Follow the Money

The State Capitol is abuzz with stories about money.  Lots of money.  This article by Don Stacom of the Courant states,

The $30 million is relatively small change in a state that gives more than $2.7 billion a year to towns and cities. But for many small towns, it's a big share of their state aid. They don't get the hundreds of millions in school aid and social services grants that go to big and mid-sized cities, and road maintenance is one of their biggest expenses.

"It's a big part of a small town's budget," Kent First Selectman Bruce Adams said Monday. "We're getting $135,000 — for a small town, that's a decent sum."

WOW!  Thirty million dollars to repair roads.  But what's that other number? HUNDREDS of MILLIONS in school aid and social services grants!  Hundreds of millions.  That's a serious chunk of change for a small number of CT large cities.

One would think AFTER DECADES of this kind of spending - BILLIONS of tax dollars that we could safely say schools in urban CT areas are well-funded.  I guess not.

In a different article by Christopher Keating we find that the burbs and small towns are so broke that Mayors Asking for a Regional Sales Tax.

Similar retail tax plans have failed in the past when the proposals would have given the communities with the malls all of the money. Under the latest plan, the money would be shared by multiple communities through the regional planning organizations. In Hartford, that would be the Capitol Region Council of Governments, which has 29 towns as members.

During a public hearing Monday, the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities and mayors pushed the concept in front of the legislature's tax-writing finance committee. Lobbyist Gian-Carl Casa said the towns need new solutions and new approaches at a time when municipalities can no longer rely on the cash-strapped state to give them additional aid. Nationally, 23 states allow cities and towns to levy sales taxes, and Connecticut's towns need the same authority, he said.

"They need the tools to do it themselves," Casa said. "We think its time has come."

With the state's budget woes expected to increase in the 2012 fiscal year, Casa said the state needs to try new ideas that would change the Land of Steady Habits.

"The need for revenue diversity is acute," Casa said. "What you're hearing from local officials is really a cry for help."

But House Republican leader Lawrence Cafero of Norwalk rejected the idea, saying that the state and towns should be thinking about cutting spending before raising revenue. One idea would be to install a 5 percent statewide sales tax and then allow the 1 percent municipal tax to keep the overall rate at the current 6 percent.

"It's more taxes to the general public," Cafero said of the proposal. "Everything is an add-on in this place. We don't need extra taxes now. I want to hear them talking about cutting spending."

In the same way, CBIA — the Connecticut Business and Industry Association — is lobbying against the bill at the state Capitol.

"You're creating numerous new jurisdictions" for sales taxes, said Eric George, a CBIA lobbyist. "Connecticut is a difficult state to do business in now. This is not going to help. This just isn't the right answer. The first thing you need to do is create more efficiencies."

Mayors and first selectmen throughout the state, however, say they have been cutting spending for years to minimize local property tax increases. Some mayors have testified that they have cut more from their budgets — as a percentage — than the legislature has cut from the state budget in Hartford.

Again, what we're hearing is more taxes that will do nothing to benefit Region 19.  No, this is throwing more HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS at the same places who've already squandered BILLIONS.

Oh, well - CT politics.  Right?  Right.

And I've already documented how corrupt the federal funding of schooling is here and here.  The politicians at the State Department of Education know it's a scam but its one that pays very well.

To top it off, United Technologies let the cat out of the bag by declaring the State is too expensive to do business in. In an article called, UTC Chief Financial Officer: Connecticut Too Expensive To Do Work, Eric Gershon of the Courant reported,

Connecticut's biggest private employer is determined to do more of its work outside its home state and other "high-cost" locations, top executives said Friday at an investors' conference in New York.

"Anyplace outside of Connecticut is low-cost," United Technologies Corp.'s chief financial officer, Gregory Hayes, told Wall Street investment analysts — paraphrasing previous remarks by another UTC executive, Jeff Pino, president of Sikorsky Aircraft.

"Even if work has to stay in the U.S., there are opportunities to reduce cost by moving out of those high-cost locations," Hayes said.

Nowhere in the article was the ever present CBIA trotted out to lecture CT residents that it is the public school's fault for all things economically failing. NO UTC finally figured it out. It's too expensive. Good for them. Even a broken clock is right once in a while.

So what else is the State concerned about?  School "reform" 'options".  Grace E. Merritt elaborates in the Courant;

Hundreds showed up for legislative hearings on a dozen major school reform proposals Monday that would significantly change the way public schools operate, from the way teachers are evaluated to parents' ability to shut down failing schools.

Students, advocates and others filled four overflow rooms to listen to 62 people testify on the bills. Several speakers spoke in favor of changing the way charter schools are funded. Currently the state pays $9,300 to charter schools for each student who attends — significantly less than the nearly $14,000 average paid to a traditional public school.

Francheska Calderon, a senior at Amistad-Elm City High School, credited her charter school with changing her from an angry girl worried about how others saw her to a student focused on achievement. She said that 100 percent of her senior class has been accepted to a four-year college.

"Charter schools deserve to be equally funded, not just 75 percent of what traditional public school students are given," Calderon said.

Advocates, such as the ConnCAN education reform group, said the state pays twice for the same charter school student: once to the local school system for a student that the system no longer educates, and once to the charter school.

The proposal calls for school systems to pay for their students who attend charter schools, a formula that would require towns to pay thousands, even millions more to cover charter costs.

Another bill calls for teacher performance evaluations to be tied to how well students perform in school.

The bill calls for building a database that would track students through college. Evaluators would look at how well students performs to determine how effective the teacher is.

The Connecticut Education Association, the state's largest teachers' union, said it favors solid, research-based reforms but said that the proposed system focuses too narrowly on test scores and might "scapegoat teachers for society's ills." It would penalize teachers who, for example, have a gift for motivating low-achieving or difficult students, they said.

Another major item was the so-called "Parent Trigger" legislation, which would allow 51 percent or more of parents from a school that has failed to make progress for three consecutive years to petition for intervention. During the hearing, many testified that they felt parents have no say and have had to watch their children attend failing schools, sometimes for generations.

Yeah, the charter school students look to be underfunded IFF you ignore the fact that charter schools serve the most capable and not the least capable students. The students with disabilities, handicaps, psychological problems, and so on [in other words the most expensive to service] are left to the public schools who are then attacked for receiving more funds. Sweet argument for the charter profiteers. Equal funding equals big profits on low maintenance students.

The bottom line for Region 19 is that our towns will continue to be underfunded as the State sinks deeper in debt and buries us in higher taxes. In Hartford, they will spend millions following the expert advice of dropouts and spineless politicians playing Washington's game of spending money to increase the cost of education.

An I the only one tired of this recipe?

Oh, Curriculum!

Sunday the New York Times reported on the textbook curriculum changes that were made to appease the State of Texas special interests. As usual, the changes are both dogmatic and intended to imprint students with ceratin myths that make open-minded learning and thinking difficult.

Battles over what to put in science and history books have taken place for years in the 20 states where state boards must adopt textbooks, most notably in California and Texas. But rarely in recent history has a group of conservative board members left such a mark on a social studies curriculum.

Efforts by Hispanic board members to include more Latino figures as role models for the state’s large Hispanic population were consistently defeated, prompting one member, Mary Helen Berlanga, to storm out of a meeting late Thursday night, saying, “They can just pretend this is a white America and Hispanics don’t exist.”

“They are going overboard, they are not experts, they are not historians,” she said. “They are rewriting history, not only of Texas but of the United States and the world.”

The curriculum standards will now be published in a state register, opening them up for 30 days of public comment. A final vote will be taken in May, but given the Republican dominance of the board, it is unlikely that many changes will be made.

The standards, reviewed every decade, serve as a template for textbook publishers, who must come before the board next year with drafts of their books. The board’s makeup will have changed by then because Dr. McLeroy lost in a primary this month to a more moderate Republican, and two others — one Democrat and one conservative Republican — announced they were not seeking re-election.

There are seven members of the conservative bloc on the board, but they are often joined by one of the other three Republicans on crucial votes. There were no historians, sociologists or economists consulted at the meetings, though some members of the conservative bloc held themselves out as experts on certain topics.

The conservative members maintain that they are trying to correct what they see as a liberal bias among the teachers who proposed the curriculum. To that end, they made dozens of minor changes aimed at calling into question, among other things, concepts like the separation of church and state and the secular nature of the American Revolution.

“I reject the notion by the left of a constitutional separation of church and state,” said David Bradley, a conservative from Beaumont who works in real estate. “I have $1,000 for the charity of your choice if you can find it in the Constitution.”

