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CAT Tracks for April 26, 2011
EDUCATION REFORM B*** S*** |
CAT Tracks Editor's Note:
CORRECTION, CORRECTION, BIG FREAKING CORRECTION!!!
Dayum...the truth will out.
This morning, when Madam CAT President took the "union support letter" to the District Central Office to fax to CEC, she was informed that there was an error in the very first sentence. The $250,000 amount should have been $2 million...for each of the next freaking three years! (BTW: I did NOT make the $250,000 up. Several people heard that same number from the CEC people.)
No wonder yesterday's arm-twisting of Madam CAT President.
As usual...
It's all about the money!
A timely article about smoke and mirrors...and lies.
Timely...
Because if you read my tirade following last week's Cairo School Board meeting, you know that Cairo School District Number One is teaming up with the Consortium for Educational Change (CEC) in an effort to get a federal grant in the amount of $250,000.
Folks...$250,000 is BIG Bucks! That's more money than the Cairo Board of Education spends on its stable of attorneys in a year! (BTW: It was $10,000 last month...a quiet month.)
Okay, that last paragraph dripped of sarcasm.
Speaking of dripping, running, flooding...
CAT Tracks Editor's Note:
Better get my disclaimers in before I go any further:
Damn, where do I begin...
Hmmm, maybe at the end:
At the end of the day, if the District and the CEC are able to sing and dance their way to the $250,000 grant,
So, excuse the hell out of me if I roll my eyes, shake my head...and walk out when the "middle class teachers" are blamed for not understanding poverty with the implication they can't teach poor children. Heard that "black and white" argument before from our "cat-napping" Superintendent.
And in conclusion...
...with the threat of catastrophic flooding being issued by the National Weather Service, with public officials strategizing the evacuation of Cairo, with the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers lapping at the top of the levees, threatening to wash the whole city and school district away...
...comes the call by the CEC to the CAT President:
"Have you got that letter in support of the grant application ready?"
When Madam CAT President responded by saying that the schools were closed because of the weather and flooding conditions...that she couldn't write a letter of support without the approval of the membership, well...the gloves came off.
When Madam CAT President explained that the logistics of having a CAT meeting and getting approval by Thursday, not even knowing if there WOULD be school (which we now know there will NOT be for the rest of the week)...the CEC "salesperson" shot back with a solution...we can have a conference call!
I'm sorry, you will just have to excuse my French...WTF?!
Cairo School District teachers are all supposed to dial in for a conference call on a 19-page grant that most have never seen or heard of? That they don't have a copy of?
This is an example of the thinking of modern education reformers...and the snake oil salesmen/kool-aid peddlers that make their livings enabling them. Their lack of a realistic world view...their entrenchment in la-la land.
I mean...teachers scattered over the tri-state area...oops. I forgot, CSD #1 has one teacher who lives in Tennessee and another in Indiana; does that make it the quin-state area?
Anyway...
These teachers (worrying about losing their homes and personal belongings to flood waters and tornadoes) are supposed place their lives on hold and dial a special number and listen to a bee ess sales pitch and then give their approval...sight unseen. The DEADLINE for submitting the grant application is THURSDAY, APRIL 28th. Well, hell...not very good planning on their part...nothing like waiting for the last minute!
When Madam CAT President wondered out loud on the feasibility of having a conference call, well, THEN came the threat...
Okay, "threat". Clearly one of my typical inflammatory adjectives, obviously designed to heighten emotion. However, in my defense, when I heard what transpired, my emotions became instantly inflamed.
In my words, the "threat" went something like this...
"Well, if you won't give us a letter of support by Thursday, we just won't send in the grant application."
Well...
Even a dumb-assed retired CAT can read between THOSE lines...no application, the District doesn't get its $250,000 of "play money", and CAT gets the blame...or specifically Madam CAT President.
It's good that Madam CAT President is in charge and not I. Me...I would have called the CEC rep's bluff...because that's exactly what it was. Ain't no way in hell that after doing "all that work...WHEW!" that CEC and CSD #1 are NOT going to submit the grant application.
Yes, I'm sure that the lack of a "letter of support" from the union would have raised a red flag with the powers that be...just like with Race to the Top applications. But, don't you believe for one heartbeat that Cairo would not have submitted the grant by the designated deadline (with the disclaimer that the District has missed application deadlines in the past through negligence or incompetence. However, it would NOT be because CAT failed/refused to provide a letter of support!)
The original phone call between the CEC rep and Madam President ended without a decision. More phone calls were to come...from both the CEC and the IEA, pushing for CAT support.
