Obama Gets an 'F' on Education Policy

For all of the rhetoric about change and a new generation of leadership, the Democrats continue to promote the same Bush bromide of the past eight years when it comes to education.

The meme of higher teacher pay and more accountability is a prescription that has failed for over twenty years and failed miserably. But the evidence is always ignored because the political payoff is in pounding the same old drum.

The public loves tough guy talk. Politicians can never be too tough especially when it comes to Muslims and children. Anything goes.

Teachers haven't been underpaid for years. Their combination of salary, benefits, time off, and pensions are solidly middle-class and considerable. The old time poor mouth rhetoric has never changed though and tax payers who are much poorer for the Bush ride now resent and can no longer afford higher taxes to support teacher lifestyles no one else is accustomed to anymore.

Accountability is Washington special interest code for business as usual. This means the funneling of millions of dollars into the coffers of standardized testing pirates and the theft of learning opportunities for children.

Bill Richardson was the lone Democratic candidate that made sense about education and sadly Obama chooses to listen to the hucksters. This means more years of close-minded and corrupt education practice. Parents and urban teachers will continue to be America's education whipping boys until a true reform agenda emerges.

Democrats are better than this policy and they need to reassess this stuff before November. What is currently advocated is unacceptable.

The party that gets my vote will need a better education grade than this.

Can a Marijuana Law Ruling Save Public Education?

There are glimmers of hope in America. I just discovered one more intelligent judge who hasn't been marginalized by the Bush regime. Judge Jeremy Fogel of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California may be instrumental in restoring the Republic and giving educators a powerful precedent for overthrowing the repressive NCLB federal legislation and Draconian administration.

In a story called, Federal Court: U.S. Can’t Subvert California’s Medical Marijuana Laws we learn:

In a first-of-its-kind ruling, a federal court today held that the U.S. Constitution bars deliberate subversion by the federal government of state medical marijuana laws.

“Utilizing selective arrests and prosecutions, the federal government has sought to sabotage California’s reasoned approach to medical marijuana use,” said Graham Boyd, Director of the ACLU Drug Law Reform Project. “For the first time, a court has recognized that a calculated plan by the federal government to undercut state medical marijuana laws is patently unconstitutional. Today’s decision forecasts an end to any organized federal effort to sabotage state medical marijuana laws.”

While previous high-profile cases affirmed the federal government’s power to enforce federal drug laws against individual medical marijuana patients and providers on a case-by-case basis, today’s ruling clearly recognizes that a calculated pattern of federal enforcement can render state medical marijuana laws effectively inoperable, which would violate the Tenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

“It is obvious to anyone paying attention that federal officials have gone to great lengths to sabotage state efforts to allow for appropriate medical marijuana use,” said Boyd. “The court made clear that this deliberate interference - once proved - would be unequivocally unconstitutional.”

It takes no imagination to apply this very same logic the the Department of Education's ruthless policies toward Boards of Education's rights to regulate and administer education locally.

Let the lawsuits begin.

When Times Get Tough, The Tough Get Weird

The title of this entry is a Dr. Hunter S. Thompson quote but it applies to an article in today's Courant called, High School Doesn't Have To Take Four Years by Lewis M. Andrews.

The argument Andrews makes is based on Leon Botstein's argument:

Botstein's original case for early graduation was based on academic and social concerns, not fiscal issues. With a rigid structure inherited from the 1830s, he argued that the "traditional high school is an out-of-date strategy and system" that accommodates neither fast nor slow learners, leads to boredom and even delinquency, ignores the relative physiological maturity of modern adolescents and fails to take advantage of new learning technologies.

But today we can add to Botstein's list of reasons the tax savings that could flow from providing high school students with incentives to voluntarily graduate early. Consider:

With per-pupil costs for high school ranging from a low of $9,000 in distressed cities like Bridgeport to nearly $18,000 in wealthier suburbs, the Yankee Institute did a study in 2007 ("Free College for High School Students," available at www.yankeeinstitute.org) showing how much each Connecticut town could save by paying its students to graduate in three years.