They also included a plank to ensure that students learn about “the conservative resurgence of the 1980s and 1990s, including Phyllis Schlafly, the Contract With America, the Heritage Foundation, the Moral Majority and the National Rifle Association.”

Dr. McLeroy, a dentist by training, pushed through a change to the teaching of the civil rights movement to ensure that students study the violent philosophy of the Black Panthers in addition to the nonviolent approach of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He also made sure that textbooks would mention the votes in Congress on civil rights legislation, which Republicans supported.

No sooner had the article been published than a twitter feed dedicated a parody of these changes was established. Twitterers from all over the country have added their own changes using a tag of #texastextbookfact to identify their entries.

Here are a few:

• Texas was the first state to recognize the value of the Negro race to high school athletic programs

•  Mountain top removal mining puts everyone on the same economic playing field.

•  Slavery was an ambassador program meant to bring people to America to save them from poverty and socialism.

•  Women should have the right to choose between paper and plastic. 

•   Adam & Eve waited til they were married before the consummated their love.

• You are only required to be able to count as high as your largest ammo clip.

• Every time you shoot something, an angel gets its wings.

•  Racial disparities in sentencing are the fault of activist judges.  

•  native americans welcomed americans as liberators

 If you enjoy snarky humor just type #texastextbookfact into the twitter search app and it will begin listing the latest Texas revisions to American History, Science and Math.
 

Deconstructing The American Dream

There's a John Lennon tune, one of his last with the lyric, "There are no problems - only solutions".

The quality of the solutions America has come to embrace have sucked us into a death spiral. Corporate pranksters with money enough to influence legislators unconscionably tinker with policies that toy with the needs and desires of citizens. Legislators surround themselves with self-serving experts who have no interest in the public good and eliminate wholesale class of solutions that would enrich this nation as a whole for the sake of a few who could care less if America disappeared into history's ashes.

Today, Herbert Kohl writes in Philadelphia Public School's Notebook an essay on Opportunity to learn, rush to equity. In the article he describes how a reasonable and coherent program to introduce equity in schools nationwide was turned into the systematic , system-wide cancer that NCLB and Race to the Top have become. And he tells us what could have been.

Jonathan Kozol’s Savage Inequalities dramatically documents the lack of opportunity presented to many poor children. Taking off from there, we raised the issue of how to negate those inequalities. The question that droves this analysis was: Do all children have the same opportunities to learn?

We were careful to avoid the question of poverty, family background, etc. because we wanted to make strictly educational arguments. We wanted to focus specifically on the conditions of schooling and make the opportunity to learn an equity issue. In this context we wanted to create a series of measures of equity, amongst which were:

* What are the facilities necessary to promote equitable learning?

* What is an equitable ratio of students to teachers?

* What is the range and scope of a learning program that promotes equitable learning – this would include the arts, opportunity for athletics and cultural learning, Advanced Placement courses, science labs?

* What are the credentials teachers are expected to have to produce excellence in learning?

* What kind of wages and working conditions contribute to educational opportunity for children?

* What kinds of supplies and equipment must all school have access to (textbooks, computers, etc.)?

* What kind of standards and measures should be used to measure a school’s effectiveness as an equitable learning institution?

* What role should parents and community organizations play to ensure that schools in their communities are equitable?

There were other conditions, but the idea was to establish a base for what was equitable based upon an analysis of successful public schools across the nation.

We did not want to tie this notion into variables that had to do with conditions outside of the context of schools, as we wanted educational solutions to educational problems. In other words, we wanted to assert that, when given the resources, schools across the country could deliver excellent, equitable education.

We were not advocating a single standard, so much as a series of baselines.

We have to ask ourselves how this got so perverted.What progressives of that time - Wellstone, Kohl, Koziol, and others were advocating was that schools all be instrumented with infrastructure, personnel, pedagogy, and curriculum that offered ALL students the opportunity to learn and allowed all schools to contribute their best efforts toward improving the human condition.

There is no explicit or implicit promise that EVERY child will literally be exactly equal in test score to another in lock step periodic progression ignoring all individual spirit. there is no mention that schools can be failures or that teachers be "held accountable" for anything more than pedagogical self-improvement. And there is no prescription that in the nation's poorest cities, modern school cathedrals should substitute shiny new buildings for vacant curriculum, demoralized personnel, and absurdist expectations.

Yet that's precisely what we have. Not only that WE KNOW ITS A FRAUD. Let me repeat that. WE KNOW ITS A FRAUD and yet we keep throwing money, goodwill, and political capital into something that can only harm public education. In this Democracy Now interview, Diane Ratvich, one of the architects of the draconian solution exposes what it has matured into:

JUAN GONZALEZ: One of the things that you’ve pointed out many times is that the entire testing system of the country right now is rife with corruption and with fraud—

DIANE RAVITCH: Yes.

JUAN GONZALEZ: —because you basically have every state deciding its own test standards, and they keep reporting that their kids are doing better. But then every time the national government does a national assessment test, these same states are not improving.

DIANE RAVITCH: Well, this is the great legacy of No Child Left Behind, is that it has left us with a system of institutionalized fraud. And the institutionalized fraud is that No Child Left Behind has mandated that every child is going to be proficient by the year 2014. Except they’re not, because no state and no nation has ever had 100 percent of the children proficient. Kids have all kinds of problems. And whether it’s poverty or a million things, there’s no such thing as 100 percent proficiency.

But every year we get closer to 2014, the bar goes up, and the states are told, “If you don’t reach that bar, you’re going to be punished. Schools will be closed. They’ll be turned into charter schools.” That’s part of the federal mandate, is that schools will be privatized if they can’t meet that impossible goal. So in order to preserve some semblance of public education, the states have been encouraged to lie, and many of them are lying, and so we see states that are saying, “90 percent of our kids are proficient in reading,” and then when the national test comes out, it’s 25 percent.

AMY GOODMAN: Diane Ravitch, we said at the top of this segment that the Department of Education announced sixteen finalists for its first round of the “Race to the Top” competition. They’re going to deliver something like $4.35 billion in school reform grants. And the Washington Post is reporting almost all of these finalists got money from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. In your book, chapter ten is called “The Billionaire Boys Club.” Explain.

DIANE RAVITCH: “The Billionaires Boys Club” is a discussion of how we’re in a new era of the foundations and their relation to education. We have never in the history of the United States had foundations with the wealth of the Gates Foundation and some of the other billionaire foundations—the Walton Family Foundation, The Broad Foundation. And these three foundations—Gates, Broad and Walton—are committed now to charter schools and to evaluating teachers by test scores. And that’s now the policy of the US Department of Education. We have never seen anything like this, where foundations had the ambition to direct national educational policy, and in fact are succeeding.

The Obama administration appointed somebody from the NewSchools Venture Fund to run this so-called “Race to the Top.” The NewSchools Venture Fund exists to promote charter schools. So, what we’re seeing with the proliferation—with this demand from the federal government, if you want to be part of this $4 billion fund, you better be prepared to create lots more charter schools. Well, it’s all predetermined by who the personnel is. And, you know, so we see this immense influence of the foundations.

And I think that with the proliferation of charter schools, the bottom-line issue is the survival of public education, because we’re going to see many, many more privatized schools and no transparency as to who’s running them, where the money is going, and everything being determined by test scores.

So the whole picture, I think—I just wish that people wouldn’t refer to this as reform, because when we talk about “Race to the Top,” we’re talking about a principle that is antithetical to the fundamental idea of American education. The fundamental idea, which has been enshrined at least since the Brown decision of 1954, was equal educational opportunity. “Race to the Top” is not equal educational opportunity. It is a race in which one or two or three states race to the top to have more privatized schools, more test-based accountability, more basic skills, no emphasis on a broad curriculum for all kids, and no equal educational opportunity. I think that’s wrong. I think it’s also not the role of the federal government to do what’s being done and to call it reform.

We cannot say we don't know what's going on. It's time to stand up and demand it stops. That starts with a call for the resignation of Arne Duncan and a request that progressives snap-slap our legislators into an ethical deconstruction of the monstrosity that Federal and State educational policy has become.

Make no mistake about it, these people are idiots and that won't change. But thinking adults need to rescue our taxes and our public schools from further buffoonery.

Education Budgets as Ponzi Schemes

Today's School Boards are presiding over a sea-change in budgeting. Baby-boomer educators are retiring in large numbers and being replaced by the younger generation and boy, this is a good thing in many, many cases.

So, in attending Board meetings you'll hear that the school is "saving" money". That's hard to argue with. Saving money means that that money can REDUCE the budget - the taxpayers should see their education taxes lower.

