That’s Right Nate

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

And now gentle reader, we find ourselves at the penultimate act of our little drama.   Throughout the summer of 2009, the DC Public Schools recruited like a drunken frat boy collecting phone numbers at a kegger.  By the end of the summer, there were a whole host of new, young, and energetic students ready to take their places as teachers in the system.   Then calamity struck.

The schools had a $40,000,000 budget shortfall and the only way to close it was to cut staff.   There is nothing harder for an administrator than when you suddenly reallize that you don’t have $40 million that you thought you had.  I still get embarrassed over the time I was 8 and went to the local convenience store for chips and pop and didn’t have enough money because I didn’t know about sales tax.   The Chinese word for crisis is the same as their world for self-serving and manipulative stunt.  Knowing this Michelle Rhee made lemons out of lemonade by getting rid of some of those tired and worn out teachers I mentioned in part 2.

Over 200 teachers were let go and the day was saved.   Police were dispatched to classrooms and the older incompetent teachers were forcibly evicted.  This provided an excellent lesson for students who witnessed their teachers’ removal about not getting old and lazy. Much fat was trimmed.  A few examples I found using this internet machine of mine:

• Students at McKinley Tech told NBC4 that their French 3 class became an introductory Spanish class when the French teacher was fired.
• Jodie Gittleson, a teacher at Shaed Elementary School who was laid off, told the Washington Post that her students were being mixed among the second and fourth grade classes.
• Students related a host of problems to WAMU-FM Dana Downs from Alice Deal Middle School says she was in the middle of a science project she was excited about. Now a different teacher has come in and abruptly changed course. Downs says students are also acting out in class, taking advantage of their new teacher. She says “they will talk really loud and won’t listen to her and throw things.”
• Many of the district’s councilors received layoff notices just as students are getting their applications together to submit to colleges.
• Taesha Hines from Ballou Senior High School complained that gym is required for graduation, but the cuts have left her school with only one gym teacher

Many of the teachers who were laid off had excellent performance evaluations.  These are exactly the kind of deadwood that are so difficult to trim because at a due process hearing they will simply use the superior rating the principal had given them to cast doubt on that principal’s claims of their incompetence.   Fortunately for Washington, DC, this budget shortfall provided a nice route around those kind of regulations.

There have been other moments of note in Rhee’s tenure.   Standardized test scored did improve, which is usually a good sign that the district is becoming more conscious of standardized tests.  Rhee also dropped support for National Board Certification–a highly valued national program for improving classroom instruction.  She has charged straight ahead with her vaunted IMPACT program which was piloted in Fairfax County in 1987 much to the amusement to one of the guinea pigs, Erica Jacobs.  Unfortunately, the union contract still seems stalled.  For some reason, the union is having trouble trusting Michelle Rhee to bargain in good faith.

I’m not from Washington, DC.  I’m from Chicago where we have had our own miracle worker Arne Duncan chosen for better things.   I won’t tell DC parents how to feel about their own child’s education prospects from hundreds of miles away.   However, in my previous entry, EFavorite posted the link to a comment by a Washington Post reader claiming that Michelle Rhee’s administration has fascist tendencies.   I can’t really speak to that, but I wonder if the sight of police leading teachers away in front of stunned students might answer the question for me.

This blog is satirical and my regular readers must be hating the last 4 articles which have gradually become less and less of my usual style.   However, some things are quite difficult to joke about–the future of our children is one of them.   A lot of well meaning liberals have gotten behind this new generation of education reformers who believe the two best ways to improve education are to bust unions and replace older largely African-American career teachers with young privileged white teachers who will spend 2 or 3 years in the classroom before moving on to bigger and better things.   These people believe that experience is a detriment and not an asset.  I wonder how these became liberal values.   Yes, the Bush family have embraced Michelle Rhee, but so have the Obamas and Oprah.

School reform has always been something that has been done to teachers, not by teachers, or with teachers.   Parents have rarely had a say either and of course children don’t know what’s good for them.   You can’t reform anything that way.   When the largest stakeholders in any endeavor are seen as the opposition you will fail.   There is another type of education reform you don’t hear much about.  If people gave it a chance, it might have a hope of accomplishing something substantial.   I don’t agree with everything that these people want, but a lot of it sure looks worth looking into.  The idea of a free, equal, and quality education is an ideal that binds us as a nation.   It has sadly never been a reality in the United States.

