Harvard Business Review asked what could be done to improve education. So I Responded.

Here’s my response to Sarah Green’s article.  We’ll see if it get’s approved, anyway.

“Here’s what I would do:

1) Kill Testing Culture- high-stakes tests inhibit creativity and curricular innovation, and are used as a blunt weapon for judging students, educators, and schools leading to the label “failure.”  This was the one and only thing mentioned by Finland’s lead teacher when he came to IL last month to speak on improving US schools.  To really hammer home how bad the testing and “data display” problem is, we need a national audit of time and money spent on testing and test prep.

We need rich curricula that includes languages and humanities, applied mathematics and sciences fine arts, civics and logic courses, vocational tech, and health.  We need to remember that the best education, is actually ancient!  Progressive (Deweyan) Education looked at the world of students and asked them, “Which problems do you want to solve today, and what do you need to learn to do it?”  It certainly did not offer them a three passages, with 25 questions each with four possible answers, and say, “this is what you need to know to lead a good life.” Students aren’t buying it, and they should not tolerate it.

2) Allow for more community input and voice.  I do not mean “school choice,” I do not mean charter schools in lieu of public schools.  Those are false choices.  All stakeholders want good schools.  Period. What I mean is a respected decision-making process that values all stakeholder input.

3) End the attack on the Unions in and of itself.  Unions, while they do have their vested interest in what’s good for teachers, heck, MOST of the time it’s good for students too!  ”Good working conditions are good teaching conditions are good learning conditions.”  If you don’t believe me, consider what kind of person would be standing in front of our children under “bad working conditions.”  Historically, Unions have fought for better public schools against a cost-cutting bureaucracies that would gladly place voter concerns over teaching and learning concerns.  Absolutely no innovations in teaching and learning have come from charter schools, in fact, “charter schools” were initially a Union idea!   Innovation in teaching and learning comes from teachers and students who feel respected, supported, and encouraged by their leadership try new things in the classroom.  Why did Congress just authorize $54 Million for states to implement charterization of public school systems when charters have a luke-warm record compared to traditional public schools (Stanford CREDO Study)?  Because charter are not unionized, and they can drive wages of the staff down (not a problem, because most staff in charter schools leave after 3-4 yrs.)

4) Reframe the Discussion and replace the “myths of fear,” with “enduring understandings” about Teaching and Learning.  Think back to what your favorite teacher was like?  what made him/her that good?  Did everyone connect to that teacher the way you did?  Probably not, but that doesn;t make your experience any less valuable.  The vast majority of educators are great for most students.  We need to end the Myth of “all these bad teachers,” and replace it with “all the teachers we loved.”

“Merit Pay,” and “Data Display” will neither shame nor incentivize teachers to be better; look at NYC and Washington DC.   instead, we need schools that are “less like prison, and more like camp.”  Tests are more like prison, fear-tactics are more like prison, top-down management are more like prison.

5) School leadership must have classroom experience, and expertise in teaching and learning.  They must be now what they used to be, “Principal Lead Teachers,” instead or what they have become, “building managers.”  When i am evaluated as a teacher, I want to know that the person who writes my evaluation actually knows what good teaching looks like!

6) Equitable funding for all schools.  ”Races” and grants are not equitable, especially if they come with incentives to make drastic changes towards “data culture” and “turnarounds.”  These band-aids that take voice away from the school community and ultimately add to problems such as higher dropout/pushout and homelessness rates in surrounding areas.  In fact, I would add under this point that we need to “follow the money.”  Pearson Education, along with Gates, Stand for Children and other groups have decided that they with throw their money behind specific candidates willing to push their form of education reform, and it has let to absolutely no innovation, but plenty of systemic ethics violations and scandals including mass cheating, data-dumps of invalid rates of teachers, and lobbying that dwarfs tobacco, gun, and liquor interests in comparison.

For You To Do Now:

1) Ask your legislator to sponsor a local, statewide, or national audit on money and time-spent on test-preparation.

2) Follow the Money (Brietbart.com announced that the “top 46 Unions earned $337 million from their members in the past year, compare that to the expenditures of the educational publishing and consulting-including Gates.)

3) Join your local school board and demand a high-quality public education that is “more like camp, and less like prison.”

The Power of Breaking Bread: Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn Cook Superbowl Dinner for Tucker Carlson and Andrew Breitbart

“Good teaching requires audacity, but demands humility.” 

-William Ayers, The Mystery of Teaching

The following is a reflection by educator and activist William Ayers, on his hosting of Tucker Carlson and five friends (including the late Andrew Breitbart) for dinner.  Carlson bid for the dinner as a fundraiser in support of the Illinois Humanities Council.  

Hosting your purported “diametric opposite” for a dinner demonstrates both audacity and humility.  Ayers reflects on the internal and external challenges and questions he wrestled with in preparation for the event, and then concludes with a recognition of humanity that goes beyond the camera lens or 8-second sound bite.  

