That’s Right Nate

My friend Tom, has an old beat up van that he had no idea what to do with.  At least he didn’t until he was inspired by Glenn Beck to start a ministry and he turned his van into a church van.  Then last week I got a bright idea.  I could borrow his van to do an under cover investigation of prayer in public schools.  Public  Schools like to say that while they don’t support public prayer, they are perfectly happy to allow students a few moments of silent prayer or meditation in the morning.   God forbid, that little Mohammad or Cynthia who has two mommies be scandalized by some good old fashioned religion.

My experience though has been that public schools actively discourage prayer.   With that in mind, we painted over the windows of the van to provide students with a quiet relaxing place where they could pray.  I put on some dark sunglasses so that nobody would recognize me from the blog and I took the church van to 10 local school parking lots.  I would wait for a student who was looking lonely or isolated and I’d encourage him or to climb in the back of the van and pray.  It became pretty clear to me pretty quickly by the horrified reaction of screaming children, that their parents who taught them that prayer was something to fear.

I could have lived with this, but the reaction of the schools themselves was even worse.  Not only did they not encourage students to pray, I got the police called on my 8 times, I got 2 large security guards chasing me around a parking lot, and I got maced twice.  Is this the kind of attitude that we accept in our public schools towards prayer?  No wonder Glenn Beck says we’ve lost our way.    Something must be done.

Sometimes, I go through writer’s block and nothing in the news catches my ire enough to inspire me to produce a new blog post.   In general though, I figure I’m good for 5 a week.   That number has fallen well off despite this being a banner week for stupid people doing stupid things.  So what gives?  What’s so important.   The only answer I can give is to go to my other blog. Things should return to normal by Saturday.  Please keep visiting.  I still read the responses.

Joe

There is an old saying that winners write history.  Well nobody is a bigger winner than the state of Texas whose Board of Education approved a social studies curriculum that will finally tell the conservative side of history.  A lot of internal debate has been splitting the Texas Board with those who question Darwin’s theories of evolution on one side and those that scream and throw things when Darwin’s name is mentioned on the other.

The new version of history in Texas shows a country guided by God’s divine light until the Obama administration and features such important historical figures as The National Rifle Association, Focus on the Family, and Tom Landry.   This is an American guided by God and inspired by Ronald Reagan to be the greatest country in the Earth.   We are the country that won the American revolution, provided hope to countless immigrant refugees, save the world from Axis tyranny, found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and continues to thrive despite the Obama recession today.

Now, I know some of you supposed “historians” will say that some of those things aren’t true.   Well, really who is to say.   Historical records are spotty at best.   How do we know what is happening in the world today? We watch Fox News.   Simply by being on Fox News, we know that something is news.  In much the same way, being in a text book will make things history.   We get irritated when madrases in the Middle East teach that the United States is a great Satan, but that’s because they aren’t winners.  They have no right to decide what is history.

Maybe a few small facts get changed.  Instead of Thomas Paine writing, “The Christian religion is a parody on the worship of the sun, in which they put a man called Christ in the place of the sun, and pay him the adoration originally payed to the sun,”  he now writes, “The Christian religion is worshiping the son of God.  I think it’s great.”   Sure, the meaning changes slightly, but which is the moral that you want your children to take away?   Will hip hop culture be as angry if black children can read that they were happier under slavery?  I think not.

The price of our unique greatness is that we must not only be great going forward, but we must accept the challenge of being great going backwards as well.   To do this we have to change a word here or a fact there, but it is a price I’m willing to pay and I’m glad to see Texas shares my vision.  I just hope they don’t secede before American textbook companies start printing to this curriculum.  As one of the largest states, Texas has a huge impact on what appears in books all over the country.

Long time readers of this blog will know that I am not a big fan of books.   The printed page is an outdated communication tool that belongs back in 17th Century Germany with the inventor of the printing press Steven Gutenberg.  I am opposed to my tax dollars being wasted on libraries to store these useless relics of an earlier age.   However,  the one book that I find especially dangerous is the dictionary.   This book contains the words that spell out all the smutty, vulgar, and deviant writings that we need to protect our children from.   It only requires a relatively clever child to put the dictionary words in the right order to tell a story that would make a sailor blush.  Furthermore, our founding fathers were schooled on creative spelling–the authoritarian rule of the spelling conventionalists  is a slap in the face to American values.

