at which a mad black woman rants about New Orleans, insomnia, teaching, education and "education," various -isms and anything involving a bitch, a spot or the letter g
So many plates spinning I feel like I have vertigo—researching for more Who IS? posts [Christine Rossell? Michael Fullan?], reading through some research on KIPP and Leslie Jacobs testimony that touches on schools, the Cowen reports, being sick and barely getting through working part-time and home changes and and and and and.
Time for a break. If something is burning a hole in my gray matter, it’ll pop up.
See you April 2, 2010.
Send tips to the email anytime: gbspotmail symbol gmail y’know.
HT: Dr. Lance Hill!
A blast from the past that states the truth about school “reform” in Orleans parish [emphasis---in blue---added; comments in italics]
________________
October 25, 2005, Tuesday
Charter schools urged for N.O. district; La. education chief cites system’s woes
BYLINE: By Steve Ritea, Staff writer
SECTION: NATIONAL; Pg. 1
LENGTH: 761 words
New Orleans should not open any public schools this academic year unless they become charter schools, state Superintendent of Education Cecil Picard said Monday, because of the district’s tenuous finances and what he called problems with the current leadership.
Picard also warned that national education associations and philanthropic groups willing to offer money and time to help rebuild the district could shrink if the district’s recent power struggles continue, a sentiment echoed by Mayor Ray Nagin and the leaders of some of those groups.
New Orleans interim Superintendent Ora Watson, who announced a plan to open four West Bank schools to students across the city Nov. 14, and School Board President Torin Sanders, who supports that effort, declined comment.
Watson’s plan flies in the face of a 4-2 board decision earlier this month to charter all 13 schools in Algiers and open as many as to eight of them in November. That plan was temporarily put on hold by a restraining order obtained Oct. 14 and set to expire this week if it is not extended.
Picard said the decision to charter those schools was “wise.”
“They don’t have any money to open four, five, six or eight schools,” he said. “I think at this point and time, until everyone can get their act together, I think that’s the best approach. I think you’re probably going to (also) see some charters on the east bank very soon.” [No one asked, or asks, why only charter schools got outside support. If you care about education, don't you care about educating kids and not just imposing free-market "methods"?]
Nagin agreed.
He said that in an Oct. 5 letter to Gov. Kathleen Blanco, he wrote, ” ‘Give me the charter schools I’ve been asking for — 20 charter schools, a citywide charter school district.’ ” [Nagin had been asking for charter schools? Since when?]
School Board Vice President Lourdes Moran and supporters of the charter effort have said it is primarily designed to take advantage of a $20.9 million federal grant to expand and create new charter schools. [The set-up---only privatized schools would get funding to open up post-Floods. How is that reform? Sounds like extortion to me.]
Alvarez & Marsal, the financial turnaround firm working with the city’s school system, has said the district can afford to open schools only if they win concessions from the federal government and if the state preserves the district’s current per-student financing levels: a questionable assumption, Picard and others have said. Other districts around the state and country have absorbed most of the district’s students and are clamoring for that money.
Reopening schools under those circumstances is a gamble, Picard said.
“Because of the current leadership and the financial situation, I don’t think they’re capable of doing that,” he said.
The decision by Watson and Sanders to announce a school reopening independent of the board’s majority decision to charter those same schools also is destructive, he said.
“Four members voted to do something else,” Picard said. “All that does is continue to send shock waves across the state and nation that they’re disjointed.” [There is never a hint of possibility that these school board members were thinking about anything other than messing up Picard et al's chance to privatize all of Orleans parish's schools. Some charter school supporters---very vague term but bear with me--- scream bloody murder when anyone raises objections to the way the reforms were imposed. The key word is "imposed"---there was no support at any level, local, state or federal, for traditional public schools to open. Suddenly, everyone is in a tizzy about how "bad" "all" the schools "are." In the past 40 years, dozens of things could have been done to improve schools. But only privatization got approval. Few people question why private industry is so hot to get its hands on federal education dollars. Millions and millions of dollars.]