I recommend eating something delicious while reading this.

Adam 

Our Dinner with Tucker and Company

In December, 2011 a tiny but wondrous Chicago program of the Illinois Humanities Council (IHC) launched an on-line auction to raise needed cash for its public programming. The Public Square was celebrating its Tenth Anniversary, and Bernardine and I had been on its Advisory Board from the start. We kicked in what money we could, and we donated two items to the auction: choice seats at a Cubs game and an afternoon at beautiful Wrigley Field with Bernardine—an ardent and unruly fan—and dinner for six, cooked by team Ayers/Dohrn. We’ve done the dinner thing two dozen times over the years— for a local baseball camp, a law students’ public interest group, alternative spring break, immigrant rights organizing, and a lot of other worthy work—and we’ve typically raised a few hundred dollars. There were many more attractive items on that year’s list: Alex Kotlowitz was available to edit twenty pages of a non-fiction manuscript, Gordon Quinn to discuss documentary film projects over dinner, and Kevin Coval to write and spit an original poem for the highest bidder.

We paid little attention as the online auction launched and then inched onward—a hundred dollars, two hundred, and then three—even when a right-wing blogger picked it up and began flogging the Illinois Humanities Council for “supporting terrorism” by giving tax-payer money to us. He was a little off on the concept, because we were actually donating money and services to them, not the other way around, but this was a rather typical turn for the fact-free, faith-based blogosphere, so onward and upward, no worries.

There was a little button on our dinner item that someone could select and “Buy Instantly” for $2500.00, which seemed absurdly high. But in early December the TV celebrity and self-described conservative bad boy, Tucker Carlson, hit the button, and we were his.

I loved it immediately. Surely he had some frat boy prank up his sleeve—his signature gesture a kind of smug and superior practical joke or an ad homonym put down —but so what? We’d just raised more for the Public Square in one bid than anyone thought would be raised from the entire auction. We won!

Well, not so fast—this did mean we had to prepare dinner for Tucker plus five, and that could become messy. But, maybe not, and anyway, we argued, it’s just a couple of distasteful hours at most, and, bingo! Cash the check!

Right wing blogs lit up, some writers tickled with Tucker’s entertaining sense of humor, others earnestly saluting his willingness to enter the den of dodgy enemies of the state and sit in close quarters, an unmistakable act of courage and daring in the service of “the cause.” But some took a grimmer view: Don’t do it Tucker, they pled, this will legitimize and humanize “two of America’s greatest traitors.”

Tucker Carlson got a letter from the IHC: “Congratulations,” it began. “You are the winning bidder for The Public Square’s 10th anniversary auction item: Dinner for six with Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. Thank you very much for your payment of $2500 for this item.”

The letter went on to offer ten potential dates for the dinner, and to note that “all auction items were donated to the IHC [which] makes no warranties or representations with respect to any item or service sold…” and that “views and opinions expressed by individuals attending the dinner do not reflect those of the Illinois Humanities Council, the National Endowment for the Humanities, or the Illinois General Assembly.” I imagined the exhausted scrivener bent at his table copying out that carefully crafted, litigation-proof language—does it go far enough? How about the governor or the Joint Chiefs of Staff? But then I’m no lawyer.

Tucker chose February 5, Super Bowl Sunday as it happens.

We were besieged by friends clamoring to come to dinner—“I’ll serve drinks,” wrote one prominent Chicago lawyer, “Or, if you like, I’ll wear a little tuxedo and park the cars. Please let me come!”

Everyone saw it as theater, but not everyone was delighted with the impending show. A few friends called Carlson and company “vipers” and argued that we should never talk to people like them, ever. We disagreed; talk can be good. Others began distancing themselves from us, wringing their hands the moment they saw themselves mentioned on the right-wing blogs, and instantly, almost instinctively, assuming a defensive crouch.

Things quickly got weirder: two board members resigned from the IHC, complaining that the organization was now affiliated with people who “advocate violence,” presumably Bernardine and me, not Tucker Carlson or his friends, not the Mayor, the Governor, the State Legislature, the Cabinet, or the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The paid stenographers at the Chicago Tribune duly reported the two resignations, quoting the outraged quitters, and leaving it at that.

(Parenthesis here on the art and science of fact-checking: Had the Tribune in fact checked the facts, the fact-checker would have checked the fact that the quitters used the term “advocates violence.” Check. Had he or she dug a little deeper, the fact-checker might have discovered that, yes, we’d been described that way before, even in the pages of the Tribune.  Check. And so it goes in the hermetically-sealed, narcissistic echo chamber—a characterization becomes a fact with enough repetition, check, the fact-checker simply reviews the work of previous fact-checkers with no felt-need to analyze primary sources or inquire up-close or in-person. Check. Presumably another fact-checker did that already, and if not, so what? Oh, and for the record, we don’t advocate violence—we’re not with NATO or G8. Check. End parenthesis)

Some winced and stooped a little deeper; no one was apparently moved to speak up publically to defend the idea of dialogue, controversy and conversation as essential to the culture of democracy and to the vitality of the humanities, and no one condemned the most knee-jerk instance of demonization and far-fetched guilt-by-association.