[As always, I appreciate feedback and comment whether you are in DC or not.  If you missed the other 3 parts of this story, please go to part 1.]

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]

Nate Peele: I’m here with Tony Federko who is a Chicago Public Schools teacher.  I wanted to get his thoughts on Obama’s proposal to extend the school year and school day.

Tony Federko: Thank you Mr. Peele, but when you asked if we could have a conference, I expected that you wanted to talk about your daughter Emily.

NP: Well, she’s doing fine–isn’t she?  She loves your class and I think she’s really learning a lot so far this year.

TF: Yes, but…

NP: Good, now how do you agree with the liberals or conservatives on education?

TF: I don’t really see a difference honestly.   Newt Gingrich and Al Sharpton are currently promoting the President’s education reforms.

NP: Really?  I wasn’t aware of that.   What do you think of the President’s idea to expand the school year?  He says we’re falling behind other countries because we don’t spend enough time in school.

TF: He’s wrong.  Don’t get me wrong I voted for him…

NP: Oh really?

TF: Anyway, Obama said that he wants our children to go to school as much as they do in Korea.   An American eighth-grader gets about 1,150 instructional hours per year while a South Korean would get 923.  Our kids have more instructional time than Taiwan, The Phillipines, and Japan who score higher than us on aptitude tests.

NP: Right, because we have teacher’s unions.

TF: Most of those countries do too.  The difference is we have a third world rate of child poverty and a third world medical system where children are forced to go to school sick and malnourished.   We also count everybody on our tests, but they only count citizens.   We do better on these tests than most developed countries like Germany and England.

NP: Germany and England are socialist countries you know.  Still, education reform is a good thing.   Don’t we need to run schools like a business?

TF: Business isn’t doing too well right now.  Maybe we should run businesses more like schools.   If we wanted to run it like a successful business, we’d start with the employees who are in the trenches everyday.  Instead, reform seems to stem from corporations who want a chance at all the money in education.

NP: Liberals are like that with social programs.

TF: It isn’t just liberals.  The very people who attack the Heritage Foundations of the world on Health Care and demand a public option are the same people joining forces with the Heritage Foundation on education to push for more charter schools.   Charter schools do the same thing insurance companies do and do not always take the students with pre-existing conditions like behavioral issues or learning disabilities.  Despite all that, test data shows that the charters don’t do as well as the regular schools at educating kids.

NP: Don’t you think that the school day should be longer?   I’d love to have a job like yours where I get out at 3:00

TF: Before we talk about adding more hours to the school day, maybe we could talk about paying teachers for the hours they already work.   Georgia has started furloughing teachers and states like California are hemorrhaging jobs.  I work a 10 hour day of which I get paid for 6 hours and 15 minutes.   Even if I was paid for an 8 hour day, they couldn’t afford it.  You know I always tell people who say they’d love my job, that they should go to school and become teachers–or go to a charter school where you wouldn’t even have to take education classes to teach.

NP: I think I’d be a great teacher.   I have a way with kids you know.   Don’t you think we need to have tougher standards for teachers though?

TF: With charters, we’re actually making the standards lower, but here’s the problem.   If you have 1000 apply for 1000 job openings, you can’t be selective.  In the wealthy school districts and the schools where they have new computers and good security they can hire good teachers.   In inner city schools some good teachers are working hard, but sometimes they have to scrape the bottom of the barrel.

NP: So how would you improve schools?

TF: First, I’d pay teachers more for working at those inner city schools.   Then, I’d try and reduce class size.   People who say that it doesn’t make a difference haven’t taught.  I’d give teachers more preparation time because many of us work almost as many unpaid hours as paid hours.   I’d keep tenure because  due process is important in this type of job, but I would make it easier to terminate somebody who was obviously not doing their job.  I’d focus more on public education and only allow charters that did creative or experimental curriculum that could be studied and possibly implemented in the public schools.  Doing those things would give you a better pool of candidates for teaching jobs.  Then comes the next two big steps:

I’d search out successful people in business, sports, the arts, you name it and I’d ask them what was it in school that helped make them successful and I’d try and reproduce it.   Everything is so geared for tests now and I don’t believe those are the most important things.   Then, I’d pass very strong health reform with a public option and I’d make childhood poverty a major focus.