Using the latest available census and per-pupil expenditure data from the Connecticut Department of Education, the Institute found that if just 25 percent of all the state's secondary students received a full, two-year community college scholarship (or $5,000 cash equivalent) for finishing high school early, more than $58 million would be left over annually to reduce property taxes.

Like most other states, Connecticut sets high school graduation requirements in terms of courses met, not years attended, and towns as diverse as Middletown, West Hartford and Westport already have written policies on early graduation, although none yet offer an incentive.

-snip-

Unfortunately, the political price for enacting most dual-enrollment programs has been the creation of a redundant payment system. Municipalities still include money in their high school budgets to pay for the places of students who have skipped their senior year and gone to college with the funding provided by taxpayers. For property taxpayers to benefit, the school budget must reflect the reduced cost when a student has either graduated early or, if still technically enrolled in high school while taking a full college course load, is no longer receiving district services. A school will not realize any saving until a large enough number of students skip senior year to allow for a reduction in classes.

True, some school districts might initially resist rewarding early graduation because of the state's Education Cost Sharing program, which supplements education budgets in distressed cities on a per student basis. The fear would be that graduating a substantial numbers of students early could mean a loss of revenue from the state. Prosperous towns get little ECS money, but might worry about damaging popular athletic programs, if some students left after three years.

In fact, Connecticut education statutes give school boards considerable flexibility in offering credit for outside learning. A senior could theoretically move on to the first year of college while remaining technically enrolled in high school at no instructional cost and even participate in sports programs — much the way home-schooled students are currently entitled to participate.

While the national education debate focuses on such contentious issues as vouchers and national testing standards, a simple policy of incentivizing Connecticut high school students to effectively graduate early could expand educational opportunity, combat classroom boredom and help the most disadvantaged afford at least two years of college — all the while providing tax relief to hard-pressed homeowners.

What I find fascinating about almost all the education arguments that are heatedly discussed in the public forums of the Main Stream Media is that the discussions virtually never involve the argument that something might be good for the students except as a co-incidental by-product of a let's save money argument.

Here, the argument that the "traditional high school is an out-of-date strategy and system" that accommodates neither fast nor slow learners, leads to boredom and even delinquency, ignores the relative physiological maturity of modern adolescents and fails to take advantage of new learning technologies." is entirely accurate yet it is not until real estate prices in wealthy suburbs are threatened that anyone from the Department of Education on down uses it.

What's important is that high schools are out-moded but largely because of government policies that treat children like prisoners of war in a battle between neo-con iron-fist tactics and sensible and humane education theory.

A front page story in the same issue of the Courant examines the code of silence among the medical profession when it comes to charges of pedophilia against a professional peer. Entitled Reardon Victim Goes Public, Blasts St. Francis Hospital it describes the nod-and-wink collusion:

There are much higher stakes than money here — like truth, accountability and healing. That's why I'm handing in my John Doe card today. Too much of the money, unfortunately, goes to the lawyers.

"This," one of them told me, testily, referring to their legal assault on St. Francis, "does not concern you."

What a coincidence. St. Francis Hospital has been taking the same dismissive tone for years. I know what the lawyer meant; I'm not the one who filed the sworn statement. But my mother, now 75, may well be the lawyers' winning Powerball number because her testimony could elevate the 100 or so lawsuits already filed against the hospital into a monster payout.

Going public with my story, I hope, will mean substantially more than money for all the victims ignored or discredited for so many years — all those afraid to speak up or whose stories were rejected, sadly, by parents too horrified and shamed to admit they delivered their child to a pedophile.

The deluge of child pornography discovered last year behind a false wall in the basement of Reardon's former home on Griswold Drive in West Hartford isn't the only evidence to corroborate the horrors of the past four decades. Among the hidden reels of film and boxes of slides, West Hartford police also discovered a manila envelope, in a brown cardboard box, containing incriminating documents that, until a month ago, I did not know existed.

My name is on those documents.