Dinner with Tucker seemed cheery and worthwhile compared to counseling a bunch of cringing liberals. Where is the back-bone or the principle? No wonder the tiny group of right-wing flame-throwers with a couple of email accounts feels so disproportionately powerful—liberals seem forever willing to police themselves to the point of forming an orderly line right into the slaughterhouse.

So on January 12, 2012, I wrote Tucker a quick letter:

We’re looking forward to seeing you all for dinner in Chicago on February 5, 2012, and what we assume will be a spirited and enlightening conversation. We salute you for making such a generous contribution to the Public Square, a tiny program that works mightily to promote public dialogue in unlikely places, and bases its efforts on a core belief that in our wildly diverse democracy, talking to strangers is an essential way forward. Our dinner surely fits that bill.

We’ve received lots of messages from friends who can’t quite believe this is happening, and find it surreal at best. Some want to serve drinks or wait tables, but others insist it’s all a silly publicity stunt. We disagree, and point to both the importance of conversation across a variety of orientations, as well as your good comment to the Tribune: “I bought the auction dinner because I support the important work of the Illinois Humanities Council.”

It appears that you’re taking some heat yourself from far-right pundits and bloggers for agreeing to sit down with us at all, and that some of your political allies argue that you are undermining “the until-now-airtight argument that Obama was wrong” to have any associations with people like us who hold quite different political beliefs, or who likely won’t agree on a wide range of issues. We’re glad to see that you disagree with these folks, and that you believe, as we do, that we can all share a dinner, have a lively conversation about the spirit and direction of our country and the world, perhaps learn something from one another, and still maintain the integrity and independence of our own views.

We heard that you were kidding around about the dinner with Dennis Miller on his radio show, and said with a laugh, ”When I hear the word ‘humanities’ I draw my gun.” It was a joke, of course, but please leave your guns at home!

So, this is a note of welcome. Come and dine, enjoy the food, the company, and the exchange, and travel safely with hope in your heart and a good appetite.

Tucker responded:

Thanks a lot for this. I’m looking forward to Sunday. Just bought plane tickets and reserved a hotel for myself and one of our reporters, Jamie Weinstein. I haven’t finished the rest of the guest list—I’ve been on the road for these primaries nonstop—but I’ll send you the names as soon as I have them. Where’s dinner? I want to make sure we’re not staying too far away.

We exchanged several notes on the next day:

We’ll meet up and you’ll be dining be in the proverbial Undisclosed Location—ten minutes by cab from any down town hotel. It’s a lovely home with a perfect kitchen for me to prepare something sensational. Keep me updated on the guests and on any dietary issues. You know, of course, that the Super Bowl begins at 5:20 Chicago time.
On another note: poor you, slogging through those particularly unattractive primaries. I’m eager to hear true stories from the front, Hunter Thompson style if possible!

Undisclosed location? Holy smokes. Are you guys in hiding again?

Nope! We’re open and easily accessible. But if we did meet in the proverbial undisclosed location I like to think we would engage the ghost of Christmas past.
I’ve got a really nice dinner planned, so bring an appetite as well as people who enjoy good food.

That’s a riot. And have no fear: I have an appetite like a golden retriever. 

Raw meat?  Gosh, I was going a cut above Alpo, but maybe I should scale back.

You could probably serve kibble. I’m not very discerning about dinner. 

If I’d been feeling mean-spirited I might have responded that he’s not very discerning about a lot more than dinner, but what the heck?

A few days later Tucker sent us the guest list: Jamie Weinstein, Andrew Breitbart, Matt Labash, Audrey Lowe, and Buckley Carlson. “Entertaining, civil people all of them, guaranteed,” he concluded.

I figured Jamie and Matt were his young associates at the Daily Caller, Buckley his brother, and Audrey his random reader who had won the privilege in some kind of contest Tucker held on-line. Andrew Breitbart, self-described “media mogul,” entertaining perhaps, but not civil, I thought, performed the role of grinning and menacing bomb-thrower of the radical right—Breitbart’s record included active assistance in the demise of ACORN, efforts to damage Planned Parenthood, and the deeply dishonest discrediting of Shirley Sherrod at the Agriculture Department which led to her being fired (followed by an apology).

Entertaining and civil! Guaranteed!

A couple of nights before the dinner I was hosting a meet-and-greet coffee at home for a young friend and former student running for the Illinois Senate (True! He told me he too had aspirations to be president someday—the first Mexican-American in the White House—and a coffee at our house seemed like the perfect launching pad!). Bernardine was away for work, so I was on my own. As the event wound down and people began to drift away, an old friend took me aside and told me it was foolish of me to have offered the dinner to the Public Square in the first place—an act of “left adventurism” she called it—and going through with it now would be provocative and stupid. What? I said, my voice rising and cracking; we’ve done this dozens of times, so how is this particular dinner/donation adventurism? “Oh, please,” she said, annoyed. And we’ve been on their board for a decade, I continued, and they asked us to do it, so how is that provocative?

