Testing databases paid for with stimulus money to aid in connecting teachers to students' test score. Can you say using the stimulus to hasten merit pay?
Part of the stimulus money, he told Sam Dillon of The New York Times, will be used so that states can develop data systems, which will enable them to tie individual student test scores to individual teachers, greasing the way for merit pay. Another part of the stimulus plan will support charters and entrepreneurs.
So instead of helping students in traditional public schools, he intends to use the stimulus money to do more testing and grade the teachers thusly. I did not think the education stimulus money was intended that way. I thought it was to build up public schools.
Start with Arne Duncan and some very intriguing statements like increasing testing and tieing student performance to teachers by databases. His very own words.
Is Arne Duncan really Margaret Spelling?"However, based on what I have seen to date, I conclude that Obama has given President George W. Bush a third term in education policy and that Arne Duncan is the male version of Margaret Spellings. Maybe he really is Margaret Spellings without the glasses and wearing very high heels. We all know that Secretary Spellings greeted Duncan's appointment with glee. She wrote him an open letter in which she praised him as "a fellow reformer" who supports NCLB and anticipated that he would continue the work of the Bush administration. (Recall, Deborah, that the media today defines an education reformer as someone who endorses Republican principles of choice and accountability.)
Everything I have seen and learned since Duncan came to office has supported Secretary Spellings' admiring comments about Secretary Duncan. It turns out that Duncan, like the Bush administration, adores testing, charter schools, merit pay, and entrepreneurs. Part of the stimulus money, he told Sam Dillon of The New York Times, will be used so that states can develop data systems, which will enable them to tie individual student test scores to individual teachers, greasing the way for merit pay. Another part of the stimulus plan will support charters and entrepreneurs.
Duncan paid his first visit to New York City last week ("New Education Secretary Visits Brooklyn School," New York Times, Feb. 19, 2009). He did not visit a regular public school, but a charter school. Such decisions are not happenstance; they are intended to send a message. Bear in mind that the regular public schools enroll 98 percent of the city's one-million-plus students.
At the charter school, Duncan endorsed the core principles of the Bush education program. According to the account in the Times, Secretary Duncan said that "increasing the use of testing across the country should also be a spending priority." And he made this astonishing statement: "We should be able to look every second grader in the eye and say, 'You're on track, you're going to be able to go to a good college, or you're not...Right now, in too many states, quite frankly, we lie to children. We lie to them and we lie to their families."
Wow! More testing is needed. In New York City right now, students take a dozen tests a year. How many more should they take? How much of the stimulus package will be used to promote more testing across the country?"
More from Arne on testing. He likes evaluating all the school workers on how the students do.
Charlie Rose: Around how will you measure their performance?
Arne Duncan: There are a number of ways to measure. You measure by student achievement, not just in the classroom level, at the school level. What we did at home is we didn't just reward teachers based on what the students are doing. We rewarded every adult in those buildings, the custodians, the security guards, the social workers, the lunch room attendants.
And he only wants the best for the charter schools. How in the world is that real free market competition, Arne?
So where we have great innovation, we need to support that, replicate that, do more of it.
So we have a group of charter that are running five schools and getting great, great student achievement. We should do 10. Let me explain the process. You need to have a very rigorous front end process. You should only be picking the best of the best to open their schools. This is not let a thousand flowers bloom, because you'll just get mediocrity and you'll perpetuate the status quo, very tough funding process. And then you need both great autonomy, you have to give them the autonomy to flourish, but also real accountability.
Charlie Rose interviews Arne DuncanWe hear that in the traditional public schools, but Duncan does not think that would be worthy of charter schools. How sad. He only wants the best for those schools.
As a retired teacher I would take the thousand blooming flowers from all walks of life, all abilities, all backgrounds. That is true education. Not handpicking the elite.
There are groups contributing money to charter schools.
Walmart is a major player in pushing charter schools.
Charter schools and attack on public education"Friedman chose as his last battle before dying in 2006 to use his clout to push for the privatization of New Orleans’ public schools.4 He advocated for vouchers—government-funded certificates permitting parents to send their child to the school of their choice—but those who support his ideas have switched tracks slightly, pushing now for charter schools.
A charter school is any school that is funded publicly but governed by institutions outside the public school system. A company, a non-governmental organization, a university, or any group of people who write a charter can become autonomous from a public school board and control the budget, curriculum, and select the group of students in a school. They receive public money, and, in exchange, they set out quantifiable results that they will achieve. One quarter of charter schools are run by for-profit operators (called EMOs, Educational Management Organizations), but most are run by nonprofit entities (usually grouped under CMOs, Charter Management Organizations.)"
Now to the role of the Walton family in pushing these schools.
The Walton Family Foundation of Wal-Mart is the single biggest investor in charter schools in the United States, giving $50 million a year to support them.21 The Waltons specialize in giving money to opponents of public education. “Empowering parents to choose among competing schools,” said John Walton, son of Wal-Mart’s founder, “will catalyze improvement across the entire K–12 education system.”22 According to a National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy (NCRP) report, “Some critics argue that it is the beginning of the ‘Wal-Martization’ of education, and a move to for-profit schooling, from which the family could potentially financially benefit. John Walton owned 240,000 shares of Tesseract Group Inc. (formerly known as Education Alternatives Inc.), which is a for-profit company that develops/manages charter and private schools as well as public schools.”23 Wal-Mart is a notorious union-busting firm, famous for keeping its health-care costs down by discouraging unhealthy people from working at its stores, paying extremely low wages with poor benefits, and violating child labor laws. The company has reportedly looted more than $1 billion in economic development subsidies from state and local governments.24 Its so-called philanthropy seems also to be geared to the looting of public treasuries.
As for a coordinated effort, the private incursion into public schools is being pushed by a band of jackals grouped around Bill Gates and the $2 billion that his Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have sunk into the education “reform” movement. The foundation funded a 2006 study by the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce called Tough Choices or Tough Times, “signed by a bipartisan collection of prominent politicians, businesspeople, and urban school superintendents,” which "called for a series of measures including: (a) replacing public schools with what the report called “contract schools,” which would be charter schools writ large; (b) eliminating nearly all the powers of local school boards—their role would be to write and sign the authorizing agreements for the contract schools; (c) eliminating teacher pensions and slashing health benefits; and (d) forcing all 10th graders to take a high school exit examination based on 12th grade skills, and terminating the education of those who failed (i.e., throwing millions of students out into the streets as they turn 16)"
Another definition that charter schools are deregulated.
Charter schools"Defining charter schools is difficult given both the variety of the charter school statutes and the types of schools that have been created. Simply, charter schools are public schools that are freed from, in most cases, local and state regulations. A contract is formed when the charter school is created outlining the details of how the school will be organized and managed, what students will be taught and expected to achieve, and how success will be measured. In return for freedom, charter schools are held accountable for student performance - if the goals of the school set forth in the charter are not reached, the school's charter is not renewed."
More calls coming now for overhaul of the laws governing these schools. The pressure will be on as our new president has called for more of these schools to open.
Charter school problems surfacing"A growing chorus of legislators and others say the law that launched the educational experiment needs an overhaul.
An Inquirer examination reveals:
The law allows little scrutiny of charters. Districts approve charters but have limited power to shut them down. The state exercises scant oversight on charter spending, which totals more than $633 million this year.
The law dictates a crazy-quilt pattern of funding for charters. Each district pays a different amount even when the students attend the same charter. For example, Philadelphia pays $8,088 per student; Jenkintown, $15,174. Cybers get the same payments as other charters even though students receive online instruction at home."
More details on funding of charter schools...and yes, they do take public money that public traditional schools used to get.
Charter school funding"Charter schools are public schools. Like district public schools, they are funded according to enrollment (also called average daily attendance, or ADA), and receive funding from the district and the state according to the number of students attending. The ways and amounts at which charters are funded compared to their district counterparts differ dramatically in an individual state and even in individual communities within a state. Nationwide, on average, charter schools are funded at 61 percent of their district counterparts, averaging $6,585 per pupil compared to $10,771 per pupil at conventional district public schools. For more information and state-by-state funding comparisons, go to Following the Money.
Unlike traditional district schools, most charter schools do not receive funding to cover the cost of securing a facility. Conversion schools begin with established capital, namely the school and its facilities. A few states provide capital funding to start-up schools, and some start-up schools are able to take over available unused district space, but most must rely on other, independent means. Recent federal legislation provides funding to help charters with start-up costs, but the task remains imposing."
Just imagine public schools being well-funded, hiring good teachers with degrees, paying them fairly and well...and then may I quote Alfie Kohn from 1998:
I don't have the link, but the article is from 1998 from an article called Challenging Behaviorist Dogma: Myths About Money and Motivation.
To create a more democratic and collaborative workplace is not inconsistent with compensating people adequately for what they do. I am not arguing against money, which is necessary and even nice. I am arguing against (1) attributing more importance to money than it actually has, (2) pushing money into people's faces and making it more salient than it needs to be, and (3) confusing compensation with reward (the latter being unnecessary and counterproductive). The problem isn't with the dollars themselves, but with using dollars to get people to jump through hoops.
Thus, my formula for how to pay people distills the best theory, research, and practice with which I am familiar into three short sentences:
* Pay people well.
* Pay people fairly.
* Then do everything possible to take money off people's minds.
Notice that incentives, bonuses, pay-for-performance plans, and other reward systems violate the last principle by their very nature.
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