But that's not how the system is being gamed. What happens year over year is that the so-called savings are rolled back into the coming year's budget. Fair enough. Maybe that pays for some increases. Maybe. Again, as a taxpayer one would think that that would mean that the school budget requires NO INCREASE because [simple math]:

Last Year's Budget - retiring teachers = New Budget + increased expenses = NO TOTAL BUDGET INCREASE

But that's not how the system is being gamed either.

Every year without fail what happens is:

Last Year's Budget + savings of retiring teachers + increased expenses = New budget greater than sum of all of last year's budget including "savings"

Let's put this into perspective. You give your child a five dollar bill to go buy bread thinking its cheaper than five dollars but five dollars is sufficient because maybe somebody's price-gouging.

The kid goes to the store and says, "Dad, good news! The bread's on sale for four dollars!"

Dad thinks, Great, I have enough to by a cup of coffee.

The kid gets home with the bread. "Where's the change?"

"Change? I had to borrow money to buy the bread. It costs six dollars by the time I got to the cash register. They hired a new bagger to help the cashier and the price of bread went from four dollars to six dollars."

Now Dad has no coffee today or tomorrow.

"Don't worry Dad, the bagger really needed the job."

Race to the Gurney

Mark Benjamin of Salon is reporting on the details of water-boarding technique used on prisoners in America's custody. It is this meticulous attention to detail that separates us from mere barbarians and it is this culture into which our children will learn their adult civic lessons.

Enjoy.

Self-proclaimed waterboarding fan Dick Cheney called it a no-brainer in a 2006 radio interview: Terror suspects should get a "a dunk in the water." But recently released internal documents reveal the controversial "enhanced interrogation" practice was far more brutal on detainees than Cheney's description sounds, and was administered with meticulous cruelty.

Interrogators pumped detainees full of so much water that the CIA turned to a special saline solution to minimize the risk of death, the documents show. The agency used a gurney "specially designed" to tilt backwards at a perfect angle to maximize the water entering the prisoner's nose and mouth, intensifying the sense of choking – and to be lifted upright quickly in the event that a prisoner stopped breathing.

The documents also lay out, in chilling detail, exactly what should occur in each two-hour waterboarding "session." Interrogators were instructed to start pouring water right after a detainee exhaled, to ensure he inhaled water, not air, in his next breath. They could use their hands to "dam the runoff" and prevent water from spilling out of a detainee's mouth. They were allowed six separate 40-second "applications" of liquid in each two-hour session – and could dump water over a detainee's nose and mouth for a total of 12 minutes a day. Finally, to keep detainees alive even if they inhaled their own vomit during a session – a not-uncommon side effect of waterboarding – the prisoners were kept on a liquid diet. The agency recommended Ensure Plus.

"This is revolting and it is deeply disturbing," said Dr. Scott Allen, co-director of the Center for Prisoner Health and Human Rights at Brown University who has reviewed all of the documents for Physicians for Human Rights. "The so-called science here is a total departure from any ethics or any legitimate purpose. They are saying, ‘This is how risky and harmful the procedure is, but we are still going to do it.' It just sounds like lunacy," he said. "This fine-tuning of torture is unethical, incompetent and a disgrace to medicine."

Did the report say "incompetent"? It won't be long before we'll have a Washington inspired Race To The Gurney competition for public schools.

Institutional Tough Love - Reduce the Upcoming Budget

I received a critical comment for my Hitler parody video today on YouTube. It reads:

I don't know who created this, but clearly it's a grandstanding person who is trying to curry favor by advocating cuts and fiscal prudence for an already underfunded school. As such, the author appears to be more part of the problem than part of the solution, IMHO.

I'm the grandstanding person he's talking about. The critic must think there's something appealing about advocating budget cuts in education. There's not. My wife and many neighbors are teachers. They earn and deserve every penny.

But getting elected to a School Board carries responsibilities that are a double-edged sword. We have to do right by the students and the community. The critic assumes our school is underfunded. And in the psychedelic world of educational economics this is always true. It is an American meme to believe schools are underfunded. The unions, parents, teachers and administrators will all swear on stacks of holy books that this is the problem. And far too many Board members believe their job is simply to escalate and spend endlessly like rich aunts and uncles - visiting dignitaries with no responsibilities except to be loved for their largess.

In fact the idea of cutting a school budget is so antithetically imprinted on Board members that every year I sit through at least one near nervous breakdown monologue about how emotionally unprepared that school board member is to imagine cutting the school budget. No Hollywood drama can ever express the angst that goes along with these discussions.

I pass along cogent and what I believe are compelling arguments for cutting the budget. And the argument I receive far more than any other is that teachers don't make as much as billionaires and CEOs. It's hard to argue with that. By that metric teachers are really making a lot less.

But I don't live in a town of CEOs and billionaires who we can shake down for pocket change that will pay for the substantial increases in our expenses.

I know better than that but the education industry is deaf and blind to the human condition outside their world. In fact, our teachers have NEVER gone a year without a substantial raise in the past decade. In a decade where most working Americans have seen zero income growth, teachers here operate as if its too damned bad. Cough up more taxes. Ditto for administrators making six figures more or less. Teaching shared community sacrifice is something abstract that doesn't happen here.

The fact of the matter is that EO Smith is spending money as if this were the Roaring Twenties rather the Depression era of the new century. These days the unemployed are unionizing to get relief.

It's been only a month that a union for the unemployed has come into existence through an ingenious grassroots organizing campaign. In case you haven't heard about it, the union's name is "UR Union of the Unemployed" or its nickname, "UCubed," because of its unique method of organizing.

UCubed is the brain-child of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAM), whose leaders feel that the millions of unemployed workers need a union of their own to join in the struggle for massive jobs programs.

The idea is that if millions of jobless join together and act as an organization, they are more likely to get Congress and the White House to provide the jobs that are urgently needed. They can also apply pressure for health insurance coverage, unemployment insurance and COBRA benefits and food stamps. An unemployed worker is virtually helpless if he or she has to act alone.

Joining a Cube is as simple as it is important. (Please check the union web site: http://www.unionofunemployed.com ). Six people who live in the same zip code address can form a Ucube. Nine such UCubes make a neighborhood. Three neighborhood UCubes form a power block that contains 162 activists. Politicians cannot easily ignore a multitude of power blocks, nor can merchants avoid them.

There is not a day that goes by that the State of Connecticut is either deferring pension payments or raising fees on citizens, or cutting local aid. In an economic climate in which the taxpayer is being squeezed from all sides the teachers and administrator's contracts project unbridled avarice and greed. If I were complaining about price gouging of oil companies, electric bills, or a local crook no one would claim I was part of the problem.

I'm not a tea-bagger and I have better things to do with my life but as long as I'm serving I owe the public an opportunity to insist on a cutback this year and for the next few years. Its not a message, its not malicious. It's necessary.

The community needs to set the amount that a school can spend and then the process of seeing what that sum affords can begin.

Frugal Funding

Yesterday, Tom Friedman reported a conversation with Intel's CEO Paul Otellini looking for yet another cheap shot criticism of American public schools. Otellini deflected the opportunity.

Instead Otellini, offered a series of fairly pedestrian prescriptions that advocated the usual tax break rhetoric one would expect from a corporate lobbyist. But the closing statement in Friedman's column of Otellini's concern about changing the course of a company during economic crisis is worth examining in the context of education.

“Having run a company through a major transition, it’s a lot easier to change when you can than when you have to,” said Otellini. “The cost is less. You have more time. I am a little worried that by the time we wake up to the crisis we will be in the abyss.”

This year I have taken a very strong stand on reducing the EO Smith budget. I'm hoping to convince the Board that a one percent year to year reduction is in order. And my reasoning echoes Otelllini.

I think we need to be preemptive about managing costs that are spiraling out of control. And I also have no intention of waiting for the next crisis to paralyze our communities. That's not the time to have this conversation.A friend of mine brought a recent speech by NJ Governor Chris Christie to my attention.

...we can no longer continue on a path where we say we are going to reduce spending at the state level but we are not going to give you any tools to do that at the municipal level and the school board level.

By the same token I am tired of hearing school superintendents and school board members complain that there are no other options than raising property taxes. There are other options.

You know, Marlboro, after a two year negotiation, they give a five year contract giving 4.5% annual salary increases to the teachers, with no contribution, zero contribution to health care benefits.

But I am sure there are people in Marlboro who have lost their jobs, who have had their homes foreclosed on, and who cannot keep a roof over their family's head there is something wrong.

You know, at some point there has to be parity. There has to be parity between what is happening in the real world, and what is happening in the public sector world. The money does not grow on trees outside this building or outside your municipal building. It comes from the hard working people of our communities who are suffering and are hurting right now.