“But not in this context,” she explained. “And this is a publically-funded group. They’re vulnerable, and this is not good for them.” I was stunned.

I’m innocent and I didn’t do anything wrong, I said, but that sounded whiny and ridiculous the moment it left my mouth—I’m not “innocent” in the least, and I do wrong things all the time. Still this dinner just didn’t seem like one of my many terrible or even tiny transgressions. I felt rattled and alone.

But this all had a clarifying effect as well. Friends came into sharper focus, well-defined and evident, and those who understood the importance of standing on principle—friends or not—on issues like resisting the grotesque demonization of individuals and whole social groups, or fighting the toxic use of guilt-by-association in political discourse, also became dazzlingly obvious. Those who were confused or confounded, duped or bamboozled faded toward the background. It occurred to me once more that the good liberals I know would surely do the right thing if zealots began burning young girls as witches in Massachusetts, for example, or if the government said, in a time of fear and threat, “We are rounding up all Japanese-Americans, and placing them in prison camps.” I’m sure they all cheered watching the movie “Spartacus” as every slave who’d been lined up on the field stepped forward in solidarity and said, “I am Spartacus,” and in “Point of Order” when the courageous Joe Walsh stood up to the bullying Joe McCarthy, and in a voice breaking with emotion uttered the famous line, “Have you no shame, Senator? At long last, have you no shame?” If only we’d lived in that more perfect time.

It’s pretty easy to be a hero generations gone by—we’re all Abolitionists and Freedom Fighters now, we’re all heroes in retrospect—but that settles nothing for today: several state legislature want teachers right here, right now to compile lists of students with questionable immigration status; several people right here, right now are being interrogated, persecuted, and jailed for giving money or medical supplies to charities disapproved of by the state department; citizens are legally barred by the US government right here, right now from free travel to a single country in the world, that terrifying island ninety miles from Miami. Where is the outrage, right here and right now? Oh, but these things are quite complicated and so very controversial that it’s hard to know what to do now—it was all so obvious and a little too easy back then. I mean McCarthy’s name itself was a dead giveaway: McCarthy/McCarthyism…who couldn’t see that shit coming a mile away?

I shopped; I cooked; I set up for dinner. But it felt mostly like a heavy slog through thick mud. I was cold; I was lonely; I was tired. Not at all the mood or the tone I’d wanted.

Things got better inside my head when Bernardine returned to Chicago. She went right to work making the carrot-ginger soup, chilling me out, and when a wondrous collection of our closest folks assembled at a friend’s beautiful home to help out and serve, mostly to be present at the dinner party, I felt fine. There was lots of wine and beer, and we set an elegant table with a placecard depicting six different “great Americans”—Rosa Parks, for example, and Gertrude Stein, as well as Dick Cheney and Sarah Palin—at each place-setting, along with a menu printed on card stock they could each keep as a souvenir:  Hoisin Ribs and Cucumbers, Carrot Ginger Soup, White Fish with Black and Red Quinoa, Midwest Farmhouse Cheeses, Apple Pie and Stephen Colbert’s AmeriCone Dream Ice Cream. At the bottom of the menu I’d included two quotations about the humanities: “I just thank my father and mother, my lucky stars, that I had the advantage of an education in the humanities.”—David McCullough (Awarded the Medal of Freedom by George W. Bush); and, “When I hear the word humanities, I draw my gun.” —Tucker Carlson. It was, of course, a joke.

I meditated on Rilke:

Let everything happen to you
Beauty and terror
Just keep going
No feeling is final.

And then they arrived: Let the rumpus begin!

Spirited greetings and introductions all around, laughter at the improbability of the whole thing, a flurry of separate conversations as wine was poured and glasses lifted. I proposed a toast to Tucker thanking him for his generous gift of $2500 to the Public Square, and I reminded everyone that this was a dinner party, not an interview or a performance (of course, dinner is always a performance, and this one more than most), and they were at the table, first course served.

Friends had warned us that they would try to create a gotcha moment, but not much happened. We ferried food in and out, pulled up chairs periodically to chat while they ate. Tucker Carlson and Bernardine gazed out the windows for a time at the Chicago skyline, and discovered a shared Swedish background (Christmas cookies!). Jamie Weinstein acted the intrepid cub-reporter, note-book in hand, scribbled the titles of books from the book shelves, questions flying in a steady stream, but perhaps his manic, in-your-face manner was the result of jet-lag (“I’m just off the plane from Israel,” he said half a dozen times.”My third trip!”). Carlson and Breitbart had been on the road covering the primaries, and each expressed deep disdain for the Republican candidates seeking the presidency; when Jamie complained that none was a bona fide conservative, I asked him to define “conservative” for me. “Small government,” he said. That’s it? I asked. “Yes.” It certainly makes thinking easier, if not completely beside the point. I pointed out that Somalia, to take an example, was a small government paradise.