They include: the sworn complaint filed by my mother, Marcia Hunt of Wethersfield, detailing the afternoon Reardon photographed me and another boy; a formal letter to Reardon from Joseph S. Sadowski, then a St. Francis neurosurgeon and chairman of the Hartford County Medical Association's Ethics and Deportment Committee, who handled the complaint; an undated "memorandum" from Sadowski summarizing the complaint in greater detail; Reardon's 15-page rebuttal; and, finally, a terse statement from my mother's attorney, the renowned Hartford criminal lawyer James N. Egan, saying criminal charges would not be filed.

A boy's word against a prominent physician would have had no chance in court in 1970. Sadowski, who died in 2001, assured my mother Reardon would be stopped. My mother trusted Sadowski. He was her doctor, a respected neurosurgeon who had operated on her back recently. She told him what happened to me as she sat in his office adjacent to the hospital at 1000 Asylum Ave. during a follow-up visit after her surgery. He's the one who suggested she file a complaint with the ethics committee.

Sadowski was a prominent, powerful physician at the hospital and within the Hartford medical community. My mother believed she had taken the ultimate action — until 1979, the medical association was the top agency governing physicians.

Only in 1993, after multiple complaints against Reardon prompted state health department hearings, did we realize the hospital's chief of endocrinology and growth-study mastermind had gone unchecked for decades.

We were devastated. But without the documentation of our complaint, what could we do? How do you avoid losing when you know you can't win?

Professional educators in this country are in a similar predicament today. Complaints about NCLB are largely ignored because too many in the education profession play the collusion game with the demented but all-powerful Bush administration.

Our high school students and taxpayers are being mis-served but money isn't why. It is this country's children who bear the brunt of this society's conditioned reflex to distrust the schools by blaming them for all of society's ills.

Schools need to change, yes... a thousand times yes but because it is right, because the system is dysfunctional as nothing more than a test dispenser, because our children are being intellectually and psychologically maimed by it.

Our political system is broken when today, just as years ago with the medical profession, educators can ignore good practice and continue to cover up the cancer that is NCLB because it's easy... no one will know... it will never happen again... it will go away on its own...

When I think about wasted money I think about the profession I care about turning its back on the facts, on the children, and on their own integrity.

Public Math, Private Math

Here's yet another study of the differences between public school results as opposed to private school results in math scores. The article is called, Public schools as good as private schools in raising math scores, study says

Students in public schools learn as much or more math between kindergarten and fifth grade as similar students in private schools, according to a new University of Illinois study of multi-year, longitudinal data on nearly 10,000 students.

The results of the study appear in the May issue of the influential education journal Phi Delta Kappan.

“These data provide strong, longitudinal evidence that public schools are at least as effective as private schools in boosting student achievement,” according to the authors, education professor Christopher Lubienski, doctoral student Corinna Crane and education professor Sarah Theule Lubienski.

The new study is the first published study to show that public schools are at least as effective as private schools at promoting student learning over time, they say.

Combined with other, yet-unpublished studies of the same data, which produced similar findings, “we think this effectively ends the debate about whether private schools are more effective than publics,” said Christopher Lubienski, whose research has dealt with all aspects of alternative education.

This is important, he said, because many current reforms, such as No Child Left Behind, charter schools and vouchers for private schools, are based on that assumption.

The debate essentially began three years ago with the publication in Phi Delta Kappan of a previous study by the Lubienskis, which challenged the then-common wisdom – supported by well-regarded but dated research – that private schools were superior.

In that 2005 study, they found that public school students tested higher in math than their private school peers from similar social and economic backgrounds.

In another, more-extensive study in early 2006, they built on those findings, and also raised similar questions about charter schools.

Both studies were based on fourth- and eighth-grade test data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).

The conclusions of the husband-and-wife team seemed “crazy radical” at the time, Sarah Lubienski said, and generated significant controversy. They were supported, however, later in 2006, with similar findings in U.S. Department of Education studies comparing public schools with privates and with charters, which looked at NAEP test data on both math and reading.

(Unlike literacy, math is viewed as being less dependent on a student’s home environment and more an indication of a school’s effectiveness, Sarah Lubienski said.)