NP: So is it too late to get my daughter transferred to another class?

TF: I’m afraid so.

NP: OK, well thanks.

One of the great things about my job is the opportunity to speak to Americans of all walks of life.   Today I was fortunate to get the chance to spend most of the day at Martin Borman Elementary School.  I really enjoyed meeting the students and explaining why health care reform would be bad for them and how redistribution of wealth would make some of their mommies and daddies poorer while making others more dependent on the state.  I had prepared a rebuttal to President Obama’s speech to the students, but Borman Elementary did not show the speech due to fear of Obama politicizing the event.   I still think this speech could be very useful for parents and teachers who want to give the other side equal time.

Hello everyone.   I hope you are having a great day.  I know that this is your first day of school and whether you’re an eighth grader or a kindergartner you’re probably excited and maybe a little nervous.   Don’t be.   For one thing, I’ve seen your school’s test scores and frankly they’re not that hot.   You are getting a free education at the expense of the taxpayers of this state, but frankly you’re getting what you paid for.   Today, all throughout this country students your age are speaking Mandarin and doing chemical experiments that you can’t even comprehend.   Someday, you will work for them.

I know that many of you wish that it was still Summer vacation and you could sleep a little later.   I know the feeling.   When I was a young boy growing up in California, my family was very well to do and there was nothing I enjoyed more than sleeping through the first two or three periods of the school day knowing that the teacher might be disappointed in me, but that my allowance was more than his entire paycheck.  I had a heated indoor pool and my own pony.   He was driving a 12 year old Buick without air conditioning.

I’m here today because I have something important to discuss with you. I’m here because I want to talk with you about your education and what’s expected of all of you in this new school year. You see, , we can have the most dedicated teachers, the most supportive parents, and the best schools in the world – and none of it will matter for most of you.   Look around your homeroom.   Do you really think that you’re all going to be doctors and lawyers?   Somebody is going to have to press the pants and make the sandwiches for the successful people in the future and that somebody is probably going to be you.  Let’s face it, college costs keep escalating and even if you can get the loans to pay for your education, why would you want that kind of debt?

And that’s what I want to focus on today: the futility of  your education. Every single one of you has something you’re good at.  Maybe you can sing really well or you’re the best player on the basketball team.   That doesn’t mean anybody wants to pay to see you do it.   It’s great to have a hobby, but just because you can play Guitar Hero doesn’t mean you’re ever going to be able to play a real guitar.  It’s complicated.

Maybe you could be a good writer – maybe even good enough to write a book or articles in a newspaper – but you probably won’t get hired to do it.  All writing will do is make you an alcoholic and give you a drawer full of rejection letters. Maybe you could be an innovator or an inventor – maybe even good enough to come up with the next iPhone or a new medicine or vaccine – If that’s the case you should really watch Tucker or Flash of Genius and see how corporate America treates innovators.   Life is tough kids.  I wish I could say it was fair.

And no matter what you want to do with your life – I guarantee that you’ll probably never be happier than you are right now.  Being a grownup is a lot of responsibility. You want to be a doctor, or a teacher, or a police officer? You want to be a nurse or an architect, a lawyer or a member of our military? You might as well take advantage of this time to hang out with your friends and play video games because you’ll be working very long hours and never have a chance to really have fun as an adult. You can’t drop out of school and just drop into a good job, but you can buy lottery tickets.   Girls, if you’re pretty they are always hiring dancers by the airport.

We need every single one of you to develop your talents, skills and intellect so you can help solve our most difficult problems. If you don’t do that – if you quit on school – you’re not just quitting on yourself, you’re quitting on your country.

Now I know it’s not always easy to do well in school. I know a lot of you have challenges in your lives right now that can make it hard to focus on your schoolwork.  I get it.  I know what that’s like.   I had so many toys I couldn’t possibly play with all of them and work on my homework.   Did I mention I had a heated pool?  There were times when I felt lonely and felt like I didn’t fit in.   You know what I did?  I threw a big party and even though people didn’t like me they’d be nice to me so they’d get an invitation.

Some of you might not have those advantages. Maybe you don’t have adults in your life who give you the support that you need. Maybe someone in your family has lost their job, and there’s not enough money to go around. Maybe you live in a neighborhood where you don’t feel safe, or have friends who are pressuring you to do things you know aren’t right.  If that’s the case I’m sorry.  You will probably be working at a car wash or working the midnight shift at a gas station.