Tucker told me at one point that his kids went to the same boarding school that he’d attended, and asserted that the only difference between his kids’ school and a failing school in Chicago was that at the prep school they could fire the bad teachers. I laughed out loud, and he smiled weakly.

Meanwhile at the other end of the table, Bernardine was saying that the US should close all foreign military bases immediately, begin to dismantle the Pentagon, and save a trillion dollars a year—a small government proposal if ever there was one. The boys weren’t buying it at all, clamoring for violence here, violence there, violence (normalized, routine, and taken-for-granted) practically everywhere. Andrew Breitbart, humid and heating up, argued noisily for US military interventions in Iran and Syria, and then, egging himself on, North Korea and China (!)—on humanitarian grounds, of course—while Bernardine, that notorious poster child for violence, steadfastly urged disarmament, peace on earth, good will toward all. It was utterly surreal.

We gave each guest a SWAG bag with candy kisses and one of my books, autographed. Tucker took my comic book about teaching, and I signed it “To my new best friend!” I had bought his book Politicians, Partisans, and Parasites, with an epigram (returned to again and again in the text) from Larry King: “The trick is to care, but not too much. Give a shit—but not really.” I asked him to please autograph it for me and he wrote: “Thanks for the fantastic ribs! Please read every word of this—the truth lies herein.” Perhaps he was being ironic as well.

As they were leaving Breitbart told Bernardine that he was thrilled to know her, and he noted that we had at least one thing in common: we were all convenient caricatures in the “lame-stream” media.

It was all over in an hour and a half. Andrew Breitbart tweeted from the taxi ferrying them back to their hotel: Shorthand: Ayers, a gourmand, charmer. Dohrn, hot at 70, best behavior. Potemkin dinner. Pampered by their coterie. Kicked out by half-time.

He elaborated in a long radio interview later that night from his hotel bar: “We were exposed to the two most sophisticated dinner party-throwers in the world…This was their battlefield and they couldn’t have been more charming…I think I’m going to try and reach out to Bill Ayers and try and figure out if I can maybe do a road trip across the country with him—him and me—and he can show me his America, and I can show him my America, and maybe we can film it and let people decide.  Because I’ve got to be honest with you, I liked being in the room with him, talking with him.”

That road trip was never a likely prospect, but it’s no longer even a distant dream or a far-out possibility—a few days after our dinner Andrew Breitbart died suddenly outside his home at the age of 43, too young.

Life—short or long—always ends in the middle of things.

Parents in Chicago Occupy their School and win a Stakeholder Meeting

Congratulations to the parents of students at Brian Piccolo Elementary  School in the West Humboldt Park neighborhood of Chicago.  

I have a feeling we will see more #OccupyOurSchools in our city and across the nation as the fight to reclaim our public schools grows.

While you plan your occupation, please join Parents Across America in national conference call on education reform on Monday Feb 20th.  Call in is at 8pm Eastern.  

Conference Dial-in Number: (424) 203-8075 

 Participant Access Code: 1037540#

Adam

Declaration #1 from Piccolo occupation

11:49pm – February 17th, 2012

We, the Piccolo Occupation, are putting our childrens’ education

first. Piccolo has failed because CPS has refused to invest in public

education. The school has struggled for years but you have taken out

all the programs, classes and opportunities to learn. We have had 3

principals in the last five years.We have not been able to work with

anyone on a long-term basis to address the chronic disinvestment in

our school. CPS and City Hall have failed us and our children. Your

goal is to privatize the education system by giving it to corporations

that support the mayor. We have been ignored, you have ignored our

children and now you are trying to make money off of them.

The Chicago Public Schools is in violation of its own remediation and

probation policy. CPS is in violation of the Illinois School Code and

the Illinois Civil Rights Act. CPS is in violation of Illinois Senate

Bill 630. Because of this, a moratorium has been introduced in the

Illinois Legislative Assembly by the School Facilities Taskforce. We

are enacting our moratorium for ourselves with this sit-in do to the

fact that CPS not once has laid out the necessary corrective action

for Brian Piccolo or Paolo Cassals along with the Local School

Councils for getting them off of probation during the last five years.

The School Improvement Plans for Academic Achievement (SIPAA) at these

two schools have lacked the budgetary resources to bridge the

achievement gap of our student populations. Furhter, the SIPAAs along

with the budgets at the time of their signings have not had real

community input. Therefor, these actions could very well be civil

rights violations. At the recent CPS hearings, the former principle of

Cassals testified that not once in the last five years had CPS met

with her nor with the LSC about any of the necessary corrective action

for Paola Cassals to be removed off of probation.