Fortunately, some good folks in Riverside, California complained to the Menifee Union School District and got the dictionary pulled from the schools.   Isn’t it a parent’s right to teach their children new words?  This is how government indoctrination starts.  “It’s just not age-appropriate,” said school spokeswoman Betti Cadmus,  “It’s hard to sit and read the dictionary, but we’ll be looking to find other things of a graphic nature.”

One board member told the Press-Enterprise that there are probably more objectionable terms in the dictionary.  You can count on it.   Unfortunately, a group of liberal thug parents demanded that the dictionaries be returned to the school classrooms and the school board caved.  However, I am hoping that this case will illustrate  the dangers of a dictionary for young kids.  They can not only find smut, but learn the correct way to pronounce it and its derivation.  This is not what our tax dollars should be going for.

The prevalence of teacher data has made for a wonderful past time for my buddies and I.    As soon as Fantasy Football season ends, we begin to play a game that I invented called Fantasy School.   Now that state test results are available for every grade and every school in Illinois, it’s rather easy to draft teachers just like you would draft football players.   It’s just as exciting as other fantasy sports and gives you a rooting interest in standardized tests that you don’t normally care about.  The advantage of starting the league now, is the schools are fairly settled and you are less likely to have a student transfer or a surprise pregnancy spoiling your fantasy season.

The rules are rather simple.   You must select a faculty consisting of the following teachers:

• Two for each of the 8 primary grades
• Two substitute teachers taken from any grade
• One ESL teacher
• One Special Ed Teacher
• We are looking forward to President’s Physical Fitness results being online soon so that we can draft gym teachers.

The draft lasts 20 rounds and this year my Ronald Reagan Elementary School is looking to improve on last year’s 5th place finish out of 16 schools.   I was let down by my 6th and 3rd grade faculty.   Fortunately, there is no such thing as tenure in Fantasy School and they have been let go.   There are several scoring options, but we go by student improvement.   I have been pouring through newspapers and websites looking for  the teachers who I think will be on the top of their games.   I found out one of my early favorites is pregnant and another one won the Golden Apple and is missing half the year on sabbatical.

Because we go by the amount of improvement, taking the best students isn’t enough.  If some teacher out in the wealthy suburbs takes on  a homeroom where 95% of the students are meeting or exceeding standards, they can only get you 5 points and in fact they’ll probably go down.   On the other hand, a teacher at an inner city school who brings up students from 30% meeting standards to 52% meeting standards is going to win you the pot at the end of the year.  I try and look for young teachers who are still worried about their job and more likely to teach to the test.   We’ll be getting together to draft in a few weeks.  I’ll give you a progress report then.  Any teachers out there that I should be scouting?

I have decided that the time has finally come to spin off a separate education blog.  I seem to be able to write satirically on every other topic that is important to me, but I am either too close to education or I am simply not that skillful a writer.   I am going to move the Michelle Rhee and Imagination Charter stories to the other site.  I hope that some of you will move with me.   Have no fear, this blog will continue to not only be regularly updated, but it will continue to be my main blog.  After all, the atheists begin their war against Thanksgiving in earnest tomorrow.    I’m sure I’ll have something new up tomorrow that is more my usual style.  The new blog is located at:

www.edumacationarchive.com

Michelle Rhee needed a way to get rid of bad teachers.   In June of this year she dismissed about 80 tenured teachers for poor performance in June, after giving them 90 days’ notice and a chance to improve and there was barely any public protest, but this process was too slow.   Tenure was her biggest enemy because it is tenure that grants teachers the right to due process when terminated.   She finally decided to make the teachers an offer that they couldn’t refuse.

tarting salaries would leap from about $40,000 to $78,000, and wages for the best performers would double to about $130,000 a year. In return, teachers would lose tenure and be paid according to merit, measured in part by their students’ results. Current teachers would have a choice: they could join the new system or stay in the old one. New hires would have to join the new system.  And where would the DC schools get the money from?   According to Rhee, they would get it from sources.   According to Rhee, financial modeling done by a an unnamed firm shows that donations by unnamed donors would be sufficient to pay for the unknown costs of this plan. What more could anybody ask for?

Unfortunately, the teachers balked.   They wanted some kind of guarantee that the money would be there to pay them before they gave up anything.  They felt that once they lost tenure, it was gone while the private funds could dry up at any time.  There are no guarantees in life.  What makes these teachers so unwilling to trust these anonymous donors to make good on the funding?  Unfortunately, this wasn’t the only problem Rhee had with donors.

Rhee was just forced to let go 200 some teachers because of a $12 million budget shortfall, but many local philanthropy groups who have supported the DC schools through the years no longer have any relationship with the school system.  They complain that Rhee won’t tell them how the money would be spent and has shown little interest in building a partnership with them.

“I don’t think she has been as open to partnerships as our foundation community would have liked,” Terri Freeman, president of the Community Foundation for the National Capital Region, told the Washington Post, “Everybody wants to be of assistance. . . . The only way we’re going to find out if we can help is to have a little bit more of an open relationship.”

According to Robert McCartney of the Post, “A key moment occurred in July 2008 when Rhee met at the World Bank with dozens of top donors who belong to the Washington Regional Association of Grantmakers. She asked for donations of about $40 million, which she hoped to combine with grants from national foundations to give her a total of $70 million, according to several people who attended the meeting. The donors were disappointed when Rhee said she would provide little detail about what the money would pay for.”  Some people just want guarantees for everything.

[In the next and final installment, Michelle takes lemons and makes lemonade.   Thrill as she takes a $12 million budget shortfall and uses it to get rid of 200 experienced school teachers after the first month of school.  If you haven't read the other parts of this exciting tale, please start with part I and if you still have the stomach to push on for the last part, click here to link to part 4.]

“I think if there is one thing I have learned over the last 15 months it’s that cooperation, collaboration and consensus-building are way overrated,” Michelle Rhee at the Aspen Institute’s education summit at the Mayflower Hotel.

Since being appointed as Chancellor of the DC Public Schools, Michelle Rhee has fought a battle with the city’s teacher union.   Her main complaint has been teacher tenure which grants teachers who have been teaching for 3 or 4 years and proven themselves to be competent due process if they are terminated.   I wonder if it is possible that tenure is the reason Michelle chose to end her teaching career after only 3 years.  The misguided principle behind tenure is that teachers should be protected if they have to fail the child of a school board member or rebuff a principal’s advances or wear a Philadelphia Eagles jersey to an institute day.

The problem is this procedure protects older teachers.   The new trend in education reform is for very privileged children from the best schools to come into the schools and teach for 2 or 3 years like Michelle did.   President Obama is fond of some of these organizations like the AUSL and Michelle’s Rhee’s  own The New Teacher Project.  These teachers are so excited to go make a difference that they don’t even have time to go through a traditional teacher certification program.  Instead, they are put into a classroom with much haste through an alternative program.  They leave after 3 years or so before they start to cost the district real money.   Experienced teachers can make as much as $70,000 and these Teach for America types never stay long enough to earn the big bucks.

For Michelle Rhee to work her magic, she needed a way to get rid of the deadwood.   She caught a lucky break in June of 2008 when Woodrow Wilson High School was reorganized after failing to make Adequate Yearly Progress for 5 years under No Child Left Behind.   This gave Michelle’s energetic young choice for principal Peter Cahall a chance to clear out all the old lazy clock punching teachers at the school and replace them with new younger more energetic teachers.    One of those lazy teachers was Dr. Art Siebens who was politely told, “you don’t fit in” as he was shown the door.  Rhee had recruited Cahall very heavily from Montgomery County and he was clearly chosen for a task such as this.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t good enough for Dr. Art Siebens.   It seems he felt that his 18 years of experience teaching weren’t a liability, but something to be proud of.   Siebens is the type of teacher that some misguided educators might think of as innovative.  Using hippie folk music to teach AP biology, Dr. Siebens had some minimal success.  According to the reinstate Dr. Art website, “on the 2007 AP Biology exam, 41 of the 43 students (95.3%) with scores of 3 – 5 throughout the District of Columbia Public Schools had taken Dr. Siebens’ class, and of the seventeen students who received a score of 5 out of 5 on the AP Biology exam, all of them had taken his class. And on the 2008 AP Biology exam, every single student who received a score of 2 or above in the all of DCPS were students of Dr. Siebens. Minority students in Dr. Siebens’ AP classes achieved scores of 3-5 (50%) at a rate twice the average of all Wilson’s other AP courses (23%). Over 64% of Dr. Siebens’ students over the past five years were in classes other than his AP classes.”

Neither this website nor the many former students who have written testimonials or created the Save Dr. Art petition address the fact that Dr. Siebens is old.   He really doesn’t fit the mold of the dynamic young alternatively certified professionals that an urban school system really needs.   Wouldn’t it be great if there was a way to get rid of all the old teachers in one fell swoop?   But wait, there is.

[In Part 3, Michelle Rhee uncovers a way to get rid of teachers by the hundreds and moves towards her ultimate goal of a school district where teachers won't stand in the way of education.   I really appreciate the comments from all the Washingtonians.   This is a national blog and while I've tried to research the DC schools very thoroughly, there is no substitute for your first hand comments.  If you missed Part 1, you can read it here.  Be sure to click this link to go to part 3.]

Previously, I have posted about the wonderful work done by basketball player turned educator Arne Duncan in Chicago.   Tonight, we  look at the dynamic young go getter who is  saving the Washington DC public schools.  Her accolades are many with education luminaries like Oprah and George W. Bush singling her out for praise.

Michelle Rhee began her teaching career where it ended at Harlem Park Community School in Baltimore from 1992-1995.  According to her official biography, Rhee was praised in the Wall Street Journal and on Good Morning America for her success as a classroom teacher.   Unfortunately, when the Daily Howler did a search they could find no record of any Good Morning America appearance or writeup in the Wall Street Jorunal.   This is a shame as I am sure they were amazing.  Her claims of huge gains among her students also couldn’t be substantiated, but I’m sure they were likewise amazing.  We were able to find one newspaper article that praised the cleaner hallways at the school, but I am not sure if she actually had anything to do with the cleaning detail.

Michelle Rhee’s recent comments on her teaching career are even more inspiring.   Rather than being the educational wunderkind of her official biography, Rhee struggled in the classroom at least  initially.   In the recent article on her in Time Magazine, it states, ”Rhee suffered during that first year [of teaching], and so did her students. She could not control the class. Her father remembers her returning home to visit and telling him she didn’t want to go back.  She had hives on her face from the stress.”

That really doesn’t matter.  What matters is that somewhere in her second two years of teaching, Michelle found the secret to being an outstanding teacher and immediately left the classroom.   It’s a very good thing she did  because had she stuck around in the classroom, her teaching experience would have disqualified her from most positions in education reform leadership.  After leaving the classroom, Rhee went into teacher recruitment before being hired in 2007 to be Superintendent [Chancellor--see comments] of DC Public Schools.

Rhee represents the new thinking in education reform that believes that the biggest impediment to education is teachers who have different concepts of how a classroom actually works than business people and politicians do.   These people believe that the main reason companies outsource production overseas is not because they can pay employees 17 cents an hour, but because our schools are not as good as Haiti’s or Sri Lanka’s.

In the second part, I’m going to look at the way Michelle Rhee has found to get rid of older teachers and replace them with more energetic new teachers who as a bonus also cost the district less money.

[Click here to read part 2]

Today, Arne Duncan came to Chicago for a summit on youth violence with Mayor Daley.   I’m not actually, sure what made it a summit as community leaders were shut out from the event at Chicago’s posh Four Seasons Hotel, but Arne Duncan was able to proudly proclaim that the school reform he helped to implement was not part of the issue.

I am reminded of the great scene in Casablanca where Claude Raines as Major Renault announces he is shocked and appalled to find gambling going on at Rick’s place just as he’s being handed his gambling winnings.   It was with the same condescending arrogance that Duncan was able to declare himself innocent on all charges, but the spike in Chicago’s violence among teenagers since the beginning of Chicago’s Renaissance 2010 can’t be denied.  Through every step of the process of closing down the other schools around Fenger, parents warned Duncan that violence would happen if charters were allowed to open which would force the neighborhood kids to cross multiple gang territories.

It didn’t just happen at Fenger either.   All throughout Chicago, parents and community leaders have come out to warn about the dangers of this sort of school reform and at each school and each community they were ignored.   Daley then compounded matters this year by replacing the faculty and administration at Fenger in a wholesale house cleaning in the name of education reform.   Even the lunch ladies and janitorial staff were replaced.   The adults who had relationships with the students and could help keep tensions from boiling over were put out on the street.  The amazing thing about Renaissance 2010 isn’t that there has been a spike in violence, but that the spike hasn’t been even bigger.

The Obama administration’s big new Race to the Top education initiative, rewards states for opening more charter schools. Innovative charters have a place, but much of the charter movement has not been innovative nor successful.  Instead, public education has been privatized and the result is a two tiered system.  Whether they are allowed to or not, charters do not educate the most difficult students.  Those students wind up in the public schools.   As a country, we need to make sure that we do not have two educations systems–one for the privileged and one for everybody else.  Our country should be better than that.