up the workers and make more money and would charge enormous sums for it. He later admitted that he made it all up when he was writing his recommendations — but his philosophy made life unbelievably HELLish, to the great profits of the multi-millionaire corporate chieftains (the ones we are supposed to worship as philanthropists today: Mellon, Carnegie, and so on.

(I use the word “Hellish” advisedly. Read anywhere about what working conditions were inside industrial enterprises 100 years ago — it was either a boiling, or freezing, or poisonous, or extremely dangerous inferno, and if you were one of the workers, any tiny existing benefits were constantly being taken away and workers were forced to speed up — with no medical or disability insurance for those injured or killed or sickened…)

The early IQ tests were the first attempt by Galton and his followers to “prove” that White Anglo-Saxon or German Protestants were smarter than everyone else on the planet, and generally superior in every way. BTW, it took a lot of trial and error to find test items that would produce that result with any reliability: Binet and other early IQ test writers kept finding that on many questions or measurements, the kids that they “knew” were inferior, would get better results. That, of course, would not do, so those items were thrown out, systematically, until they found entire batteries of questions which would produce what they felt were the “correct” results. Those results included the suprising findings by Yerkes et al, when testing US Army draftees during 1917-1919, that recent immigrants of Jewish origin were ‘mentally inferior’ to native-born WASPs … All of which was used as fuel for the Eugenics movement and the racist anti-Chinese, anti-Black, and anti-Jewish — or should I just say, utterly racist — immigration quota laws passed by Congrress back then, just after another piece of mass insanity (Prohibition) was enacted, with similar perverse results.

 
And, just as the current round of educational insanity is being funded by the uber-rich, all of those racist immigration quotas, forced sterilizations which gave Adolf Hitler and his party all the justification he needed to pass his racist Aryan laws and begin a racist, murderous world war. He could say, and did say, in truth (for once, because he generally lied all the time), that he was just using the ideas of the very best and whitest and richest and most powerful people in the US, who agreed with him on the need to keep down the swarthy types and labor organizers and leftists of any persuasion.
You can read about this in many places. I’ll give you a few citations but the butter is burning on the stove.

Weekly Roundup of Resistance to Stupid Corporate Testing

This is from Robert Schaeffer of FairTest:

====================================

Every week seems to set a new record for coverage of the rapidly expanding national movement against high-stakes testing overkill.  In addition to stories about resistance to standardized exams from a dozen states, many excellent commentaries were published in the past few days.

Remember that back issues of these updates are online at http://fairtest.org/news – click on the red button at the top of the page to Donate to support FairTest’s work making testing reform news and distributing it.

Overuse of High-Stakes Tests Feeds Cheating Explosion — USA Today editorial response by FairTest
http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2013/04/22/standardized-tests-cheating–editorials-debates/2104923/

High-Stakes Testing Exposed . . . Again
http://www.beyondchron.org/news/index.php?itemid=11240#more

Education “Reform” Missing Another “R” — Results
http://www.jsonline.com/news/education/education-reform-missing-another-r-word-results-rf9hgtc-202854471.html

How Do You Evaluate Teachers Who Change Lives? (not by “value-added” test scores)
http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2013/04/17/28cella.h32.html

New York Parents: My Kids Not Taking Another Standardized Test
http://news.yahoo.com/york-parents-kid-not-taking-another-standardized-test-025008171.html
Parents Outraged by Common Core Testing
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/19/education/common-core-testing-spurs-outrage-and-protest-among-parents.html

Error by Testing Giant Pearson Shuts 2,700 NYC Students Out of Gifted-and-Talented Classes
http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/exam-error-shuts-2-700-gifted-talented-programs-article-1.1322573

Chicago Students Plan Boycott of State Test
http://www.wbez.org/news/students-want-boycott-state-test-106735

In Bid to Pare Exams, Texas Targets Pearson
http://www.texastribune.org/2013/04/21/taking-aim-testing-firm-quest-pare-state-exams/
State Tests Impede Learning
http://www.statesman.com/news/news/opinion/westerlund-state-tests-impede-learning/nXQR3/
Crash Test: A History of Texas Testing and the Growing Resistance
http://www.texasmonthly.com/story/history-of-standardized-testing-in-texas

Portland Students Protest High-Stakes Testing
http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2013/04/cleveland_high_school_students.html

Ohio School Administrators Under Investigation in Another Cheating Scandal
http://www.takepart.com/article/2013/04/17/ohio-new-school-cheating-scandal

Testing Regime Fails Georgia Students
http://onlineathens.com/opinion/2013-04-20/blackmon-testing-regimen-failing-georgia-students

Only Bubble-Headed Zombies Rely on Standardized Testing in North Carolina
http://www.newsobserver.com/2013/04/13/2821145/our-bubble-headed-zombie-creating.html

Testing time: Anxious Kids. Angry Parents. Approaching Revolution
http://www.ajc.com/weblogs/get-schooled/2013/apr/20/testing-time-anxious-kids-angry-parents/

Teaching to Test Takes Away From Education
http://www.seminolechronicle.com/vnews/display.v/ART/516ffd6a3ad3b

School Uses Bribes and Threats to Make Students Take Tests
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/04/22/school-warns-students-no-test-no-sports/

Standardized Testing: The Great Deception
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-rhonda-joy-edwards-vansant/standardized-testing-the-_1_b_3118062.html

Testing Addiction is Real School Scandal
http://www.toledoblade.com/Keith-Burris/2013/04/21/The-real-school-scandal-is-our-testing-addiction.html

How High-Stakes Testing Transformed My Job From Great to Infuriating
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/04/21/teacher-how-my-job-went-from-great-to-infuriating/

The First Race to the Top
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/21/opinion/sunday/the-first-testing-race-to-the-top.html

Bob Schaeffer, Public Education Director
FairTest: National Center for Fair & Open Testing
ph-   (239) 395-6773    fax-  (239) 395-6779
cell-  (239) 699-0468
web- http://www.fairtest.org