Because CPS has been not willing to meet with or listen to us, this is

what we want:

1) A meeting with Mayor Rahm Emanuel

2) A meeting with at least five of the Chicago School Board members present

3) The removal of Piccolo and Cassals from the turnaround list

Retired Oswego Superintendent Calls for Quinn to Fire IL State Superintendent Chris Koch for Pearson-Scandal Involvement

And the letters keep rolling in… this one is from fellow Chicagoland SaveOurSchools Member Roger Sanders.

Adam

January 9, 2012

Honorable Patrick Quinn

Office of the Governor

207 State House

Springfield, IL 62706

Dear Governor Quinn:

I am writing to ask that you demand the resignation of Dr. Christopher A. Koch, State Superintendent of Schools.  It is with continued dismay that the citizens of Illinois live under the cloud of corruption that has become the hallmark of too many elected and appointed officials.  As a life-time resident of Illinois for 60 years, and a career educator of 40 years in Illinois, I feel it is imperative that our educational system be seen as above reproach.  Sadly, our State Superintendent has joined the ranks of those who make us question the motives of policies and contracts set by Illinois’ public officials.

The New York Times (January 3, 2012) reports that:

“Christopher Koch, state superintendent of education in Illinois – which has $138 million in contracts with Pearson [the nation’s largest education publisher] – went to China, Brazil and Finland with the [Pearson] foundation.  The only Pearson compensation he listed on state ethics forms was the cost of the flight to China, $4,271 for business class.  Asked why hotels, meals and the other flights were not documented, a spokesman for Dr. Koch, Matt Vanover, said , “What we’re looking at is a litmus test; they just want to make sure he’s not traveling first class.”

The New York State’s attorney general has been investigating similar trips involving other education officials from around the country who have taken world-wide junkets as guests of the Pearson Foundation.  I have included the full article for your review.  How shameful it is for Illinois to be in the national spotlight, AGAIN, among the infamous allegations of crooked politicians and officials who are supposed to be protecting the public trust.  And if the only thing we are looking at is to see if Dr. Koch is traveling first class, then we need to look even further at the people and processes that are supposed to be watching for ethical malpractice.  Frankly, if that is the standard for Illinois, then we need new people and new standards to protect the public interests.

First, Dr. Koch should have had enough common sense not to bring his motives into question in such a way.  At best he has used poor judgment.  Or perhaps he believes that in his role as President, now Past President, of the Council of State School Officers, it was O.K. for him to accept such trips.  Or perhaps he just doesn’t think it is wrong.  Or perhaps there is more to his motivation than we would like to think.  I suppose only Dr. Koch knows for sure.  Do we really think we are going to learn a lot from countries such as China or Brazil about how to “improve” our educational systems?  Having been to China myself, I would question that rationale.  And even if we thought we might learn from Finland or Brazil, if it is that important, then the Illinois State Board of Education should pick up the tab.  And if we are sharing with those countries all the great things we are doing, then those countries should pay the freight.  It’s crystal clear to any objective observer that these trips were neither necessary, not important for the people of Illinois, nor more than a “free” way for Dr. Koch to travel the world with money laundered through a foundation associated with a company with which Illinois has a huge contract for services.  Plus, the funds were further brokered through an organization in which Dr. Koch had a high-level position.

Second, Dr. Koch should report his full expenses, or should we not expect such high-profile officials to be accountable at the same level that we hold our students, teachers and administrators.  As a teacher, administrator and former school superintendent, I was  always acutely aware of the compelling need to be above any question regarding contracts for services.  Had I taken such trips as Dr. Koch with a company that has such large contracts with my employer, I would fully expect my Board of Education to ask for my resignation.  If they did not, I’m sure community members would have.  And rightfully so.  To suggest that you can maintain objectivity in contract decision making in those types of arrangements is ludicrous.

Third, our compulsion to test, test, and test our students and evaluate teachers based upon standardized test results has gone so far beyond reasonable, and is so pedagogically unsound, that it is crystal clear to me that policy making at the highest level has more to do with business economics and political ideology that teaching and learning.  Dr. Koch’s willingness to accept such travel perks certainly reinforces many educators’ beliefs that our educational policies are less about what is in the best interest of students and more about what is in the best interest of business.

I guess Dr. Koch didn’t think we would find out.  I guess Dr. Koch didn’t think he needed to report all his expenses paid for by Pearson.  I guess Dr. Koch thinks it’s alright to accept such perks from a company who he oversees a $138 million contract with.  I guess Dr. Koch thought the tens of thousands of dollars for these trips, when laundered through the Pearson Foundation and then brokered through an organization that he was president of, would go unnoticed.

Well, we did find out and it is not alright.  How many corrupt governors, how many corrupt elected officials, how many corrupt appointed officials must Illinois’ citizens endure?