Critics of these previous studies, however, have cited the lack of longitudinal data showing the possible effect over time of different types of schooling. The studies of NAEP data were only snapshots, they said, showing student achievement at a single point in time. The studies did not address the possibility that some students may have entered private school at a lower level of achievement.

The new study was designed, in part, to address that issue, the authors say in their PDK article.

The data for the new study came from the database produced by the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten Class of 1998-99 (or ECLS-K), administered by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), part of the U.S. Department of Education.

The ECLS-K database includes both student achievement and comprehensive background information drawn from a nationally representative sample of more than 21,000 students, starting with their entry into kindergarten in the fall of 1998.

The most recent data available for the U. of I. study was gathered in 2004, in the spring of the students’ fifth-grade year. The sample used for the study included 9,791 students in 1,531 schools (1,273 public, 140 Catholic and 118 other private schools).

To better determine the effects of attending different types of schools, the sample included only students who had stayed in the same type of school – though not necessarily the same school – throughout the years covered.

As in the previous studies, the researchers used a statistical technique known as hierarchical linear modeling to control for demographic differences between students, as well as schools. Among the demographic variables included in looking at students were measures of socioeconomic status; race and ethnicity; gender; disability; and whether the child spoke a language other than English at home.

Among the variables included in looking at schools was the average socioeconomic level of its students, its racial or ethnic composition, and its location (urban or rural).

The NAEP data had included similar information, but its quality and controls on its collection were not as strong as for ECLS-K, according to Sarah Lubienski, who studies math education and specializes in statistical research. “It’s one reason this study feels more definitive than the NAEP studies,” she said.

After controlling for demographic differences among students and schools, the researchers’ found that public school students began kindergarten with math scores roughly equal to those of their Catholic school peers. By fifth grade, however, they had made significantly greater gains, equal to almost an extra half year of schooling.

The American public has yet to be told that even conservatives who had previously advocated for school vouchers are now admitting that it is an exteremely bad idea. And although NCLB continues its reign of intellectual deprivation of American public schools it is only because of the continuing and unrelenting masochist policies of the Bush administration led by education dominatrix , Margaret Spellings.

Until the current administration is voted out of office into the jailcells they more rightfully deserve the pox of NCLB will continue to stain the reputation of public schools that in study after comprehensive study demonstrate competent, superior results before Bush denigrated their good name.

Race as a Dodge

The Sacramento Bee uncovered an interesting new (or heretofore undiscovered) way that schools are making an end run around NCLB requirements. Of course there is no honor in any of this because the schools are playing the NCLB game. After all, they aren't conscientiously objecting to NCLB, they just aren't passing the metric under certain data alignments like, say, is a student black or white?

This is just another example of how the Feds are compromising the integrity of the system and corrupting the profession in addition to making a mockery of racial background.

From, Sacbee.com - Schools reclassify students, pass test under federal law by Laurel Rosenhall and Phillip Reese:

Will C. Wood Middle School faced a vexing situation when last year's test results came out in August. Most students had met the mark set by No Child Left Behind. But African American students' math scores fell far short of it, bringing the school into failing status in the eyes of the federal law.

One hundred students were categorized as black when they took the test last spring. But if the school had fewer than 100 students in that group, their low scores wouldn't count. So Principal Jim Wong reviewed the files of all the students classified as African American on the test, he said, and found that four of them had indicated no race or mixed race on their enrollment paperwork. Wong sent his staff to talk to the four families to ask permission to put the kids in a different racial group.

"You get a kid that's half black, half white. What are you going to put him down as?" Wong said. "If one kid makes the difference and I can go white, that gets me out of trouble."

Over the past two years, 80 California schools got "out of trouble" with No Child Left Behind after changing the way they classify their students, a Bee analysis has found. The changes nudged their status from failing to passing under the federal law.

The state allows school officials to comb through test results every August, changing students' demographic information to correct mistakes that can happen, for example, when clerks register new students or when districts swap student files.