That message is getting out to the district’s would-be benefactors and could scare them away, Nagin said.
“I’ve been getting calls from (former CNN News Group executive and current Aspen Institute CEO) Walter Isaacson, the (Bill and Melinda) Gates Foundation and all of these folks. They said, ‘Look, you set up the right environment, we will fund, totally fund, brand-new schools for the city of New Orleans. But we don’t want to go through what you’ve been,’ ” he said. ” ’All that struggle you’ve been having with that School Board. We don’t want to do that. We want to come in clean.’ “
Tulane University President Scott Cowen, chairman of the education committee of Nagin’s Bring Back New Orleans Commission, said the philanthropic Gates Foundation, named for Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and his wife, and the Broad Foundation, a nonprofit education reform group, will be active on that panel.
“I think if those foundations were asked to give money to the school system as it exists right now, it would be unlikely to be forthcoming,” he said. [No one questions why the schools have to get funding from private organizations like the Gates Foundation, which is not an advocate for public education. Why was it necessary, or the only way, to solicit from private funds interested not in school reform but transferring the management of schools, and all the state and federal fuinds they receive, into private hands.]
Isaacson, a New Orleans native, said the Aspen Institute is “willing to come in if we can all rise above politics.” He also said the board has “shown some good leadership in wanting some charters.” [Privatization is a sign of "good leadership"? The current privatization movement is not "above politics." It's all about politics because few if any in this movement talk about pedagogy, child development, the latest in research on brain development and learning. No talk of best practices. Have you seen that phrase used anywhere? Challenge me. I want to be wrong on this one.]
Henry Duvall, a spokesman for the Council of the Great City Schools, which has already begun helping the district assess the conditions of some schools, said the board and the district superintendent need to be working in tandem. Otherwise, “you’re going to have disarray,” he said, which is “a turnoff” to organizations willing to help.
“I can’t disagree with them,” Picard said. “They said, ‘We’re not going to come in and do it under the auspices of the present governance.’ ” [The juxtaposition of these quotes implies that the only way to avoid disarray is for OPSB to agree to whatever the superintendent says. Was OPSB a great board? No. Were the schools overall in great condition? No, no matter what definition of "condition" you use. Does that mean that privatization was the only alternative? No. Did these organizations geared toward privatization have to be appealed to? No. Was there any effort by anyone on the state level to find reforms or help other than privatization? No. And you can see that there was and is no plan other than privatizing this urban district---Pastorek is all over the place about teachers and the classroom and actual students and their learning and whether suburban districts have to accept whatever he says and that is because there is no plan, no road map. When the problem is reduced to a nail, only hammers are the solution.]
. . . . . . .
Steve Ritea can be reached at sritea@timespicayune.com or (504) 826-3396.
Times-Pic Metro section page 1—”Cowen report endorses school reforms” [he online version tries to make it look less like an arranged marriage: Tulane University report praises. prods New Orleans educators]
As if the Cowen Institute has or will do anything but approve of the reforms imposed on Orleans parish.
And what they mean by “educators” isn’t necessarily teachers, who are mostly cogs in this reform machine.
If you are interested in the counter-narrative of local school reform, you should be on Dr. Lance Hill’s email list.
From “Pastorek on Separate Policies for Urban and Rural Districts”:
http://bit.ly/pastorekinterview
I have mentioned in the past that school takeovers and privatization in Louisiana has been restricted to urban districts governed by black majorities. This interview with Paul Pastorek indicates that there is, indeed, a separate standard for urban and rural districts; rural districts are generally white-controlled and they are not subject to complete take-overs.