Where you are right now doesn’t have to determine where you’ll end up. No one’s written your destiny for you.  They know it, but they’re scared to write it down for fear you’ll lower your expectations for yourself.  I personally think that a good healthy dose of realism is just what you as first graders need.

Young kids like you are learning this everyday.   Angelis Villenueva is a young girl in my district who came to this country not speaking a word of English.  She worked hard in school and graduated number one  out of her class  of 2500 students despite working after school helping her mother clean the homes of many of her more affluent classmates.   Unfortunately, Angelis’s family came to this country illegally and she has no social security number which has made it impossible for her to go to college. She is currently working at a Speedway or will be until I make a phone call to immigration later this afternoon.

That’s why today, I’m calling on each of you to set your own goals for your education  – Maybe you’re going to try and drive your teacher crazy.  Maybe you’ll decide to make fun of the girl who sits next to you because her parents don’t have much money and she buys all her clothes at Walmart.   Maybe you’ll decide to just hang out in the hallways a lot.   That’s great.

Some of the most successful people in life have been drop outs.   Look at people like Lebron James, Bill Gates, and Konye West.   If you get a bad grade that doesn’t mean you’re stupid, it just means that school probably isn’t for you.   Well maybe you are stupid, but if you are then school definitely isn’t for you.  If you get in trouble, that doesn’t mean you’re a troublemaker it just means that your teacher is picking on you – Probably for no reason.  Some people will tell you that you owe it to your family to graduate and that you can’t let your family down, but who knows you better than your family.  They expect it.  Use your school years well.  They’ll always be something you can talk about with your friends at the bar when you don’t want to talk about how miserable your job is.

Thank you, God bless you, and God bless America.

As today is the the first day of school for many children in this country, I thought I’d address the charter school movement.  It is an area that I feel very strongly about and one that I hope we can all agree upon.   The support that these schools get from both the left and the right makes me believe that like the landmark No Child Left Behind legislation, this is something we can all get behind.  Education in this country is in a very sorry state.  If we are going to be able to compete with the top education countries in the world like Finland despite having higher childhood poverty than any industrialized country, but Mexico and an extremely high child mortality rate, we need to get our lazy teachers to do something. Charter Schools get public money, but are freed from the strict controls placed on public schools.  In this way they are like the brave folks of Blackwater or as they are now called Xe.

Charter Schools began for four noble reasons:

1. To replace the ineffective public education system with a profit-based system.
2. To give wealthy, involved, and politically connected parents a chance to separate their children from the less desirable children in their community.
3. To create an island of educational utopia because fixing the public schools would be way too much work.
4. To crush teacher’s unions.

Charter Schools have not been very successful in raising student achievement on standardized tests, but aren’t schools supposed to be about more than test scores?  KIPP for instance has managed to open 82 schools in 19 states in a relatively short amount of time.   The profit motive is a great incentive  to keep expanding.   The public schools don’t have this kind of incentive.

Teachers unions are crippling education.   Let’s face it.   Where else can you make 30K a year or more for watching a couple dozen adolescents for 6 or 7 hours, still get a 20 minute lunch, and take your work home with you instead of staying in a depressing cubicle until you’re finished.   Worst of all, like cops and firemen teachers have ridiculous due process rights that require a school district to prove that they’re incompetent in order to fire them.   In a charter school, they can fire you that day if your shoes and belt don’t match.  That’s the way corporate America is and that’s the way our schools should be.  Public schools also require teachers that work for them to be licensed and certified.   Charter schools are freed from this bureaucratic monopoly of the education process.

Chicago is currently in the middle of an educational renaissance.   In fact, the program Chicago has established is called Renaissance 2010.  I hope that former Chicago Superintendent Arne Duncan will bring this program national.   Every year, the city opens up 10-20 new charter schools and closes some public schools.  Conceivably, this educational miracle will be completed by next year and I can’t wait.   The Heritage Foundation and some other conservative think tanks have no trouble being for charter schools and being against a public option for health care because they don’t want to see public and private insurance competing.   On the other hand, I think the two issues are one and the same.   Public schools don’t work for the same reason public health care wouldn’t work.   More charters mean more profits and more profits mean more learning.