...[snip]...

I would love to tell you that municipal aid will stay level, but it's not. And it's not because we don't have the money. So you need to prepare. You need to prepare for what's coming down the line because we have no choice but to do these things.

And so we need to get honest with each other. In this instance, the political class,for which unfortunately all of us are a member of, the political class is lagging behind the public on this. The public is ready to hear that tough choices have to be made. They're not going to like it. Don't confuse the two. But they are ready to hear the truth.

In fact, they find it refreshing to hear the truth.

They are tired of hearing, don't worry I can spare you from the pain, because they have been hearing that for a decade, as we have borrowed and spent and taxed our way into oblivion.

We have done every quick fix in the book that you can do. And now we are left, literally holding the bag.

Leadership should be about making tough decisions. I'm not hear to tell you that anything you are going to have to do as mayors, council people will be easy. But I firmly believe after spending the last year traveling around the state of New Jersey, talking to regular citizens, that this is what they are expecting us to do.

They are also expecting us to ferret out waste and abuse. But they also know that old song that waste and abuse is going to balance the budget is an old and tired one, and it's not going to.

...[snip]...

We need to understand we are all in this together. And you know, all of you know in your heart, what I am saying is true. You all know that these raises that are being given to public employees of all stripes, we cannot afford. You all know the state cannot continue to spend money it does not have. And you all know that the appetite for tax increases among our constituents has come to an end.

And so the path to reform and success is clear. We know what it is. We just have to have the courage to go there. What we are doing is showing people that government can work again for them, not for us. Government has worked for the political class for much too long.

There's no time left. We have no room left to borrow. We have no room left to tax. So we merely have room left now, to do this. We are all reaching the edge of a cliff. And it reminds me a bit of that part of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid where the had a seminal decision to make. So what did they do? They held hands and they jumped off the cliff.

We have to hold hands at every level of government, state county, municipal, school board. We have to hold hands and jump off the cliff.

I firmly believe we will land and we will be fine. It does not mean it will not be a scary ride on the way down. And it does not mean there won't be moments of fear and moments of apprehension.

But for certain, the troops of the decades of overspending and overborrowing and overtaxing have gained on us. So the ruination of New Jersey's economy, and of the quality of life we want all our citizens to have, is certain if we do not take this course.

It's time for us to hold hands and jump off the cliff. It's time for us to do the difficult things that need to be done and to stop playing the petty politics of yesterday, of lying to the people telling them they do not have to pay for it because someone else will.

We are going to make the leap because that's what people elected me to do. We are going to make the leap because it is the responsible thing to do. We are going to make the leap and we are going to do it together because that is what leadership demands for us. That is what the responsibility of the offices we hold requires of us.

Connecticut is in the same economic condition as New Jersey. A few details will vary but Gov. Christie's speech is true and urgent.

In order for Region 19 to survive the current economic malaise and to eventually recover, our community needs to constrain the budget severely this year. It's unpleasant and it will be uncomfortable but its necessary for the sake of all the communities involved.

EO Smith will have larger class sizes and parents, students, and teachers will holler but quite frankly these class sizes are already being experienced at the elementary school levels because of the strain the EO Smith budget puts on local budgets. And class size is a far more important metric at the elementary school levels than they are in high school.

EO Smith, its teachers and students can handle it. If tax-payers can handle adversity then our schools and children need to learn to as well.

EO Smith has a chronic problem that needs our attention. The track and field needs rebuilding. I cannot support a referendum to fund that rebuilding unless our Region 19 budget is brought into a significantly constrained scope.

I have served on the Board for over four years and in all of those years generous spending habits dictated budget. For the foreseeable future we need to change that formula so that EO Smith spends only what is frugally budgeted.

In a recent essay on abundance called "How Abundance Breaks Everything", Clay Shirky provides some insight in how we can manage the economic changes we're going through.

It’s easy to say “preserve the best of the old and combine it with the best of the new,” but in revolution, the best of the new is incompatible with the best of the old. It’s about doing things a whole new way.

Spending less money will have its challenges but those challenges are opportunities to re-invent the way we deliver education. We cannot reduce the budget and not change the way we do business. That is an implicit consequence of that decision.

I've given you my viewpoint. This is what I'm voting for and why. As citizens you need to think about all of this and make your voices heard.

I'm listening but this year I'm not voting to spend any more money than we can afford unless I hear some damned good arguments to change my mind.

Serpico - All Over Again, Adil Polanco - American Hero

Jim Hoffer at an NY ABC affiliate is reporting on the covert practices of Police in one NY Precinct. Given the nature of the practice, it is likely a viral practice within all urban police communities and it is symptomatic of the way that society is being micro-managed by the self-appointed government bureaucrats who want to be our jailers.

This video is a tribute to the fine art of journalism done right:

Officer Adil Polanco is doing something so ethical that he reminds us of who police used to be.

When Officer Adil Polanco dreamed of becoming a cop, it was out of a desire to help people not, he says, to harass them.

"I'm not going to keep arresting innocent people, I'm not going to keep searching people for no reason, I'm not going to keep writing people for no reason, I'm tired of this," said Adil Polanco, an NYPD Officer.

Officer Polanco says One Police Plaza's obsession with keeping crime stats down has gotten out of control. He claims Precinct Commanders relentlessly pressure cops on the street to make more arrests, and give out more summonses, all to show headquarters they have a tight grip on their neighborhoods.

"Our primary job is not to help anybody, our primary job is not to assist anybody, our primary job is to get those numbers and come back with them?" said Officer Polanco.

Polanco goes on to explain to Hoffer the effect this has on urban youth. The same urban youth public schools and teachers are being "held accountable" for. The math lessons they are learning in the streets will be hard to overcome.

Eyewitness News asked, "Are you telling me they're stopping people for no reason, is that what you're saying?"

"We are stopping kids walking upstairs to their house, stopping kids going to the store, young adults. In order to keep the quota," answered Officer Polanco.

"Yeah, they locked us up for nothing," said Zebulun Colbourne.

The Colbourne brothers say they and three other friends were the victims of quotas. All were arrested a few months ago after one of them had fallen while racing each other.

Eyewitness News asked, "You fell and that's how you hurt your eye?"

"Yeah, and they just wanted to arrest us. I told them I fell but that didn't matter to them," said Elijah Colbourne.

All five were accused of engaging in tumultuous and violent conduct that caused public alarm, given a summons for unlawful assembly and locked up overnight.

Eyewitness News asked, "So you're locked up waiting to see the judge, right?"

"Yeah," answered the Colbourne brothers.

Eyewitness News asked, "Then what do they do?"

"We don't see the judge, they let us out the back door after they kept us for a day and some change," said Elijah Colbourne.

The charges were dropped, but Officer Polanco says the patrolman still got 5 summonses toward their monthly quota.

"At the end of the night you have to come back with something. You have to write somebody, you have to arrest somebody, even if the crime is not committed, the number's there. So our choice is to come up with the number," said Officer Polanco.

Hitler Finds Out About EO Smith's Budget

WebCamGate: Who Watches the Watchers?

The WebCamGate case in which the Lower Merion School District near Philadelphia, PA developed and authorized the use of software to visually monitor students using school issued computers off school grounds is raising new questions very day.

There is every indication that the laptops issued to students at the Harriton High School in that district were instrumented to act as virtual stalkers. This news report confirms that students believed they were being surreptitiously monitored by someone at the school.
What becomes immediately obvious, even from this limited student testimony is that these students are not hardened criminals and the cracked voice fear that this one student had and the legitimate concern for the privacy of his family's lives is chilling. The behavior of the web cams as described is more like that of a peeping tom than a tracking system.

Another youTube video explains the parents concern:


Again, the school's explanations that only 42 instances took place sound like fiction based on the fact that numerous students reported the web cam activity AND the vice principal who somehow is accused of confronting a student about "drugs" (Mike and Ike candies). This is not only a case of spying but defamation of these student's character and the vice principal's character.

The fact that this boy's family is also politically connected (Hillary Clinton) is another aspect of the case. Was this family being set up because of their political convictions? Dirty tricks? It's been known to happen.

But the vice principal's denials of culpability are troubling. If she didn't authorize this intrusion, who did? And why did the school ignore the previous concerns?

This has become an example of a real-life Truman Show and the details continue to unfold. Today, all leads point to the school's technician,.Mike Perbix.

Who's Your Daddy?