From “Comparing Charters and Traditional Schools in New Orleans”:
In contrast, the RSD-chartered schools had to recruit from a pool of students with a higher percentage of at-risk and high-need students and theoretically all these schools had open admission. So while New Orleans has a two-tiered system of academically segregated students, i.e. privatized charters on the top tier and public RSD-run schools on the bottom tier, we also have a two-tiered division within the charters: “advantaged” and“disadvantaged” charters. The School Progress Scores (SPS) cited in the study [by Cowen Institute--here's the link Dr. Hill provided] reflect this difference and how it impacted the RSD-charters. Comparing the 2006-2007 and 2007-2008 school years, the RSD-run (public) schools improved at virtually the same rate as the RSD-charters (privatized schools): less than ½ percentage point difference (+13.3 compared to +12.9–see the chart on page 16). In other words, the more that the new charters had to recruit from the remaining high-needs student pool, the more their progress was imperceptible when compared to the remaining public schools.
Other emails include “Leslie Jacobs on Schools,” “Buddy Roemer on Katrina Exclusion,” “KIPP Pays $50 a Week for Good Behavior,” and “Pastorek Supports $5,000 Cut in Teacher Stipend.”
You can request to be put on his email list—Lhill at tulane dot edu.
Playing around with the Times-Pic’s “How much do state employees earn?” “graphic,” I found in a $100K-$300K search:
top of the list
bottom of page 1, $300K-$100K search
BWAH-HAH-HAH-HAH!
I wonder if I qualify as part of the “Tulane community”? And why only Tulane? Are we non-Tulaners too dim for a briefing? If I go, will I be asked for ID?
We’ll see.
I hope to finish Ravitch’s book by then. I wonder how or if her reversal will have an effect on this briefing.
You must listen to the interview with Diane Ravitch featured on Morning Edition Tuesday, March 2—and, if possible, read her new book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education . [NPR.org has an excerpt.] Ravitch was one conservative voice supporting NCLB and standardized testing but she has now changed her mind—she sees standardized testing used incorrectly, she sees forces involved in school “reform” who primarily want to dismantle public education, and she’s looked at the research which does not show that charter schools are better than traditional public schools.
“I was known as a conservative advocate of many of these policies,” Ravitch says. “But I’ve looked at the evidence and I’ve concluded they’re wrong. They’ve put us on the wrong track. I feel passionately about the improvement of public education and I don’t think any of this is going to improve public education.”
…
“There should not be an education marketplace, there should not be competition,” Ravitch says. “Schools operate fundamentally — or should operate — like families. The fundamental principle by which education proceeds is collaboration. Teachers are supposed to share what works; schools are supposed to get together and talk about what’s [been successful] for them. They’re not supposed to hide their trade secrets and have a survival of the fittest competition with the school down the block.”
As a matter of fact, about 17% of charter schools do better than traditional public schools. Which means that 83% do the same or worse than public schools. This is not bias. This is what the research has shown using the same standards, primarily test scores, used to close, uproot and demonize traditional public, primarily urban [read: black], schools and systems.
You’d think those involved in school reform would care about research and thinkers like Ravitch, or at least recent research on child development, the brain and learning, since the improvement of public education is their stated goal.
Guess what?
Yeah, you right.
from Salon.com
Someone used that phrase a couple days ago to refer to some faculty at a high school.
Just for your information, I did not fail; I did bail.
I am a bailed academic.
Jodi Jacobs Aamodt is the board president of 4 local schools. She’s someone worth knowing about.
She’s an attorney at Jacobs, Manuel, Kain and Bernberg. She’s also on the board of KIPP New Orleans and listed as the Board president for KIPP Central City Primary, KIPP McDonogh 15 School for the Creative Arts, KIPP Central City Academy and KIPP Believe College Prep in the New Orleans Parents’ Guide to Public Schools 2008 and 2009 [PDF]. Aamodt was listed in “35 and Under” in New Orleans Magazine, June 1, 2001. She was on the board of Dress for Success New Orleans at that time. But is not now?
When did Aamodt become involved in education reform? What are her connections to New Schools New Orleans? Is she related in any way to Leslie Jacobs? How so? Is that relevant or not? You tell me.
"G Bitch" is a persona-pseudonym brought to you by a person with a "real" life, job, family, friends, etc. And nothing on this blog has anything to do with the views, practices, needs, or pet peeves of any employer, association, profession, clan, family member, or BFF.
The G Bitch Spot by G Bitch is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
