Let's move (those pencils)!

I listened to Michelle Obama's launch of a new national campaign to attack childhood obesity last night on C-SPAN radio last night.  It's a critical problem, because overweight children face significantly increased risk of health problems over their lifetimes, not to mention a host of potential social and psychological issues.  MO's tackling of the problem is all well and good, but it focusses almost exclusively on the nutrition side, with no acknowledgement of the fact that recess and phys ed are among the first things to be cut under the pressure-cooker NCLB's test-prep regime -- which her husband's policies only intensify.  From ABC News:

But many physical education programs across the nation's school systems are among the first to fall victim to deeper budget cuts.

In fact, only 4 percent of elementary schools, 8 percent of middle schools, and 2 percent of high schools offer daily physical education, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

"What we're trying to really encourage school districts to think about is even when things are very, very tough, don't cut those extracurricular activities," said Duncan.

Of course, Duncan's policies do nothing of the kind.  Do Race-to-the-Trough applicants get extra points for assuring that their students get at least an hour of vigorous physical exercise every day?  I don't think so.  Perhaps Duncan is referring to his penchant for closing schools, which will force students to walk farther and often through gang-patrolled streets to get to class -- as occurred in Chicago under his reign, with lethal results.  Hey, nothing like scurrying along for fear of one's life to get the heart pumping!

Politics, Ideology, and Education

I've been reading Elizabeth DeBray's book of that title (subtitle: Federal Policy During the Clinton and Bush Administrations).  I learned 2 things.

First, we have Osama bin Laden to thank for NCLB.  Many of the elements of NCLB were championed by the Clinton Administration.  But the Republicans hated it.  Abolition of the Dept of Education was a plank in the Republican platform in the 1996 election.  After 9/11, education was Bush's top domestic priority, and Republicans went along with it in a show of party loyalty with their wartime president.  Kennedy was initially sidelined (Bush's guys were negotiating with the New Democrats, like Lieberman), but then got involved, softening the bill a bit and extracting a bit more funding.  Only Paul Wellstone, bless his soul, took an active stand against all the standardized testing and draconian punishments.

Second, both researchers and educators were completely locked out.  In other words, everyone who actually knew something was excluded.

Plus ca change we can believe in.  We still have terrorists and nitwits in charge of setting our education policy.

"The worst is one who is despised"

When the Master governs, the people

are hardly aware that he exists.

Next best is a leader who is loved.

Next, one who is feared.

The worst is one who is despised.

- Tao Te Ching

Poor Joel Klein has been taking quite a beating lately.  First he gets booed and shouted down for 5 minutes straight by parents and teachers while trying to make a speech.  Then he gets hammered by the New York State Senate Finance Committee:

Klein was roasted by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Carl Kruger (D-Brooklyn) for ignoring the concerns of parents and lawmakers and treating them as "annoyances."

"You come to us for money, but you don't come to us for involvement," Kruger said.

Kruger also referred to Klein's tenure as "nine years of torture, nine years of acrimony, nine years of nail biting and hand twisting."

Of course, Klein is unfazed.  He knows exactly why this is happening to him: "When you do tough things, you are going to get pushback and resistance."

Note, Joel, you might also get pushback and resistance for doing stupid and dishonest things.  Difficult though it may be for you to fathom, not everybody who disagrees with you is necessarily wrong.

Great ideas still not coming from Washington

Arne Duncan gave a speech at the National Press Club last May, wherein he said: "You know, when I was in Chicago, I didn’t think all the good ideas came from Washington. Now that I’m in Washington, I know all the good ideas don’t come from Washington. The good ideas are always going to come from great educators in local communities."

I guess that explains why his ideas for ESEA re-authorization, outlined in the Obama administration's 2011 budget proposal, are a federal bureaucrat's wishlist: national standardized tests, cradle-to-career child surveillance systems, and a big pot of discretionary dollars for the US Secretary of Education to dole out to states that do his bidding. 

Given the sea of red ink we are embarking upon, I think the notion that Congress will give Arne another big pot of playmoney is fantasy -- even if his ideas for reform had some currency outside the small gang of thugs driving the deformation of American education, which they don't.  No Republican is going to risk his seat to support such federalization of education policy, however attractive its union-bashing elements might be.