Thousands of schools make demographic corrections, and the majority have no bearing on their No Child Left Behind status. But the correction process may allow some schools to escape the scrutiny intended by No Child Left Behind, The Bee found.

Read the rest of the article for graphics and extended analysis - definitely worth a read.

The End of the Republic? Bush's NCLB Poison Pill

A recent entry in the Educational Justice blog caught my attention. I responded with this comment.

"Another reason to revamp the accountability system is the new testing program that will be launched in high schools in the 2011-12 school year. Beginning with ninth-graders that year, students will be required to take a dozen end-of-course exams through high school and get a passing score in each subject area to earn a diploma."

This has me concerned. Connecticut's new Dept of Education administration is recommending this identical thing. It is as if the states no longer exist in a republic in which each state gets to decide what's best for that population.

The horrifying thing about this additional testing is that by 2011, NCLB is supposed to eliminate failing schools and if it doesn't then high-stakes, high-stress testing is a failure. Yet, it looks as though the Bush administration's plan is to create 50 state NCLB's to carry on the nightmare.

Can we get a head count of states plagiarizing each others future plans? there may be an unconstitutional intrusion of federal tyranny at work in the states educational responsibilities. Where's these 2011 testing plans coming from?

Every indication is that the Bush administration is preparing a surprise for America after they leave office and that is the perpetuation of their insipid educational pogroms by migrating their legislation to all 50 states. This is a wholesale subversion of the principles of the republic, the brazen theft of states rights, and the denial of the next democratically elected administration to administer their desired education policies and directives. State legislatures may not even be aware of the federal high-jacking of their jurisdiction.

This collusion of dictating testing policies in each state may have criminal implications if bribery or corruption is involved. At face value, the co-incidental similarities are highly suspicious.

The UnTold Neil Bush Story: Preface

A few months ago I had bookmarked an Alternet article that repeated a question about Neil Bush's education company, Ignite, Inc. who distribute something called Curriculum on Wheels (COW). I was doing some house-cleaning of my bookmarks a few days ago and reread the article and decided to update it with my observations.

I never expected what looked to be yet another run-of-the-mill Bush family scam to be so vile or so mysteriously obfuscated by both the journalists on the right and the left. Like a greased pig, the untold story continues to slip its way into oblivion.

This education story involves concubines, cover-ups, threats to national security, international intrigue, a press corp more interested in smoke than fire, a bait-and-switch product, non-existent oversight, the subliminal subversion of the Constitution, and the central character is qualified to be little more than a whistling hollywood second-banana in a buddy western.

Because of the volume of research this story requires, this post as well as follow-up postings will be re-edited over the next few days. Unlike most journalists who have tried to connect the dots, I am not following the money. I am following the slime trail.

Instead of spending a lot of time admonishing you about the excesses of the Bush family or Neil in particular, I just want to examine the public record and asked some unasked questions that I believe weave a quite different story than you will find anywhere else.

Neil's Divorce

The first unusual fact that everyone who examines Neil's public record will discover involves the unusual behavior his former wife testified to in relation to the divorce proceeding. Neil's household behavior had become so bizarre that his wife ripped some hair off his head to be tested for drugs. A second time she pocketed a wisp of hair from a stylist's studio for the same reason.

Neil Bush's lawyer claimed the former wife was practicing "voodoo". Let's assume Bush's wife of twenty plus years, a former schoolteacher and mother of his children was not walking around with a little Neil voodoo doll with pins in it.

Let's assume, she really did want to have the hair tested because of the behavior she was witnessing. If the drug were alcohol abuse, a hair sample would be unnecessary because according to this and many other sites here's what she was worried about:

What type of drugs can be detected in a standard hair test?

Cocaine (Cocaine & Benzoylecgonine), Marijuana, Opiates (Codeine, Morphine & 6-Monacteyl Morphine), Methamphetamine (Methamphetamine/Amphetamine & Ecstasy), and Phencyclidine (PCP). These five drug classes are mandated for testing by the Federal Government.

Oh. That's an interesting concern, don't you think? Maybe she knows something the rest of us should know.