An incident in Pennsylvania is receiving the scrutiny of the FBI and with good reason. The incident is being called WebCamGate by the mass media. Education Week summarizes the details in an article post by By Dan Hardy, Derrick Nunnally, and John Shiffman of the Philadelphia Inquirer (MCT).

Blake Robbins, 15, said in the suit that an assistant principal confronted him last November with a photo from the laptop—supposedly evidence he was involved in "improper behavior" in his Penn Valley house.

The teenager has said that he was holding Mike & Ike candy in his hand, and that the assistant principal thought they might be drugs.

The system was triggered 42 times this school year, in an attempt to track lost or missing computers, school officials say.

District spokesman Douglas Young yesterday repeated that the security program was developed to help recover lost or stolen laptops, and added: "This included tracking loaner laptops that may, against regulations, have been taken off campus."

Furthermore, the article goes on to assert that the administration had been previously confronted by individuals concerned about the legality and ethics of the software;

More than a year ago, two Harriton High School student council members privately confronted the principal when they learned that the school could covertly photograph students using the laptop's cameras.

When Kline said it was true, the students told the principal they were worried about privacy rights, and asked questions about other kinds of monitoring. Could, for example, the school system read saved files on their computers? At a minimum, the student leaders told the principal, the student body should be formal warned about any surveillance.

But nothing happened, according to other council members who were briefed afterward, and the student leaders returned a short while later to once again tell the principal that they were greatly concerned about a potential invasion of privacy. Again, nothing happened.

Kline and district spokesman Young did not respond yesterday to requests for comment about the meeting with the principal.

A class action lawsuit has been filed and justifiably so. The software called LanRev has been downplayed as little more than a security software program that helps the school track stolen laptops. But the school is not a law enforcement agency. If the laptops were indeed stolen instead of simply removed from school for home use then the school should have reported them stolen and allowed the police to handle their retrieval.

But that's not what happened. Instead, the school officials did precisely what bureaucrats with too much time on their hands and the opportunity to overstep their authority always do. Like the script of a bad movie they activated the webcam of the laptops of students, collected those snapshots, and apparently confronted at least one student who was eating candy that looked like pills as a drug user.

Here at the Gazette we are shocked by nothing that school officials get involved with. As Einstein is quoted as saying, "the difference between genius and stupidity is that stupidity has no limits."

What concerns us more is the fact that the LanRev software can be and may have been used in a much more pernicious fashion. You see, contrary to the sugar-coated, law-abiding explanation that the administration has painted of this software, it can be used to for criminal behaviors that have the potential to incriminate the end-user (e.g. a student, teacher, administrator, and so on) instead of the true criminal. In other words, in the hands of a disgruntled technical help desk employee, an innocent target's life can be irreversibly harmed. This video details in very technical terms the scope of this software's reach:



To translate that into plain language, this software can covertly alter just about anything on a client machine so that the user can be spied on, the machine used to download pornography or act as a cracking platform, and more. Everything and anything can be compromised including your antivirus, spyware, and malware products.

This software has no place in schools. Innocent families, teachers, employees, or relatives can get entrapped in Julie Amero type nightmares that occur only because software with the same ability to maim a life as a gun is being put into the hands of fools.

And today this is only a school incident. But this stuff poses a political and terrorist threat as well. Imagine the havoc this kind of software can play in a Senator's office, at Homeland Security, the Pentagon, or maybe a foreign diplomat, the UN, and so on. You won't know the Cam is on or the microphone and maybe a background script is working to dump or access confidential information.

The FBI needs to take a long, hard look at this stuff.

Should Teachers Unions Pull Out of Urban Schools?

There is a time to cut your losses. It seems to me that teachers unions are not only losing the fight to provide a quality education in America's cities but they are being unfairly and irreparably harmed for the effort. It may be time to pull out.

Let the philanthropists, oligarchs, big city politicians, urban right-wing parent organizations, and profit-seeking educational entrepreneurs have at it - ALL OF IT.

The teachers unions would be wise to retreat to the places where education can be practiced sanely. A place where expectations are matched by parental attention, an audience that's receptive, and with sufficient resources to do the job.

It will not be long before those who inherit the task will be calling for an end to standardized tests as a metric of success. In fact they'll be angry that public schools with unions have an unfair advantage in providing superior product. It'll be called class warfare and racist and unfair. It'll be a fun lesson in educational pragmatism.

You might be wondering why I make such a suggestion. The latest NYTimes article called The New Poor by Peter S. Goodman about poverty is a start;

Some poverty experts say the broader social safety net is not up to cushioning the impact of the worst downturn since the Great Depression. Social services are less extensive than during the last period of double-digit unemployment, in the early 1980s.

On average, only two-thirds of unemployed people received state-provided unemployment checks last year, according to the Labor Department. The rest either exhausted their benefits, fell short of requirements or did not apply.

“You have very large sets of people who have no social protections,” said Randy Albelda, an economist at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. “They are landing in this netherworld.”

So what's the netherworld look like you ask. In No Child Left Behind as an Anti-Poverty Measure by Jean Anyon & Kiersten Greene we find out;

For more education to lead to better jobs, there have to be jobs available. However, there are not now, nor have there been for more than two decades, nearly
enough jobs for those who need them. Labor economist Gordon Lafer demonstrated that over the period 1984 to 1996—at the height of an alleged labor shortage—the number of people in need of work exceeded the total number of job openings by an average of five to one. In 1996, for example, the country would have needed 14.4 million jobs in order for all low-income people to work their way out of poverty. However, there were at most 2.4 million job openings available to meet this need; of these, only one million were in full-time, non-managerial positions (2002).

Furthermore, the jobs the U.S. economy now produces are primarily poverty-wage jobs—and only a relative few highly paid ones—making it increasingly less certain that education will assure that work pays well (Anyon, 2005). Seventy-seven percent of new and projected jobs in the next decade will be low-paying. Only a quarter of these are expected to pay over $26,000 a year (in 2002 dollars). A mere 12.6% will require a college degree, while most will require on-the-job training only. Of the 20 occupations expected to grow the fastest, only six require college
degrees—these are in computer systems and computer information technology fields, and there are relatively few of these jobs overall (Department of Labor, 2002).

Gender discrimination can work to reverse—or even eliminate—wage gains that accrue to individuals with more education. Female high school graduates earn less than male high school dropouts. And women with post-bachelor’s degrees earn less than men who have just a bachelor’s (Lafer, 2002; Mishel, Bernstein, & Boushey, 2003; Wolff, 2003). If you are female, more education does not necessarily mean higher wages.

Race as well can cut into the benefits of further education. A study of entry-level workers in California, for example, discovered that Black and Latino youth had improved significantly on every measure of skill in absolute terms and relative to White workers. Yet their wages were falling further behind those of Whites. In this example, the deleterious effects of racism outweighed the benefits of education, with minority workers at every level of education losing ground to similarly prepared Whites (Lafer, 2002).

Various other economic realities—such as lack of unionization, multiple free trade agreements which outsource jobs, and increasing use of part-time workers — cut across the college-wage benefit, lowering it significantly for large numbers of people, most of whom are minorities and women.

Even a college degree no longer guarantees a decent job. One of six college graduates is in a job paying less than the average salary of high school graduates (Anyon, 2005). Between 8.8% and 11% of people with a bachelor’s degree make around the minimum wage. This means that an increasing number of college graduates—about one in ten—is employed at poverty wages (ibid.). Even the education levels of welfare recipients are high. The share of welfare recipients who
have high school degrees has increased from 42% in 1979 to more than two-thirds (70%) in 1999 (U.S. General Accounting Office, 2001).

These realities suggest that the promise of good jobs and better pay underlying NCLB is a false one for many people—especially low-income minority students and women—because for them educational achievement brings no guarantee of economic success.

Consider, finally, that the vast majority of low-income students who do attend college do not have the funds or other supports to complete their bachelor’s degree. The majority of low-income students who attend college are forced to withdraw, and only 7 percent of very low-income people attain a bachelor’s by age 26 (Ed. Trust, 2004b).

In addition to these economic realities, there are federal policies that contradict the implicit premise of NCLB that higher educational achievement leads to good jobs. Minimum wage policy and job training policy are two examples.

What this makes plain is that public schools are being pressured to provide career education for careers that don't exist or that pay no more than minimum wage. And what of the college career tracks? Given the dropout rates and the fiscal burden of a lifetime of loan payments, does it serve society's best interest to herd students to college for a life of indentured servitude?

It is time for teachers unions to take a stand. Pull out of the urban quagmire and demand that any union teacher who is enlisted be assured of educational diplomatic immunity from the political toxins at work.

Unknown Artist: Nina Paley

Paley created Sita Sings the Blues. Enjoy.