Bottom Line: Madam CAT President took a page from the CEC playbook...Bee Ess for Dummies. Madam President will fax a letter of "support" to the CEC today that contains, well, Bee Ess...AND...a clear DISCLAIMER that any changes in the working conditions of Cairo teachers MUST BE NEGOTIATED AND APPROVED by the CAT membership.
So...
If the District does NOT receive the $250,000 grant, it ain't CAT's fault...although, I'm sure that (just like with classroom teachers and student achievement) CAT will get the blame.
Hey, maybe that why God gave CATs nine lives...
Below is an op-ed piece by a guy who has a real world view, his feet solid on the ground...
From the New York Times
The Limits of School Reform
By JOE NOCERA
I find myself haunted by a 13-year-old boy named Saquan Townsend. It’s been more than two weeks since he was featured in The New York Times Magazine, yet I can’t get him out of my mind.
The article, by Jonathan Mahler, was about the heroic efforts of Ramón González, the principal of M.S. 223, a public middle school in the South Bronx, to make his school a place where his young charges can get a decent education and thus, perhaps, a better life. Surprisingly, though, González is not aligned with the public school reform movement, even though one of the movement’s leading lights, Joel Klein, was until fairly recently his boss as the head of the New York City school system.
Instead, González comes across as a skeptic, wary of the enthusiasm for, as the article puts it, “all of the educational experimentation” that took place on Klein’s watch. At its core, the reform movement believes that great teachers and improved teaching methods are all that’s required to improve student performance, so that’s all the reformers focus on. But it takes a lot more than that. Which is where Saquan comes in. His part of the story represents difficult truths that the reform movement has yet to face squarely — and needs to.
Saquan lands at M.S. 223 because his family has been placed in a nearby homeless shelter. (His mother fled Brooklyn out of fear that another son was in danger of being killed.) At first, he is so disruptive that a teacher, Emily Dodd, thinks he might have a mental disability. But working with him one on one, Dodd discovers that Saquan is, to the contrary, unusually intelligent — “brilliant” even.
From that point on, Dodd does everything a school reformer could hope for. She sends him text messages in the mornings, urging him to come to school. She gives him special help. She encourages him at every turn. For awhile, it seems to take.
Meanwhile, other forces are pushing him in another direction. His mother, who works nights and barely has time to see her son, comes across as indifferent to his schooling. Though she manages to move the family back to Brooklyn, the move means that Saquan has an hour-and-a-half commute to M.S. 223. As his grades and attendance slip, Dodd offers to tutor him. To no avail: He finally decides it isn’t worth the effort, and transfers to a school in Brooklyn.
The point is obvious, or at least it should be: Good teaching alone can’t overcome the many obstacles Saquan faces when he is not in school. Nor is he unusual. Mahler recounts how M.S. 223 gives away goodie bags to lure parents to parent association meetings, yet barely a dozen show up. He reports that during the summer, some students fall back a full year in reading comprehension — because they don’t read at home.
Going back to the famous Coleman report in the 1960s, social scientists have contended — and unquestionably proved — that students’ socioeconomic backgrounds vastly outweigh what goes on in the school as factors in determining how much they learn. Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute lists dozens of reasons why this is so, from the more frequent illness and stress poor students suffer, to the fact that they don’t hear the large vocabularies that middle-class children hear at home.
Yet the reformers act as if a student’s home life is irrelevant. “There is no question that family engagement can matter,” said Klein when I spoke to him. “But they seem to be saying that poverty is destiny, so let’s go home. We don’t yet know how much education can overcome poverty,” he insisted — notwithstanding the voluminous studies that have been done on the subject. “To let us off the hook prematurely seems, to me, to play into the hands of the other side.”
That last sentence strikes me as the key to the reformers’ resistance: To admit the importance of a student’s background, they fear, is to give ammo to the enemy — which to them are their social-scientist critics and the teachers’ unions. But that shouldn’t be the case. Making schools better is always a goal worth striving for, whether it means improving pedagogy itself or being able to fire bad teachers more easily. Without question, school reform has already achieved some real, though moderate, progress.
What needs to be acknowledged, however, is that school reform won’t fix everything. Though some poor students will succeed, others will fail. Demonizing teachers for the failures of poor students, and pretending that reforming the schools is all that is needed, as the reformers tend to do, is both misguided and counterproductive.
Over the long term, fixing our schools is going to involve a lot more than, well, just fixing our schools. In the short term, however, the reform movement could use something else: a dose of humility about what it can accomplish — and what it can’t.