But let's assume Neil is innocent of illegal drug use. What could explain the behavior? Another disturbing clue is found in the divorce public record.

Neil Bush's trips to the Arab Republic, Asia, and the Pacific might hardly be considered a series of boring hotel stays. That means that he would be writing home about the stinking mint that was left on his pillow.

But that's not at all Neil's experience. No, Neil testified that on at least two occasions, a woman knocked on his door and asked to have sex. And , not wanting to offend the locals, Neil obliged.

Now, everyone who covered this part of the story leaves it at that and wags a finger. But my concern -cough- goes a little deeper. How does an unidentified woman walk past the Secret Service and knock on Neil's door for a nooner unless the woman is pre-screened as a concubine assigned to the administration?

I mean, if Clinton sharing a cigar with Monica Lewinski was a security threat, what the hell would you call this? And how -pardon the pun- widespread is this practice? Is it limited to the Bush Bros? Chaney? Does a Unik visit Condolezza as an ice breaker while visiting?

But let's finish the lap. If Elliot Spitzer's infidelity is all over the internet, has the administration been compromised? And which one? Does Osama Bin Laden relax on Friday nights by having a beer party featuring stag films of the American government officials who preach but practice abroad?

And finally, was Bush's erratic behavior the results of willfully taking drugs or being drugged? And what are those conversations like in the Gulf and China - small talk or state secrets?

Postscript to the preface:

Oh, actually there is one more detail that no one talks about. Only the Bush administration and their hosts know who these visitors were, male or female, child or adult, predisposed to the exotic or missionaries.

The origin of Ignite, Inc. was consummated in this stew of inbred, power broking hubris.

Next: Neil Bush - Igniting Investigation

Why Honest, Independent Boards of Education Matter

In my forty years of political awareness I have never read a more bizarre or shocking story about the administration of schools. It is indescribable.

From An "F" for Effort by Sarah Fenske, New Times, Phoenix:

Only in Arizona, kids.

For decades, school districts like Maricopa County's have been virtual dictatorships. Superintendents like Dowling are elected, often with little opposition, and then answer to no one: They're literally a one-person governing board. That's the way the law is written, and past legislative efforts to change it have failed. No wonder Dowling thought she could get away with hiring virtually her entire family — and, more importantly, running the district into the ground, even while smiling big for the cameras.

So State Representative Mark Anderson, a Mesa Republican, introduced a bill earlier this year to mandate that school boards, whether elected or appointed, be set up to oversee county superintendents. Great idea, except Dowling managed to squash it. The word at the Capitol is that Dowling practically camped out in the hallways for six weeks, campaigning against the bill. (I can confirm that she's also enlisted her own registered lobbyist and several district employees to blitz state lawmakers with e-mailed objections.)

Apparently, it wasn't enough that she screwed up the county school district, thereby dooming thousands of kids to lousy educations. Dowling has the chutzpah to lobby the state from preventing similar mismanagement in the future.

You have to wonder: Why is anyone giving this woman the time of day?

It's been clear for some time that Sandra Dowling had absolutely no business running a school district — much less doing it without accountability for 17 years. Look at her track record: a big budget deficit, a history of horrific test scores, and enough evidence of personal corruption to get her indicted.

But don't take my word for it. Read the report from the experts brought in to run the schools after Dowling's indictment. That three-person board of receivers, appointed by Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Kenneth Fields earlier this year, has the unenviable task of straightening out the district's finances and getting education on track. (Click to view their February and May reports.)

Nancy Haas, an education professor at Arizona State University, has been on the receiving board since November. More than 10 years ago, Haas spent her sabbatical at one of Dowling's schools. She witnessed enough problems to become one of the district's few outspoken critics during Dowling's pre-indictment heyday.

But even Haas is getting an education these days.

"I had knowledge at the high level of critical issues that were working against providing good educational services to the students," she says. She still wasn't prepared for the rat's nest that she and her fellow receivers have found: "Even I am surprised at how bad it is."

Considering John McCain's presidential bid, one can't help but wonder how this could be going on under his nose without comment.

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