For more on Nina see:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AK9LGN6xHNE&feature=channel

Reading Is Fundamental (RIF)... And Dead (RIP)

A number of sources are reporting that the Obama education budget is doing exactly what the Bush administration couldn't. That is kill successful and effective reading programs.

All in the name of closing the education gap of course.

Donalyn Miller in EdWeek blogs:

Last week, policymakers announced that the Fiscal Year 2011 federal budget increases funding for education, but a closer look at the proposed budget indicates that direct funding for effective literacy programs such as Reading Is Fundamental (RIF), Literacy Through Libraries, Even Start, Ready to Learn TV, Striving Readers, and the National Writing Project (NWP) will cease under the new budget. Money historically allocated to support these programs will be folded into a larger, competitive grant program offered to states.

Let the politicians know how you feel about this.

When Did the Food Drop Off the Table?

This is a stunning and sobering presentation about the loss of Home Economics and Cooking Classes in schools.

Steel Cage Learning

The decades old mantra of getting tough on public schools is reaching a fever pitch. And a consequence of that fever is that children and parents are cracking under the stress of it all.

Just yesterday it was reported that child was given the equivalent of a water-boarding torture because she could not recite the alphabet for her dad.

According to a police report obtained by CNN, Tabor's girlfriend called police to their home in Yelm Sunday because Tabor had dunked his daughter's head in the kitchen sink. Yelm is about 65 miles south of Seattle.

According to the police report, Tabor admitted to holding his daughter in the sink because she was afraid of water, CNN reports.

When investigators asked the little girl about the bruises on her back and scratch marks on her neck, she told them "Daddy did it."

"It was hot, the water was hot. I told him I would say my letters then!" the girl told police, according to the police report obtained by CNN.

In Detroit, citizens well indoctrinated in the get tough lynch mob mentality are calling for the jailing of teachers and administrators who are blamed for the city's low test scores.

The Detroit scores on the progress test were the lowest in its 40-year history. The sample of students included 900 of Detroit's 6,000 fourth-graders and 1,000 of the district's 6,000 eighth-graders.

Sharlonda Buckman, CEO of the Detroit Parent Network, called for jailing and civil lawsuits against anyone in the city's educational system that is not doing his or her share to help properly educate children.

"Somebody needs to go to jail," she said in a tearful address to 500 parents gathered Saturday for the organization's annual breakfast forum. "Somebody needs to pay for this. Somebody needs to go to jail, and it shouldn't be the kids."

But, increasingly school is becoming a police state that entraps kids in a legal quagmire that makes a fool of everyone. In New York students indeed go to jail for the silliest of reasons.

A 12-year-old Queens girl was hauled out of school in handcuffs for an artless offense - doodling her name on her desk in erasable marker, the Daily News has learned.

Alexa Gonzalez was scribbling a few words on her desk Monday while waiting for her Spanish teacher to pass out homework at Junior High School 190 in Forest Hills, she said.

"I love my friends Abby and Faith," the girl wrote, adding the phrases "Lex was here. 2/1/10" and a smiley face.

But instead of simply cleaning off the doodles after class, Alexa landed in some adult-sized trouble for using her lime-green magic marker.

She was led out of school in cuffs and walked to the precinct across the street, where she was detained for several hours, she and her mother said.

"I started crying, like, a lot," said Alexa. "I made two little doodles. ... It could be easily erased. To put handcuffs on me is unnecessary." Alexa, who had a stellar attendance record, hasn't been back to school since, adding, "I just thought I'd get a detention. I thought maybe I would have to clean [the desk]."

"She's been throwing up," said her mom, Moraima Camacho, 49, an accountant, who lives with her daughter in Kew Gardens. "The whole situation has been a nightmare."

There are even studies claiming that smacking children is a healthy exercise.

Professor Gunnoe questioned 2,600 people about being smacked, of whom a quarter had never been physically chastised.

The participants' answers then were compared with their behaviour, such as academic success, optimism about the future, antisocial behaviour, violence and bouts of depression.

Teenagers in the survey who had been smacked only between the ages of two and six performed best on all the positive measures.

Those who had been smacked between seven and 11 fared worse on negative behaviour but were more likely to be academically successful. Teenagers who were still smacked fared worst on all counts.

Parenting guru Penelope Leach disagreed with the findings.

'No good can come from hitting a child,' she said. 'I do not buy this idea that children will learn positive behaviour from being smacked.

'The law says adults hitting adults is wrong and children should be protected in the same way. Children are people too.'

The assault on children and schools is becoming a crisis and organizations such as Stop Schools to Jails are responding. Stop Schools to Jails has issued a free action kit that helps anyone interested in the issue to begin taking action. In it you'll learn more.

Across the United States, there is an ominous trend that is cutting short the opportunity to succeed for huge numbers of children and youth. Zero tolerance policies and practices are, in many instances, pushing young people off of the academic track and onto a track to prison. This approach, which was originally intended to address the growing concerns over school safety, has been expanded to include overly harsh punishments for behavior that has no bearing on safety. Students across the country are being pushed out of school through the over-use of out-of-school suspensions, expulsions, and school-based arrests, mostly for minor misconduct. While this trend is harming children and youth of all ages and races, it weighs most heavily on children of color, who are being pushed out or thrown out of school at alarming rates.

School districts are not acting alone. In most places, school districts have teamed up with law enforcement to create this “schoolhouse to jailhouse track.” School districts are literally delegating their responsibility for school discipline to police, resulting in a large number of incidents that are now handled by school police and juvenile courts that could be – and were once – handled by a trip to the principal’s office or a call home to a parent. If the schoolhouse to jailhouse track is not stopped now, there will be serious negative consequences for generations to come.

It's important to look at their material and get involved.

Racing to the Top, Wherever That Is

Arne Duncan's Race to the Top is coming under increased scrutiny because improprieties keep springing up faster than test scores.

Late last year, Pro-Publica published an article asserting that education funding was being appropriated for "Phantom School Districts" - a phrase that could be synonymous with a money laundering operation.

In Kansas, 11 school districts that no longer exist are on the U.S. Department of Education’s distribution list for stimulus funds. They are set to receive nearly $600,000.

We found these school districts when Kirby Ross, managing editor of the Phillips County Review in Phillipsburg, Kan., alerted us that our county-by-county stimulus tracker [1] included two districts in his area that didn’t exist. That prompted us to do some more digging.

We checked more states and found that other consolidated or dissolved districts were on the list. In Missouri and Iowa, a handful of closed districts were listed as receiving stimulus funding.

That doesn’t mean stimulus checks will be arriving to empty buildings. In instances where money is allocated to a closed district, it typically is divvied up among the districts where the students now attend.

States must notify the Department of Education when districts are dissolved or merged. We asked the Department of Education why the list of districts receiving stimulus funds included closed districts, but we did not hear back. We’ll let you know when we do.

I don't need to remind you that this is the same Federal government operation that wants to control every aspect of our schools.

Also late last year, the neo-con dirty tricks campaigns against public education started floating sensational news stories emphasizing how illiterate our high school students are. Nate Silver at the FiveThirtyEight blog examined one such claim in Real Oklahoma Students Ace Citizenship Exam; Strategic Vision Survey Was Likely Fabricated.

It turns out that I was not the only person who had doubts about the survey. So did Ed Cannaday, the State Representative from Oklahoma's 15 House District.

In a telephone interview yesterday, Cannaday told me he was shocked when he heard of the results, which had received widespread media attention. "When I saw the statistics, I was just flabbergasted and said it cannot be true," he told me.

There were two items in particular that sent up warning flags for him: the one claiming that only 23 percent of the students knew the identity of George Washington, and another that claimed that about one in every ten students had listed the two major political parties as "Republican and Communist".

"Given the dialog of today, if they had said Republican and socialist, then maybe," Cannaday told me. "But communist -- that's just not something that you throw out there any more. I don't think Sarah Palin even used that term."

Cannaday, age 69, would be in a position to know. Before entering the State Legislature three years ago, he had spent decades in education, first as a teacher in a large public school in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and then in Oklahoma where he set up an alternative school. After a stint in private business, Cannaday returned to classroom, first as a teacher and then as a principal, and then -- finding he missed the one-on-one interaction with his students -- as a teaching principal at a small school in House District 15. He now serves on the House's education committee in Oklahoma City, and continues to pay regular visits to the schools in his district. "Most schools like to have me once a month," he says, to talk about legislation pending before the state.