Arne wants to replace NCLB accountability with national standardized tests that measure growth toward "College and Career Readiness."  It's a brilliantly stupid idea that will eventually lead to the complete discreditation of the test-driven accountability train.  Any national testing regime is going to invite widespread scrutiny, and under such scrutiny it will collapse.  The reason why it will collapse is quite simple: as is well-known among psychometricians, year-to-year changes in student test scores are almost completely random.  Aggregating these bits of randomness to the class or school level mostly results in more randomness.  This is what New York City does for it school progress reports, and, because the results are meaningless junk, why nobody believes them any more.  (As an indication of how bad they are, New York City Department of Education ignored its own reports in making its recent school closing decisions.)

It's evident that there is going to be no real national dialogue on the issue.  Duncan has resolutely ignored the eminently sensible alternatives proposed by the Broader, Bolder Agenda -- even though  he two-facedly signed onto it.  So I say, let the test-o-maniacs have their way.  A national testing regime couldn't possibly be worse than all the ridiculous state tests we have now,  and, sad to say, an accoutability metric that produces meaningless junk would actually be an improvement -- because what we have now produces toxic junk.  Argument is not going to sway these obsessed clowns who have never spent a day in the classroom as a teacher, but think they know best.  Let them have their way and fall on their faces.  The sooner we let them demonstrably fail, the sooner we might move onto something that makes sense.

US Secretary of Education: Total devastation good for education

Poor Arne.  His fortunes were riding high.  It looked like in the aftermath of Obama's State of the Union speech, education was the one policy arena where is might not be too difficult to get bi-partisan agreement.   (Not exactly a heavy lift.  Teachers' unions are traditionally strong Democratic supporters, so a Democratic president willing to undermine them must have seemed a little bit too good to be true to the just-say-no Republicans.  Of course, there was the usual posturing.    Can't appear too gleeful, you know. ) 

Along with the opportunity to impose policy, it looked like Arne was going to get another big pot of play money to toss around.  And the New Yorker had the courtesy to profile him with a nice little puff piece.

Yep, things were going along swimmingly for ole Arne.  He had managed to escape any questions about the emerging news of his seven-year failure as Chicago Public Schools CEO, and the pummelling of his chief flack Peter Cunningham by the evil Richard Rothstein in a radio interview had escaped widespread media scrutiny.

But then a mutant virus tunneled into Duncan's mindware, causing him to say this:  "Let me be really honest. I think the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans was Hurricane Katrina. That education system was a disaster..."

The red alert immediately sounded in mission control room as programmers scrambled to fix the rogue program and get Duncan back on script -- but it was too late.  The US Secretary of Education had pronounced that total destruction of their schools and communities was the best thing that could have happened for thousands of poor, black children.

I think you should have kept doing what you're best at -- being considerably less honest -- Arne, chum.

Arne's trough problem

A few days ago, I wrote about the political calculations Arne Duncan would have to make in doleing out the Race to the Trough dollars.  It seems like the editors of the Wall Street Journal were also vexed that Duncan might not be heartless enough to keep sufficient numbers of little piggies away from the slops.  After all, they did go to all the work of filling out those great big applications!  And they do so need the money!

"Courage, Arne!" cry the WSJ editors, "Don't waver!  Stand firm!  Allow only the truly deserving to gorge!  Damn the rest!"

But Arne, think.  Wall Street Journal, Arne.  Republicans.  Elections.  Not your friends.  Will never be your friends.

Lest there be any doubt who WSJ's readers are, it is illuminating to peruse the readers' comments on this editorial.  I particularly fancied this gem:

And the real problem is the low quality of "inner city" students that no amount of federal legerdemain will ever cure. Hint! High dropout rates are good. It gets rid of the deadbeats so motivated kids won't have their classrooms disrupted.

Yep, this commenter perfectly encapsulates the current school reform strategy promoted by Duncan and praticed in Chicago and New York.

Person of the Year!

Michelle Rhee has finally gotten herself into deep doo-doo over a remark to Fast Company about teachers let go in October for what she claimed were budgetary reasons  "I got rid of teachers who had hit children, who had had sex with children, who had missed 78 days of school. Why wouldn't we take those things into consideration?" 

Just imagine, if she says stuff like that to a journalist, what demon spawn emerges from her mouth when speaking to her closest staff behind closed doors?  Perhaps one or two of her top lieutenants might realize that now is a good time to save themselves from the sinking ship and come clean about all the shenanigans that are no doubt going down in DCPS HQ.

In an ironic twist, as a perfect illustration of how clueless such groups are, some business/politican outfit called Federal City Council announced Rhee as their person of the year.  Nice move guys.  I'm sure that will be a great comfort to her as she's packing her bags for Sacremento.