I have always viewed you as an advocate for the citizens of our great state.  I am confident that you have our interests and well-being foremost in your thoughts.  Your long-standing and steadfast fight for equity and fairness are without question.  I’m asking you to do the right thing.  I’m asking you to demand that Dr. Koch resign.  Then, I’d like to see you ask the Illinois Attorney General to launch an investigation into state contracts with Pearson, just as New York State has done.  And, I’d like to know that Illinois has a higher level of concern than just whether Dr. Koch flew first class or not.  Surely our standards for ethical behaviors can be higher than that.

You can send a clear message to every appointed official.  Illinois’ citizens expectations for ethical behavior and sound judgement must be reflected at the highest level of our government.  Certainly the school children and educators of Illinois deserving nothing less.

Sincerely,

Roger L. Sanders

105 Wilson Place

Oswego, IL 60543

c: Mr. Gery Chico, Board Chair, Illinois State Board of Education

Members, Illinois State Board of Education

Honorable Michael Madigan, Speaker of the House

Honorable John Cullerton, Senate President

Honorable Tom Cross, Representative

Oswego Ledger-Sentinel

Michael Winerip, New York Times

Chicago Sun Times

Chicago Tribune

Fellow Educators

A Letter to Marquette Elementary School Teachers from a Former Colleague

Recently I visited a teacher friend of mine who used to work at Marquette Elementary School on the southwest side of Chicago.  Upon hearing the news that Marquette was to be turned around by AUSL, she felt compelled to write the following letter.

Adam

 

On Behalf of my Former Colleagues at Marquette Elementary,

            I am a 2001 graduate of CPS, and Marquette Elementary was my introduction to teaching in the Chicago Public School system. In my time there, the most inspiring and helpful people were my fellow teachers. CPS’s decision to turnaround this school belittles and dismisses the fact that the faculty there is a hardworking and dedicated group and ignores the true needs of the community.

            While there, I was surrounded by colleagues who arrived early and left late. Colleagues who used their own money to help their students be successful in class. Colleagues who visited students’ homes to help build better relationships with students, parents and the community. I was always encouraged to search for and continue my professional development.  My colleagues  taught me how to use data to plan engaging and responsive lessons, as well as how to keep working in spite of the overwhelming odds against my students and by extension, myself.

            If it hadn’t been for my colleagues, I wouldn’t have learned how to deal with an often demeaning administration or how to meet the area office requirements (which often had more to do with how my classroom looked physically, rather than how it operated as a learning environment).

            By turning around Marquette, CPS is getting rid of its most valuable assets in the community: the teachers who have built bonds and an understanding of the problems Marquette students face every day.  They do not sit in an office and make policies based solely on numbers; they see the actual students affected by those numbers and policies.

            Dismissing the faculty also validates the -politically valuable and acceptable, but completely inaccurate- idea that if a school is performing poorly, those to blame must be the teachers.  Yet, CPS has failed to acknowledge that at Marquette, poverty and violence make education secondary to survival.

            Closing this school, dismissing its teachers and making it harder for students in the community to get to their place of education will only make things more difficult for every student affected.  CPS must look beyond the numbers at the real people and children whom your policies are supposed to be helping.

-Mariana S.

Spanish teacher 

The Longer School Day in Chicago Part II: What Should it Look Like?

I have previously argued that reforming education by just adding time onto the school day amounts to good talking points for the newspapers, but bad planning, and won’t necessarily improve education teaching or learning.  Perhaps that argument fell on deaf ears because it seems as if the Longer School Day is more or less a “given” for next year in Chicago.  Now, the discussion has turned to, “Ok, so what do we do with the extra time?“

But to say it is a “discussion” would imply everyone is talking together, except that’s not what’s happening.  Teachers are talking about what next year will look like.  Students are talking about it, as are parents.  So is the media.  All stakeholders have their opinions, ideas and recommendations, but  if the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing, it’s hard to point in the direction in which we actually want to go.

In November, the Chicago Teachers Union and the Board of Education  agreed not to push each other on the longer school day for a while.  The Union retracted its lawsuit, and those thirteen schools that voted for the longer day at the beginning of this school year will not have to revert to their former schedule.  So, what of the rest of the schools and the future decisions to be made?  Perhaps the Pioneer schools, as the Board has dubbed them, can offer great insight for the district-wide plan for next year as to what worked -and didn’t work- in their schools during the 2011-2012 school year.

But we are neither waiting nor relying on the teachers at the Pioneer schools to come up with ideas.  Teachers are involved in planning across the city, but to what capacity and what end?

In October, National Louis University partnered with the VIVA Project to ask CPS teachers, “what do you think a longer school day should look like?”  They did this by inviting teachers through the CPS workplace email system to participate in online discussions regarding the topic for twenty days.  In November, eleven of those 600 participating teachers* were selected to write a summative report on the overall concepts and themes brought up in the discussion boards.

Major themes and action items included: eliminating time wasted at the beginning and end of the school year by staffing all classrooms by day 1, and having finals grades due the last week of school (currently grades are due at the beginning of June, and students remain in school-with nothing to do- for another ten days);  recommending that all schools go to Track E (year-round) scheduling, but only as long as all schools have air-conditioning; and considering block and parallel schedules which could include  even having clubs and activities at the start of the day.

This past week the eleven teachers who wrote the report presented it to the CEO of Chicago Public Schools Jean-Claude Brizard, and in a separate meeting to Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis.  From what a participant told me, both leaders responded generally positively to the report.

While this has been going on, Principals across Chicago Public Schools were told/asked to form Longer School Day Committees in each of their schools to have teachers in each school “plan for how time in an extended school day will be spent,” and were given estimated minutes in each day between 75 and 90 depending on the grade level.

Many of the in-school committees will spend hours deliberating and carefully laying out how a longer schedule could be best implemented in their schools, (principals have to provide the committee reports to their network facilitators in early January, so many committees are meeting this weekend) but teachers have to consider more than a few unknown factors that will affect the implementation of the each plan; factors that they have little if any direct control over.

Because extra time in school must consider both what the students will be doing, and where they will be doing it, both capital and operating budget expenses affect the final plans for implementation.  Will principals be allotted the extra money to support the recommendations their committees make?

Beyond that, will contract negotiations in the summer break down over disagreements on how the time will be spent?  Will one school plan be weighed against another plan as being more or less cost-prohibitive?  Will teachers who have invested time and energy developing great plans for their schools fight for recommendations only to be told all schools will implement plans garnered from the VIVAteachers report?

Too many unknowns.  It would be better if the Board and the CTU would agree to a process for 1) developing and supporting longer school day committees in each school, 2) providing each committee with research from VIVA and the Pioneer schools , and 3) allotting financial resources to support each committees’ recommendations.

But it would be best if we started having honest discussions about how much time and money is being wasted in non-instructional capacities, and what good education looks like.  Only when that happens can we begin to assess how a longer school day has the potential to be a better school day, and that’s the direction in which we need to head.

*Only current CPS teachers and education professors were allowed to take part in the VIVA dialogues.

Stephen Krashen speaks to Chicago Teachers Union on Standards and High-Stakes Testing

The ever-succint teacher-educator Stephen Krashen @skrashen spoke to the a group of teachers at he Chicago Teachers Union recently.

“Everyone thinks our schools are broken and that’s why we have standards and tests.”

The Turnaround Timeline Simplified

In Chicago, and nationally, if schools don’t “work” we close them down or turn them around.  If we take a look at why they do not “work” however, we see a pattern of strategic decision-making:

1) Chronically under-resource a school.
2) Declare it a “failure” after when you have a couple years of test-score results.
3) Throw it away and tell the students and educators to go elsewhere.
4) Re-open the building as a charter school with a $1 lease the following year.

Chicago attorney and edu-journalist Matt Farmer recently reported on the timeline to close Walter Dyett HS in Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood.

All the rest is connecting the dots, and following the money.

Also, check out WBEZ’s map and chart for turnarounds and closures since 2001.  They also list the reasons given for each school action.

Does an abstract curriculum lead to an inability to define purpose of task?

I teach law, and I try very hard to get my students to form solid arguments, often finding this challenging and frustrating.  ”Why can’t they clearly articulate what I know they know?” or “why on earth would they use that piece of evidence when it doesn’t really coincide with what the point they are making?”

Students are living in the abstract.  Reading is abstract.  Math is abstract.  What exactly is experienced in the classroom anymore?  Does this level of abstraction make the question , “why?” more complicated for students to answer.

In other words, are students less and less able to reason, justify, or make evident because they don’t study tangible experiences?  Evidence that isn’t tangible is highly complex to process; the brain has to fill in the missing pieces the best that it can.

As readers know I am very concerned with the for what of education. Charlotte Danielson can teach anyone how to be a good teacher, or what they should teach, but that doesn’t mean just anyone should be a teacher. Beyond the curriculum and instruction, people need to be able to justify their actions in understanding teaching and learning.  ”Why am I studying/learning/teaching this?”  I think students are less and less able to answer this question amidst a curriculum that doesn’t matter to them or doesn’t make sense to them.

As a response to a curriculum that doesn’t reflect clarity of purpose, or their values, I expect students to lash out, “why do we need to learn this bulls***?!”  Rarely do I hear, “I don’t need to learn this because A, B, and C.”

There is a clear connection between practical learning and growth as opposed to leading  ”in the abstract.”   Consider how much stronger vocabulary and comprehension are when dendrites in the brain can grasp onto sensory and emotional experiences surrounding concepts.

This puts tremendous onus for the learning process onto curriculum and instruction rather than onto the learner.  How dare we ask our students to devote so much of their time abstract thinking.  In so doing, we disrupt the healthy development of the curious, experiential human mind.

Ken Goodman on Common Core Standards

Ken Goodman says it well: It’s high expectations, not standards that we need.