Cannaday therefore had little difficulty setting up an experiment: he arranged to have all the seniors in the 10 secondary schools in his district take the Strategic Vision/OCPA survey. Cannaday tried to replicate the Strategic Vision survey to the greatest extent possible. The same exact questions were used, and as in the case of the original survey, the answers were open-ended rather than multiple choice. The survey was administered to a total of 325 seniors, including special education students.

Cannaday's survey however, found his students doing just fine: They answered an average of 7.8 out of the 10 questions correctly. By comparison, the high school students that were purportedly surveyed by Strategic Vision had gotten just 2.8 out of the items correct. 98 percent of the students on Cannaday's survey -- not 23 percent -- knew that George Washington was the first President. 81 percent -- not 14 percent -- knew that Thomas Jefferson had written the Declaration of Independence. 95 percent -- not 43 percent -- knew that the Democrats and Republicans are the major political parties. There was just no comparison between the two.

The entire article is worth a read. The assault on public education in the name of accountability, closing achievement gaps, and school profiteering is not lost on students who are learning at their own expense that the game is rigged against them.

And that brings us to the latest scandal, transparency in Arne Duncan's Department of Education.

Alexander Russo's blog at Scholastic, This Week in Education raises a number of disturbing questions.

I have now heard the same thing from three independent credible sources - the fix is in on the U.S. Department of Education's competitive grants, in particular Race to the Top (RTTT) and Investing in Innovation (I3). Secretary Duncan needs to head this off now, by admitting that he and his team have potential conflicts of interests with regard to their roles in grant making, recognizing that those conflicts are widely perceived by potential grantees, and explaining how grant decisions will be insulated from interference by the department's political appointees.

Over the last several months a national education reporter, a senior manager at a national education research organization, and the head of a national nonprofit working in the field all volunteered that the Department's senior officials know exactly who they want to get RTTT and I3 money - in brief, the new philanthropies' grantees and the jurisdictions where they work.

These three hold positions of some responsibility. None have been prone to exaggeration in the past. They are not colleagues. They run in entirely different circles, live in entirely different parts of the country, and work in very different parts of the K-12 education space. They all relayed conversations with colleagues about the problem.

We do know that the Secretary benefited from a strong relationship with the new philanthropy in Chicago. We know that the Secretary is high on charter management organizations and the new teacher development programs that benefited from the new philanthropy. We know that RTTT czar Joanne Weiss was senior staff member at New Schools. We know that Assistant Deputy Secretary for Innovation and Improvement Jim Shelton was a senior program education officer at the Gates Foundation and NewSchools. We know that both managed investments in the organizations' Duncan favors.

Anyone who remembers the Reading First fiasco is familiar with the pattern.

There's more at the link. And Frederick M. Hess writing in The Enterprise blog of The American Enterprise Institute adds,

The larger issue here, of course, is not merely whether Duncan should have announced the identity of the judges (though the Fordham Institute’s Mike Petrilli offers a terrific explanation of why he should, from the perspective of a Department of Education veteran). The larger question is how the department is proceeding on RTT. Let’s remember to keep that question in context. The administration has unprecedented discretion due to the $787 billion stimulus package, more than $100 billion of which is directed to education. Given the control over this kind of money, as well as the terrific intuitions that undergird RTT, it’s essential that the administration does everything possible to reassure observers that it is operating in a credible, non-political fashion. Part of having unprecedented sums of money is the need to embrace unprecedented levels of transparency. That includes reaching out to skeptics and moving with particular thoughtfulness when it comes to the process. In fact, for all the criticism that the Department of Education justly received under Bush for insularity and a lack of transparency, the names and affiliations of the growth model pilot peer reviewers and the differentiated accountability pilot peer reviewers were disclosed prior to the reviews taking place.

Yet, after President Obama’s assurances that “politics won’t come into play” in the RTT process, after Duncan’s claims about how he’d recruit “disinterested superstars” to judge RTT, and after comments from RTT chief Joanne Weiss on the “unprecedented level of transparency” of the process, the reality has been otherwise. Last summer, the 19(!) RTT priorities appeared pretty much out of nowhere—with the dictate that states would not be rewarded for successes in data systems or teacher quality alone, but would be required to check all 19 boxes in sprawling applications if they were to seek funds. The advisers for the RTT evaluation were named and secretly convened last fall. The 58 reviewers were selected from 1,500 applicants in a process that was never made clear. The department has never explained what constitutes a “conflict of interest” for potential reviewers. The department never announced that reviewers had been named or when or how they’d be trained. Indeed, it took Education Week’s intrepid Michele McNeil to finally leak that story, before Duncan responded (and not in an official department announcement, but in a blog post!).

Again, the link version offers many more references and should be used for further exploration.

What's already clear to every school child in the country should be becoming clear to all of us, the race is gamed. And its not gamed for the benefit of anyone we know.

Teaching Tools: Art Resources

I've been coing across an increasingly braod range of interesting art sites that offer open source resources for art teachers.

Today, I discovered UBU.com that is a central repository for outsider art. This link features hundreds of films and interviews with artistswho deserve far more attention in high school art classes than they receive.

Over at MugTUg.com, I found this HTML 5 browser based painting program called Sketchpad.

And over at the O'Reilly site is this handy-dandy web color chart for digital designers.

Fiscal Gymnastics

EO Smith has had the misfortune of falling victim to the collapsing economy at exactly the wrong time. About three years ago, just prior to the economic collapse, the Board discovered that the athletic fields behind the school were deficient and needed extensive repair. The track is the most critical component that could no longer be merely patched.

It is dangerous and requires significant drainage and field reconstruction to be sustainable. The longer the Board investigated the field conditions, the more the realization that the lack of water and limited scope of the existing fields dictated a comprehensive proposal.

After soliciting bids and a three town education campaign a bond issue was presented to the public and they voted 'no'. Since then we've had to bus our track and field activities out to Tolland.

It's humiliating and expensive and largely a direct result of the general economy.

Last night we discussed a revised proposal - a $2M dollar plan that cuts deeply into the comprehensive repair plan and reduces the scope to what is sufficient and absolutely necessary.

Even at this reduced level, the tax burden to a reeling tax base will be challenging to pass. And for all the talk of "shovel ready" funds being made available by the Feds, those monies are gobbled up by the special interests of the State and don't apply to schools caught in the middle.

And while urban schools are built and rebuilt perpetually by State and federal funds, suburban schools must afford their own infrastructures in addition to being responsible for the entitled schools.

State government and education are now cannibalizing each others budgets to continue the lifestyles they've become accustomed to. In the meantime, our track and field are more unlikely than ever to be realized until the economy significantly improves.

Deconstructing NCLB

The New York Times reports [Obama Seeking Sweeping Change in 'No Child' Law by Sam Dillon] that the Obama administration is revising No Child Left Behind (NCLB). I suspect such changes are more the result of reality finally catching up with the mean spirited political fantasies that NCLB marketed to an all too gullible public.

"The secretary of education, Arne Duncan, foreshadowed the elimination of the 2014 deadline in a September speech, referring to it as a “utopian goal,” and administration officials have since made clear that they want the deadline eliminated. In recent meetings with representatives of education groups, Department of Education officials have said they also want to eliminate the school ratings system built on making “adequate yearly progress” on student test scores.

“They were very clear with us that they would change the metric, dropping adequate yearly progress and basing a new system on another picture of performance based on judging schools in a more nuanced way,” said Bruce Hunter, director of public policy for the American Association of School Administrators, who attended one of the meetings.

The current system issues the equivalent of a pass-fail report card for every school each year, an evaluation that administration officials say fails to differentiate among chaotic schools in chronic failure, schools that are helping low-scoring students improve and high-performing suburban schools that nonetheless appear to be neglecting some low-scoring students.

Instead, under the administration’s proposals, a new accountability system would divide schools into more categories, offering recognition to those that are succeeding and providing large new amounts of money to help improve or close failing schools.

A new goal, which would replace the 2014 universal proficiency deadline, would be for all students to leave high school “college or career ready.” Currently more than 40 states are collaborating, in an effort coordinated by the National Governors Association and encouraged by the administration, to write common standards defining what it means to be a graduate from high school ready for college or a career."

Imagine a plan from the Bush administration being labeled 'utopian'. No, expecting every school to qualify as non-failing in a rigged system is not utopian - it is blissfully and maliciously devoid of reason.

And the secondary goal of NCLB that we magically close the education gap is equally insane yet remains intact in Arne Duncan's Big Adventure called Race to the Top.

Children will continue to be mis-educated in America because it is politically profitable to do so. Obama and Duncan are no less dependent on the public's gullibility than Bush was.

Like Bush, Obama and Duncan's social engineering experiments are the usual American lab rats, the poor. Unfortunately, NCLB and its succeeding educational cancer, Race to the Top are beginning to deform all American schools and that is not a good thing.

By myopically treating the symptoms of urban poverty as if all American schools were the disease, we are overdosing on standardized tests, memorization, and militaristic behaviors of conformity. Our children can barely breathe without special services and they certainly are not allowed to play, think, or mature without first asking permissions.

Urban school reform enthusiasts who profit from the deception that schools can fail are the buffoons that Washington embraces to dictate school 'reform' policies. It will not end well.

Treason of the Supreme Court

The recent Supreme Court decision to treat collaborative entities as equivalent and equal to a citizen of this country is an act of treason. And it is an act of treason because the American people who can dream an American Dream no matter how much money they have are now marginalized by a Corporate Dream that can expend as much money as is necessary to control public policy - the rights of man.

And so actors such as Osama Bin Laden can now subliminally influence federal and state elections in ways that are wholly unhealthy for the democracy.

This decision flushes away in one misguided conservative-activist decision the American Republic. Every educated person in the world should be fearful of the consequences of this decision.

Teaching Tools: English, Language, and Expression

The teaching aids for reading and writing has come a long way since the simple vocabulary drill programs were introduced. But in many cases, the programs that most useful to teachers lock schools into proprietary tracks that force yearly subscriptions to be renewed over and over again for little more than cosmetic effect.

In this post, I want to enumerate a number of open source alternative applications that cash-strapped teachers and schools can consider.

Digital Comic Strips

Digital comic strips satisfy a whole range of student interests - creating their own short narratives (micro-stories), writing dialog (how does what one character respond to another), and so on. All of this is reading and writing fundamentals with a whole lot of creativity sprinkled in.

The first program is called strip generator and it allows students to add pre-defined characters to comic strip panels and add their own dialog. I've used it in this blog on a number of occasions and its both easy to learn and fun to use.

Another program that's web-based is from ReadWriteThink. And it allows students to choose fixed numbers of panels, drag and drop characters, word balloons and objects into the panels and print out their cartoons. This program is considerably more constrained and elementary than Strip Generator but nonetheless useful.

Open Source Screenwriting Application

I recently discovered Celtx, a program that is intended to be used by professional screenwriters and movie producers. It offers the ability to create storyboards, comics, and more. It has a set of very useful videos to introduce teachers and students to what's available.

It goes without saying that this program is a high school and college level application (this doesn't preclude gifted teachers and students in lower grades giving it a go).

Now, this is a rich product suite that has school pricing options that can be purchased. However, the beauty of this product is that every student can download a free version at home and it works on Windows, OSX, and Linux!

The other feature that English teachers in particular will like is that the characters that students write into their stories can be assigned voices that will play back the dialog. This is often a critically missing component of writing - that is, hearing what your writing sounds like.

"I Have A Dream!" and This Ain't It

The struggle of Humanity for social justice is far too often expressed as a litany of unapologetic platitudes. There is a degrading transformation of an ideal into a disposable sentiment that reduces holidays such as today into little more than another excuse to waste away our lives in the opiates of mass media, gaming, and vacant social networking.


Today, more than any other day, should expose the schemes to close the so-called educaton gap for what they are, an evil social engineering experiment run amok.

Today, Bush's NCLB scheme is called Race to the Top and it is wrapped in the Orwellian language that has plagued education for decades. If we have the courage to talk about these policies in plain english then we could expose their hidden agendas.

The Race to the Top in plain English is a government policy that intends to create the illusion of social equality and justice by providing a test score metric showing that all school children have approximately identical scores in English and math.

The schools will do this so that poverty and housing discrimination can remain intact because we aren't looking to solve inequality, poverty, adequate housing, job training, urban violence, black market drugs or the victimization of the poor to loan sharking. No, equality will be demonstrated in school test scores. And these scores will be used as a tool to establish social classes such as those found in India and China.

Social classes will have all of the corrosive and toxic benefits of racism without any of the fuss people like Martin Luther King would rail against.

There are those who say that Race to the Top is an inappropriate label for this education policy but it is precise in far more ways than educators imagine.

Maintaining racial segregation is at the "Top" of the priority list. The plan is to keep the urban environments warehouses for the poor and underclass citizens. Let them shoot each other, disease each other, and poison each other with social dysfunction. To have a Top is to celebrate a bottom and there is no plan to change where that bottom is.

And to Race to the Top is to Race up a social class hierarchy that excludes the undesirables. The tools of the race are weighed grades, segregation, and a social appetite for permanent poverty.

Martin Luther King's Dream was buried with him. What remains is a social fabric that self-insulates and distances itself from dreams that aren't consumer dreams and bumper sticker intellectualism.

Updated: Race to the Happy Meal

Tuesday the Board got together for a special public meeting to discuss whether or not to participate in the CT Department od Education's Race To The Top grant application.

The initial information we received was both sketchy and dubious.

I started putting together a FAQ sheet to make sense of the monetary implications of what the State was suggesting. Here's the updated version of that:

Region19 Race to the Top (RaTTT Race) Fact sheet


Region 19 was "invited" participate in the RaTTT Race Connecticut Grant submission. We are being told that if we agree,

"Our District can expect up to $66,000 over the 4 year period for participating should we decide to participate in the grant. The allocation is based on the Title I funding formula."

Update:


CT applying for $175M to be spent over Four Years

50% of those funds ($87.5M) get disbursed to participating "Districts" based on the title 1 formula


The RTTT Title 1 fund distribution sheet takes every potential participating district and shows *the maximum* potential Title 1 sum *if all districts participate* AND *the grant is fully funded*.

If all that were true then Region 19 *might* get $66,924 over four years

That means:

$66,000 / 4 years = 16,500/year
Corrected: $66,924 / 4 years = $16,731/year

$16500/year / 1262est. EO students/year = $13.08/yr./student
Corrected: $16,731/year / 1262est. EO students/year = $13.26/yr./student

$4.5B / 50 states = $90M/ state if averaged
Fixed: $4.35B / 50 states = $87M/state - flat average

Note that CT is requesting twice the sum of an evenly distributed grant sum across all states!

$29.5M (CT grant) / $87M avg state grant = $0.327777778/$1 of an avg state grant
$175M (CT grant) / $87M avg state grant = $2/$1 of an even state distribution of funds

The RTTT allocation tables that Region 19 received are based on the grant request sum that is clearly double what one might expect as a dollar for dollar expectation based on evenly distributed funds.

If we adjust the State's estimates to simply reflect that each state may receive a fair share sum then:

Instead of $175M, we'll start with the evenly distributed sum of $87M. And since just 50% of that amount applies to the Title I funding, we are talking about dividing up 43.5 million over four years. That's a little less than $10M.

$29.5M RTTT State grant / 4 years = $7,375,000/year (for all CT schools)

$7,375,000/year / 1658 schools in CT = $4,448.13/year/school
$10M per year / 1658 schools in CT = $6,031 per school

But we'd also have to adjust EO Smith's expected sum from $66K over four years to $33K over four years or $8,250 per year - less than $1 per student.

I must caution everyone that this fact sheet is napkin math until proven otherwise.

But finally, the money in many big cities will be funneled directly into the city to be -cough- dispensed. In other words, it may go toward potholes instead of classrooms.

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As you can see, our district has virtually nothing to gain by this formula that is obviously dedicated YET AGAIN to -yawn- close the education gap whatever in hell that means.

So much of the Board discussion concerned whether or not our participation or non-participation would hurt the State, cause retaliatory action against the district, or somehow deny us participation in something bigger than... well, money.

And we had a lively discussion about all of these things and more. In the end the vote was unanmously against getting involved. We will politely decline our participation.

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However, the State DOE's proposal is shoddy and quite frankly, disingenuous. Connecticut is probably in good company. I examined some other state's public documents and the Race to the Top more accurately looks like a race of blind people in a muddy mosh pit.

Most states have slapped together a bundle of existing, largely platitudinal existing programs that could use some additional funding.

Thankfully, our State DOE is incompetent enough to put together a proposal that is transparent in its agenda and unsupportable in its legal splendor.

Those who sign up for this death march will have their school budgets plundered by Hartford bureaucrats who should be fired and their Department boarded and turned into an abandoned building. That would signify just how vacant this State's education policies are.

Sign This Contract NOW!

The Board of Education received a -cough- invitation from the Department of Education to sign a Race to the Top Contract with them that allows the State Board of Education to ignore the needs of the Region and allow them to spend every red cent of multi-millions on Urban school Districts and, um, themselves.

The Board gave these documents the attention they deserve. Here's a re-enactment: